Tribute to the White Poplar Part II With straight trunks and branches, white poplars aim high. Their trunks are usually over ten feet tall and, as if wrought by human effort, utterly bare 6f branches below ten feet. Their twigs, also like things artificially shaped, all reach out towards the sky and grow close together in a cluster without any sideway growth. Their leaves are broad and point upwards with very few slanting sideways, much less upside down. Their glossy barks are a faint light green with hazy silver spots. They stand erect and unbending in face of North China's violent wind and snow. Though they may be only as big as the mouth of a bowl, they strive to grow upwards until they reach the towering height of some twenty feet and stand indomitable against the northwest wind. You may call them unattractive because they have neither the graceful carriage of a dancer, nor such branches as can twine and climb. But nevertheless they are big and tall, honest and upright, simple and plain, earnest and unyielding --- and not without gentleness and warmth though. They are giants among trees! When you trudge through the melting snow of the highland and see one or a row of white poplars standing proudly on the vast plains, how could you look upon them as nothing but mere trees? How could you forget that with all their simplicity, earnestness and unyieldingness, they are symbolic of our peasants in the North? How could you fail to associate them with our dauntless soldiers guarding our homeland all over the vast rear? How could you fail to see that these trees, ever striving to put out their closely knit branches and leaves in an upward direction, are symbolic of the spirit and will of our men who, fighting heroically all over the northern plains, are writing the history of New China with their own blood? White poplars are no ordinary trees. But these common trees in Northwest China are as much ignored as our peasants in the North. However, like our peasants in the North, they are bursting with vitality and capable of surviving any hardship or oppression. I pay tribute to them because they symbolize our peasants in the North and, in particular, the spirit of honesty, tenacity and forging ahead - a spirit central to our struggle for national liberation. The reactionary diehards, who despite and snub the common people, can do whatever they like to eulogize the elite nanmu and look down upon the common, fast-growing white poplar. I, --for my part, will be loud in my praise of the latter!