Shengliver’s Note: In this entry, Shengliver tells the story of Mr Lian. What happened to the Lians was a tragedy. The narration here is based on what Shengliver saw and heard in his home village.

Most families in the hamlet share the same name, Wang. In fact, all the Wang families are related one way or another. Local legend has it that the Wang clan are descendants of four brothers who migrated here from north China in ancient times.

Uncle Lian not sharing our family name, his family was one of the few that were not related to the Wangs. But Uncle Lian’s father and my great grandfather were buddies, so the two families had been on good terms over the decades. To strengthen the bond, following a local custom, the two families agreed at a special ceremony that my father, as a boy, was adopted by the Lians as a son. The title was just nominal though.

Born in the early 1940s, Uncle Lian was a few years older than Father. Life was harsh in his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. When things were picking up in middle age, he fell abruptly.

Student Days

Uncle Lian was a bright pupil from the very beginning of his school years. When he completed primary school, he was one of several kids in my village who made it to middle school. The middle school he was to attend was located in a town called Nanhua, which is about 30 kilometres away from my village. Uncle Lian suffered a lot in his middle school days.

It was arranged that pupils whose homes were too far away had to board at the school. Uncle Lian had to carry his provisions to the school at the beginning of each week. 30 kilometres of mountain trails was no worry for Uncle Lian, for he was brought up to be strong and hardy for a harsh life. What pained him was that when he left home for school his father and mother at times could not provide the food he would need for the coming week. What he needed was normally cornmeal and flour, which would be entrusted to the school kitchen, where the ingredients were processed into soup or porridge for the boarders.

When the family could not come up with the food, his parents would borrow some dried sweet potato slices from the neighbours. Uncle Lian would then take them along to school. He would have to subsist on the slices for the week. Instead of handing the slices over to the school kitchen, Uncle Lian ate them raw. He had to ration them to last a week.

Chinese kids in the 21st century might believe that Uncle Lian’s potato slices were as tasty as those potato chips served at the McDonald’s or KFC, but nothing could have been further from the truth. The truth was that dried in the sun and wind, the raw slices were stored in the attic to last a family through the following spring months, when staples like corn and wheat were running low. Uncle Lian’s dried sweet potato slices were coarse, uncooked and unpalatable.

Attitudes

I have no idea whether Uncle Lian managed to complete middle school or not, but he ended up a farmer while a couple of his classmates from the village went on to high school in the county town. Like most of his contemporaries, he got married to a country lassie. In time the couple brought a boy and a girl into the world.

Uncle Lian worked in the People’s Commune for over a decade. Then in the early 1980s, the institution was dismantled, and each peasant family was allotted a share of farmland to work on its own.

Chemical fertilisers were introduced and used extensively when the establishment of People’s Communes was in place. After the system was replaced by each family working individually, the application of chemical fertilisers became rampant as a result of the farmers’ greed for a higher output. The local Supply and Sales Cooperative Shop supplied several varieties of chemical fertiliser the year round to the farming community.

Uncle Lian’s attitude to the chemical stuff was poles apart from that of his fellow villagers. Instead of chemical fertilising his fields, he carried compost, manure and human waste over to his crops. Chemical fertilisers were light while organic fertilisers were hefty, so it cost Uncle Lian a lot of sweat to port his organic stuff to the fields. Few fellow farmers understood him, and his eccentricity incurred jeers and derision.

Walking by his fields one day, I asked Father whose crops it was because the plants, weak and yellowish, stood in sharp contrast with those in the neighbouring plot, which were verdant and green. Father told me that Uncle Lian raised them. While saying so, Father sighed, “We have to go with the flow. Your uncle is obstinate and he will go against it.”

When the crops were ripe and harvested, Uncle Lian did not reap as much as did the other farmers in the village. It was obvious to the farmers that chemical fertilisers did help boost yield, so it baffled them how on earth Uncle Lian could be such an idiot.

Because Father and Uncle Lian got on well, they often met at our cottage in the evening to chat. Their talk sometimes lasted deep into the night. Mother, my brother and I often retired to bed when they were still conversing. Many a time Uncle Lian tried to persuade my father to accept his ideas on organic farming. Father sympathised with him, but to feed the family, Father had to follow the herd and increase the output of our crops in the fields by chemical means.

The discussion between Uncle Lian and Father also involved issues which at the time were beyond me due to my age and naivety. When Father did not agree with him on an issue, Uncle Lian would scribble some messages down and pass them on to Father. The messages were not written on proper stationery, for Uncle Lian could not afford it. He penned them between the lines on a leaf torn off some used books like Selected Works of Chairman Mao. This was in the early 1980s.

To my young eyes, Uncle Lian was poor but great. I thought then he was knowledgeable and far-sighted. One summer the local government organised an illiteracy eradication campaign to help those who could not read or write. Many farmers were hostile to the lessons, but Aunt Lian, with his husband’s unwavering support, went to the classes and never missed a lesson. She was among the very few who became literate through the programme. By the time she finished the course and got the certificate, Aunt Lian was able to read a newspaper.

Relationship with Our Family

To augment the family income, Uncle Lian and his wife bought an electric noodles processing machine and set it up at their one-room cottage. Theirs was the first ever of its kind in the village. The villagers had to pay a fee if they had their flour processed into noodles on the machine by Uncle and Aunt. Their service was very well received. My family got favours from them. On several occasions Mother sent me on the errand. I took the flour to their cottage. When the noodles were ready for me to take home, Uncle and Aunt refused to charge me anything for the service.

Well-read in the subject, Uncle Lian was a master of feng shui. Father and Mother, with the help of fellow villagers, built our second bungalow of dried adobe bricks around 1982. The orientation of the house was adopted following Uncle Lian’s advice. My family owed a debt of gratitude to him for his wisdom. Also he led the fellow villagers in the construction of the house, without any modern machines. Father said that without Uncle Lian’s coordination and leadership the construction would have been slower and the quality inferior.

Fall

Later on I went on to high school in the county town. One winter holiday when I got home from school, Father told me that Uncle Lian had committed suicide. I was stunned. He had been spraying rice plants in the paddies when he drank the pesticide and killed himself that way. His failing to come back for lunch alarmed the family. They started a search and spotted his body amidst maize plants on a slope. Why he took his own life still remains a mystery today.

After his death, his wife got remarried to a widower in a village in neighbouring Henan Province so that Uncle Lian’s two kids, a boy and a girl, could be supported.

Last winter I went back to visit Mother. Mother told me that Uncle Lian’s son had died earlier in the winter, exactly in the same manner as his father. The young lad had been chasing a lassie in his village in Henan. For one reason or another, they could not get spliced. Uncle Lian’s son took his own life by drinking pesticide. Brought back to my village later, his corpse was laid to rest beside his father at the graveyard.

What became of Mr Lian’s daughter then? The young girl was in trouble. She had left her village to go and work as a housemaid in a city. Unfortunately, the girl had an affair with the man by whom she was employed. She ended up pregnant, and her master was going through some legal process with his wife at the moment.