He didn't even have a coffin for the funeral, and in the end Benyi donated a basket of grain which, supplemented by another basket from the team leader, could be exchanged for two lengths of fir wood to make a coffin.

In accordance with local custom, people placed a small bag of rice in his coffin as a pillow and put a copper coin in his mouth. While they were changing his clothes, Zhaoqing suddenly discovered, "Hey, he's got no dragon!"

Everyone was dumbfounded.

"Really!"

"Really, really, he's got no dragon!"

One after another they went up to the corpse to have a look, one after another discovered this male really had no dragon, no male organ, and one after another came away dumbfounded.

By evening, the news had spread through the whole village, and left the women whispering among themselves in shock and disbelief. Only Uncle Luo was a little disdainful of all the gossip, pronouncing in highly considered tones that there was no need for conjecture, his appearance made everything clear: if he wasn't a eunuch, how come he didn't have a beard or eyebrows? He also said that a long time back he'd heard people say ten or so years ago Wanyu had been arrested immediately upon assaulting the wife of a local grandee. This landlord controlled Changle, and headed up the defence grouping of the puppet regime; no matter how much Wanyu begged for mercy, they still cut off his dragon with one stroke of the knife.

When people heard this, there were sighs all around. They thought back to the way that Wanyu endlessly curried favor with women, helping them with their work, taking their punches for them-why had he bothered? He'd suffered decades of thunder, with never a drop of rain; fed decades of pigs, without getting a single meatball-was he mad? It turned out even his only child wasn't his own flesh and blood-when people came to think about it, the child didn't look anything like Wanyu.

With Wanyu gone, the village was much quieter, with far fewer songs. Sometimes you seemed to hear a faint screeching, but when you listened carefully it turned out to be the wind, not Wanyu.

Wanyu was buried under Tianzi Peak. When subsequently I went into the mountains to cut wood, several times I walked over his body. At the grave-sweeping festival, I took a look at his grave: it was the most colorful grave, all the straggling grasses had been pulled off the mound and there were masses of paper ashes, burnt candles, and incense sticks. There was also bowl after bowl of rice, laid there as a sacrifice. I also saw women there, both familiar and unfamiliar faces, some from the village and some from far away, all come to weep and wail, eyes red from grief.

There was nothing furtive about their weeping, nothing timid; a fat woman from Zhangjia District even plonked herself on the ground, slapping her enormous legs, howling that Wanyu was her liver, her lungs, wailing that her liver and lungs had lived a life of poverty with only three broad beans left when he died. It was no less than a spontaneous convention of the feminine world. I was surprised their husbands didn't have anything to say about this outpouring of tears.

Fucha said that they wouldn't say anything because they all owed Miller Wan money for work done. I think there was perhaps another reason: they felt that Wanyu wasn't a real man, and couldn't have had any untoward relations with their women; it wasn't worth putting up a fight, there was no need to settle scores.

: Maqiao people always paint dragons in black, with horns, claws, snake bodies, ox heads, shrimp whiskers, tiger teeth, horse faces, fish scales, and so on-every single feature is necessary. These dragons are painted on walls, on mirrors, or carved onto beds, with billowing waves and clouds added on-sea, land, sky, everything present and correct. From this it seems that dragons belong to no animal species and bear no relation to the dinosaurs of prehistoric times. Dragons are a kind of Chinese-style synthesis of all animals, an abstracted summary of all life on the planet.

Dragons are a kind of concept. An exhaustive, all-inclusive, omnipotent concept.

Dragon Boats evolved out of the building of ships in the shape of dragons. When I was an Educated Youth in Maqiao, the Dragon Boat Festival had been criticized and prohibited as an old custom, because of the Cultural Revolution. I only heard from the villagers that the Dragon Boat race used to be very exciting, with both sides of the Luo River competing for supremacy; when the losing side got onto the bank each rower had to put his pants over his head and submit to endless mockery and humiliation. I also heard that the Dragon Boats were all painted hundreds of times over with tung oil, and that before starting to build the boats they burned incense and supplicated the spirits-endless fuss and ceremony-after which the boat couldn't get wet in the rain, or dry in the sun, or have water dropped on it, until the day of the race, when, thronged by drums and music, it would be lifted by the young men to the starting line. Even though the route was right along the side of the river, the men couldn't ride in the boat, instead the boat rode the men.

I asked why things were reversed this way.

They said that they'd wanted to let the dragon boat rest-it shouldn't be allowed to get tired.

At this time of year, the dragon became a real kind of animal, even a creature with limited stocks of energy.

:Before I started writing this book, I hoped to write the biography of every single thing in Maqiao. I'd been writing fiction for ten or so years, but I liked reading and writing fiction less and less- I am, of course, referring to the traditional kind of fiction, which has a very strong sense of plot. Main character, main plot, main mood block out all else, dominating the field of vision of both reader and writer, preventing any sidelong glances. Any occasional casual digression is no more than a fragmentary embellishment of the main line, the temporary amnesty of a tyrant. Admittedly, there's nothing to say this kind of fiction can't approach one angle on the truth. But all you have to do is think a little, and you realize that most of the time real life isn't like that, it doesn't fit into one guiding, controlling line of cause and effect. A person often exists in two, three, four, or even more interlocking strands, outside each of which a great many other elements exist, each constituting an indispensable part of our lives. In this multifarious, scattered network of cause and effect, how valid is the domination of one main thread of protagonists, plot and mood?

Anything left out of traditional fiction is normally something of "no significance." But when religious authority is all-important, science has no significance; when the human race is all-important, nature has no significance. When politics is all-important, love has no significance; when money is all-important, art has no significance. I suspect the myriad things in this world are in fact all of equal importance; the only reason why sometimes one set of things seems to have "no significance" is because they've been filtered out by the writer's view of what has significance, and dismissed by the reader's view of what has significance. They are thus debarred from all zones of potential interest. Obviously, judgement of significance is not an instinct we are born with-quite the contrary, it is no more than a function of the fashion, customs, and culture of one particular time, often revealing itself in the form into which fiction shapes us. In other words, an ideology lurks within the tradition of fiction, an ideology which reproduces itself only on passing through us.