The posted notices were prepared by Xiao Juza and reviewed by Ning An.
These notices gave a detailed account of Li Changwei’s family situation and personal circumstances.
His grandparents and parents had all been sent down for reformation. She didn’t mention that they had been labeled “stinking old ninth category,” partly because she disliked the term, and partly because the eight categories ranked ahead of it were far more serious—she’d let everyone speculate on their own.
[Li Changwei and his younger sister Li Changling severed ties with their elders and stayed in the city.]
In this era, this counted as politically correct, but politically correct didn’t mean emotionally correct. People would say “good riddance” out loud, but behind their backs they’d all curse them as ungrateful wolves.
[Li Changwei has a childhood sweetheart, Zhang Yujie. Zhang Yujie’s entire family was sent down to a harsh place for reformation.]
[Even though Zhang Yujie’s whole family was sent down, Li Changwei doesn’t care. He deeply treasures his relationship with Zhang Yujie. Every day he scrimps and saves, sending all the money, coupons, and supplies he saves to Zhang Yujie, hoping to help her get through these difficult years.]
[The bond between Li Changwei and Zhang Yujie is unbreakable. We hope the young girls of the village will remember this and never get close to Li Changwei—he already has a sweetheart!]
For those last two paragraphs, Ning An gave Xiao Juza a thumbs-up.
Full of feeling, and thought-provoking.
What was this? Grandparents and parents sent down, so you sever ties; sweetheart sent down, and you stay devoted? Your parents raised you for nothing, did they? Were you raised for the Zhang family instead? How could anyone be such an ungrateful wolf?
Stories like this resonated especially easily with parents and elders.
The other educated youth who had abandoned her husband and child was named Wang Baohong, and her situation was also quite interesting. It turned out she had a sweetheart in the city too—her own classmate.
The two of them were originally supposed to go down to the countryside together, but the young man’s parents spent some money at the last minute and pulled some strings to get their child sent to a production corps in the Northeast. Conditions there were good—you practically got half the year off—and a corps was different from a production team: they had partially achieved mechanization, so the work wasn’t very tiring, and they even paid a monthly salary. It was essentially a long-distance relationship.
And so, “the two who loved each other were temporarily separated.” The explosive part was that Xiao Juza dug some details out of the plot: the two had agreed that for these few years, each would live well where they were, and once there was a chance to return to the city, they would find a way to get back together. And “living well,” of course, could mean getting married—using other people’s help to live well.
This was even more outrageous than Li Changwei and Zhang Yujie. Those two had only done this with a tacit understanding, still keeping up appearances. These two truly had no shame at all. Or rather, their sense of morality was so low that they simply didn’t care about such things.
In the original plot, after Wang Baohong married, she basically stopped working in the fields, just doing a bit of housework at home. Later she gave birth to a son, considered herself a great contributor to her in-laws’ family, and became even more arrogant.
When she later returned to the city, she wanted to reunite with her first love as agreed—but who would have thought that her first love would betray their original “vow”? He refused to divorce… but that was another story altogether.
[Educated Youth Wang Baohong already has a partner. Her partner went to the Northeast as an inserted youth, and the two agreed to marry when they return to the city. Please respect Educated Youth Wang’s romantic life—young men, do not approach her, and keep an appropriate distance from her.]
As for the remaining three, there wasn’t much good to say—two were refined self-servers, and one was endlessly greedy for petty advantages.
Xiao Juza simply introduced their family situations: their parents’ jobs, the siblings at home, the houses they lived in. There were no outright negative comments, but every sentence implied that these three came from families with poor conditions—homes that were far too crowded, complicated family members who were hard to get along with, families that wouldn’t send them any money or be of any help when they returned to the city.
Finally, it concluded: [The educated youth have come here to help our Erdaogou Shenchandui raise productivity and harvest more grain, so that everyone can eat their fill and live good lives. They answered the Leader’s call to go down to the countryside—they came to labor and work, not to pursue romance or find partners. Everyone, please correct your attitude and do not court the educated youth!]
[We wish the educated youth comrades the chance to strengthen their bodies and temper their wills in the vast countryside! The great Leader said that educated youth must go to the harshest places to train themselves. They have come to be tempered, not to enjoy themselves! We ask the brigade leader to treat the educated youth the same as the commune members, assigning them the same work as the commune member comrades. This will benefit the growth of the educated youth comrades.]
The brigade leader of Erdaogou was a good comrade, soft-hearted. In the original storyline, he had looked after the educated youth a great deal, rarely supervised them, and tried to assign them lighter work. Ning An hoped that this time around, they would not get to enjoy that special treatment again.
After posting these notices at gathering places and along the main routes, Ning An also posted them at some of the village’s “landmarks”—the well, the millstone, the front gate of the elementary school. It wasn’t her fault Xiao Juza had prepared so many.
Once she had posted notices everywhere she could think of, Ning An went back to sleep.
“Juza, keep watch and see how the villagers react tomorrow morning. I figure these notices will work for a while, but as time passes, the effect will fade. When that happens, we’ll need to add more fuel to the fire.”
“Mm-hm. I’m watching. You’ve worked hard, An’an. Go to sleep.”
“Thanks, Juza. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Xiao Juza had a slight case of OCD—if Ning An said one sentence to it, it absolutely had to reply with one, so that it would be the one to end the conversation.
Ning An didn’t fight it over this.
She slept soundly through the night.
The next day, Zhao Fengxia woke up feeling refreshed, her body feeling unusually light. Normally when she got up, her lower back would feel heavy and sore, her back would be uncomfortable, and her legs and feet would feel off—she’d have to get up and move around for a while before it passed. But today, for some reason, she sprang right up without a trace of discomfort.
She couldn’t help chuckling to herself, imagining the process of “expelling toxins and curing illness.” Maybe the night before last, it was precisely because the sick energy had been expelled that the smell had been so foul.
As for why they had expelled that sick energy—who cared! She felt so good right now she wanted to jump for joy!
Humming a little tune under her breath, Zhao Fengxia headed out to work.
Ning An, as usual, slept until breakfast was ready.
Her parents couldn’t bear to wake her, and neither could Xiao Juza.
Ning An just let them be. She would take good care of them in other ways.
The family sat together eating breakfast, all in good spirits.
Zhao Fengxia said with a smile, “Look at our An’an—isn’t she getting prettier and prettier? I feel like she’s gotten a lot fairer.”
Jiang Xuegong said, “She was always fair.”
To put it bluntly, his daughter was the fairest in the whole village. No other child was like his—she had never once worked in the fields.
Ning An said, “I do seem a bit fairer. Dad, Mom, I think you both look great too—you’ve gotten fairer as well.”
Zhao Fengxia and Jiang Xuegong looked at each other and spoke at the same time:
“That’s true—your mom’s complexion does look good.”
“That’s true—your dad does look healthy.”
With that, both of them broke into grins. Clearly, the couple were on the same wavelength—both had thought of the expelled sick energy. They didn’t know why it happened, but it was a good thing!
As for why Ning An hadn’t gone through that whole ordeal like the two of them—well, that was simple. She was young, her sick energy was mild, so there was no need.