: Guangfu, a physical-education teacher in the county capital, was one of Maqiao's few intellectuals and, as it happened, the only person from Maqiao who settled in town with a state-allocated job.

His father was the one great historical figure who came out of Maqiao. But for a very long time, Maqiao people were loath to mention this great man, would hedge vaguely about events from the past that involved him. It was only later that I found out this great man was called Ma Wenjie, and that his case was reexamined and he was rehabilitated only in 1982, after which the labels of "Bandit Leader" and "Reactionary Bureaucrat" were dropped in favor of "Performer of Outstanding Service in Uprising." At the time, Guangfu was on the standing committee of the County Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), of which he later became the vice-chairman, a fact which was not, of course, entirely unrelated to his father's rehabilitation. It was also at this time, the time I paid my visit to Guangfu, that I found out a little more of the story behind Ma Wenjie taking up the post of County Head under the GMD.

As I said, this was in 1982. It was on a rainy, overcast evening that I found myself in a small streetside beancurd shop by the river-when Guangfu couldn't be sure of earning enough to live on even as a Phys. Ed. teacher, he opened this little shop. I took down what he said in a small exercise book, the smell of soya bean dregs tickling my nose. A thought suddenly came to me: as far as I was concerned, as far as all I knew about Ma Wenjie was concerned, 1948 wasn't actually 1948 at all. It had been postponed and postponed, had fermented and soured. In other words, it had been postponed until it reemerged on this rainy evening of 1982, It was just like the bomb that blew up Maqiao's Xiongshi, that bomb from the Sino-Japanese War that had lain quietly in the mud, frozen for thirty years, this longstanding postponement waiting until a beautiful, bright spring to explode in a child's face.

In the case of something we don't know about, we can't say definitely that it exists, or at the very least we lack sufficient evidence to conclude it exists. Before 1982 came along, Ma Wenjie's 1948 was a total blank as far as I was concerned.

By the same reasoning, Ma Wenjie's 1948, Maqiao's 1948 was not, in fact, the 1948 of many history textbooks. The events that made up this year, the mass of developments and changes that made this year moving, significant, memorable-the GMD-CCP talks at Beiping, the battle of Liaoshen and the Battle of Huaihai, Mao Zedong's angry rejection of the USSR's suggestion to divide China at the Yangtze River, the intense struggles within the GMD between Chiang Kaishek's clique and Xiao Zongren's clique, and so on-neither Ma Wenjie nor any of his followers knew anything of this at the time. Thanks to the multilayered screen of the Jiulian mountain range, in addition to the chaos of war, a great drought and a few other factors besides, Maqiao Bow's contact with the outside world had been on the wane for some time. Maqiao people's understanding of the outside world extended no further than the fragmentary rumors of a few old soldiers returning to the countryside.

Most of these old-timers had served under Regiment Commander Ma Wenjie, messing with the Forty-second Army; they'd reached Shandong and Anhui before taking part in the Battle of Binhu, relieving the garrison of the Forty-fourth Army. They looked down on the Sichuanese Forty-fourth Army, the most ill-disciplined army of all, in which almost everyone smoked opium; when the Japanese army disguised themselves in mufti and infiltrated their ranks, the army's command was finished off in one fell swoop. Of course, Regiment Commander Ma didn't have an easy ride either: once, in an ambush in Yuanjiang County, the hundred-odd landmines he'd buried all turned out to be duds. Just brought over from Shaoyang, the landmines exploded into two, like the halves of a melon: the explosions made quite a noise but failed to kill anyone. As they stood amidst the gunpowder, the Japanese found themselves not a single man down, and every one of them charged with a great cry of "ya-ya-ya," slashing the Forty-second Army into pieces in no time at all. Seeing the way things were going, Commander Ma had no choice but to order his followers to dump all the remaining mountain explosives in the river as quickly as possible and to scatter into guerrilla units. The Japanese were here to transport grain, and it was just a question of drawing things out toward winter, when the water in the holes and lakes would have dried up, when the Japanese boats would no longer be able to set out, and Ma's containment duties would be completed.

They recalled how Ma Wenjie led them on expeditions to capture prisoners. The reward for capturing a Japanese soldier was 10,000 yuan. Every company had to capture four prisoners each month; if they didn't manage it, the failing would be marked heavily against the Company Commander and the next month's quota would be doubled. If they failed to fill the quota again, the Company Commander would be dismissed and flogged, as laid down by army law. Three strokes with a carrying pole always left the buttocks bleeding. The buttocks of one luckless Commander, who didn't manage to stay out of trouble very often, were permanently dented.

When they found a position to defend, they'd change into mufti, take up their "Good Citizen" passes and, thus disguised, carry out punitive raids into enemy areas. The braver among them would latch onto the "tail" of Japanese troops. One company, made up entirely of Miao people from Xiangxi, all good swimmers and courageous too, captured the most prisoners, but unfortunately they all died in the line of duty when caught in a surprise attack in Huarong County. Those few fellow villagers of Ma Wenjie who'd served under him had been pretty lucky, it seemed, to survive with their heads left on; it was just that every time they captured a prisoner, they brought back either a Mongolian or a Korean, not genuine Japanese goods. Although they were grudgingly allowed to report for completion of duties, they didn't get any reward. Even after they returned home, these Maqiao people would still simmer with resentment at this. Bandit Ma was being unreasonable, they'd say: Mongolian Tartars were the biggest in size, too big even for three or four people to lift. We had it rough, they reckoned: how come everyone else got a reward, and we got nothing but cold water?

Bandit Ma was Ma Wenjie's nickname.

Their audience was sympathetically scandalized: that's right, that's right, Bandit Ma's a skinflint, he landed a big official job but no one ever saw him give his wife a gold bracelet. That time he returned to his home village and invited his relatives over for a meal, he cooked only five catties of pork, filled everyone's bowls with radish!

Their 1948 was full of such topics of conversation. To sum up, in other words, the outside world of the time, as defined by their own mental horizons, was: the opium-smoking Sichuan army, the Shaoyang landmines that exploded without killing anyone, the Mongolian Tartars in the Japanese army, and so on-they might, at best, have heard vague rumors of the Third Changsha Campaign, too. They had no idea even what "1948" was, they'd never used the Gregorian calendar. The term "1948" remained unknown to them right up until the time I came to know them. They used some of the following terms to refer to this year:

1. The year of the Great Battle of Changsha.

This was obviously incorrect. Their Battle of Changsha was a piece of news that came nearly six years late, and was mistaken by them for an event that took place in 1948. If someone from outside Maqiao who had no clue about the Third Battle of Changsha relied solely on what Maqiao people said to gain a sense of history, they'd end up with a very muddled chronology.