In ancient China, the study of names and principles infiltrated all philosophy. Naming is the fulcrum, the point of departure, the focal point and result of all theoretical debate.

In Maqiao, female unnamedness is in fact male namedness, which, of course, is not such a very unusual phenomenon. Even though the English language passed through the tumultuous baptism of humanistic enlightenment several hundred years ago, feminists still now continue to attack the masculinization of a range of prestige terms (for example, using "man" to mean "human," and words such as "chairman" and "minister"). But even though gender-neutral or unisex terms have carved out an enclave only under the shadow of male hegemony, English has never been masculinized to the same degree as Maqiao dialect, where female terms were completely deleted. I've had great difficulty in working out whether this linguistic misrepresentation had any influence on the sexual psychology or even sexual biology of Maqiao women-whether it had to any degree altered reality. From the looks of things, the women all seemed to use coarse, vulgar language, had even learned how to fight and curse. Once they gained the upper hand in relation to a man, they often became complacent. Their hands and faces were hardly ever clean, hardly ever fresh and bright, and their bodies were always hidden in masculine clothing that covered their female figures with loose, straight pants or stiff, rough-padded jackets. They were also embarrassed to talk about menstruation, and referred to it as "that thing." "That thing," again, is no kind of name. When I was laboring in the paddy fields, I hardly ever saw a woman ask to rest because of her period. They could ask for leave to go to the market, to deliver pigs, to help with farm work, and so on, but the period of leave would not be given over to their own health. I figured that in order to affirm their position in male roles such as "little big brother" they had to obliterate even their own periods.

: In Maqiao Upper Bow there was a stretch of cobbled road, along both sides of which stood a few cottages. The buildings on one side of the road were fronted by a perfectly ordinary wall of wooden planks, leaning this way arid that. They were, however, still crowned by a high, square terrace built out of bricks. Once you looked carefully, you realized that these platforms were trading counters from many years before, that these old houses retained the faint appearance of storefronts. Such trading counters represented the fossils of commerce. The Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion record that this area experienced a period of prosperity in the reign of the Qing emperor Qianlong, of which these damaged, peeling counters, besmirched with chicken and duck droppings, were probably material evidence.

Another mysterious relic from the past was a big iron pot, now full of holes, long cracks, and splits; abandoned in the woods behind the state granary and minded by no one, the bottom of the pot had filled with rotten leaves and rainwater. The pot amazed people by its size, which was big enough to steam two baskets of rice, and the spoon used to stir it would have had to be at least as big as a rake. Nobody could say to whom this pot had belonged in the past, why they'd needed such a big pot, why the pot's owner had subsequently discarded it. If this pot had been used to cook food for regular hired labor, its owner must have been a great village landlord. If this pot had been used to cook food for ordinary soldiers, then its owner must have been a general of no little standing. These conjectures were enough to unsettle me.

Of the prosperity that the Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion described, there still remained one last corner in an old house in Maqiao Upper Bow. It was a house made of blue bricks and large tiles, whose main gate had disappeared; it was said a stone lion behind the main gate had been smashed during the revolution, but stone portals which came more-or-less up to people's knees gave an indication of how impressive it had looked in earlier days. Inside the house, a window casement that hadn't been ripped out still remained, on which flying dragons and dancing phoenixes were intricately and exquisitely carved, and which brought with it a faintly oppressive air of extravagant wealth. The local people jokingly referred to this ownerless construction as the "House of Immortals." It was only later that I found out the word "immortals" referred to its lazybones residents who didn't do honest work in the fields. These people were also known as Maqiao's "Four Daoist Immortals" and had lived here for a very long time.

I went to the House of Immortals once: dispatched by a cadre with orders to paint quotations by Chairman Mao everywhere in red and yellow paint, I couldn't leave out this corner of the village. When I went, I knew that all the other Daoist Immortals in the House of Immortals had either passed away or departed, leaving only one Ma Ming. He wasn't at home, and having received no response after coughing several times at the gate, I had no choice but to advance timidly up a few dilapidated stone steps into this dust-smothered darkness, into a state of hopeless and overpowering fear and trepidation. Fortunately, after proceeding sideways into the right wing of the house, I found a few tiles were missing from a corner of the house and a shaft of light had sneaked in, finally helping me out of the desperate obscurity. Only slowly did I begin to make out an expanse of brick wall, for some unknown reason bulging outwards, shaped like a Buddha's belly. The wooden plank wall was riddled with woodworm, and everywhere I went there were grass rushes and the crunching sound of broken tile residue. Next to the wall was a large coffin, also covered with rushes and a piece of torn polyethylene. I spotted the owner's bed, a piece of worn matting in amongst a grass nest in one corner. On top there was a mound of wadding as black as ashes-probably the end that kept his feet warm, bound tightly together with a length of grass rope, demonstrating the owner's ingenuity in keeping out the cold. To the side of the grass nest were two old batteries, a wine bottle, and a few multicolored paper cigarette packets- these must have been the few trophies in the House of Immortals seized from the world outside its door.

My nostrils encountered an aggressively pungent stench which, if I leaned a little over to one side, disappeared. If I leaned back, there it was again. I couldn't help but feel that the bad smell here was not caused by a gas, but was a formless solid, built up over a long period of time, already coagulated into a concrete form, a heavy mass. The owner of the house would surely have had to watch where he stepped to avoid stirring up such a deeply accumulated stench.

I also took care to avoid this solidified stench, and found a place where my nose could be more at ease to paint a board of quotations. They went like this: "When busy, eat dry food, when leisured eat liquid, at normal times eat half dry, half liquid." I hoped it would have some illuminative value for the owner of the house.

I heard someone behind me exclaim with a sigh: "When time is confused, it must be a time of confusion."

As I hadn't heard footsteps approach, I didn't know when he'd appeared. He was so thin his temples were deeply sunken, and he was wearing a cotton hat and unlined cotton jacket unusually early in the day. As he upbraided me with a slight smile, his hands in his sleeves, it occurred to me this must be the owner of the house. The brim of his hat was just like that of other men round here, always worn twisted at a great angle.