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【阅读理解】Reading: The Wall and the Hand
Shen Yulan was a sign painter in Chengdu, and she had worked on Fish Street for 41 years.
The street was a narrow lane, only 300 metres long, and her shop was a small room of 12 square metres.
In March, the city issued a redevelopment notice, and by June, 78 percent of the households had signed the agreement.
Her daughter, Zhou Min, 38, an accountant, had signed for the family two weeks earlier.
Zhou Min told her mother, "You cannot protect a wall forever. You can protect a child. You cannot protect a wall."
Shen replied that the wall was not the point; the point was the relationship between a hand and a surface, and that relationship, once broken, does not return.
Zhou Min said that was pretension.
Perhaps it was.
Shen went upstairs and did not eat dinner.
She had learned the trade from her father, who painted shop signs in the 1960s, when paint was scarce and every stroke was treasure.
He taught her to purify the oil, to grind pigment until it was smooth, to respect a surface before touching it.
She still kept his 3 brushes in a tin box, and she could still grasp the difference between a line drawn quickly and a line drawn well.
In 1998 she painted her first large mural here, 9 metres wide, 2.4 metres high, a scene of six neighbours eating at one table.
It took 47 days.
She was paid 3,800 yuan, which was then four months of rent.
Later, when the street grew more affluent and rents rose, she painted 240 more murals across the district.
Sixteen survive.
Seven are behind new construction hoarding, invisible but intact, which she found somehow worse than destruction.
Her son, Shen Kai, 41, a cell biologist in Shanghai, came home in July to help her move.
He had not lived on Fish Street for 19 years.
He found the street smaller than he remembered, the air more turbid, the shops more competitive, and his mother thinner by perhaps 6 kilograms.
"You look severe," she told him, which was her way of saying she was glad.
They packed for 11 days.
On the ninth day he watched her repaint a corner of the 1998 mural, a small patch near the bottom where damp had begrimed the plaster.
She did it without a sketch, from memory, in 20 minutes.
He asked why.
She said a passer-by had once touched that corner every morning on his way to work, and that this small continuity mattered, though she could not explain the extent of it.
He did not argue.
He had learned, slowly, that argument was not the appropriate instrument for this.
The mural itself was implicit, not explicit; it did not announce anything.
It simply held attention.
In September the hoarding went up, 210 metres of it, blue and white.
Shen was given 1.4 million yuan in compensation, which was generous by any standard, and an apartment on the 16th floor of a new block 3 kilometres away, with a lift and central heating and no damp.
Her neighbours dispersed to 5 different districts.
A young curator from a gallery in the east of the city came to photograph the murals before demolition, and asked Shen to sign a consent form.
She read it twice.
The form gave the gallery permission to remove 3 sections of plaster, each about 1.8 metres square, and to display them indoors, which the curator described as a way to preserve them.
Shen asked who would look at them.
The curator said many people, thousands, probably.
"In a room," Shen said.
"With a ceiling. And a guard."
The curator nodded, encouragingly.
Shen signed, because the alternative was the machine.
What followed was dispiriting in ways she had not anticipated.
The 3 sections came off badly.
One cracked along the mortar; another revealed, beneath the surface, a layer of artificial pigment that had been applied by someone else in 2004, a repair she had not approved.
At the opening, 190 guests drank wine in an auditorium with a polished floor, and a scholar gave a lecture on the historical value of vernacular art, using 22 slides, of which 4 showed her work.
She sat in the third row.
No one asked her a question.
A woman beside her asked whether the artist was still alive.
Shen said yes.
The woman said that was lovely, and turned back to her phone.
Outside, it began to rain, and the taxi took 35 minutes to arrive.
Questions
1. What was Shen Yulan's occupation?
A. A cell biologist B. An accountant C. A sign painter D. A gallery curator
2. How many murals did Shen paint across the district after her first large mural?
A. 16 B. 7 C. 240 D. 3
3. What does the word "begrimed" in the sentence "a small patch near the bottom where damp had begrimed the plaster" most likely mean?
A. Made dirty B. Made smooth C. Made dry D. Made bright
4. Why did Shen Kai not argue with his mother when she repainted the corner of the mural?
A. He wanted to finish packing quickly. B. He was too tired from packing. C. He had learned that argument was not the right way to deal with this. D. He thought the mural was not important.
5. What is the main idea of the passage?
A. The relationship between a mother and her son. B. The life of a curator in a city gallery. C. The economic benefits of urban redevelopment. D. The conflict between preserving art and the forces of redevelopment.