A corner of the Southwest, Wenpu County.
Dawn had not yet broken. A night watchman walked the dark, long streets, and scattered figures were already stirring in the quiet.
Pushing small carts through the alleys, hanging small orange lanterns, were women dressed in worn, plain clothing, most of them stooped, some barefoot, treading through the pre-dawn streets slick with wastewater. Each of these women had her own route, stopping beneath familiar eaves or at roadside spots, picking up wooden buckets from inconspicuous, pre-arranged corners, hanging them on their carts before continuing on.
These were the night-soil women of the small city, the first to rise before dawn.
The old town had no sewage system for waste disposal. Collecting night soil was a disreputable trade people avoided discussing, but honestly, it paid decently well — some women, impoverished or widowed with no other options, took up this work and managed to earn enough to support themselves and their families. In some areas, night-soil women even had established “territories” for their business, occasionally sparking disputes over who served which customers.
But at this hour before dawn, the women pushing their carts to collect the night-soil buckets moved mostly in silence, following their set routes through the dim town, before gradually converging at a run-down courtyard outside the city’s south gate.
A man in a wide-brimmed hat would collect the buckets one by one and pay them in copper coins.
Human waste was an unseemly thing, but in the past, there had always been someone to collect it in bulk. Since the Huaxia Army’s arrival, the previous collectors had been scared off, and this business had been taken over by Huaxia Army personnel — though no one could quite figure out why an army with such vast holdings would bother with something like this. After a while, the night-soil women mostly came to understand that this had become “public” enterprise, and that even the man collecting the waste seemed to be a member of the Huaxia Army.
Compared to the rogues and ruffians who used to collect night soil, the Huaxia Army’s handling of the business was, in fact, better. They gave the women little trouble and paid clearly and promptly — it hadn’t always been this way. In the past, those who bought night soil tended to have unsavory backgrounds as local toughs, and they often meddled with the women’s “qualifications” and “territories” too, sometimes shortchanging or harassing them out of spite when they took a dislike to someone, and occasionally making lewd advances toward a decent-looking young widow. This business of “shit bullies” and “shit thugs” — absurd as it sounds, laughable even — was nonetheless a very real thing happening at the bottom rungs of society.
After the Huaxia Army arrived, such things stopped happening. It seemed at first that whoever in the Huaxia Army was responsible for collecting waste here simply had no interest in this small potential profit and paid it no mind. But over the past couple of months, with a new manager taking over this night-soil station, even the run-down courtyard had gradually become orderly.
Deliveries of various supplies proceeded in an organized fashion, and when the women arrived before dawn, the surrounding air didn’t smell nearly as foul as usual. This newly arrived Huaxia Army member had reinforced the frame supporting the huge waste barrels on one side of the courtyard, and would hose down the road with water each day. The women no longer had to struggle as much emptying their buckets, and he’d occasionally help pour out the night-soil buckets himself — clumsily, but his temperament seemed easygoing and approachable enough.
Over the course of a month or two, the more seasoned among the night-soil women quickly struck up conversation with him, asking where he’d come from, whether he was a proper member of the Huaxia Army, why the Huaxia Army’s officials would bother collecting waste at all, and so on. This middle-aged man, named Tang Minjie, answered without much hesitation — he was originally from the north, and no, he wasn’t a formal member of the Huaxia Army. As for why he collected waste, it was because the Huaxia Army had set up a farmstead nearby at Xiaoye Village, needing to stockpile manure to research soil fertilization methods, and he’d taken on the job for wages, doing odd work.
“Ah, I see…” The night-soil women nodded, understanding now. “So the manager before you must have been a proper Huaxia Army employee… I thought as much — he never used to do much extra.”
By comparison, the previous “proper employee” at the night-soil station hadn’t shown any particular enthusiasm for devoting himself to the post — a “government official” with an aloof manner. Even women accustomed to dealing with waste-collecting thugs found him a bit intimidating, and there hadn’t been much conversation between them. Now that a “temporary worker” had arrived, someone of roughly equal standing, there was naturally more talk between them; this temporary worker would occasionally ask about their lives and experiences over the years, and some of the older women would laugh heartily as they told their stories.
