Ninth Building by Jingzhi Zou

Author:Jingzhi Zou [Zou, Jingzhi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781739822507
Google: L57nzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Honford Star
Published: 2022-05-14T18:30:00+00:00

First Harvest

When I was in the Sixth Propaganda Brigade, we had a performance called "Harvest Dance." Six girls appeared with yellow satin ribbons in their left hands and prop sickles in their right, going through the motions of harvesting wheat on stage, joyous and light. These fake farmers never stopped smiling as they scythed and gathered. I was in the orchestra, and in order to replicate the experience, I pressed the bow down hard on my violin, but every time I did that, my fellow musicians complained. I guess the difference is I'd harvested wheat before, and they never had.

When we got to the Great Northern Waste in 1969, it was already the middle of August, yet the wheat was still moldering in the ground. Autumn rains had made the soil impassable to tractors, so the crop continued to ripen, like children who couldn't go home. There was a slogan at the time, "snatching food from the dragon's mouth," which I found very stirring. It had exactly the right combination of myth and fighting spirit to appeal to a seventeen-year-old.

The sickles we were issued were the simple, northern kind. We grabbed one each and did what the locals did: spat on a stone and started whetting. The sharpened blade felt cold when we tested it against a fingernail, and with a single sweep, we left piles of flattened grass next to us. This added to the sense of heroism—young people hard at work accomplishing things.

It was still raining when we set off. My classmates had their own raincoats in all sorts of designs, mostly pale-colored ones, bestowed by their parents. The hats were even worse—baseball caps and an assortment of army headgear—which made our little harvest troop look somewhat wishy-washy.

People who haven't been to the Great Northern Waste don't have a clear sense of the land—they tend to think of it as if seen from above, a flat surface ready to be sliced into squares. It was different here. There were areas it took a whole day to get to and back on a tractor. Harvesting wheat in such a vast space? Our sickles suddenly felt tiny and insignificant.

Looking at the croplands that seemed to fill the entire heaven and earth, we didn't know where to start. Our leader called out: Six rows per person, six rows per person ... And pushed everyone with a sickle to the front line. Next to me was the Little Mute (he wasn't actually mute but had a speech impediment that made him hard to understand), dressed more like a businessman who'd fallen on hard times. The edge of his raincoat was caked in mud, and his baseball cap was too big—it fell over his eyes whenever he raised or lowered his head.

By the time we actually started work, the pride with which we'd scythed the grass had completely evaporated. The only way to get the waterlogged wheat out of the ground was a combination of hacking and tugging. I'd only gotten ten meters before my legs sank completely into the ground.

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