Wanyu had been deeply upset about the X-ray glasses: "It's unfair, it's so unfair," he once complained to me. "You city people have films to watch, zoos to visit, cars and trains to look at-what do we country people have? This is the only cultural life we have,"-he was referring to his qoqo songs and to goings-on between men and women-"using X-ray glasses, now, what's the world coming to! And another thing, if the Communist Party doesn't let everyone do low stuff, how's there going to be a little Communist Party later on?"

I won't consider right now whether or not Wanyu's complaints about Commune Head He were justified. I will say, though, that it isn't historically correct to view sexual conservatism, as represented by the binoculars, as a speciality of the Communist Party. When the Guomindang (GMD) ruled China, it so happened that the military governments of Guangzhou, Wuhan, and other places too prohibited ballroom dancing, regarding it as a form of licentiousness "harmful to social morals and mores." And earlier than this, when China was ruled by the Qing dynasty, The Romance of the Western Chamber was right at the top of the list of forbidden operas, and love stories and poems were all officially viewed as "works of evil filth," with pile after pile rooted out, confiscated, and burned. The word "low," still in use by Maqiao people, likewise has a long history as a moral prejudice against sexual behavior, and forms part of a single thread that has permeated Chinese linguistic thinking for several thousand years. As long as this name, "low," remains unchanged or unexpunged, people will always have difficulty in truly, totally, thoroughly walking out from under the shadow of prejudice. Even if Commune Head He had been an exceptionally open and enlightened individual, he wouldn't necessarily have been able to shake off a mindset that was as much a part of him as his own flesh and blood. He was just a traditional dictionary user, wielding his binoculars, coasting along the track of a given meaning; like a donkey on a halter, he could do nothing other than move forwards. In this sense, then, do people produce words, or words produce people? Was Commune Head He indeed responsible for his implacable strictness, or was it this word "low" that way back in the past had become a halter for Commune Head He-in that case, then, should all users of Chinese, including Maqiao people, be held responsible for Commune Head He? This, of course, is a question.

:When Maqiao people were working on the land, their favorite type of conversation, apart from food talk, was low talk. The endless variety of low talk would make your eyes pop, jaw drop, mind blow, thoughts wander, make the heavens spin, the earth turn, and the sun and moon darken. Nothing, not even the most ordinary of things-radishes, ploughs, carrying poles, caves, birds in flight, grain mortars, grassland, ovens-failed to invite low associations for them, anything could become an excuse or an analogy for lowness, could provide justification for the endless repetition (with minor alterations) of jokes and stories, could detonate rallies of raucous laughter. It was during the planting season in particular that their crude rantings got wilder than ever.

She pants to catch me

Runs to catch me-I'm like a wet loach,

Loaches love their rice gruel

Squeezing into slippery wet rice gruel…

At planting time, a song like this was counted as really quite refined. Singing this stuff wasn't normally allowed, it was prohibited by the government, but it was encouraged in the planting season and cadres turned a deaf ear. Wanyu said this was called "soiling the ground"-and the lower you went, the better. Unsoiled ground was dead ground, cold ground, ground that wouldn't produce shoots or allow seeds to take root.

Maqiao people saw "ground" as distinct from "fields": ground was "male," fields were "female." Ground had to be sown by women, whereas fields, of course, had to be sown by men. Both these stipulations had an important part to play in guaranteeing bumper harvests. Rice seedlings were to be planted in the fields, so the job of immersing them in water inevitably had to be done by men, and it was strictly taboo for women even to stand by and look.

By the same logic, a greater degree of sexual immodesty amongst women when they were on the ground was temporarily permitted and became entirely proper, enjoyed a kind of tacit approval. This wasn't just a type of diversion: it was a struggle for production, a sacred mission to be carried out with the loftiest sense of responsibility. Some female Educated Youth couldn't get used to it, couldn't hide their feelings of embarrassment and aversion on encountering it; their frowning and blocking of their ears so disheartened the local women that they couldn't get any "soiling" done; the men would then get anxious and make the team cadre transfer the female Educated Youth to work elsewhere.

I've seen with my own eyes the savagery of women on the ground, how they dragged a young man to one side, for example, how everyone pitched in to pull down his pants and throw balls of ox dung down his crotch to teach him a lesson, then scattered with roars of laughter. They wouldn't have treated Educated Youth like this, of course, but lesser instances of harassment were quite common, stealing and sitting on a grass hat, for example, followed by a volley of guffaws; or calling you over to make you guess the answer to a riddle, followed by a volley of guffaws. Ill at ease, you couldn't clearly make out what the riddle was, but you could tell from their mad laughter that this riddle didn't need to be answered, and could never, ever be answered.

: Fields were maternal, female, and so the holes where water flowed in the ridges between fields were called "menstrual holes." Humans have menstrual leaks, or menstruation as it's more standardly termed, so it's perfectly natural that fields should also have menstrual holes.

Depending on the irrigation needs of the seedlings in the fields, the water level needed to be adjusted whenever necessary by blocking up or digging open each menstrual hole; this was the duty of the water regulators. Normally it was old people who took on this job, solitary figures roaming around the ridges with a hoe on their shoulders; sometimes you heard the intermittent pad-pad-pad of their footsteps in the depths of the night, each one sounding out with a particular, crisp clarity, one clattering pebble after another rising up out of an insomniac night.

There were always small puddles by these menstrual holes where water sprang forth, sometimes there were even small fish struggling desperately against the water-flow; this was where people could easily wash and scrub themselves when work stopped for the day. If women couldn't face going to the river, which was a long way away, they'd stop to wash their hoes or sickles if they passed by one of these holes; while they were about it they'd wash their hands and feet, wash away the mud and sweat from their faces; one after another, they'd wash back into view a shining face and bright eyes before they walked off toward the cooking smoke of the evening. Once they'd passed the menstrual holes, they were transformed. Their brightness tarnished by a whole day of overwork, it was only on their way back home that the gurgling flow of water from the menstrual hole suddenly restored their radiance.