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By Root 1274 0

the old monk came in with a bowl of gruel and told me that I should go outside and see what was happening in the world. What he said made sense, so I went back to the county seat, where the atmosphere was still extremely tense, and the papers announced that there was no end in sight to the crackdown. Fortunately, transport was running again, and so I went to Zhangzhou in Jiangxi. It was eerily quiet. People were avoiding each other’s eyes in the street, just like in Beijing after June 4, 1989. At the beginning of March, the evening papers announced that the crackdown had come to an end, and the following day all the papers carried the same headline: ‘China’s Golden Age of Prosperity Has Officially Begun.’ Now everyone was smiling and taking to the streets to set off firecrackers. So you see, there were twenty-eight days between the time the world economy entered a period of crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy was officially announced. The nation went from potential anarchy and terror to the comparatively lesser fear of a police crackdown. China’s Age of Ascendancy was not announced until after the crackdown, and not, as everybody today says, on the same day that the world economy went into crisis. That’s the end of my story, Lao Chen. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?”

“I’ve had a text message from Hu Yan. She says the Grain Fallen on the Ground underground church is in Jiaozuo in Henan. Old Fang, let’s take a trip to Henan.”

2.

THE FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE OF SEVERAL PEOPLE

The grain fallen on the ground does not die

Fang Caodi had been all over, north and south of the Yangzi, and as he drove his Jeep Cherokee at high speed along the G4 highway, overtaking every car he came to, he told Lao Chen about some of the strange and fascinating things he had witnessed.

Fang Caodi said there was a place called Happy Village in the Mount Taihang area of Hebei; everyone in the village was exceptionally happy, but the media had been repeatedly ordered not to report this. Probably because upstream from the village was a huge, secret chemical factory. After he heard about it from a reporter in the provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, Fang Caodi went directly to Happy Village. Everyone in the village really was smiling and extraordinarily friendly. They all looked pretty healthy, too. The men wore flowers in their hair, and there were old women sitting around, bare to the waist and sunning their droopy breasts; they didn’t seem to mind at all when strangers walked by. It was a spectacle virtually never seen in China. He followed the river upstream from the village, and after about five kilometers he saw a huge chemical factory with a wide-perimeter barb-wire fence and warning signs all around it. There was no way to get any closer, but he could see small planes flying in and out of what looked like a private landing strip.

Lao Chen listened to Fang Caodi; he didn’t dare say a word, even though he felt like it, for fear that Fang Caodi would take his attention off the road. He was driving so fast and talking so much that several times they came very close to an oncoming vehicle. Lao Chen vowed that, if he arrived in Henan alive, he’d give thanks to God and Buddha.

Lao Chen didn’t want to die before he had found Little Xi. If he were to die in an accident, he hoped it would be while holding her hand, and facing their last seconds of life together. If he were to die a natural death, he hoped that Little Xi would be sitting at his bedside watching over him. He wanted to grow old with her. But now she was almost definitely living in her own personal hell, unable to see any way out. He had to give her hope, had to end her loneliness, had to do everything in his power to bring her out of her shell, so that she wouldn’t feel so exhausted.

He took a bite of one of Miaomiao’s cookies. Outside the window was the unending North China Plain, and inside his heart was full of unending love; he never imagined he could feel this way at his age.

Driving south from Beijing past Baoding, but before they reached Shijiazhuang,