by Cao Wenxuan
“Time’s moving on,” said the head of the village.
Mama nudged Sunflower, never expecting that she would throw her arms around her waist and wail, “I’m not going! I’m not going!”
Many of the villagers had to look away. Cuihuan, Gayu and the other children started to cry. Mama pushed Sunflower forward. The head of the village gave a big sigh, went over to Sunflower, picked her up, turned round and headed towards the boat. Sunflower flailed her arms in the air, screaming, “MAMA! BABA! BRONZE!” She kept screaming for Bronze, but he wasn’t there. Mama turned her head away.
The head of the village carried her aboard the boat and delivered her to the aunties. Sunflower struggled, but the women held her tight and said over and over again, “Be good, Sunflower! Be good! If you get homesick we’ll bring you back. This will always be your home. And your brother, and Baba and Mama, can come to see you in the city!”
Gradually, Sunflower became calmer, though she was still sobbing.
“It’s time to go!” said the head of the village. The engine started up. A plume of black smoke sputtered out of the stern and onto the water. Sunflower opened the wicker basket, took out the jade bracelet and ran to the front of the boat.
“Mama!” she shouted.
Mama came to the pier. Sunflower handed her the bracelet.
“I’ll keep it safe for you,” said Mama.
“Where’s Bronze?”
“I told him to go to Grandma’s. If he was here, he’d never let you go.”
Tears streamed down Sunflower’s face.
“It’s time to leave now,” shouted the head of the village. As he pushed the boat off with his foot, Mama and Sunflower were separated. The aunties came out of the cabin and stood with Sunflower at the prow, each holding one of Sunflower’s hands.
The boat turned around. It paused for a moment, churning up waves, then it pushed its bottom into the water and sped off, leaving Damaidi behind.
Anxious that Sunflower didn’t have much time left, Bronze had run all the way to Grandma’s and then all the way back. He arrived as the boat was heading downstream, a white dot, no bigger than a dove on the horizon. He didn’t cry, or make a fuss, he just went numb.
From then on, he left the house early each morning and went to sit on top of a big haystack by the river. Some of the haystacks near the river were as high as mountains, as high as three-storey city buildings. There was a white poplar near the haystack, and every morning Bronze would climb it and clamber onto the haystack. Then he sat completely still, facing the east. From here he could follow the river far into the distance. He could see the point where the white boat had disappeared from view.
No matter how bad the weather, Bronze spent all day, every day on the haystack. He was even seen there at night sometimes.
The villagers soon discovered where he was. At first, they came – both adults and children – to see him on the haystack, but as the days went by they tailed off until only the occasional visitor passed by.
“He’s still up there,” they’d say, out loud to whoever was there, or silently to themselves.
One day, the rain came down in such torrents that it was almost impossible to see anything. The villagers heard Mama calling Bronze. They could hear the tears in her voice as she walked through the curtain of rain, and their hearts went out to her. But Bronze ignored his mother. The rain had smoothed down his hair, as it smoothed down the hay. It clung to his head, almost covering his eyes. As the water ran down from his brow, he blinked, forcing his eyes open again and holding them open wide as he stared down the river as far as he could, at the rain and at the vastness of the water.
When the rain stopped, people looked up at the haystack. Bronze was still there, but he seemed to have shrunk.
The autumn sunlight was dazzling. By midday the leaves on the plants were drooping or starting to curl. The buffaloes walked on the dust road near the end of the village, and made their plaintive bellowing noises. Ducks hid in the shade of trees, their flat beaks open, their chests rising and falling. Villagers hurried across the open threshing ground, eager to get out of the baking heat. And still, Bronze sat on the haystack.
“The sun’ll kill him up there,” said one of the older people.
Mama would have fallen to her knees and begged him to come down, if only it would have made any difference. They could all see how thin he was getting, as lean as a monkey.
As Bronze stared ahead, the sunlight spiralled like a whirlpool, and the river glowed with golden heat. The villages, trees and windmills, and the people on the roads and on the boats, all seemed to be an illusion, both real and unreal. It was as if he was seeing things through a curtain of rain, as if their forms were always changing. Sweat dripped off his chin into the grass. He saw everything as gold, then black, then red, then all the colours of the rainbow.
Bronze felt the haystack begin to move, and then gradually to sway, until it was swaying like a boat on the river. At some stage he must have turned round: he was no longer looking at the river but at the fields. The fields were underwater, even the sky seemed to be in the water.
Bronze looked straight ahead. He rubbed his eyes. They stung from the sweat. He rubbed them again.
She seemed to be running as if through a screen of rain towards his haystack. But she was completely silent – in a silent, fluid world. He staggered to his feet on top of the haystack. It was clearly her, running through the rain towards him. He ran to meet her.
Bronze lay on the ground, completely still, completely quiet. When he came round, he leant against the haystack for support, and slowly pulled himself up. There she was, running through the screen of rain, waving to him.
He opened his mouth, summoned all the strength in his body, and shouted, “S U N F L O W E R!”
Tears were flooding down his face.
Gayu was out with his ducks. When he heard Bronze shout, he was astonished.
