Under the Hawthorn Tree by Ai Mi, Anna Holmwood Page A

them to walk side by side, so he walked ahead and had to turn around to talk. ‘What did Auntie say?’
    â€˜She wanted me to buy some wool for Lin and knit him a jumper.’
    â€˜Auntie wants you for her daughter-in-law, that’s what she wants. Did you know that?’
    â€˜She said.’
    â€˜Did you . . . say yes?’
    Jingqiu nearly fell over with shock. ‘What are you talking about? I’m still at school.’
    â€˜Does that mean if you weren’t at school you would say yes?’ Old Third teased. ‘Did you agree to make him a jumper?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Well, if you agreed to knit him a jumper then you can make me one too!’
    â€˜You sound like a child! Someone gets a jumper, so you have to have one too?’ She gained courage. ‘Are you sure you want me to knit you one? What would your wife say?’
    He was startled. ‘What wife? Who told you I have a wife?’
    So he isn’t married. She was rapturous, but continued to push him. ‘Auntie said you had a wife, that last time you left you went home to visit your family.’
    â€˜I’m not married yet, so what wife is that? She must have been trying to get you and Lin together, otherwise why would she say that? You ask the men at my unit, they’ll tell you if I’m married or not. If you don’t believe me, you’ll believe my unit, yes?’
    â€˜Why would I ask your unit? What’s it got to do with me whether you’re married or not?’
    â€˜I was just worried you’d got the wrong idea,’ Old Third replied.
    He must like me, otherwise why would he worry that I’d got the wrong idea, Jingqiu thought. But something stopped her from persisting. She’d approached an exciting but dangerous point and she could see that he didn’t seem to want to continue either, instead changing the topic of conversation to her family. She decided to be candid, that she would tell him the truth to test him. She spoke of her father’s denunciation, how he had been driven out to the countryside, how both he and her brother had no chance of returning, she told him all of it. He listened, never interrupting and asking questions only when she faltered.
    Jingqiu said, ‘I remember at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and my mother still hadn’t been hunted down. One evening, when I was with my friends, we ran to the meeting hall at my mother’s school as we heard noise and we wanted to see what it was all about. We knew they often held struggle meetings there. We thought struggle sessions were fun, watching people being criticised as traitors to the revolution. That day a teacher called Zhu Jiajing was confessing to being a traitor, but only in order to save her skin. She said she had never defected, and had never betrayed a comrade. She was often pulled out for struggle sessions but was always perfectly calm, would raise her head, and say coldly, “You’re not talking sense. This is not true, and I can’t be bothered to respond.” One day, I went with my friends to the meeting hall as usual to see what was going on, and this time I saw my mother in the middle of the crowd being criticised, her head lowered. My friends started laughing at me and copying my mother. I was so scared I ran home, hid and cried. When my mother returned she didn’t say anything, because she thought I hadn’t seen.
    â€˜When the day came for her to be publicly criticised, she knew she couldn’t hide it from us any more, so at lunchtime she gave my sister and me some money and told us to go to the market across the river, and not to come back before dinner. We stayed away until five o’clock. As soon as we entered the school gate we saw a poster so big it could have covered the sky, and on it was my mother’s name, written upside down with a red cross over it, calling her a historical counter-revolutionary.
    â€˜Back at home I saw