Collecting night soil wasn’t glamorous work, but once you got used to it, life wasn’t unbearably hard either. Or perhaps it could be said that, in these times, hardship was simply part of everyday life to begin with. These women, mostly silent as they collected waste before dawn, would loosen up once they reached the station and found someone curious enough to talk to, occasionally even bursting into laughter — laughter that could sometimes be heard drifting through the pre-dawn night-soil station.
Once they’d finished dumping their waste at the station, the women pushing their carts would head to a nearby tributary of the small river to wash out their buckets — this too was part of the job, and keeping the buckets properly clean often earned extra goodwill from the households they served. Some of the women continued their conversations by the riverside, occasionally bringing up this “temporary worker” at the station.
“Hard to say his age…”
“Thirty… forty-something?”
“Speaks like someone who’s seen the world…”
“Seems like a decent sort…”
“His health doesn’t seem too good, though…”
“Yeah, I saw him coughing once, nearly couldn’t catch his breath, the bucket almost fell on him.”
“Wonder if he’s got some illness…”
“Not consumption, though — he doesn’t cough constantly.”
“Living off the public payroll, at least…”
“Watching him work… I bet he could get made permanent someday.”
“I think he’s not bad either… what do you all think, should we introduce him to Little Qing? Little Qing’s not bad-looking…”
“Little Qing’s sturdy, good for bearing children…”
Once the older women had finished praising a man’s virtues, the conversation almost always drifted here.
The Little Qing they spoke of was a recently joined night-soil woman, twenty-seven years old, fairly good-looking, who’d been left to raise a daughter alone after her husband died. Unwilling to work in a brothel, she’d taken up night-soil collection instead. Rough going at first, but her resilient character had quickly won her the others’ respect.
After a few rounds of this sort of talk, they concluded it seemed a solid match, especially since the woman named He Qing was present at the time — seeing that she only blushed and stayed quiet rather than cursing sharply at them, they knew she found the temporary worker “not bad” after all. A few days later, the most socially adept of the older women privately hinted at the idea to him.
Tang Minjie fell silent for a while, then sighed repeatedly, before telling her that his health wasn’t good — especially after a serious illness last year that had nearly killed him. He’d only managed to land this job through connections, and there was no telling when he might not be able to keep doing it — how could he possibly drag a good woman down with him?
His words were earnest, and by the end, the old woman, aside from offering a few words of gentle comfort, found herself thinking the match wasn’t such a good fit after all. When she reported back to the others, mentioning “Little Tang’s” health issues, she couldn’t help but tear up. He Qing, upon learning that the man was “too frail” and “often sick,” fell silent and stopped paying attention to the matter.
Everywhere, people lived their own lives.
As the sky gradually brightened, the area around the night-soil station returned to calm.
Tang Minjie began tidying up odds and ends, giving the courtyard a simple cleaning, both inside and out, before hitching up the mule cart and transferring the huge waste barrels, propped up on a wooden frame at the back of the courtyard, onto it. Thanks to the height difference built into the frame, this task wasn’t particularly strenuous.
The mule cart used daily to transport waste was the night-soil station’s main asset, and also a demonstration of the Huaxia Army’s “deep pockets.” Each day, the cart hauled one or two large barrels of night soil back to an experimental farmstead nearly ten li away, used to test various composting techniques and, selectively, to experiment with the properties of different substances — though admittedly, none of this was particularly refined yet. Fertilizer research, in particular, was considered a “menial trade” even within the Huaxia Army; Ning Yi had proposed some ideas, and others had offered their own thoughts, but the experimental cycles were long and the overall approach lacked clarity, with few people involved — nowhere near as organized as the direction taken with “seed selection and breeding.”
