This is a down-to-earth story and yet it is beautiful and poignant.
And it is a familiar one to me.
There was this woman in our village who was bought and raised as a servant girl by a well-to-do family in the nearby village.
During Land Reform (土改), the communists asked the servant girl to testify that she had been treated cruelly by her "evil" owner.
To the disappointment the communists, the servant girl went to the podium and instead said that
she was treated kindly by her owner and she ate the same dishes at the same table with the owner's family .
In addition, she was given new clothes and red pocket money on Lunar New Year.
Well, the communists were not too pleased with her testimony but her words spared her owner a lot of pains.
A few years after Land Reform, the owner left the village with her children to go to America to be reunited with her husband.
Some thirty years later, the owner returned to China and had an emotional reunion with the servant girl, who was then a married women in her early fifties.
Apparently, through all those years the servant girl never forgot the kindness of her former owner and the owner always felt grateful
to the servant girl for her conscience and courage to tell the truth during those crzy years of Class Struggle.
Seeing her former servant was living a hard life, the owner helped her out financially and even gave her two-story house to the servant's oldest son when he got married.
It is stories like these that have given us hopes in the darkest hours of the human histroy
and reenforce my belief that most of the people, rich or poor, are kind, decent and dignified.
Thank you for sharing!
