The Killing Wind by Hecheng Tan; Mosher Stacy; Jian Guo

The Killing Wind by Hecheng Tan; Mosher Stacy; Jian Guo

Author:Hecheng, Tan; Mosher, Stacy; Jian, Guo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00


After crossing the river, they saw a man named Mao Tianguai hoeing weeds in the sweet-potato field. Party secretary Zhou Yongbin said to him, “Tianguai, over on the hill there are some class enemies that didn’t get killed. If you take care of it for me, the brigade will pay you five kuai.” At that time, five kuai bought a lot. Mao Tianguai was an old bachelor who’d fought in Korea. As a decommissioned soldier, he was brave as well as poor, and when he heard what Zhou Yongbin said, he wasted no words before picking up his hoe and setting off. When he reached the hill, he found that there were in fact some people who were still alive and groaning. He used his hoe to kill them all. He even took a couple of sweat rags off the corpses to take home. We have a saying here that the sweat rag of a dead man is a charm, and that keeping it with you will extend your life; the sweat rags of those who die violent deaths are the best. After Mao Tianguai finished, he came down the hill and crossed the river to the brigade office and filled out the form to get his five kuai. [That form became part of the Task Force’s files in 1986.]

Now you’re wondering about that little baby? No one dared to kill it, not even Mao Tianguai. It was just left there on the hill with no one taking care of it, and that night people heard it crying. …

Afterwards I left the village to work as a cook at the Dongsheng machine plant. When the Task Force began its investigation, I took the initiative to go to the factory party committee and confess. The factory party committee had someone take me back to the production brigade for a study class lasting more than 20 days. Because I’d been away, people in the brigade had pushed all the blame on me. That wasn’t right—we had to seek truth from facts! I went to them, and in the presence of the Task Force, I clarified everything point by point, what I had done and what they had done, systematically and in full detail. There was no question of not admitting error—that was impossible. Saying you didn’t remember was a lie—how could anyone forget what had happened? I remember everything clearly, times, places, witnesses—who can deny their wrongdoing? Afterwards, the comrades from the Task Force thanked me for helping them clarify how everything had come about in our production brigade.



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