Bronze shouted again, “S U N F L O W E R!”
The sound wasn’t perfectly clear, but it had definitely come out of Bronze’s mouth. Gayu left the ducks and ran to Bronze’s house, and as he ran he shouted out so all the villagers could hear, “Bronze can speak! He can speak!”
Bronze ran like crazy from the haystack to the fields.
Sunshine spilled over the boundless fields of sunflowers, filled with thousands and thousands of stems, whose big round heads were turning, just as they should, to face the golden body of heaven as it rolled across the sky.
Historical Note
Bronze and Sunflower is set in rural China in the late 1960s and early 1970s at the time of the Cultural Revolution, when the political situation in the cities was very tense. The Chinese authorities sent huge numbers of professional people (known as “cadres”) from the cities to labour camps (known as “cadre schools”) in remote rural areas. These were educated people who had worked in government offices, universities and schools. Many had never been to the countryside before, and found living there extremely hard. Like Sunflower’s father, they spent all day doing physical labour and then had to attend political meetings in the evening. It was exhausting. Children like Sunflower, who went to the cadre schools with their parents, were often left to play by themselves.
Farming the land and looking after the animals was also back-breaking work for the villagers, who had always lived there. Natural disasters such as plagues of locusts could be life-threatening or ruinous, especially for poor families like Bronze’s. The villagers and the cadres came from very different backgrounds. They didn’t always understand each other but they had to get on as well as they could.
In the early 1970s, as the Cultural Revolution had run its course, the cadre schools were closed and the city people returned to the cities.
On Writing “Bronze and Sunflower”
In the 1990s, a friend told me stories about her childhood. Her father worked in one of the government ministries and was sent to a cadre school in the countryside. When she went to stay with him, he
couldn’t spend time with her because he had to work on the land. She got bored and went to play with the children in the village across the river. As she was talking, the endless reed marshes of my own childhood drifted into my mind. There’d been a cadre school hidden in the reeds. I knew what life was like at a cadre school, so I thought this might be a good setting for a book.
For a long time it was just an idea. Then one day I started wondering what it would be like for a little girl to move from the city to a small village, in the middle of nowhere, and to make friends with the village children. And I thought if two children from very different worlds could become close friends, that would make a very special story, with the contrast of city life and country life in the background. So, more than a decade after that conversation with my friend, I had what I needed: the setting, the characters and the plot. But the different parts of the story weren’t coming together – they were like islands in the sea and I didn’t feel ready to start writing, so I put it to one side.
A few years later, the night before Chinese New Year, I thought I should get on with writing this book. After all, I already had plenty of good material for the story. But I still couldn’t put pen to paper; I felt something was missing. Then, at about half-past five the next morning – I remember it so clearly – I was lying in bed when all of a sudden four Chinese characters appeared in front of me: … Bronze and Sunflower. It just happened; just like that. And when I saw them, everything fell into place. The boy was called Bronze, the girl was called Sunflower. I saw fields of sunflowers reaching into the distance, then Sunflower’s father appeared – an artist, a sculptor who’d spent a lifetime working on sunflowers that he made in bronze.
At last, my story had a soul. It seeped into all the material I had prepared, and brought it alive. And I realized that this was what I had been waiting for.
Cao Wenxuan, 2005
Cao Wenxuan is one of China’s most important children’s writers, often referred to as the country’s very own Hans Christian Andersen, and he has won several of China’s most prestigious awards for children’s literature. He is a professor of Chinese literature at Peking University and has in turn taught some of the country’s best young writers. Many of his books have become bestsellers, including Thatched Cottage and Red Gourd, and his work has been translated into French, Russian, Japanese and Korean as well as English. Note that “Cao” is his family name and “Wenxuan” is his given name; in China, Cao Wenxuan would be addressed as Mr Cao or, more respectfully, Professor Cao.
Helen Wang grew up in Yorkshire. She studied Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies and is now a curator at the British Museum. She has written and edited numerous books and has been translating from Chinese to English for over 20 years, including, for children, Jackal and Wolf by Shen Shixi and Pai Hua Zi and the Clever Girl by Zhang Xinxin. She lives with her family in north London.
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This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg and Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas.
Each year, a dedicated committee of professionals selects books that are translated into English from a wide variety of foreign languages. We award grants to UK publishers to help translate, promote, market and champion these titles. Our aim is to celebrate books of outstanding literary quality, which have a clear link to the PEN charter and promote free speech and intercultural understanding.
In 2011, Writers in Translation’s outstanding work and contribution to diversity in the UK literary scene was recognized by Arts Council England. English PEN was awarded a threefold increase in funding to develop its support for world writing in translation.
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This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s “PEN Translates!” programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Published by arrangement with Phoenix Juvenile and Children’s Publishing Ltd
First published in the English language 2015 by Walker Books Ltd 87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ
Text © 2005 Cao Wenxuan
English translation © 2015 Helen Wang
> Illustrations © 2015 Meilo So
The right of Cao Wenxuan and Helen Wang to be identified as author and translator respectively of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-4063-5537-6 (ePub)
www.walker.co.uk