This was most unfair, he felt. He said that the Communist Party were burning their bridges behind them-when they first arrived, they'd relied on him as an ally. At that time they were Purging Bandits and Fighting Local Tyrants, and the bandits were fleeing everywhere. Dai Shiqing had helped the work team out by dispatching beggars as scouts to keep an eye on the comings and goings of suspicious elements around the town, and to visit each house to "count bowls": this meant surreptitiously noting, under cover of begging, how many bowls each household was washing and gauging from this whether the household was feeding an extra guest, whether they were concealing a suspicious personage. This, of course, only lasted a short while, however. Dai Shiqing had never foreseen the revolution would turn on the beggars and transform him into Changle's Local Bully, have him tied up and paraded under escort to the country jail.

In the end, he died of illness in custody. According to the recollections of his fellow unfortunates, when close to death he said: "This is the way of things for great men. When my star was rising, a thousand people couldn't topple me; now that I'm down on my luck, ten thousand couldn't raise me up."

By the time he said this, he'd been unable to stand for some time.

His illness started from his feet up-first they swelled so much he couldn't get either shoes or socks on, even after he'd cut them open at the sides. The line of his ankle bones disappeared, and his feet became as wide and round as two bags of rice. Later, as was to be expected, erythema developed and within a few months the red patches turned into purple patches. After another month, they turned into black patches. He scratched at them until there wasn't a scrap of healthy skin left on his feet, until they were nothing but a mass of scabs. All night long in the cells you'd hear his shouts and cries. He was sent to the hospital to be cured, but the penicillin the hospital gave him had no effect at all. He would kneel in front of the iron gates of the prison, shaking and clanging them, begging the guard:

"Just kill me! Quick, just get a knife and kill me!"

"We're not going to kill you, we want to reform you."

"If you're not going to kill me then let me go and beg."

"Let you go and kneel on the street, you mean?"

"I'm begging for mercy, begging you to be kind masters, please, quickly, let me go and beg. See how my two feet are rotting away…"

The guard gave an icy smile: "Don't go playing your tricks on me."

"I'm not playing tricks. If you don't trust me, then send an armed escort in behind."

"Get going, you're supposed to be moving fired bricks this afternoon." The guard didn't want to waste any more breath on him.

"No-no-no, no good, I can't move any bricks."

"Doesn't matter if you can't, you've still got to: it's what we call labor reform. You still want to beg? Still want to live off the fat of the land, not lift a finger? This is the New Society-we're going to give your sort some backbone!"

And so, in the end, the guard wouldn't let him go and beg. One morning, a few days later, when the prisoners were eating breakfast they realized that Dai Shiqing was still shrunk down inside his quilt. Someone went to shake him awake but discovered that he'd already gone stiff. One eye was staring open, the other eye closed. Four or five blood-sucking mosquitoes flew out of the nest of straw by his pillow.

: When people told me the story of Dai Shiqing, they used the word "scattered." If he couldn't beg, they said, Tiexiang's old man just scattered.

"Scattered," obviously, meant died.

This is one of my favorite words in this dictionary of Maqiao. Dying, expiring, snuffing it, croaking, passing away, going to the underworld, kicking the bucket, closing your eyes, breathing your last, giving up the ghost, and so on, all mean the same as "scattering," but all, by comparison, seem simplistic and superficial, none able to illustrate the process as precisely, vividly, or minutely as "scatter." Once life has finished, then all the different elements that hold life together disintegrate and disperse. Flesh and blood, for example, rot into mud and water, the rising steam turns into clouds and air. Or they are bitten by insects and channeled into autumnal chirping; absorbed by roots into green grassland and manyhued petals under the sunlight, stretching out into vast formlessness. When we fix our gazes upon the multifarious, diverse, unceasingly active wilds of the earth, we perceive all sorts of faint sounds and smells, such as at dusk, when dense golden mists, fresh and damp, seem to float restlessly under old maple trees. We know that life, that countless earlier lives are contained within-it's just that we don't know what they were called.

The moment that their heartbeat stops, their names and stories also disperse in fragments of human memories and legend, and after the passing of just a few years will end up utterly lost in the sea of humanity, never to return to their beginnings.

As the four seasons pass and clock hands rotate, the scattering of all matter is part of an inexorable linear progression, revealing the absoluteness of time. The second law of thermodynamics terms this a process of entropy: an ordered organism will slowly disintegrate into disorder, uniformly, homogeneously scatter into solitary, mutual isolation-once this state is reached, there's no qualitative difference between a corpse and the earth it's buried in, between Dai Shiqing's feet and his teeth.

To accumulate or cohere is, of course, the opposite of scattering. Cohesion is the basic condition of existence, of life. Blood and energy cohere to make people, clouds and mist cohere to make rain, mud and sand cohere to make rock, language and words cohere to make thought, days cohere to make history, people cohere to make families, political parties, or empires. A weakening of the power to cohere marks the onset of death. Sometimes, the more things expand and prosper, the more limited their power to sustain life becomes, the harder it becomes to maintain internal cohesion. Bearing this in mind, it becomes understandable that Maqiao people don't use "scatter" just to mean people dying, but also for any catastrophic predicament-and in particular, clouds that travel inside silver linings.

Many years later, listening to the old people considering the merits of television, I heard them remark in fearful tones: "If you watch television every day, till your head's full of it, won't you end up scattered?" They were simply expressing the anxiety that all the extra knowledge people picked up from watching television would stimulate more and more desires-and then how would they manage to cohere? And if they couldn't cohere, surely they were done for?

I can't say whether or not their terror of television was rational. But it did make me realize the connotations of "scattered" had by then extended far beyond what they had been twenty years ago. I also realized that Maqiao people retained their own sense of stubborn vigilance toward any form of scattering, toward the wild flights of fancy, the merging with the wider world one could experience while watching, for example, a color television.