The Four Books Read Online Free PDF Page B

villages on the other shore. However, the middle portion of the river, after it has passed Gansu and flowed through Shaanxi toward Henan, always floods during the rainy season, stirring up vast amounts of sand and silt, and consequently no one has ever dared try to ford it. In winter, the water along the banks of the river freezes solid, and people can walk over it, but in the center, in areas where it is dozens of meters wide, the bone-chillingly cold water flows too fast to freeze, making it impossible to cross. The Yellow River constitutes a natural barrier for Re-Ed, like a no-man’s-land along a nation’s border. Those of us in the ninety-ninth are surrounded by the river. Some people have tried to flee, but they were all caught by others and brought back, and while their punishment was redoubled, those who caught them were deemed to be re-educated and permitted to return home. Some people thought that the Yellow River was lower in late autumn and early winter, but when they tried to cross they drowned before getting very far, and their corpses appeared on the riverbank about twenty li downstream. There was one person who did succeed in escaping, but after he returned home, his wife and children, acting out of either fear or a new awareness, brought him back to Re-Ed. As a result, he ended up being transferred from Re-Ed to prison, while his wife was promoted from an ordinary schoolteacher to a school principal, and from section chief to department head.
    After that, no one else even dared to flee.
    Life here is in fact much better than prison. Here everyone has enough food to eat and clothes to wear. The air is as fresh as a ripe peach or pear. Many people spend most of their time sunning themselves in winter and enjoying the cool breeze in summer, and throughout the year they are only busy when there is farmwork to be done. When the farmwork is light, they feel as though they are on vacation. Like me, for example. Here I can not only go for walks, enjoy the fresh air, chat with my neighbors, play cards, and sleep, I can also write novels. If everyone had not insisted that a mu of farmland definitely wouldn’t be able to yield six hundred jin of grain, then virtually everyone would be able to read whatever books they wanted, and think about whatever they wanted.
    However, everyone committed the grievous crime of claiming that a mu of land wouldn’t be able to yield six hundred jin of grain. As a result, things were never the same again, precipitating a situation whereby a tiny grain of sand was transformed into a huge stone, and a light breeze was transformed into a full-blown storm.
    3. Criminal Records , p. 9 (excerpt)
    The seemingly calm afternoon of December 26 was actually fraught with class struggle between the capitalists and the proletariat. On the surface, everyone was undergoing labor reform, following the current trends, but in reality the capitalists were secretly cursing and plotting against the proletariat. For instance, I noticed that when the pretty young Musician went to work in the fields, she would always have a copy of La Dame aux Camélias in her pocket. This is an extremely reactionary French capitalist novel about a prostitute. Not only had the Musician not voluntarily handed over this book, but she even dared to carry it with her when she went down into the fields, and when everyone else was resting she would secretly read the novel, rapt with attention and her eyes full of tears. She would stare intently at that image of the heavily made-up prostitute, Marguerite, and for the longest time couldn’t bring herself to look away—and from this one can clearly see how sordid her thoughts were. In order to attract men, Marguerite would wear a camellia blossom and therefore always smelled of camellias. The Musician, too, always emitted a camellia-like scent of cold cream. Marguerite’s hair flowed down like a waterfall, while the Musician’s also hung past to her shoulders like a waterfall. What