Lenin's Kisses Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    She blushed and looked around, as if trying to escape, explaining, My mother is sick, and I needed to get her some medicine.
    He introduced himself as Cadre Liu from the commune, and asked if she knew who Wang, Zhang, Jiang, and Yao were. When she didn’t respond, he proceeded to educate her, explaining that an event had taken place in China that was so momentous that it was celebrated throughout the land as a second Revolution. He asked her how it was possible that she didn’t know who Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chuqiao were, or even that Jiang Qing was Chairman Mao’s wife. Afterward, he still didn’t leave, but stayed in Liven another night. He was determined to teach this girl and her isolated village many things about the outside world—about the commune, the provincial capital, and indeed the entire nation.
    It wasn’t until many days later—after he had gotten to know the girl well—that Liu finally returned to the commune.
    And at the end of that year Jumei miraculously gave birth to four daughters.
    After the birth, Jumei’s mother, Mao Zhi, went to the commune to look for Cadre Liu. Given Liu’s willingness to promote soc-ed in remote mountainous villages like Liven, he had become recognized as the most outstanding soc-ed cadre in the commune—or perhaps the entire county—and consequently was no longer charged with such lowly tasks as sweeping the courtyard or boiling water, and instead had become a prominent national cadre. Therefore, shortly after Mao Zhi arrived at this commune that functioned as the township office to look for him, she promptly turned around and returned home. When she arrived at her daughter’s bedside after having spent two days on the road, she said only one thing—that Liu Yingque had died, having been crushed like a pancake after falling into a ravine while promoting soc-ed in the countryside.
    Further, Further Reading:
    1) Soc-school babe. This was a designation that dated from when Chief Liu was a child, and was the product of several unforgettable pages from the history of the nation. Soon after the founding of new China, there began to appear many socialist academies and cadre training centers, which developed into Party institutes or Marxist-Leninist academies. People called these institutions socialist schools, or soc-schools, and within a decade they could be found in every city and county, with some provinces and districts having as many as three or four of them. Some continued to be called socialist education institutes, but most were referred to simply as soc-schools.
    The Shuanghuai County Institute was known as a soc-school. It was located in a field to the north of the city and consisted of several red-tiled buildings arranged around a white-brick courtyard. This school was founded in the early years of the People’s Republic, and the county’s Party secretary doubled as the school president, while the county chief served as the school’s vice president. Cadres from throughout the county regularly came to study, and anyone who wanted to be promoted had to study for three to six months. There were also periods, however, when attendance was very light. The school had only one full-time teacher, whose name was Liu, and all of the other classes were taught by the secretary, the county chief, and various visiting experts. During the farming season, the government wouldn’t initiate many new policies and movements, and therefore the school would send all of its employees home to tend their crops, leaving only Teacher Liu to oversee the premises.
    Liu Yingque had grown up in this school, and had been adopted by Teacher Liu.
    That was the gengzi year, 1960, or the first of what people subsequently referred to as the Three Years of Natural Disasters, when the entire country endured a series of nightmarish famines. The county stopped sending cadres and Party members to the Shuanghuai soc-school, and the cadres and teachers who were already there were told to return