The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China by Yuan-Tsung Chen

Author:Yuan-Tsung Chen [Chen, Yuan-Tsung]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9780307831941
Google: Qw2nItgArhgC
Amazon: B00C8S9XFU
Barnesnoble: B00C8S9XFU
Goodreads: 17736833
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 1980-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

11

The Search

It was an unusually mild winter night. Moonlight softened every line of house and tree. Stars twinkled in the dark-blue sky. The air was scented by the breath of still-distant spring. On such a night at another time I would have lain down on my bed, content to gaze peacefully through the window at the heavens. But tonight I was too troubled to go to bed and sleep. Tomorrow we would start searching the landlords’ houses. Wang Sha, Malvolio Cheng, Shen, Tu, and I had discussed and planned everything—or so we thought—but, as my aunt used to say, I’m a “worrywart.” This head-on confrontation could lead to violence, and while I had no fear of a verbal battle I knew my ninety-five pounds stood no chance in a real fight. I had heard that the peasants could get so aroused that they threw discipline to the winds. I knew that the landlords could get so desperate that they resorted to murder. I doubted if we could control events completely, but I put my hopes in Shen and Tu and Cheng. Any mishap would be our responsibility. We had plenty to worry about all right.

I had come to rely more and more on Malvolio Cheng. For all his eccentricities, I found that, when needed, he was a mine of information and level headed, too. Twenty years of activism put him that many years ahead of me in experience and judgment. That evening I asked him, “Cheng, tell me truly. Do you think the landlords in Longxiang are hiding arms?”

“They’re guilty until they prove they’re innocent, if you get what I mean.” He was frowning with concentration as he considered how best to explain this to me. Finally he said, “Look at it this way. The landlords’ houses are fortresses, real fortresses, spiritual strongholds. We have to break into those forts. Right now, I can bet that some landlord is drinking wine with some peasants, perhaps with a few of our own people. The antique furniture, the old paintings on the walls, family heirlooms, shelves of books, solid walls of brick … all these things create a feeling of stability, of something unchanging and imperishable.”

Cheng spoke with an unaccustomed seriousness that gave depth to his voice. He knew what he was talking about. He came from a landlord family himself; I knew little more about it than that. But while I had seen the world from a high-rise apartment building or a villa in the middle of modern and almost wholly bourgeois Shanghai, Cheng had lived in and grown up in that old world of village feudalism. Intellectually he shared the progressive beliefs of our time, but at the same time he seemed unable to shake off a lingering memory of life in his landlord father’s home. Bits of this conflict had come out in conversation as we got to know each other better during our time in Longxiang, and now I posed a direct question about it.

“Cheng, are you talking about things you’ve felt yourself?”

He started, surprised at the bluntness of the question.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.