The Inspection

The three days at Willow Creek Hollow were the brightest three days of the year.

Word came on the eighth night of the twelfth month that the provincial team assessing the poverty campaign would arrive. Secretary Liu had every dog in the village tied up that same night, for fear a bark might startle the honored guests. First Secretary Xiao Zhou was busier still. In the notebook he carried, the per-capita net income of every poor household sat a few coins above the poverty line — added in red ink, stroke by stroke, until his hand ached from the writing.

Granny Wang was the village's truest poor. Her husband died young; her son broke his leg in the mine and her daughter-in-law left the next year with another man, leaving a grandson tied to her apron strings. She lived in a mud-brick house, its walls daubed with yellow clay that leaked whenever it rained, so that three cracked bowls stood inside to catch the drips. She ate the sweet potatoes she grew herself, and could not afford medicine; when the rheumatism seized her, she bit the corner of her quilt and endured.

And yet this household, on the forms, had become a "stably lifted-out" family, with a per-capita net income of three thousand eight hundred. Granny Wang did not believe it — she could not even read the three characters for "net income."

Two days before the team came, the village changed its face.

First came the whitewashing. Granny Wang's earthen wall was scraped of its clay and smeared with lime, and on the lime, in red paint, were written the words: Targeted relief, not one soul left behind. The plasterer said the base was still damp and the lime would flake before spring. No one listened.

Then came the hens. Each poor household received thirty speckled birds, said to be "industrial relief — raise them, sell the eggs." The hens had been bought in town overnight and squawked in their bamboo cages. Xiao Zhou went door to door: "The hens are on loan. The moment the team leaves, return them exactly, not a feather missing." Granny Wang held the thinnest bird a long while and asked, "So is this hen mine, or not mine?" Xiao Zhou only smiled and said nothing.

The boggy patch at the village mouth was, in a single night, scattered with a thin layer of gravel and planted with a sign reading Cultural Square. The road beside it still lay in mud; the team's car could not enter, so Secretary Liu had it parked half a li away on the asphalt, and the leaders were helped in stepping on bricks.

Most vital were the "clarity cards." On every door a blue plaque was nailed, bearing the cause of poverty, the relief measures, the income detail — written as neatly as if printed. Under Granny Wang's card, the relief-measures line read: shares and dividends, public-welfare post, industry to the household. She had touched none of these; what she had done was sweep the village office yard for three days, for not a single coin.

The day the team came, the sky was fine. Granny Wang was dressed in a starched blue jacket and seated against the whitewashed wall, the thirty hens strutting at her feet. Xiao Zhou crouched and taught her line by line: "If they ask whether life is good, say it is good. If they ask whom to thank, say the Party. Remember?" Granny Wang nodded, then asked, "But what if I tell the truth?" Xiao Zhou's face darkened. "Granny, if your household drops the chain, Secretary Liu and I both take the blame. Could you bear that?"

Granny Wang said nothing more. She remembered the previous winter, kneeling at the township clinic door, begging someone to let her have a prescription for the rheumatism first and she would repay when her son sent money. No one had listened. Yet now the team's car had come, and suddenly she was the most precious person in the village.

The team was satisfied, as expected. They saw the wall, the hens, the clarity cards; they shook Granny Wang's hand, asked her three questions, wrote three lines. At leaving, the lead inspector clapped Xiao Zhou's shoulder and called the work at Willow Creek Hollow "solid, with outstanding bright spots." Xiao Zhou's eyes reddened; he said it was the fruit of everyone's struggle.

The taillights rounded the mountain's lip, and Willow Creek Hollow sank back into its old shape.

The thirty speckled hens were collected household by household and packed back into the town's bamboo cages. Granny Wang held the empty basket and stood a while. The red paint at the wall's foot was still fresh, but behind the wall the rain still leaked. She fetched the cracked bowl for catching drips and set it back under the bed.

The next spring the lime did flake, in great sheets, revealing the damp yellow clay beneath — like a plaster torn from a face, ugly and true. Secretary Liu was promoted to deputy town chief; Xiao Zhou was named Excellent First Secretary, his photograph in the county paper, smiling very white.

Granny Wang's rheumatism ached as before. She still bit the corner of her quilt and endured. Only this year, the village office's notice board gained a sheet of red paper announcing that Willow Creek Hollow had been lifted from poverty as a whole, not one soul left behind. The characters were neat, the red seal pressed upon it, and all who read it said, how good.

Wind poured through the mountain pass and curled one corner of the red paper, until someone weighed it down again with a stone.