Chapter 21: Entering the Village

When Yun Suji saw them walk away, he got up and dusted off his pants. The guards behind him had already caught up.

“Chief, are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Yun Suji said. “Look at that cadre, quite impressive.”

The guard said, “Isn’t it always like this in the countryside? If you don’t have some authority, who will listen to you!”

Yun Suji said nothing. He had been a technician for the Tiandihui for several years, spending more than half the year in the countryside. The wife he had married was the daughter of a small landlord. He knew that what the guard said was largely true.

“Let’s go, into the village!”

The standard villages were all built according to a uniform model, neat and orderly. Since Qiongshan was a yellow zone, there were no military defense needs, so the standard villages did not adopt the fortress-like tulou style designed by Director Wen. However, for the convenience of public security management, the villages were still enclosed. The outermost circle of houses had walls built between them, forming a continuous barrier with only four entrances in the east, west, south, and north.

Yun Suji walked into this standard village. There was a wooden sentry box at the entrance, and a few women were sitting outside, sewing shoe soles and talking. Hearing their accents were from Shandong, he nodded to himself.

Just as he was about to enter the village, a woman asked, “Comrade, which village are you from?”

Yun Suji stopped. The woman who asked was in her mid-twenties, tall, with an oval face and a few faint pockmarks. Her blue cloth jacket was carefully trimmed with a red border. Although old, it was clean and tidy. He said, “I’m from the county, here on business.”

“Do you have a travel permit?”

“Yes, yes.” Yun Suji took out a letter of introduction from his pocket. The woman took it and examined it from all angles. Yun Suji knew she was probably illiterate and was just looking at the official seal.

The naturalized citizen cadre at the county office had said that the literacy rate in this village was over 80%. It seemed that was a gross exaggeration.

After a while, the woman handed the letter of introduction back. “The seal is correct. You can enter the village, old man.”

Yun Suji praised, “You have strict security here.”

The women all glanced at him but said nothing. It was the woman who had asked for the letter of introduction who spoke again. “The village has a rule: strangers must have a travel permit to enter or leave.”

Yun Suji originally wanted to talk to them a bit more, but they all fell silent, just sitting and sewing their shoes. Seeing he couldn’t strike up a conversation, he could only ask for the location of the village office.

“Follow the road east. You’ll see it when you see the big banyan tree,” the young woman said.

Yun Suji thanked them and walked into the village.

The village roads were clean, with no garbage or debris. The walls were not snow-white, but they were clean, with no urine stains, feces, or garbage at the corners. Slogans were painted on the white walls along the street: “If you don’t plant red clover today, you’ll be in a Sanya mine tomorrow”; “One person steals electric wires, the whole family goes to labor reform”; “If sanitation is not done well, the whole family gets malaria”; “If women don’t unbind their feet, men will have their feet bound”; “Cross the strait and liberate all of China”… Yun Suji had seen many such slogans on his trips to the countryside and didn’t pay them much mind. But the cleanliness of this village was truly beyond his expectations—it was on par with the best model villages in Lin’gao.

There were few people on the street; they had probably all gone to the fields. The few who saw him quickly moved to the side of the road and said nothing.

Yun Suji found it a bit strange and walked straight to the village office. There was a large banyan tree outside the village office, which was probably already there. A stone mill was placed under the tree. Yun Suji knew that such places were where the villagers gathered to talk. It was now the slack season for farming, yet there wasn’t a single villager there. Yun Suji found it even more strange.

The village offices in the standard villages were all the same. Outside the door was a bulletin board with various notices posted. Yun Suji stopped to look. Most of them were the latest policy announcements, all standard notices printed by the county office printing press. There were also some written in ink on rough paper, all about village affairs. Yun Suji looked and saw that the latest one was a notice about each family’s corvée labor, with a detailed list behind it: which family had how many people, with names, very detailed. Next to it was a newspaper reading board with yesterday’s Lin’gao Times posted.

Just looking at this bulletin board, it was a rare sight not only in the 17th century, but even in the rural areas of 21st-century China.

Yun Suji was secretly amazed. This level of grassroots governance! And this was a “relatively advanced village”? He wondered what the most advanced one would look like. He stepped inside. It was also very neat. In the middle was a courtyard, leveled and smooth. The three main rooms were for office work, and the side rooms on the left and right were locked, probably warehouses.

In the village office, he came across two village cadres playing chess. They were arguing over a move and didn’t see Senator Yun enter.

Yun Suji waited for a while, but no one spoke to him. He asked amidst the argument, “Which one of you is the village head?”

The two village cadres looked up. They saw he was wearing a conical hat, a gray front-buttoned cadre’s uniform, dark blue homespun trousers, and straw sandals on his feet. He looked like someone who often worked in the fields. Although they didn’t know him, they could tell from his accent that it wasn’t the southern accent of a naturalized citizen cadre, but had a northern tone.

