Think of her and I lose my wits, When I walk on rocks, I don't feel a thing, When I'm eating, I can't hold my chopsticks, When I squat, I don't know how to get up.

Another verse was even sillier:

Think of her and I get in a rage

I eat every day but never put on weight,

If you don't believe me, then look under my clothes,

I'm nothing but skin and bones.

Some were quite terrifying, such as this one about a foolish woman's secret plot to kill her husband:

My husband's ever so handsome and smart, My husband's like a stick of firewood, Three chops, two chops, he drops dead, All my friends come to have a barbecue.

Some were melancholy:

When I'm with you I hate to leave, I paint a picture and stick it on the wall, We haven't seen each other for weeks on end, Hugging your shadow, I cry awhile.

Some expressed desperation in love:

What a waste for us to love each other,

Makes more sense to grind rice for other people's chickens,

Her children have already grown up,

But they don't call me father, just hey you!

All these were love songs. After reaching a certain point with love songs, the singers moved on to "low songs":

I see you, a girl twenty years old You don't bolt the door too tightly I see your face, peach-blossom pink My crotch is already soaked through

Nonstop shouting from your house

The water flowing out is thick and white

A thousand pounds are thumping down on your bed

Stamping out a hole in the ground…

Every time these songs started, any women in the audience would hastily depart, cursing as they went, their faces burning scarlet; the young men would follow the more eye-catching back views with their eyes, like a line of restless fighting cocks, necks stretched out, eyes red, spoiling for a fight, springing up, then squatting down, their faces contorting into bursts of scorching laughter. They would deliberately make their laughter resound exaggeratedly so that the women would hear far away.

There were also songs about female suffering; for example, one sung by Wanyu from the lower village, describing the scene as a woman watched her illegitimate child float off downstream in a wooden basin along the Luo River:

Go slow and steady, steady and slow, Don't crack your head on the rocks you pass, It's not that your ma doesn't want you here, You have no pa, she can't take the shame, Go slow and steady, steady and slow, Don't get wet in the wind and waves, It's not that your ma wants to let you go, Three times each night, she cries out loud…

In Wanyu's version, the wooden basin drifted into a whirlpool, made a circle and floated back, as if reluctant to leave, wanting to return wailing to its mother's bosom. When he'd sung up to this point, there wasn't one among the women listening whose eyes weren't red-rimmed, who hadn't begun to wipe her eyes on the edges of her clothes, each woman's snivels rising up one above another. Benren's wife's mouth fell at the corners, the basket of pig's fodder dropped from her hand, and she bent over another woman's shoulder and bawled.

: I heard that taking a virgin bride used to be taboo in Maqiao, and that "striking red," as it was called, on the nuptial night was seen as something highly inauspicious. Contrarily, the husband's family would be very content with a female pregnant before marriage, whose stomach stuck out a long way. Li Minggao, a scholar of Dong minority customs from the provincial Cultural Association in Hunan, told me there was nothing odd about this: in areas and periods of low production rate, people were the most important productive force and giving birth was the most important task for women, much more important than maintaining moral chastity. It was pretty common in many parts of the South for men to favor a big stomach when choosing a spouse.

Since it seemed to be an explanation that made sense, T made a note of it for reference.

In connection with this custom, Maqiao men harbored animosity toward their first-born, viewing it as wild spawn of unascertainable origin, not of their flesh and blood, and they either stuffed it into the piss bucket or smothered it in the mattress; they were always glad to be rid of it. This type of custom was called "favoring younger brothers"-in other words, murdering the eldest-and was for a long time practiced tacitly by people in Maqiao. Those mothers unable to bear it would swaddle the baby in a padded jacket and place it on the main road before their husband had struck, or place it in a wooden basin to float downstream, entrusting the fate of their own child to heaven-a common occurrence, this was.

After the Communist Party arrived, they prohibited such brutality and very little more was heard about it. There's no way of telling whether or not some people continued the practice in secret. Of course, when Wanyu sang ballads such as "Farewell from the Riverbank," it's easy to understand how, as the sound of weeping rose up on all sides, the song evoked for its female listeners the misery of earlier days.

:The best singer in Maqiao was Wanyu, but I only got to know him a long time after I arrived in Maqiao. Orders had been issued for the village to organize an arts propaganda team to propagate Mao Zedong thought, which meant performing documents or editorials sent down from above to the sound of clappers. Performers were sent off to other villages banging drums and beating gongs, and other villages did the same thing. When the performance was finished, they would always have to yell a few slogans. Since everyone would be yelling at once, it was very difficult to yell them in a neat, coordinated fashion. Therefore, they would often divide up the long slogans into several sentences for the purpose of yelling, which created some unavoidable problems. There was one quotation from Chairman Mao which divided into three sentences: (1) Strike at poor peasants! (2) Means! (3) Strike at revolution! The first and last sentences thus became reactionary slogans. But everyone, as ever, raised their arms together and shouted, not hearing anything odd about it.

Orders were also issued to perform model revolutionary operas. As resources in the countryside were limited, people had to make do with what was available-you couldn't be too particular about props and costumes. When the White-haired Girl got on stage, a length of flax hung from her head, transfixing the faces of small children with terror. The hero Yang Zirong didn't have a proper cape, and had to make do with a rush cape to go up the mountain and fight the tiger. Once in late autumn, a very strong wind blew over the wooden scenery, along with a door plank covered in cotton, and poor Comrade Yang Zirong, who had just finished fighting the tiger with his lofty ideals, was knocked sideways by the snowy mountain. His eyes glazed over, as he swayed left and right, before toppling over onstage. Luckily, the oil lamps on stage were quite dim, and the audience couldn't see very well, or even thought that the hero falling to the ground was planned as part of the fight, and gave him a round of applause.

The peasants said that although the old plays were still the best, the new ones were also fun in their own way.

Although Yang Zirong was injured, he still gave a pretty good performance. As his brain was a bit fuzzy, he forgot his lines, but he came up with an emergency solution. When he saw gongs and drums, he would sing "gong," "drum"; if he saw chairs and tables, he would sing "chair," "table." When he finally sang in one breath "Land Reform Cooperative and People's Commune repairing irrigation sowing rape plants," the whole theater burst into spontaneous cheers. Not having heard properly, the commune cadre said again and again how good it was. He decided to choose the Maqiao propaganda team to represent the whole commune at the theater festival in the county seat.