The problem is, everyone's perceptions are different, and one person's perceptions will constantly alter as a situation changes. Standing amongst a huge pile of crushed sensory fragments, do we still have a reliable, permanently fixed, abiding image of time? A unified time? When we discuss the year 1948, which perception of 1948 are we discussing? On that rainy, overcast evening, in that small beancurd stall, after Guangfu had had a cry about his dad, he got onto the subject of lotus root. He said the lotus root that year was incredibly sweet, unusually powdery after you'd boiled it-you couldn't get stuff like that to eat now. Lotus root nowadays, he said, grew from chemical fertilizer, was a hundred times inferior to lotus root back then.

What he said left me a little perplexed. I knew that nowadays some places did in fact use too many chemical fertilizers, that this did in fact affect crop quality. But most lotus root was still organic and not all that different from old Guangfu's lotus root of yore. I suspected it wasn't the flavor of the lotus root that had changed, but rather Guangfu's perception of its taste that had changed, as he grew older and older, as periods of famine or liver trouble receded further and further back in the past. This is a very common phenomenon. We often gloss over things from the past, lotus root or a book, some neighbor of ours, for example, because we've forgotten the specific circumstances which produced our original warmth of feeling. We may even feel that a distressing experience from the past was incredibly beautiful, because we've already become distant spectators, utterly removed from the danger of sinking back down into its mire. We're no longer in distress, we're simply enjoying the memory of that distress.

And so time, that hostage to perception, in fact corrodes our perceptions.

To what extent was the 1948 of which Guangfu spoke to me truthful, reliable, still uncorroded? To what extent were his unreliable recollections of the flavor of lotus root distinct from his own unreliable beliefs?

On the subject of the government's recent decision to rehabilitate the "Advisory Committee," Guangfu said that what the CCP did was far from easy for them: rectifying your own mistakes, swallowing down your own phlegm, none of this is easy. As he said this, he discovered that the box of tobacco was empty and told his son to go and buy some tobacco, and get two bottles of soda for the guest while he was at it. His son was twelve or thirteen years old, and at the mention of soda his eyes lit up and he ran barefoot out the door. When he returned with tobacco and soda, he didn't leave things at that: he frenziedly pryed off the cap of the soda bottle with the tip of a chopstick. Pop-he stood there, briefly dazed, before he began turning in every direction, climbing under the dark bed to grope around, his pointy buttocks sticking right up in the air. The tin bottle cap must have flown off somewhere.

He re-emerged with a spider's web on his head: I couldn't see it, he said, I couldn't see it, then brushed off his hands and took the other bottle of soda off outside to drink, humming a tuneless popular song.

"So that's that, hmmm?" Guangfu asked him angrily.

"I looked everywhere, I couldn't see it."

"Did it grow wings? Fly off into the sky?"

I didn't know why Guangfu was attaching so much importance to a tin bottle cap. Maybe the little tin cap could be returned for money? Or was he furious about his kid's devil-may-care attitude?

He made the child have another look, interrupting his conversation with me, helping move a pile of charcoal away from a corner of the wall, along with a wooden bucket and hoe and other tools, huffing and puffing as he did so, subjecting every single suspicious hiding place to a thorough investigation. "Where the hell are you hiding?" he threatened the bottle cap, "I know you're hiding somewhere! Where've you gone to?"

Of course, he didn't forget to scold the child: "Get looking, you good-for-nothing! Look! Getting a bit big for your boots, are you? Let me tell you, if it wasn't for the Communist Party rehabilitating your grandfather, d'you think you'd be drinking soda? Or wearing shiny leather shoes? Or going to high school with a fountain pen in your pocket? I nearly died doing labor reform, I was so hungry I even picked out the grass from ox dung to eat…"

The child pouted, kicking sourly at a piece of wood ash.

"Kicking, are you, you pig-sticker!" (see the entry "Stick[y]"). The Phys. Ed. teacher whacked him on the top of his head.

The child raised his arms to ward off the blow; maybe he used a little more force than was necessary, for his father had to take a couple of steps back, almost slipped over. "So hit back at me, would you? You'd hit back, you good-for-nothing?" He snatched the bottle of soda from the child's hand, "I'll bury you alive, I will!"

Panting with fury, the boy ran outside screaming like a mad thing: "You old bastard! You old bandit! You old counterrevolutionary! What kind of teacher are you, hitting people like that?" A torrent of abuse ensued: "Reckon this is still the old society? Reckon you can bully everyone else, make everyone's life miserable, humiliate the nation and forfeit its sovereignty, hmmm?" These two phrases he'd used sounded very scholarly. "Serves you right! Serves you right, picking over ox dung! My life'd be better if you went to prison. If I get to be premier when I grow up, I'll launch political movements! And tell you what, I won't be rehabilitating your type!…"

"I-I-I-"

Guangfu's angry response caught in his throat; even though he was a Phys. Ed. teacher, he still couldn't catch up with his son, but his whole body shook with anger; luckily, I was there to help him get back home and calm down. The boy's attitude toward him left me surprised and bewildered. Of course, the boy had spoken in anger, so his words shouldn't be taken too seriously. But the way he'd jabbed at his father's sore points proved at the very least that he had no acute sense of pain toward past events, and that no misjudgement of any case could compare in importance with his bottle of soda. It was at this moment that I was again made conscious of the ambiguities of time. Like a lot of people, Guangfu thought that most people would sympathize with his ordeals, that everything set in stone by Time should be forever preserved in its original form, universally recognized and admired like a precious cultural relic in a museum. Rooted in this belief as he was, he was like my parents or lots of people from earlier generations, always lecturing the younger generation by revisiting past events, talking about his time in prison, the famine, ox dung, or 1948.

What he hadn't realized was that time isn't a cultural relic, that there is no unified sense of time, existing for and appreciated by him and his son simultaneously. When the government returned to him a 1948 in which his father was pure as the driven snow, they failed to allocate one to his son as well. The boy's sullen kick at the pile of wood ash showed he was not only uninterested in, but resented all that came from the past, including 1948.

This, it would seem, was illogical. Despite having no personal experience of the past, he could at least be curious about strange events that took place in the past, just as children normally respond enthusiastically to classical legends, rather than kicking them angrily away. There was one plausible explanation for this: he didn't have any real hatred of the past, it was just that he hated the present past, which was to say the past of this overcast evening, the past that resonated with his father's scolding lectures and pomposity, the past that had snatched away his halfbottle of soda.

Guangfu's anger drove him to tears. This got me thinking about the policy that had made their whole family suffer injustice, a policy that had ruled that all personnel still serving in the old regime after 1947 at department and lieutenant-commander level and above were historically counterrevolutionary. This was applied across the board, to anybody, anywhere, in any temporal schema, the implication being: everyone lived within one, single time scheme, with no exceptions permitted. Years later, people finally realized that this policy was an oversimplification, and thanks to the revoking of this policy Guangfu's bitterness was replaced by sweetness. On the other hand, however, Guangfu was still trying to force his son to live in a single time scheme, again with no exceptions permitted. He was insisting on nothing less than a new timetable: the past that he detested so much, his son also had to detest; the present that he cherished, his son also had to cherish. The vast and momentous 1948 of his mind had to take on the same form and supremacy in his son's mind, it couldn't shrink, couldn't scatter, least of all disappear into nothingness. What he hadn't realized was that his son lived entirely outside his father's time-that in his son, a tiny little tin bottle cap could lead to a totally different conclusion: