Northwest travel

Author: Yang Haoming / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: Bu Yanfang felt that for someone like him, a "child who could be reformed," becoming a military settler and participating in frontier construction should be the beginning of a bright new life. However, because his sister Bu Yanli started crying as soon as they got on the train and nothing could comfort her, Bu Yanfang's light and cheerful mood was completely ruined. Those long-standing troubles that had plagued Bu Yanfang for years had already been driven out of his life after he was approved to join the production team, yet now they returned uninvited, resurfacing in his mind. Thinking back on the path he had walked, Bu Yanfang felt deeply. In his 18 years of life, his carefree childhood had passed like a shooting star in the night sky, quickly vanishing, followed by humiliation and oppression brought on by family problems. It could be said that since his early childhood, a troubled fate had shadowed him like a shadow, and until he became a builder in the vast northwest, his days were like crying, raging, struggling, and stagnating in a nightmare. And all of this stemmed from that turbulent autumn of 1958.
Bu Jieqing, his father, was the head of surgery at a hospital in the province. Although he was an old intellectual, he had always pursued progress and had written an application to join the Communist Party immediately after the liberation. Unfortunately, even after seven or eight years of being "enlightened," his organizational issues had not been resolved, and he had not even been qualified to attend the training for aspiring party members, which deeply saddened Bu Jieqing. In 1957, during the "Anti-Rightist Campaign," at a meeting in the hospital, he arrived late. He heard that the quota set by the had not been met and that there was still one short. The leaders were very anxious. Bu Jieqing saw this as an opportunity to get closer to the organization and demonstrate his loyalty to the Party. Without asking for details, he walked into the meeting and said he was willing to take on that spot. This saved the leaders, and for a time, his father's reputation soared. Besides his skillful medical practice, he was also known as the only one in the entire system who actively sought to become a rightist. After being as a "rightist," his general history of belonging to the Kuomintang before liberation was upgraded to a history of counter-revolution.
His mother worked at the same hospital as his father and could not bear this blow. Under the intervention of the organization, she was forced to divorce his father. Bu Yanfang did not know about his father's situation until an argument with a classmate exposed this secret that had been hidden from him for more than a year.
When Bu Yanfang was almost finishing elementary school, his grades improved, and his habit of playing and causing trouble also lessened. His popularity in the class soared. When the sixth grade started, the class officers were re-elected. Just as a classmate announcing the vote declared Bu Yanfang elected class monitor with a high vote, his neighbor Shen Zhanqun suddenly shouted loudly, "Bu Yanfang's father is a big 'rightist,' and I don't agree with him!" After the shout, all the classmates looked at him with terrified eyes. Bu Yanfang was extremely upset—he had never cried in front of others before.
What happened after that, Bu Yanfang no longer remembered. He came home and refused to eat, and his father asked him but received no reply. As a young child, Bu Yanfang understood little about the "rightist" issue. Although he did not hate his father, he became a different person from then on. He changed from an outgoing, lively, and cheerful child into a silent, timid, and spiritless one. His poor background felt like a heavy stone weighing him down, and at a young age, he felt like an orphan abandoned by society.
P4-5