Going to the county seat was a very rare treat. Rehearsals, moreover, were bound to be a lot more relaxing than hauling pond sludge. The men and women could also make use of this rare opportunity to mix freely, make each other up, fiddle with each other's costumes, and so on. Everybody was overjoyed. The Party Branch Secretary in the village, Ma Benyi, felt it gave him face and explained to me in great excitement that he wanted a play with four girls. He didn't care what it was about, as long as it had four girls in it.

I asked why.

"Didn't you have four red mandarin jackets made up last year? Those jackets cost the production brigade more than two carrying poles of grain, it's a shame to leave them locked in a case."

Back then, he hadn't wanted to sink two carrying poles of grain into the jackets.

Everyone thought this suggestion was spot on.

In order to improve the play, two people came from the Cultural Center in the county seat and suggested we add a mountain song to represent the folk characteristics of Maqiao. Benyi took a moment to think, then said, no problem: Wanyu had a fine pair of lungs, could do just about anything, funeral songs, comic songs, you name it. Let him sing!

All the villagers laughed-especially the women, who simply collapsed. Somewhat perplexed, 1 inquired who this person was, and they gave a brief description of someone who sounded vaguely familiar: beardless, eyebrows twisted but extremely thin, head always shaved smooth, rather like a shiny oiled radish. I remembered that he always left the village bearing a carrying pole, but I didn't know what he went off to do. I also remembered that when he stood looking on while others were singing, and people asked him to join in, he'd whine old-fashioned classical Chinese in shrill girlish tones: "Nay, nay, I'll sing not, thou must not jest with little me, comrades." He even blushed as he spoke.

He lived in two thatched huts in the lower part of the village, divorced, with a small child. It was said he was a bit of a lowlife: his high-pitched voice always appeared in places where there were a lot of women, and he always provoked guffaws or was chased away by them with stones. He'd started off as a miller, one of those people who came to the door to mill rice, and so had a lot of dealings with housewives. As time went by, the word "mill" started to take on connotations of low behavior because of its association with him. People would often ask him, so how many women have you actually milled? He would give an embarrassed laugh, "Tease me not, don't you know that in the new society we should be civilized?"

Fucha told me that once, when Wanyu went to Longjia Sands to mill rice, a child asked him what his name was. He said he was called old officer Ye. The child asked him what he'd come to do. Mill your mommy's baba cakes, he said. The little child rushed back into the house in excitement and reported what he'd been told. There was a group of women gathered at home drinking ginger tea, and they burst into raucous laughter on hearing the news. The child's elder sister was furious, and set the dog onto Wanyu, who scurried away like a terrified rat before losing his footing and falling into the manure pit.

Covered in manure, he climbed up onto a ridge between fields, leaving a great big hole in the pit, as if an ox had been asleep there. On the way back, people asked him in surprise, "Miller Wan, why did you leap into the manure pit today?"

"I wanted to see… how deep the manure pit really is."

"Did you come to check on production then?"

He hurried off, muttering away to himself.

A few children followed behind him, clapping their hands and laughing, and he picked up a stone as a threat and twisted round a few times in preparation for throwing it, but even straining every muscle he lacked the strength to toss it a bamboo-pole length away. The children laughed even more uproariously.

From then on, "checking on production" became a Maqiao allusion, referring to a Wanyu-type of sticky situation and to covering up difficulties. For example, if someone fell over, Maqiao people would laugh and ask "Have you been checking on production too?"

Wanyu was Benyi's same-pot cousin. At one time, when there was a pretty female guest at Benyi's place, he would turn up at Benyi's almost every day to sit around, hands in sleeves, his girly voice shrilling out deep into the night. One evening, he casually barged his way with a chair into the circle of people by the fireside. "What are you doing here?" Benyi asked ungraciously.

"The young lady's ginger tea smells good, really good," he answered virtuously.

"We're having a meeting in here."

"A meeting? Oh good, I'llhave one too."

"This is a meeting for Party members. D'you understand?"

"That may be, but I haven't had a meeting for months. I really feel like one today, I'm getting desperate."

Uncle Luo asked "Eh, eh, eh, when did you become a Party member?"

Wanyu looked at the people around him, then looked back at Uncle Luo. "I'm not a Party member then?"

"Have you got a member?" said Uncle Luo, at which everyone guffawed.

Wanyu finally started to look embarrassed. "Bah, your humble slave stumbled into the royal sanctum, I take my leave, I take my leave."

Once he'd stepped outside the threshold, he exploded in anger, and said menacingly to a Party member on his way in, "When I feel like having a meeting, they don't let me come. Next time there's a meeting, don't ye come bothering me!"

As threatened, he subsequently attended no meetings, each time justifying his refusal with "Why did you stop me having a meeting when I felt like one? Fine, you have all the good meetings, then drag me along to the rotten leftover meetings-let me tell you, you can forget it!" As a result of his resentment at having been driven out of the Party meeting, he gradually started whining more and more. Once, for example, when helping a few women dye clothes, working up a happy sweat, he was talking away, getting more and more pleased with himself, until his mouth ran away with him. He said that Chairman Mao didn't have a beard-d'ycm reckon he looks anything like old Mother Wang San from Zhangjia District? He had two cherished portraits of the leader, he continued, one stuck on the front of his rice bucket, one stuck on the front of his piss bucket. If there was no rice in the bucket to scoop, then he'd give the portrait a clip round the ears. If there was no piss in the bucket to carry, he'd whack that portrait too.

Seeing the women grinning from ear to ear, he felt even more pleased with himself and said that next year he wanted to go to Beijing for a bit, to talk things over with Chairman Mao, ask him why the cold-water paddies have to be planted two seasons in a year.

Once his remarks reached the ears of a cadre, the cadre immediately got the People's Militia to grab their rifles, tie Wanyu up, and send him under guard to the commune. He returned a few days later, muttering away, somewhat paler than before.

"Well, what happened? Did the commune invite you to check on production?" people asked.

He rubbed his face and smiled bitterly: "Luckily the cadre who came with me had respect, the punishment wasn't too heavy, not too heavy."

He meant that the commune had seen he was a poor peasant and only fined him one hundred catties of grain.

From then on, "have respect" or "the cadre had respect" also became a Maqiao allusion, meaning to explain away personal ridicule, or a grain fine.

When he first appeared in the propaganda team, he seemed really down on his luck: his thin, tattered jacket was held together with a straw cord, he wore a crooked woollen hat and his stockingless feet stuck out from pants that were too short for him, revealing a length of leg that was raw from the cold. He still had an ox whip in his hand, as he'd just come back from the fields. What on earth were we playing at! he said. One minute we wouldn't allow him to sing, the next we'd want him to sing, then we wanted him to go to the county seat to sing-he felt like a chamber pot at the foot of the bed, dragged out when needed, shoved back when he wasn't needed. Nothing good could ever come out of Commune Head He!