Narrative: “A Comfort to the Widow, a Light to the Child”
October 31, 2022
It was an old, modest house in the outskirts of Fengwei, along a narrow road in a neighborhood perched in the mountains overlooking the northern industrial city. A row of automobiles were parked outside the home, mostly cheap Amca sedans; Séverine Huang’s own 2018 Amca Polarité was perhaps a decade newer than most of the bunch. An elderly Rén man, hands and expression worn and hardened by age, was trudging up the hill as Séverine arrived, but as soon as his gaze reached hers he brightened and trotted forward to embrace her.
“Hah! You came! I knew you would, I was telling Yu Meng just this morning — ” here he paused, to embrace the younger woman in a hug, “I was telling Yu Meng just this morning, ‘Chunying will be here, of course she will.’”
“And here she is indeed,” Séverine said with a brief smile. “I wouldn’t have missed this. Changshun and I went back so many years—and besides, any reason to get away from Laeralsford. It’s been so long since we’ve seen each other!”
“Ah, but you look as young as ever, truly you do,” Zihao said. “There’s so much for us to catch up on, how are the kids, how’s Anya?”
“The children are healthy and the missus is as good as ever, I’m happy to report,” Séverine said, unlatching the gate to the garden and holding it open for Zihao to step through.
“Good, we’re right on time,” Zihao said softly, noticing the small crowd of people, mostly middle-aged Rén men in cloth caps and weather-beaten jackets over modest suits. In the manner of working people across Laeral, their weatherproof jackets showed signs of having been lovingly adorned: Minjian blessings painted in faded ink along the sleeves, whimsical drawings, union patches for the sanitation worker’s union. At least one of the men had the leaping tiger sigil of the Rén Self-Defense League on his sleeve. A few of them nodded greetings to Séverine and Zihao in between soft conversation and puffs on their cigarettes.
At last, the door to the humble home opened, revealing a young man, bespectacled, who couldn’t have been older than 30. “We’re ready inside.”
Garden chairs scraped on the patio as men stood up, taking off their caps and stubbing out cigarettes in respect as they entered. Each of them made a point of shaking the young man’s hand as they entered, the way they would before starting the day at work. Séverine slipped a 50-mark note to Zihao before entering. It was the crew chief’s job to assemble the contributions from the team, enough to make the government pension stretch a little further, before slipping them into an envelope, white like a ghastly version of the red hong bao envelopes at new year’s, and then passing the collection into the young man’s hand under the guise of a handshake. Behind her, the dead man’s son murmured his thanks to Zihao.
In Minjian tradition the deceased was presented in a burial shroud within an open coffin, a coffin that now seemed freakishly out of place in a sitting room adorned with a brightly-colored Minjian calendar, family photos, and a portrait of Gramont just like the kind found in a classroom. Han Changshun looked peaceful in the coffin, his features masked under the shroud, with two coins placed over the spot where his eyelids would be. The image didn’t match the lively, energetic man Séverine had known, but she supposed it never would again. At least he was peaceful now. There was no sign of the toll the cancer had taken on him, a slow but inevitable decline she’d noticed in pictures on social media and later, the way his handwritten holiday cards had become typed ones, shorter and shorter with each passing year. His reading glasses sat, folded, in his hands.
Some time later, they were sitting outside, sipping on weak jasmine tea from the cups Changshun’s widow had brought them, chatting in small groups. The men who’d turned up to pay their respects today were all members of Changshun’s old team with the city sanitation division; some of them still worked even after Changshun’s retirement several years back. Nearly all of them, though, had worked for the city long enough to remember the team leader’s tenure as head of the sanitation worker’s union.
The sky was darkening by the time Séverine was making her departure. “The Anmin Garden Banquet Hall, it’s on Aoshuang Street, at 8 pm tonight,” Zihao said. “But we’ll all understand if you can’t make it for the feast.” He took her hand. “Thank you for being here today.”
“Of course,” Séverine said. “And please give Ms. Han my number, and tell her that I’m here if she and her family need anything.”
“I will,” Zihao said. “And, ah…me and a lot of the guys, we think the same way on this. In the election, we’ll vote for whoever the Progressive is — but we’d much rather have your name on the ballot to vote for. Just, uh, keep that in mind?”
Séverine smiled a faint smile. “I will. Thank you, it means a lot.”
She was back in her car when she took out her phone to look down at it. The news alert from Les Couloirs caught her eye, alongside half a dozen texts. “Benjamin Lin, Justice Minister, will not run for president. Fellow Progressive heavyweight Tanvi Misra bowed out yesterday.” The Labor Minister sighed and rubbed her eyes. The path to the nomination had become far clearer.
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La Sentinelle: “Benjamin Lin’s Bowing-out Leaves ‘Wide-Open’ Progressive Primary”
Benjamin Lin’s decision to rule out a run for president, alongside Tanvi Misra’s similar decision announced yesterday, has left an open Progressive field for the presidential primary, narrowing the party’s already-slim route to reclaiming the office it held for much of the 2010s. Deprived of obvious frontrunners, the party primary is now open for a lesser-known contender.
Speaking to supporters at a fundraiser in Laeralsford, Delegate Benjamin Lin of the capital province and Minister for Justice and Home Affairs said that a presidential bid was “off the table.”
“I intend to dedicate myself in the coming months to my work with the Justice Ministry and to aiding our eventual nominee as they campaign for the presidency,” Lin said.
Prior to this declaration, the 63 year-old was considered the frontrunner for the primary. A well-known figure who served as a federal prosecutor and mayor of Laeralsford municipality before his election to the General Assembly, Lin’s presumptive campaign was expected to leverage the delegate’s personal popularity and incorruptible reputation to win back the coalition that brought Nicholas Brennan to Republic House for two terms between 2010 and 2018.
“The entire Progressive world was expecting Lin to be the standard-bearer, with Misra’s withdrawal only emphasizing it” said Wang Liguo, fellow with the Institute for Political and Strategic Studies in Laeralsford. “Lin remains the clear leader of the Riverlands faction in the party, but his decision not to run in what looks like a tough year for the party will only create a vacuum of leadership at the top.”
Lin’s withdrawal from the race sets up a hotly-competitive primary race for the Progressives, who will elect party delegates to select a nominee at the party’s national convention in two weeks. Names bandied around as holding presidential ambitions include Labor and Industry Minister Séverine Huang, Trade Minister Raoul Chen, and Governor of Corday Marius Song. Yet the deep Progressive bench means any number of consensus candidates could emerge from the convention.
Like all Progressive internal affairs, this primary is expected to be dominated by the influence of the party’s two rival factions, divided less by ideology than by geographic networks of support and patronage: the urban-based Riverlands factions led by Benjamin Lin, and the largely rural-based faction headed by Foreign Minister Tanvi Misra. Huang is aligned with Lin’s Riverlands faction, while Governor Song is aligned with Misra’s country faction; Trade Minister Chen has sought to triangulate a position transcending the two factions. Émeric André, Progressive leader in the Assembly of Commons and a Misra confidant, has also publicly mulled a run.
Regardless of who is named the next Progressive nominee, they will face an uphill battle to reach Republic House. Current polls show a Progressive candidate narrowly falling short of the presidential runoff, although within striking distance of the second-place spot to challenge incumbent Liu Mei-han.
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