My memory and imagination aren't totally in line with tradition.

I therefore often hope to break away from a main line of cause and effect, and look around at things that seem to have no significance whatsoever, for example contemplate a stone, focus on a cluster of stars, research a miserable rainy day, describe the random back view of someone it seems I've never met and never will meet. At the very least I should write about a tree. In my imagination, Maqiao couldn't do without a big tree. I should cultivate a tree-no, make that two trees, two maple trees-on my paper, and plant them on the slope behind Uncle Luo's house in lower Maqiao. I imagine the larger tree to be at least twenty-five meters tall, the smaller around twenty. Anyone visiting Maqiao would see from faraway the crown of the trees, the tips of whose branches would spread out to encompass a panoramic view.

This is excellent: writing the biography of two trees.

A village without big trees is like a home without parents, or a head without eyes-it just doesn't look right, as if it lacks a center. These two trees were just that, the center of Maqiao. There wasn't a child in Maqiao who hadn't breathed in their cool shade, who hadn't drunk in the chirps of the cicadas, or in whom the bark's gnarled tumors hadn't induced bizarre and terrified imaginings. They didn't need any particular looking after: when people had things to do, they could just be left to themselves and forgotten about. But they were perfectly willing at any moment to welcome and provide company for the lonely, who would find their melancholy gently soothed away by the rustling of the leaves, and who under the leafy screen, on a patch of silver that was stippled and studded, dispersing and overlapping, sometimes tranquil, sometimes stormy, could set sail for a cloudless dream land.

There was no way of knowing who had planted these trees, and the old-timers in the village production team wouldn't shed any further light on the matter. As regards the name "Maple Demons," apparently there'd been a mountain fire many years ago in which all the trees on the slope were burned to death, except for these two, which escaped safe and sound; even their leaves and branches weren't damaged in the slightest. Henceforth, people eyed the trees with increasing awe and respect, and legends concerning them multiplied. Some said the gnarled patterns in the bark were in fact human shapes; in violent storms they secretly grew several feet, and only shrank back to normal when they saw people coming. Ma Ming told an even spookier story. Once, unthinkingly, he'd fallen asleep under the trees, hanging his bamboo hat on a broken forked branch. In the middle of the night, he was startled awake by the sound of thunder and made out, by a flash of lightning, that his bamboo hat was now hanging on the top of the tree. Very peculiar.

Ma Ming boasted that he used to be quite an artist when he was younger. He said that after painting these two trees, for three days afterwards his right hand swelled up dramatically and he ran a fever; he didn't dare try again.

You couldn't even paint them, much less cut them down. The two trees therefore grew taller and taller, and became a landmark for miles around. When someone had sawed off a branch, they hung a piece of red cloth from their door to ward off evil, or carved a wooden fish out of the wood, to beg the spirits to ward off misfortune; all of which was, apparently, very effective. Once, while taking part in an irrigation project, I went to the commune to draw up some plans. I went together with Teacher Fan from the Middle School (who had also been allocated to the project) to the county irrigation office and copied the map of the commune. I found out, as we choked on the archive room dust, that even after 1949 the government had still not drawn up a comprehensive map of the area, and that all plans were still based on the military maps left by the Japanese army at the time of their invasion of China. These looked to be the contour maps of great and resourceful strategists, drawn in black and white on a scale of 1:5000; the commune took up one large sheet. Instead of sea level, the map used the foundation stone of the Changsha city wall at Xiaowumen as its starting point for elevation. Apparently, before the Japanese invaded, they bribed Chinese traitors to draw up plans in secret. The ingenuity and thoroughness of their preparations are nothing short of astonishing.

I saw that on this map too, Maqiao's two maple trees were so awesomely imposing that they'd been ringed in red pen by the Japanese. Teacher Fan said knowledgeably that they'd been a landmark for navigating Japanese planes.

This set me to thinking that Maqiao people had actually seen Japanese planes. Benyi said that the first time they caught sight of this freak apparition, Benyi's elder uncle thought it was a big bird and yelled at some lads to spread grain on the ground to entice it down, and got everyone else to run and fetch ropes to catch it.

The plane didn't descend, and his uncle hurled abuse up at the sky:

I know you're up there! I know you're up there!

Only Long Stick Xi guessed then that it was a Japanese plane, come to drop bombs. Unfortunately, this outsider's rough speech was barely intelligible, and no one understood him. Benyi's uncle wondered how a Japanese bird could grow that big, since Japanese people were so very small.

For a day, the villagers watched and waited in vain for the plane to come and peck at the grain. The second time the planes came, they relieved themselves of bombs, setting off earth-shattering explosions. Benyi's uncle died right there, mouth blown off to the tree top, as if it wanted to nibble on the birds' nests. Benyi even today is still a bit hard of hearing, but I don't know if it's from the explosion or from the shock of seeing that mouth fly up the tree.

Three villagers were killed in the bombing. If you add Xiongshi (see the entry "Dear Life"), who died in a delayed explosion twenty years later, then the death toll rises to four.

When you think about it, if it hadn't been for those trees, would the Japanese planes have found their way there? Would they have dropped bombs? After all, there was no particular reason for the Japanese to take any great interest in a small mountain village. If they hadn't used those trees as a navigation mark, they wouldn't necessarily have flown through, probably wouldn't have seen the crowd of people down below shouting and yelling, and probably would have dropped their bombs somewhere they considered more important.

Everything, including the deaths of four people and all that subsequently occurred, happened because of those two trees.

From that point on, there was always a flock of crows perched on these two trees, a fractured blackness erupting as they flapped their wings. Sometimes people would try to chase them away by burning or smashing their nests, but these creatures of ill omen waited until people's backs were turned, then flew back, stubbornly defending the tops of the trees.

The crows cawed year in, year out. I heard it said that three woman hanged themselves under this tree, one after another. I don't know their backgrounds; I only know that one had had a big argument with her husband, and she hanged herself after poisoning him. All this happened a very long time ago.

When I passed by these two trees, it was like passing any tree, any blade of grass, any stone-I wouldn't take too much notice of them. I wouldn't think, aha, there they are, lurking in the depths of the day, concealing unfathomable possibilities, harboring menace under their canopies, rumbling and erupting at portentous moments, sealing such-and-such a person's fate.

Sometimes I think that one tree is very unlike another, just as people are very unlike one another. Hitler, say, was also a human being. Suppose aliens happened to read of him: on the basis of his possession of five senses, four limbs, upright posture and frequent emission of regulated sounds to others of his kind, the aliens, on leafing through the dictionary that they might possess, would define him as human. This would not be incorrect. The Songs of Chu is the title of a book excavated in the Han dynasty. If a copy was given to a Hebrew man who understood no Chinese, on the basis of the shape of its characters, writing implements, and its state on being unearthed, the Hebrew man might, through sufficient ingenuity and erudition, conclude that the writing was Chinese. This, similarly, would not be incorrect. But how meaningful is this "not incorrect"?