2. The year Mao Gong was head of the Protection Committee.

You could say this was correct, you could also say this was incorrect. Maogong was from Maqiao Upper Village, but that year he was in fact covering for someone from Zhangjia District, and it was his turn to act as Head of the Protection Committee, with jurisdiction over the eighteen bows around. There was nothing much wrong in marking 1948 by this event. The problem, however, was that Maqiao people didn't know the Japanese had already surrendered and that the Protection Committees set up under Japanese coercion no longer existed in most places, that the "Good Citizen" card was no longer in use; because they were cut off from news, they were still doing things by the old rules, still using the term "Protection Committee"; this might lead to later confusion.

3. The year the bamboo in Zhangjia District flowered.

There was a grove of fine bamboo in Zhangjia District and in 1948, when a terrible drought came and not a single grain was harvested from the fields, a kind of seed-yielding white flower bloomed on all the bamboo. When people picked these seeds and threshed off the husk, they found bamboo rice-chaff, a pale red in color, which produced a heady scent when steamed and which tasted pretty much like nonglutinous red rice. After a bamboo flowered, it immediately died, but this grove of bamboo enabled the people who lived nearby to get through the famine; the locals were deeply grateful for its generosity, and named the grove "the merciful bamboo." This event made a very deep impression on Maqiao people, who henceforth remembered the year by it. There was, in general terms, nothing incorrect about this, it was just that outsiders wouldn't have known about the event itself. When the census register was taken, or recruits drafted, or school entrance exams registered for, those born in "the year the Zhangjia District bamboo flowered" and their parents would need to spend ages gesturing and explaining before managing to communicate to an outsider the age of the person concerned.

4. The year Guangfu got muddled in Longjia Sands.

To "get muddled" meant to start school, Guangfu, the son of Ma Wenjie, didn't have that much natural aptitude for learning; when he was little, he loved playing around and it took him seven years to finish primary school. Year upon year he had to repeat, which he found terribly embarrassing, and even after he grew up he hated admitting to this poor record, so on his curriculum vitae he put the time he got muddled forward three years, to 1951. If someone who didn't know these details were to calculate time only by Guangfu's curriculum vitae or by what Guangfu said, he'd dislocate Maqiao's whole history forward by three springs and three autumns. So this, too, is a very perilous way of conceptualizing time.

5. The year Ma Wenjie called an amnesty.

Ma Wenjie's amnesty was a great event: news of it spread near and far, everyone knew about it; it served as a highly convenient temporal marker for Maqiao people and was the easiest way of explaining things to people from outside the area.

There are a few things to be said about this amnesty, of course.

The atmosphere had been very tense that year. In the twelfth lunar month, a lot of people in the countryside were busy weaving grass mats to send over to the county seat in preparation for the wrapping of corpses. Rumor had it that the men from around Pingjiang had sworn alliance to the provincial army, which was under the generalship of "Donkey Peng" and was claimed to have mustered ten thousand men and three cannon, all ready for a fight to the death with Ma Wenjie and the men on both banks on the Luo River. Reckoning his number was up, Ma Wenjie divided up his family's property amongst the crowds and prepared his own coffin. He asked only one thing of Donkey Peng: he didn't want to fight in the city. So as to avoid bringing suffering on the people, the white mud embankment on the lower reaches of the Luo waters was the best place for the battle. Not having any of it, Donkey Peng cut off the head of the messenger Ma Wenjie had sent, and hung it on the bridge outside the east gate of Baisha Town. When the locals went out they didn't dare cross the bridge, and could cross only by wading through the water under the bridge.

When the news spread around, the ordinary people in the county seat fled in panic. After a while, though, after there was neither sound of cannon nor sighting of Donkey Peng's army approaching the city boundaries, it emerged that Ma Wenjie had issued a proclamation that he wouldn't fight. He had a new title, too: County Head and Head Commander of the Provisional Fourteenth Company. When he took people out to eat dogmeat in restaurants in Changle, people spotted that his followers all wore National Army uniforms and that a sprinkling of foreign-style machine guns gleamed in their possession.

As later opinion had it, Ma Wenjie did an incredibly stupid thing in going over to the GMD in the year of the GMD's great defeat. With regard to this, Guangfu explained to me over and over again how his dad had in the first place wanted to surrender to the Communist Party, but with the yin in a bad way and the yang tied up in knots he ended up surrendering at the wrong door. With his few years' experience of traveling around in the army, his dad had learned a thing or two, and knew vaguely about the Communist Party; he'd heard that the Communist Party killed the rich and helped the poor, that they were good fighters; he had no ill feeling towards them. While under pressure from the provincial army, he dispatched his sworn brother Wang Laoxuan to go and seek out the Communist Party. Wang Laoxuan had a brother-in-law who worked as a carpenter in Liuyang and who was very thick with the Communists. But things worked out very unfortunately: as soon as Wang Laoxuan set out, he was struck down by evil spirits and a huge carbuncle erupted on his back. He applied herbal medicine but it was still so painful he ended up knocked out for two whole days at an inn. By the time he hurried on to Liuyang, his brother-in-law had just left for Jiangxi.

"Two days, two rotten, measly days! If Wang Laoxuan hadn't got a boil, if he'd carried out his orders on time, wouldn't my dad have joined the Communist Party?"

Guangfu took a gulp of beer, fixing his eyes on me as he spoke.

Guangfu had reason to be regretful, of course. It was just those two short days that changed the fates of Ma Wenjie and his hundred or so followers, and that changed Guangfu's fate, too. Instead of finding the Communists, Wang Laoxuan was later introduced at Yueyang by the boss of a theater troupe to the aide-de-camp of a GMD Section B warlord. The Section B warlord offered Ma Wenjie amnesty and enlistment, for which arrangements began at that meeting.

By this time, it was nearing the end of 1948, exactly when the GMD's political power was beginning to collapse completely in the Mainland- but country-dwellers cut off by winter conditions didn't know this. I'd guess that the Section B warlord knew then that the game was already up, that amnesties and weapon handovers were happening everywhere, but wanted to make things just a little more stressful and difficult for the Communist Army as it prepared to head south. Or, as historical documents later made clear, it so happened that the Hunan Provincial Government Army belonged at the time to Section H of the GMD, between whom and Section B there was a rift; strife was both open and covert, but the friction never ceased. Section B was trying to enlist itinerant bandits on Section H's territory to increase their own power and contain Section H. Either way, the amnesty and generous support offered by Section B pleasantly surprised Bandit Ma, who, as a simple country bumpkin, was overjoyed to receive a certificate of appointment from his opposite number, as well as eighty guns and the assurance of a period of peace on both banks of the Luo River. He knew nothing of the factional struggle within the GMD, nor of the motives of the Section B commanding officer (even now, we can't be entirely sure of all this); he just thought that as long as they wore a uniform they were government troops, that they were to be feared by him, that he should sue for peace from them.