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Girl with the 'fire plough'

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-11 09:44

Most elderly folk like to thumb through old photo albums to remember their past, but not 79-year-old Liang Jun.

Instead of an album, she can often be found staring at an old 1-yuan note, with a picture of a sprightly girl, driving a tractor.

The picture is that of a young Liang behind the wheel of a German-made Hotbull Lanz tractor.

While time has added wrinkles and gray hair on Liang, there is no mistaking the eyes and confident smile of the girl on the note.

Indeed, Liang looks much younger than her age, with a constant smile on her face and a tune on her lips.

She joined the Harbin Women Model Workers' Chorus after retirement in the 1990s and almost never misses rehearsals.

She like singing revolutionary songs, very popular in the 1950s, as they bring back memories of the early days of China's founding.

Born in 1930 into a poor peasant family in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province, Liang was sent to live and work at a nearby landlord's family as a child bride of 12.

She was freed of her child-bride fate when Heilongjiang was liberated from Japanese occupation in 1945.

Liang was convinced her life would change if she learned to read and write and always dreamed of going to school one day.

Her wish was fulfilled two years later when the Communist Party opened a teacher's school in Dedu county, to cater to children from poor families.

"I learnt not just to write and read, but also got the chance to read many novels and watch movies," Liang says.

"A movie from the then Soviet Union movie, Heroic Woman, made a deep impression. I decided that I too would become a tractor driver, just like the heroine who uses her tractor driving skills to fight the Nazi army during World War II," she says.

In February 1948, when the Heilongjiang provincial Communist Party committee announced plans to encourage tractor drivers, Liang seized her chance.

She was one of three selected from her school for training and the only girl in a class of 70.

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