Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [82]
“Our fellowship has a thousand members in the Wen County area alone,” said Li Tiejun proudly. “How could the county head dare refuse to see us?”
Gao Shengchan kept reminding Li Tiejun that when they met with the county head to leave the talking to him. He felt confident that he could persuade Yang to solve the Zhang Family Village land-rights encroachment, so he asked Li Tiejun not to interfere.
As they were thinking and talking, the four men met at the front gate.
“Morning, friends!” Fang Caodi spoke up, afraid that Lao Chen’s Taiwanese accent might give rise to suspicion. “Sorry to trouble you, but is this the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground?”
“That’s right,” Li Tiejun answered somewhat warily. “Who are you looking for?”
“We’re looking for a woman called the grain does not die,” said Fang Caodi. “Her real name is … er, what is it?”
“Wei Xihong, Little Xi,” Lao Chen said.
“Do you know her?” asked Fang Caodi.
“Wei Xihong, Wei Xihong.” Li Tiejun didn’t want to lie, so he just repeated the name. “Little Xi, Little Xi …”
“She’s from Beijing,” offered Fang Caodi.
“From Beijing,” Li Tiejun went on repeating as though he was thinking about it, “from Beijing, come to Henan from Beijing …”
“Who’s in charge here?” asked Fang Caodi impatiently.
“God is in charge here,” said Li Tiejun.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Fang Caodi.
“Forget it, let’s go,” said Lao Chen, pulling Fang Caodi away.
Li Tiejun turned around, closed the front gate very purposefully, and walked off with Gao Shengchan toward the township. The shepherd has a responsibility to protect his sheep, he thought. “Those two,” he said to Gao Shengchan, “might be Public Security informers, so I didn’t want to tell them anything, but I didn’t lie either.”
Gao Shengchan had not said a word, but he had a different opinion of Chen and Fang. He knew where Little Xi was, and he didn’t want to help them find her. He knew that they would come back, and he felt a little uneasy about his refusal to talk to them. He had to handle things in the order of their importance, and the most important of important things he had to concentrate on now was to prevent his fellowship from being drawn into a protest.
If Lao Chen had not received Zhang Dou’s text message he would not have known for certain that Little Xi was there and he might have had his confidence shaken by this encounter. Now that they had located the church, he knew for certain that Little Xi was there somewhere. Those two fellows were simply unwilling to tell them the truth. He told Fang Caodi to stay there at the church and watch for Little Xi to come out while he himself returned to the township center, found an Internet café, and tried to communicate with maizibusi online.
Lao Chen and Fang Caodi didn’t know that Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun were fully aware that Little Xi was at that very moment inside the church attending a Bible-reading class. She would not leave the church that day, but would eat lunch there and in the afternoon she would go on the Internet and surf the virtual world, or perhaps use her maizibusi web name to write a blog on the peasants’ rights defense movement. She might even receive an answering post accusing her of being a sonovabitch who turned the truth upside down. Dinner in the village at five p.m., participation in the fellowship witness meeting at six-thirty, and at eight a discussion with the most enthusiastic brothers and sisters of the plans for the final meeting on the Zhang Family Village land-rights protest. Little Xi felt that her life was richly rewarding.
The population of the Warm Springs township was less than a hundred thousand, but there were quite a few Internet cafés. As Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun were going into the county head’s office in the county government building on Yellow River Road, Lao Chen was entering an Internet café that had just opened for business. He was extremely excited when he found maizibusi’s blog and comments. Little Xi was so