Frog

Gugu took time out of her busy schedule to come. Little Lion, medical kit over her back, walked behind her. Gugu was still hobbling, and, in the months since I’d last seen her, she seemed considerably older. She knelt at the foot of Mother’s grave and wailed. We’d never seen Gugu cry like that, and it shook us to our core. Little Lion stood off to the side, her eyes tear-filled. Women came up to console Gugu; they lifted her up by her arms, but the moment they let go, she fell back to her knees and wept even more bitterly. Affected by the display of Gugu’s grief, women who by then had stopped crying fell to their knees and began to keen along with her.

I bent down to help Gugu to her feet, but Little Lion said softly, Let her cry. She’s been holding this back for a very long time.

The look of compassion on Little Lion’s face gave me a warm feeling.

When she finally stopped crying, Gugu got to her feet, dried her eyes, and said to me: Xiaopao, Chairwoman Yang phoned me to say that you want to leave the army.

Yes, I replied. I’ve already handed in a request.

Chairwoman Yang has asked me to talk you out of it. She’s made arrangements to reassign you to the planning section, where you’ll work directly under her, with a promotion to the rank of deputy battalion commander. She thinks highly of you.

That means nothing to me now, I said. I’d rather go back and collect manure than work in family planning.

That’s where you’re wrong, she said. Family planning is Party work, important work.

Phone Chairwoman Yang and thank her for her concern. But I’m coming home. I don’t know how the very old and very young will get by if I don’t.

Don’t be so firm, she said. Give it more thought. You really should stay in the army. Fieldwork is hard on a person. Look at Yang Xin and then look at me. We’re both involved in family planning, but she has a leisurely life and it shows, with her nice complexion and all. And me? Scurrying here and hopping there, blood one moment and tears the next, until I look like this.

4

I confess, fame and fortune meant a lot to me. Though I said I wanted to leave the army, when I heard that I could look forward to a promotion and that Chairwoman Yang regarded me highly, I wavered. Back home, when I talked it over with Father, he too thought that leaving was a bad idea. Years ago, your great-uncle healed an injury to Commander Yang’s leg and cured his wife’s illness, putting them in his debt. Now he’s a high-ranking officer, and your future will be assured by having a connection with him. I voiced my objection to what Father was saying, but deep down that’s what I was thinking. We were ordinary people, common citizens, and I could be forgiven for wanting to curry favour with people of power and influence, society’s dragons and phoenixes. So the next time Gugu came to see me, my attitude had changed. And when she suggested a marriage between me and Little Lion, though I brought up Wang Gan’s decade-long infatuation with Little Lion as an excuse, even that argument began to crumble.

I’m childless, Gugu said, and Little Lion has become like a daughter to me. She’s a woman of fine character, has a heart of gold, and is fiercely loyal to me. How could I ever let her marry Wang Gan?

Gugu, I said, I’m sure you know it’s now been twelve years since Wang Gan wrote that first letter to Little Lion. In that time he’s written more than five hundred letters. He told me so. And that’s not all. One of the ways he expressed his love for her was to report his own sister. Of course, he reported Yuan Sai and Renmei too. How else would you have known about Yuan Sai’s illegal removal of IUDs, and how else would you have known that Renmei and Wang Dan were pregnant in violation of family-planning policy?

The truth is, Little Lion never read any of those disgusting letters, since I intercepted every one of them. I told Postal Director Ma to send me all his letters.

But he helped you in your work, I said, ever since his father had his vasectomy. In this latest contribution, he handed you his own sister.

One absolutely cannot marry a person like that, she said angrily. How dependable can someone who would sell out his friends, even his own sister, over a woman be?

But he still helped you.

Those are two different matters. Remember this, Xiaopao, she said earnestly, a person can be anything, anything but a traitor. There is no reason, however lofty, that excuses that. From ancient times to the present, betrayers have always come to grief. That includes Wang Xiaoti. He may have been given five thousand ounces of gold, but I’m willing to bet that he will die badly. If you were to defect to the KMT today for five thousand ounces of gold, would you then defect to another political party that offered you ten thousand? So the more Wang Gan reports on others, the lower he is in my eyes, and in my heart he is nothing but a pile of dog shit.