With an icy snigger, the stonemason left him there and walked off.

With great difficulty, Wanyu got himself back onto his feet and shouted at a black shadow in front of him, "Keep 'em coming! On the chin!" The black shadow remained motionless, but he sensed the people standing around were laughing. He rubbed his eyes to steady his vision; he then saw that the black shadow wasn't the stonemason but a grain winnower.

He roared furiously at the front door of the Zhihuang household: "What are you running from? Come out and fight, if you've got any guts! You vicious dog's bladder, you can't even keep your word, you owe me two punches, you, you chicken you!" Despite his heroism, he'd staggered dizzily to the wrong place: the stonemason wasn't there but had gone off to the mountains.

He stumbled back home. People he met on his way back laughed when they saw him covered in mud. "Hey, miller, you been checking on production again?"

He merely laughed bitterly. "I'm going to report him! Report! When the People's Government deal with it, they're not going to worry about our precious Master Huang knocking them around!"

He added: "I'd sooner be torn limb from limb than worry about Commune Head He's favoritism!"

In all matters his thoughts turned to Commune Head He, believing they were the result of Commune Head He's conspiracies. Listeners couldn't make heads or tails of this unreasoned hatred; when asked, he always failed to account for it.

Wanyu was very used to taking blows for women. Time after time, he rolled involuntarily into the midst of marital disputes, leaping inevitably to the defense of the woman, which he paid for successively in terms of physical pain, even in hair and teeth. Some of the women whom he sheltered thought him too meddlesome, and turned on him with their husbands, showering his head with enraged blows, which left him feeling rather aggrieved. Generally, he wouldn't argue with these women. People used to say that he was the ligelang for these women, and hearing this made him very happy. Ligelang (pronounced lee-guh-lang) is an ono-matopoeic word, often used in describing tunes played in the traditional Chinese five-note scale; in Maqiao vocabulary, it's also used to refer to lovers and to lovers' talk. To be more precise, it's used for less formal, sincere, whole-hearted love; it has a more playful feel, the flavor of a burst of a tune on the fiddle, and stands for an ambiguous state somewhere in between love and friendship. For this very reason, the rather vague term ligelang has an unfixed meaning which can be elaborated into marginal, vague imaginings. Illicit fornication amongst clumps of grass is ligelang. Informal boistering and ribbing between men and women can also be called ligelang. It could be reasonably concluded that if Maqiao people saw ballroom dancing or men and women walking together in the city, they would place it firmly in the category of ligelang-a broad extramarital category lacking clear-cut analysis and explanation.

Maqiao people have many sketchy and muddled areas of consciousness, of which ligelang is one.

: Dragon is a swear word, referring to the male organ. It often comes up in Maqiao insults:

You, dead dragon, you!

Look at that stupid dragon!

Watch where you put your great big dragon feet!

Although Wanyu was no saint when it came to bad language, he couldn't bear other people calling him "dragon." Once thus insulted, he would grab the nearest likely weapon (stone, rake, whatever) and challenge his adversary to duel it out-I don't know why this was.

The last time I saw Wanyu was when I returned to Maqiao from the county seat and brought him the soap and women's socks he had asked me to buy for him. I spotted his son in front of his hut: he spat at me, guarding the door vigilantly. I said I'd come to see his dad.

Wanyu, lying on the bed inside, must have heard this. But he waited until I had reached the bed before suddenly pulling up the tattered, soya-black mosquito net. A face popped out. "What are you looking at, eh, eh? Here I am, like it or lump it!"

There was nothing comic about this. His face was waxy yellow, thin, and angular as a bunch of dead twigs-I had to hide my shock.

"I really missed you, I've been pining for days."

There was, once again, nothing comic about this.

After having asked about his illness, I said it was a pity he hadn't come to the city to sing. He waved his hands feelingly.

"Oh yes, very nice, very nice. Farming songs? That hoe and piss bucket, swing it here, swing it there stuff, you really call that singing?"

He sighed, and said the best times were past, from the first month to the eighth day of the third, when no one did any work, when all they did was enjoy themselves singing songs. This village would go perform in that village, this mountain in that mountain, now that was fun. The kids would sing "hallway songs," seated opposite each other to sing; once they'd completed a verse, they would shift their stool forward an inch, until the two stools were level with each other and the two singers snuggled up to each other, cheeks grazing, singing into each other's ear, their voices as quiet as the buzz of a mosquito, so that only their singing partner could hear clearly. This was called "earside singing." Wanyu's eyes shone with animation. "Tsk, tsk, tsk, those girls, they were like beancurd, squeeze 'em and the water'd come out!"

Since I happened to be feeling aimless myself that day, I felt a stirring of curiosity about Low Songs and begged him to sing me a bit of one. He came over all bashful for a time, and put up a show of refusing before he agreed. "You want me to get into trouble, then?"

"I bought you soap and socks, don't I deserve any thanks?"

His energy dramatically returned, and he jumped out of bed, pacing round the room once, then twice before he considered his throat properly moistened and his concentration properly focused. Suddenly, he burned with strength, vigor, power, his sickly color swept away, two beams of electric light shining from his eyes.

After he'd sung a few lines, but before I'd managed to understand them, he started waving his hands and coughing violently; unable to get any words out, he slowly groped his way back to the edge of the bed.

"I'm afraid my singing days are over." He grasped my hand tightly between his icy palms.

"Not at all, you sing really well."

"Really?"

"Of course, of course."

"Stop putting me on."

"I'm not putting you on."

"D'you reckon I can still sing?

"Of course, of course."

"What d'you know about it?"

I took a drink of my water.

His eyes dulled and he heaved a long sigh, leaning his head back onto the bed. "My singing days are over, all over. It's all Commune Head He's fault."

He began muttering darkly once more about Commune Head He. I didn't quite know what to say, but just drank my bowl of water good and slowly.

One day, a few months later, an ominous explosion of firecrackers was heard far off in the distance. When I went out to inquire, I discovered that Wanyu had scattered, or died (see the entry "Scattered"). I heard that when he died there was no one at his bedside, and his corpse lay there for a day or more before it was discovered by his neighbor Zhaoqing. I also heard that when he passed away, he had no more than three broad beans to his name, certainly not enough to eat for the next day. He left a child of about ten, whom some time ago he'd sent off to an uncle who lived far away. I'd seen the bare interior of his house, covered in spiders' webs and duck droppings; there wasn't even a cupboard inside this empty shell-clothes were always heaped on a tattered hanging basket over which his neighbors' chickens would jump back and forth. People said that he'd suffered all his life at the hands of women-otherwise, surely, his wife wouldn't have divorced him and would have made certain he had hot meals to eat.