None of this, in fact, had anything to do with Commune Head He.

He asked mysteriously "Can I sing qoqo songs now? The Communist Party…?" He made a toppling over gesture.

"What are you blathering on about?!" I thrust a piece of paper at him, some lines about spring ploughing. "Memorize them today, tomorrow we rehearse, the day after the commune are going to come and check it."

Having studied it a while, he suddenly seized me by the arm. "Sing this? Hoes and rakes and carrying poles filling manure pits watering rice seedlings?"

I wasn't sure what he meant.

"Comrade, I have to put up with all this stuff every day in the fields, and now you want me to get on stage and sing about it? Just thinking about hoes and carrying poles makes me sweat, gives me palpitations. What d'you really want me to sing?"

"What do you think we asked you here to sing? You'll sing what we want you to sing, if you don't sing then go and do some work!"

"Ooooh, comrade, temper, temper!"

He didn't give the lines back.

I didn't find his voice as beautiful as people said it was; though it was clear and sharp, it was too abrupt, too stark, too direct, sung throughout in a monotone, a real girly screech it was, as piercing as a knife edge scraping on tiles. I felt that the sinuses of listeners must be contorting horribly, that everyone must be listening not with their ears, but with their nasal cavities, their foreheads, the backs of their heads, in order to cope with these repeated knife cuts.

This kind of scraping noise must have been known in Maqiao. Yet except for the Educated Youth, the locals all had a high opinion of his singing voice.

The Educated Youth were even less impressed with how smug he was about his choice of costume, and wouldn't let him wear his old leather shoes. He also wanted to wear his candle-wick silk pants, even put on a pair of glasses. As the people from the County Cultural Center pointed out, how on earth could there be a toffee-nosed intellectual right in the middle of the spring ploughing? No way. They paused to think, and decided that he should be barefoot, roll up his trouser legs, wear a bamboo hat on his head, and carry a hoe on his shoulder.

He protested violently. "Carry a hoe? I'll look like an old water watchman! Horrible! Too horrible!"

The people from the Cultural Center said, "What do you know? This is art."

"Well, why don't I make it even more artistic by hauling a bucket of shit around?"

If Benyi hadn't been there supervising the rehearsal, the argument would never have ended. In fact Benyi wasn't that keen on the hoe himself, but since the county seat comrades said the hoe was good, the hoe stayed. "If they want you to carry it, you carry it." He scolded Wanyu: "You've got the wits of a pig, you have! You're going to look like an idiot on stage with nothing to do! What are you going to do when you start to sing?"

Wanyu blinked a couple of times, but remained blank.

Starting to get agitated, Benyi got up on to the stage to do a few sample actions to make Wanyu understand, holding the hoe upright, or carrying it on his shoulder, on his left shoulder for a bit, then on the right shoulder for a bit.

In the subsequent days of rehearsal, Wanyu's heart wasn't really in it as he stood on one side, a solitary figure holding a hoe. He was a good bit older than the other actors, and didn't seem able to join in with the chatter. Whenever any women came by to watch the fun, Wanyu's face always took on a shamed expression, his features screwed into a bitter smile. "Pray look not, ladies, it's too horrible."

In the end he didn't go with us to the county seat. The day we boarded the tractor in the commune, we waited and waited but there was no trace of him. When we finally saw him arrive, we discovered he hadn't brought his hoe. When asked where his hoe had got to, he mumbled no problem, no problem, I'll be able to borrow another in the county seat. The team leader said that the town wasn't like the country, where every household had a hoe-what if we couldn't borrow a suitable one, what would we do then? Quick, go back and fetch it! Wanyu just stood there hemming and hawing, with his hands in his sleeves. It was plain to see: he and that hoe just didn't mesh, and he didn't want to get on stage with it.

The team leader had no alternative but to go and borrow one from nearby. As we waited for him to borrow one, we discovered that Wanyu had disappeared, slipped away.

In fact, although he never made it to the county seat, he always very much wanted to go. From very early on, he was always washing his shoes and clothes, making preparations to go into town. He'd also secretly begged me that, when the time came, I should lead him across the roads in the city-he was terrified of cars. If a hooligan picked a fight with him, he would surely get the worst of it. The city women were good-looking, and he'd be so busy looking in all directions that he might lose his way. He hoped that I would rescue him as the need arose. But in the event he didn't go with us to the county seat, pitting himself against that hoe to the bitter end. He later explained that no matter how he tried, he simply couldn't remember the words to that song about manure pits, about digging the soil, scattering ox dung, watering the rice shoots. He just got confused and frustrated, and all that singing made him want to scream. If he'd really gone to the county seat to sing, there would have definitely been a major incident. It wasn't that he hadn't put in the effort, but even after he'd eaten pig brain, dog brain, ox brain, he still couldn't remember some of his lines, and then he was off on a spirit journey thinking about low doings between men and women. He had no choice but to slope off half-heartedly at the last minute.

Because he didn't say goodbye, Benyi later fined him fifty catties of grain.

This was how I saw it: Wanyu wasn't conscientious about a lot of things, but when it came to singing he was pretty conscientious. Many times he wouldn't stand firm, yet in his attachment to qoqo songs, none stood firmer. Quite simply, he was intent on martyring himself to art, prepared to give up this cushy number in town, to give up work points and put up with punishment and abuse from cadres, rather than put up with hoe art, with this pathetic womanless excuse for art.

:One day, Wanyu saw the stonemason Zhihuang beating his wife so violently that she cried out for help; Wanyu went to mediate, saying that he'd seen what was going on and that Zhihuang shouldn't be so brutal. One look at his bald head and smooth, beardless face sent the stonemason into a blind rage: "What business is it of yours if I beat my cheating wife to death, you piece of shit?" Wanyu replied that the New Society said we should all be civilized, and women were female comrades, not punching bags, don't you know?

After arguing a while, the stonemason finally smiled coldly and said, okay then, as your heart bleeds so much for female comrades, I'll strike a bargain with you. If you can take three punches from me, I'll respect what you say.

Wanyu normally acted like a weedy scholar, terrified of pain; a leech bite in the fields would make him bellow and bawl, and his face turned ashen at Zhihuang's challenge. Despite his terror, he probably didn't want to lose face in front of onlookers and decided to see the thing through; he squeezed his eyes shut, and shouted yes, while he braced his outer cranium for the blow.

He'd overreached himself, and shutting his eyes any tighter wasn't going to help. After just the first punch from Zhihuang, he hurled himself howling and yelling into the ditch and failed to re-emerge.