Qu Yuan never saw this glory, and in any case, not just any aspiring Qu Yuan could win this glory. Looking at things from the opposite angle, the way in which Maqiao people understood and used the word "awakened" concealed another viewpoint, concealed the dislike of their forefathers for the politics and foreign culture of a powerful state, concealed the necessary ambiguity between different historical positions. This use of the word "awakened" to mean "ignorant" or "stupid" is a fossil seam running through the unique history and beliefs of the Luo people.

: The character pronounced jue in Mandarin is pronounced qo in the Maqiao accent, with a rising tone, and means "clever," the opposite of the Maqiao meaning of "awakened."

In fact, when pronounced jiao in Mandarin, this character happens also to mean not clever at all, but muddle-headed, confused, dazed, as in the phrase shuijiao, meaning "asleep."

"Awakened" and "asleep" are antonyms. Directly opposed to normal understanding in standardized Chinese thinking, this pair of antonyms exchanged places when their meanings were extended in Maqiao: as Maqiao people see it, regaining consciousness is stupid, while sleeping is in fact clever. This inversion always sounded rather odd to outsiders who were new to the village.

We have to allow that different people will judge cleverness and stupidity from different angles and using different yardsticks. We must, it seems, also permit that Maqiao people are perfectly entitled to draw from their own experience original metaphors from "awakened" and "asleep." Take Ma Ming: people can sigh about what a down-and-out he was, and laugh at how he was smelly and stubborn and crazy and stupid and how he lived, quite frankly, like a dog. But if we look at things from a different angle? From Ma Ming's angle? Far from lacking happiness or unfettered freedom, his existence could often be compared even with that of the immortals. And if we consider how act upon act of bitter farce have played themselves out: the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Cultural Revolution… far too much human brilliance dissipated into absurdity, far too much diligence turned into mistakes, far too much enthusiasm diverted into wrongdoing; at least Ma Ming, this distant onlooker, remained pure and unblemished, with no trace of blood on his hands. Even with all the natural hardships he endured, he lived to be healthier than most.

Now, does that make him stupid or clever?

Was he "awakened" or "asleep"?

Every pair of antonyms is in fact the fusing of different understandings, the intersection of different lives and paths of practice, leading in turn to two paradoxical extremes. This type of intersection is concealed in a secret language which often gives those traveling abroad pause for thought.

: If you happen to spot Maqiao men getting together in twos and threes, squatting down by walls, or crouching by the fireplace, cupping their chins or covering their mouths in a way born of long habit, then you know they are singing. They have a secret way of singing: not only do they keep their voices low, they also avoid the eyes and ears of outsiders and do it in out-of-the-way places. For them, the activity of singing is closer in spirit to a game of chess within a small circle of friends than to a kind of public performance. Originally, T thought this resulted from fear of official censorship and political criticism; later, however, I found out that this secretive style of singing existed many years before the Cultural Revolution. I don't know why this was so.

In Maqiao, "singing" {changge) is also called delivering songs, or dealing songs (fage), similar in sense to "delivering a speech" at a meeting, or "dealing cards" at a card table. In Chinese, this word fa can also mean "incite" or "exhort," and in the Han (202 b.c-220 a.d.), Mei Sheng wrote the famous "Seven Exhortations," a type of fu rhapsody poem, mostly made up out of a question-and-answer structure. "Delivery of songs" in Maqiao is also structured around a question-and-answer opposition, one singer inciting, exhorting the other, but I have no way of knowing whether this is the same as the "exhortation" of the Han dynasty.

Young people like listening to people deliver songs, and react promptly to each phrase in the song with comments or cheers. If there's someone fairly generous in their midst, he may fish out some money to buy a bowl of wine or use "face" to buy a bowl on credit, as a reward for the singer. After the singer has finished singing a round, he'll take a sip of wine, after which, fueled with alcohol, he can of course make up lines that are even more vigorous, cutting, and impossible to answer, forcing his opponent into a corner, so heavily under siege that all around is blocked out, yet still the hand cupping the chin or covering the mouth won't be released.

Their songs have always derived from great affairs of state. One might ask an opponent, for example, who is the country's Premier? Who is the country's Chairman? Who is the country's Chairman of the Military Commission? Who is the elder brother of the country's Vice-chairman of the Military Commission? What illness has the elder brother of the country's Vice-chairman of the Military Commission had recently, and what medicine did he take? and so on. I was amazed by the difficulty of these questions. I read the newspapers every day, but I'm afraid I couldn't recite details about these remote great personages as if they were members of my own family, or recall with such exactitude their lung cancer or diabetes. I can only guess that the amazing memory of these men, who stank from head to foot of ox dung, must have developed out of a particular type of training. Just as vagabond barbarians did not forget their sovereigns, their ancestors must have had a tradition of paying attention to court affairs.

They later move on to delivering filial songs. The singers often find fault with each other, blaming their opponent for failing to fluff cotton wadding for their beloved parents, or for not having bought a coffin for their godfather when he died, or for not having sent cured meat over to their uncles on the fifteenth day of the first month, or saying that the fat on the meat wasn't even two inches thick, or even that the meat was swarming with maggots, and so on. They always sing with the force of justice behind them, calling their opponent to account: isn't this stingy miserliness? Isn't this rank ingratitude? Isn't this someone who, eating animals every day, has grown the heart of an animal? Of course, their opponent has to keep his wits about him under this barrage, use the weather or a lame foot as a pretext to exonerate himself from his own wrongdoing, then quickly launch a counterattack, seeking out his opponent's recent unfilial behavior-neither adversary balks in the slightest before exaggeration of the facts. They have to face up to sung interrogation; this kind of folk morality is strictly enforced.

The above forms the necessary opening struggle, setting up the stand-point of the adversaries.

After this has been delivered, they can relax and deliver a few qoqo songs. Qo can also mean "joke," for example "qoqo talk" can mean "funny talk." It can be further extended to mean indecent, and "qoqo songs," for example, often mean flirting songs. Qoqo songs excite the physical senses, and these are the numbers that animate young men the most. They can still be delivered in adversarial mode, as long as one side plays the male role and the other plays the female; one side has to love, and the other has to refuse this love. Here's one I wrote down: