Or he would put on a show of bravado in self-justification: "The stream water tastes sweeter."

Once, someone treated him to a bowl of ginger-salted sesame vegetables and insisted that he swallow it down. After he'd swallowed it and before he'd walked ten steps, he threw up violently-so violently that long strings of saliva hung down from his mouth and you could see the whites of his eyes. He said it wasn't that he wasn't grateful, it was just that his guts couldn't cope with coarse food like that, and the well water stank of duck shit-how in heaven's name could he let it pass his lips? Of course, it wasn't quite the case that he received no charity at all: for example, the padded unlined jacket that he wore all year round, in summer and winter, was given to him by the village. At first he categorically refused it, until the old village leader took a different tack and said this wasn't charity, it was more a case of him helping out the village; if he went out of the village dressed too shabbily, it would be bad for Maqiao's face. Only then, as a special favor, just to keep people happy, did he accept, with enormous reluctance, the new jacket. Furthermore, whenever this matter was raised in the future, he acted as if a great misfortune had come over him, and said he hadn't cared how old and venerable the village head was, he'd absolutely refused to bow down-the jacket burned his bones, made him feel ill when he was perfectly healthy.

He wasn't in fact afraid of the cold, and would often sleep out in the open. If, while walking somewhere, he didn't feel like walking anymore, he would yawn, lie down in his clothes, and curl up into a ball, sometimes under the eaves of a house, sometimes at the side of a well-and he'd never ended up ill from all his curling up. As he put it, when sleeping in the open your upper surface could be at one with the spirit of the heavens, and your lower surface could make contact with the spirit of the earth, from 11 P.M. to 1 A.M. you could absorb the yang in the yin, from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M. you could pick out the yin in the yang; this was the best way of making up deficiencies in the body. He also said that human life was a dream and that dreams were the most crucial part of life. If you slept next to an ants' nest, you could dream the dreams of emperors; if you slept among clumps of flowers, you could dream romantic dreams; if you slept in front of a pit of quicksand, you could dream golden dreams; if you slept on a grave, you could dream ghostly dreams.

He would forego anything for the rest of his life, apart from dreams. During his whole life he was particular about nothing, except for where he slept. For him, the most pitiful of beings were those for whom life meant only the awakened state and who didn't experience the life of sleep. Sleeping-awakening-sleeping-awakening: it was always sleeping that had to come first. A life with no dreams was a life half lived, was, in fact, a gross outrage of the Way of heaven and earth.

Other people regarded these remarks of his as the talk of a madman, or as a joke. This made his feelings of rancor towards the villagers grow ever deeper, made him even more stonily silent in public.

He was, in point of fact, someone who lacked all public connections, someone who had no connections with Maqiao's laws, morality or any of its political changes. Land reform, the campaign against bandits and landlords, the mutual aid teams, the cooperatives, the People's Communes, the Socialist Education Movement, the Four Clean-ups, the Cultural Revolution, none of these had any effect on him, they weren't part of his history, they were no more than a play that he enjoyed from a great distance, but which was incapable of having any influence on him. The year they opened canteens, a cadre from outside the village-who wasn't in the know-tied him up with a rope and dragged him down to the construction site for labor reform. No matter how much they beat him with sticks or whipped him, he remained coldly contemptuous, preferring to die rather than labor, to die rather than stand up. He just lay there, stubbornly prostrate, rolling around in the soupy mud, refusing to get up. What's more, once they'd gotten him there, it wasn't so easy to get him home again: he repeated over and over that he wanted to die in front of the cadre, and wherever the cadre went, he would crawl after him; in the end, everyone had to lend a hand lifting him back to the House of Immortals. Since he didn't want to be counted as a person, he overpowered any authority. Having easily foiled society's last attempt to harass him, he henceforth became in Maqiao even more of a nothing, a blank space, a drifting shadow. As a result, when it later came round to checking class status, grain allocation, family planning, even carrying out the census-I helped the village do this-nobody thought about whether there was still a Ma Ming, and nobody felt he should be included in the calculations.

He was definitely not included in the full national census.

He was definitely not included in the worldwide census.

Obviously, he didn't qualify as a person.

If he wasn't a person, then what was he? Society means People, writ large. He rejected society, and society canceled his qualifications as a person. My guess is that he finally brought the situation to a head because he'd always wanted to become an immortal.

The slightly surprising thing is that in the stretch of land near Maqiao, there were quite a number of creatures like Ma Ming who were perfectly happy to withdraw from the normal run of human society. Fellows like Maqiao's Four Daoist Immortals, it was said, were still to be found in most villages from far around; it was just that outsiders tended not to know of them. If an outsider didn't discover them by chance or curious inquiry, the locals wouldn't talk about these creatures, would even forget they existed. They were a world inside this world that has already caved in and disappeared.

Fucha once said that they weren't at all awakened (see the entry "Awakened"). Most of their parents weren't hard-up, and there was an insolent cleverness about them. As an early indication of what they'd become, though, they'd been a bit mischievous as children, not very diligent as students. Ma Ming, for example, never did his homework, but when it came to writing couplets, they'd spring from his mouth fully formed. One example: "See the national flag, everyone goes spare, do the rice sprout dance, we're got nowhere." Agreed, it was counterrevolutionary, but the sound and sense of the lines (in Chinese, at least) are flawless. Even while they were struggling him for it, everyone praised the kid's phenomenal literary aptitude. Once someone like him lost his parents, he started to turn bad, turned scientific (see the entry "Science"). Who knew what possessed him.