The farmstead here was named the “Huaxia Army 223 Agricultural Research Institute,” situated near a village of a few hundred residents. It was clearly not a priority project within the Huaxia Army’s agricultural experimentation efforts. Few people, small in scale, unclear research direction, and members with weak combat motivation — these were things Tang Minjie noticed at a glance when he arrived. The institute’s director was named Chen Cirang, recruited into the Huaxia Army at some point unknown, literate and well-read, evidently a Confucian scholar by training. He handled arrangements in an orderly enough fashion, with a relatively mild-mannered temperament — though perhaps only such a temperament suited the work of agricultural experimentation.
In the mornings, the night soil would be hauled back and poured into large septic pits, with various composting experiments arranged according to the farmstead’s work schedule. Given the pace of work at the farmstead, most of these tasks were dirty but not particularly exhausting for Tang Minjie — though, as someone who had worked for years deep within Jurchen territory, part of his spirit had already been warped in ways that made his standard for what counted as “exhausting” different from an ordinary person’s, and it was hard to say whether that standard was even objective anymore.
Since he rose before dawn, there was often little left to do by afternoon.
Though it was said there was no hierarchy of nobility among different kinds of work, collecting night soil inevitably left a lingering stench on a person. In the month or two since arriving at the farmstead, Tang Minjie hadn’t made any friends — this was his own choice, too. During work meetings, he’d take care to sit somewhat apart from others; when passing colleagues on the road, he’d offer a simple greeting; and at the dining hall, naturally, no one much wanted to sit next to him. It wasn’t discrimination, exactly — the smell alone was enough to spoil anyone’s appetite.
The injuries he’d brought back from the north hadn’t fully healed; his body remained weak, and he’d occasionally feel his strength failing him during physical labor. After being reassigned here, in the process of adjusting to the work, he’d borrowed some agricultural research books and materials from Director Chen — and found, overall, that he had little trouble grasping the material.
On clear, uneventful afternoons, he’d often cross the small grove at the edge of the farmstead and sit by the pond, watching the goings-on in the village across the way. Opposite the pond lay the threshing ground of Xiaoye Village, with a stone millstone nearby where villagers, young and old, often gathered — some grinding grain, some chatting, children playing and laughing.
Sunlight fell on him; though it was already late autumn, the warmth in that sunlight would still draw out the chill that filled his heart, that cold surging forth to clash with the sunlight within his body, tormenting his skin, rattling in his bones.
In his eyes, every night, he would still see flashes of that northern landscape — the people who died skin and bone, those who perished under every manner of abuse, the maddened screams of enslaved men flayed alive. Though thousands of li away, it all remained vivid and close enough to touch. It often blended together with everything before his eyes now.
The villagers across the way at the threshing ground would occasionally glance curiously his way. Once or twice, the village’s elder gentleman had strolled over along the pond, seeming to want to strike up a conversation — but caught a whiff of him and walked off instead.
The life he’d found upon arriving in Wenpu County had never featured in any of his previous expectations. During this stretch of time, his mind remained in disarray; often he’d wake in the middle of the night, momentarily convinced he was still up in the clouds, straining to hear sounds outside, sometimes even bursting out of the courtyard searching for a weapon, needing a good while before he could figure out where he actually was. Sometimes, hearing the night-soil women laughing heartily, he’d feel dizzy, as though still trapped in a dream; the people gathered at the threshing ground in the sunlight always reminded him of those villages full of enslaved Han captives up north. He’d instinctively feel for his collar, only to find no poison hidden inside.
Once he’d been settled here, it seemed the outside world had entirely forgotten about him. Until one afternoon in October, when three Huaxia Army soldiers rode into Xiaoye Village on horseback, led by Peng Yueyun.
“Senior Brother.”
Peng Yueyun could now be counted among the younger generation of rising stars within the army, carrying the symbolic weight of inheriting the West Army’s legacy — a senior colonel with a bright future ahead of him. Yet facing the disgraced Tang Minjie, he still saluted with full military formality. Tang Minjie looked at him for a moment, waking as if from a dream.
“Guess I can’t call you Little Peng anymore. What should I call you now?”
“We’re family here, no need to stand on ceremony,” Peng Yueyun said. “Just call me your father.”
“…Hey.”
Tang Minjie answered reflexively before catching himself, hesitating a moment. Then he kicked out at him.