He was already asleep in his grass mat shroud before he got to see this letter. After taking instructions from the prefectural commissioner's office and the province, the county government bought him a coffin, a pair of white candles, and a string of firecrackers.

: Most Maqiao people wouldn't know what Bramble Street, the place I just mentioned, was; most people from near Maqiao wouldn't know either-especially not the younger generation.

Bramble Street disappeared many years ago. If you left the county seat from the East Gate on Sanhuali Road, then crossed the Luo River, you'd see a flat stretch of bank, where cotton or sweet potatoes grew; on top of the northern face, which was slightly elevated, were a few scattered stones, some straggling grass, and a couple of thatched sheds built for night watchmen. If you came in a bit closer to look, you'd probably glimpse some ox droppings or the nests of wild birds in amongst the deep grasses, or a broken straw sandal. This was Bramble Street, now called Brambleland, or Brambleland Embankment. It would have been near impossible for younger generations to gain a sense of how this had in fact once been a "street," that it had actually been host to a hundred bustling, clamoring people and a huge, grand Confucian temple, famous for miles around.

Bramble Street had become a name without any links to reality, that had gone to waste.

Bramble Street only continued to figure, only carried any importance as a place-name, in stories relating to Ma Wenjie. Even so, its inevitable disappearance into oblivion was merely postponed for a few decades in the minds of one group of people-nothing more. The massacre of the "Advisory Gang" which took place that year started right here. In the last stage of their study meeting, the fifty-odd leaders of the surrendering bandits had been ordered to dig a pond. They dug and dug, hauled and hauled, dripped with sweat for three days; as soon as some kind of a pond had been dug, the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun hidden on a roof somewhere suddenly went off-a sudden noise, it was, that would have sounded very foreign, very distant to its hearers. The rain of bullets whistled over, rolled up into a whirlwind. None felt the bullets passing through his flesh, but as clouds of dust leapt up from the mud slope behind them and sand splattered in all directions, it became very obvious that somethinghad exploded through one side of their bodies before blossoming out into a whole chain of dust-cloud blooms on the other side. Maybe they were just beginning to understand what kind of a thing metal is, what kind of a thing speed is, how freely and easily metal bullets passed through flesh and how hard this instant was to grasp. And finally, they fell, one after another, into the hole in the ground they themselves had just dug.

It was only after 1982, when the government pronounced the "Revolt of the Advisory Committee" to be a case misjudged for all sorts of complex reasons, that talk of this episode once more began to flash into conversation, that the strange name of Bramble Street began to be used once more. Some old people said that after that volley of gunfire, Bramble Street became the haunt of ghosts, that house after house had caught fire for no apparent reason, and that before two years had passed, seven houses had burned down. A lot of the children born there-three within two years-were born feebleminded. The fengshui man said there were ghosts at work there and that the fish in the pool couldn't keep them off, so of course houses were going to get burned down. Mr Fengshui also babbled something about these being guan ("government") ghosts, ghosts connected to catastrophes in government, guan being homophonic with the word coffin, which referred to souls which hadn't scattered after death, something like this-no one listening quite got what he said. People immediately started to dig inside and outside their houses, tunneled several feet down, and cleared out any suspicious broken bits of material which might have been rotten coffins. They also dug a new pond and planted a few thousand fishtail seedlings in a determined effort to increase the flow of water, to overcome fire with water. The strange thing was that the fish in this pond just wouldn't survive: all of them went belly-up within a month. Finally, an umbrella-maker's shop on the eastern side of the street caught fire and people slowly lost confidence in fire-fighting; one after another, they were forced to move elsewhere, a great many to the area around Huang Bay.

By the end of the 1950s, Bramble Street had become totally deserted, a stretch of wasteland; even the well had caved in, and mosquitoes and wigglers flourished in vast numbers.

In fact, it became a patch of good land, very fertile, so it was said, where cotton flowers and sweet potatoes would grow particularly well; it also produced a wonderfully sweet variety of melon that very quickly became famous. Sometimes, in an effort to drum up customers, the peddlers in the county capital would yell with particular vigor, "Get your Brambleland Embankment Brambleland Melons!"

Some people wrote this as "Baubleland Melons" on the signs for their melon stalls.

: I used to think that time was measured equally everywhere, that it was something that traveled at uniform speed, a transparent fluid equally, evenly, and precisely distributed, drop by drop. But no: this, in fact, is just the time felt by our bodies: being born, growing up, getting old, dying, for example, all according to the prescribed order. But people aren't trees, or stones. Perhaps, apart from material time, it is felt time that is most meaningful to people. A person's period of childhood is always very long, just as periods of upheaval, danger, and distress are very long. There can be no doubt that a sense of longue duree springs from a person's special sensitivity of feeling, clarity of memory, and depth of new knowledge. For those who pass comfortable, dull days, in whose lives one day is replicated by one hundred, and one year is replicated by ten, we see the opposite occurring: time isn't drawn out, it isn't expanded or enlarged, but becomes increasingly hurried, increasingly shrunken, until it finally turns into a zero, a blink, then it's gone without a trace. One day, they suddenly discover to their wide-eyed horror that the old person in the mirror is themselves.

By a similar logic, time we know very little about, the time of the ancients, the time of distant nations, for example, is always hazy and so close to being invisible that it can be practically ignored, just as anything far away, anything at the very extreme of our worldview shrinks into specks of dust, into something barely distinct from air. When I used to read American fiction, I found that I often got the 1920s and the 1940s in America mixed up, and the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, even more so. I was frightened at myself: how could the entirely distinct, undeniable living and dying, and dying and living-several decades, even several centuries long-of all the generations that lay behind a novel, quietly escape me, why were they so frantically brief that they stimulated me only to skim quickly through a book, or even yawn?

The reason was very simple: I was too far away, I couldn't see everything clearly.

Time is a hostage to the powers of perception.

Human time only exists through perception, and people whose powers of perception are weakened, or even totally lost, human vegetables confined to their sickbeds, for example, lack a truly meaningful sense of time. This transparent fluid, time, has never trickled down in equal quantities, at uniform speeds, it quietly changes form according to different powers of perception, undetectably extending or shortening, concentrating or scattering, protruding or collapsing.