From his clothes, the older village cadre thought he was a messenger from some other village and asked lazily, “Which village are you from?”

Yun Suji replied, “From Lin’gao County.”

The village cadre still asked, “What are you doing here?”

The other cadre was about to lose the game and urged from the side, “Make your move!”

Yun Suji was getting impatient and said, “You’re very busy! Let’s talk when you’re free!” He threw his backpack on the steps and sat down to rest.

The first cadre, seeing his tone was a bit off, stopped the game and came over to talk. “May I ask where the distinguished guest is from?”

Yun Suji, seeing he was a village cadre, deliberately asked again, “Where is the village head?” He answered with a red face. Just as Yun Suji was about to give him the letter of introduction, there was a commotion outside. Someone shouted, “Village Head Fan! Village Head Fan!”

The village head frowned, pushed the chessboard aside, and said, “I’ll go see what Yuanhu is up to now.” He didn’t bother to greet Yun Suji and went out.

Yun Suji said nothing and quietly got up and stood by the window to look out. He saw seven or eight people in the middle of the courtyard, men and women, old and young. At the head was the young cadre who had hit Old Man Meng earlier. His chest was open, revealing the white cloth undershirt inside. His hands were on his hips, full of authority.

Behind him were a few young men, carrying sticks, surrounding a middle-aged man. This man was wearing a homespun front-buttoned short jacket and was tied up tightly with a rope, his face full of fear. A woman followed behind, crying and trying to get close to the man, but was pushed away by the young men.

At the very back was a little girl of eleven or twelve, wiping her tears and following shyly, supported by a woman.

Yun Suji wondered what was going on.

As he was thinking, he heard the young cadre say loudly, “Village Head! Yan Laowu is binding his daughter’s feet again! His wife’s feet are still bound when no one is around, and now he’s binding his daughter’s! This is resisting the central government and engaging in feudal restoration! He needs to be dealt with properly! Look!”

He waved his hand, and a few young men brought something to the steps: a disemboweled rooster, bloody, a few broken bowl shards, and a roll of foot-binding cloth—all things used for foot-binding.

Yun Suji thought to himself that this young man had learned the slogans well, but his temper was not good.

Village Head Fan frowned. “Old Yan, how many times has the county’s propaganda team been here about foot-binding? Let’s not talk about your wife’s feet. She’s had her feet bound her whole life, and it’s not easy for her to walk with them unbound. We’re all fellow villagers, so we’ll turn a blind eye. But for you to secretly bind your daughter’s feet, you’re clearly ignoring the instructions from the county and the central government!”

When Yan Laowu heard “ignoring the instructions from the county and the central government,” his legs went weak with fear. He knew that the “Australian Chiefs” hated this the most. But for a girl not to have her feet bound, Yan Laowu couldn’t imagine it. In his common sense, only the destitute who didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, or beggars, didn’t bind their daughters’ feet. As long as a family had food to eat and land to farm, there was no one who didn’t bind their daughters’ feet. When he was at home, he had heard from well-traveled people that the women of the southern barbarians who grew rice did not bind their feet. He had thought it was a fantasy. He never expected that after coming to the land of the southern barbarians and just learning to grow rice, the Chiefs would forbid foot-binding.

Foot-binding was forbidden, and those whose feet were already bound had to unbind them. Yan Laowu was panicked. In his common sense, a woman going out with unbound feet was like going out without pants. Besides, when he and his wife were intimate at night, without a small foot to knead, he couldn’t get aroused…

Seeing his daughter was already twelve, if he didn’t bind her feet now, it would be too late. Although girls in this place didn’t have to worry about getting married, the bride price for those with unbound feet was always lower. Yan Laowu and his wife discussed it and decided to secretly bind their daughter’s feet.

To avoid being found out by the village, Yan Laowu didn’t let his daughter go out and didn’t let anyone come to their house. He never expected that his daughter couldn’t bear the pain of foot-binding and cried at night. Someone heard her, and word eventually reached the ears of the militia captain, Liu Yuanhu.

Militia Captain Liu Yuanhu was an orphan. He had lost his parents before the mutiny. Before he could support himself, he was a wild child beggar in a village in Dengzhou. From the age of thirteen, he herded cattle for a landlord. He could do all kinds of farm work and was very strong. The landlord liked his ability and strength and always said he would give him a maid to win his heart. Before this painted pie could be realized, the landlord’s whole family was killed by mutinous soldiers, and he himself was tied up and dragged away by the soldiers, almost dying in the chaos.

A senator had saved him from a pit of dead bodies and had made him, an illiterate, a cadre and a human being. In Lin’gao, his eyes were opened. He knew how a real person lived and what the Australian world was like. And the Chiefs wanted to turn the whole world into a world like Australia. At the Ma’niao Agricultural Cadre Institute, Du Wen had instilled in his mind the consciousness of “serving the Senate and the people,” and so he had become a fearless person who regarded the “instructions of the Senate” as higher than anything else.