"Served you right going to prison like that!"

"I'd be better off if you were in prison!"

Maybe, from this evening onwards, in this tiny little beancurd stall, an irrevocable chasm opened up between their pasts, a chasm that included 1948, and that was practically unbridgeable.

: A very small variety of mosquito, this was, and very dark in color; if you examined it carefully, though, you'd see there was a small white dot on its black head. Its sting produced a red bite, not that big but unbelievably itchy, that lasted about three days. Maqiao people called it the "army mosquito." People said Maqiao didn't used to have this sort of mosquito, only the vegetable mosquito, a large, greyish creature. Although the bites it produced were big and extremely itchy, they disappeared pretty quickly. Maqiao people also said that the army mosquito had been brought by the provincial army, the year that Donkey Peng's provincial army had fought their way up to Changle. They'd been stationed there for ten days, leaving behind piles of pig bristles, chicken feathers, and this vicious breed of mosquito.

That's how the army mosquito got its name.

It was during my time in the countryside that these mosquitoes taught me just how fierce they were. Particularly in the summer, when work finished very late, mosquitoes would swarm around your face and legs, making a deafening buzz, forming clouds so dense they could almost lift you off the ground. We were too hungry when we got home for our hands to take care of anything besides eating and drinking. And so, wolfing and gulping as we held our bowls, we had to keep our legs jigging about in a mealtime dance that we had to get used to: if you stopped for only a moment, a swarm of mosquitoes would mercilessly descend. If your hand happened to shoot out to rub your leg, you'd rub a few mosquito corpses off. People were quite used to rubbing rather than swatting mosquitoes, because in the end hands and feet were your own flesh and wouldn't put up with getting slapped all the time.

When it got late, the mosquitoes, too, seemed to get tired and rest, and the buzzing noise would grow fainter.

: Maqiao's paddy fields were unusually shaped, interlocking like fangs, and lay on a strip of valley between two mountains, slowly descending, one step at a time, to the drifting chimney smoke or evening moonlight of Zhangjia District. This stretch of land was called the "Great Gully," a name which should tell outsiders there were a lot of gully fields in the area. These "gully fields" were a type of paddy field to be found in mountainous areas where residual water exceeded flowing water, thereby producing a cold, swampy mud that concealed a great many deep gully holes; once you'd stepped in one, you could be in up to your forehead. The gully holes weren't easy to spot from the surface, and only people often in the fields would get to know the position of each and every one.

Maqiao's oxen also knew where the gully holes were, and if they suddenly stopped short somewhere, the plougher would know to tread very carefully indeed.

Each of these fields had its own name, derived either from its shape- turtle patch, snake patch, melon strip patch, silver carp patch, wooden bench patch, straw hat patch, and so on-or from the quantity of grain it ought to produce-three-peck patch, eight-peck patch, and so on; some were named after political slogans-unity patch, leap forward patch, four purifications red flag patch, and so on. Even so, naming them thus still wasn't enough to identity all those scattered fields, and people's names had to be used, or placed in front of the field names, in order to tell them apart: "Benyi's family's three-peck patch" and "Zhihuang's family's three-peck patch," for example, differentiated these two pieces of land.

It should thus be apparent that these fields used to be privately owned, or had been allocated to private owners during Land Reform; it was thus very natural that they should be linked with the names of the landowners.

Considering that collectivisation had happened a good ten years before I arrived, I was surprised they all still remembered so determinedly what had once belonged to their own families. Even the children, once they'd reached a certain age, all knew where the fields that had originally belonged to their own families were and whether rice would {ken) grow there. When putting down fertilizer, they'd put a bit extra down there. If they needed to pee, they'd relieve themselves there. Once, a child stepped on a piece of china, almost carving his foot open, and hurled it angrily onto another field. A woman standing nearby immediately glared at him:

"Where d'you think you're throwing stuff, eh? Want a smack, do you? Or a poke with my chopsticks!"

That patch had originally been her family's-a long, long time ago.

This woman's continuing recollection of her family's private field proved that public ownership of land in Maqiao, right up to the early 1970s, was no more than a system, that it hadn't yet permeated to the depth of a feeling, or at least not to the depth of a whole-hearted feeling. Systems and feelings are, of course, two very different sorts of things, and all that seethes below the surface of a system is different again. Within the matrimonial system, a husband and wife could share a bed while dreaming different dreams, while having changes of heart. (Can this still be termed "marriage"?) In an absolutist system, factions can operate behind the scenes after great power has waned. (Can this still be called "absolutist"?) By a similar logic, for as long as many Maqiao people would hold in their urine in order to release it over what had previously been their own private fields, their grasp of the concepts of public ownership, of the "public family" had to be a little shaky.

Of course, neither was it the case that they were dead-set on private ownership. In fact, Maqiao had never had a proper system of private ownership. Villagers told me that even before the Republic (founded in 1912), their private rights extended only to three inches of swamp below the surface of the fields. Anything below three inches had always belonged to the emperor, to the state. Everything, the world over, belonged to the ruler, and officialdom did as they pleased, the landowner remaining powerless to prevent them. This explained, outsiders can perhaps understand that when collectivisation was later introduced in Maqiao, although some private complaints were inevitable, once the government order was given, the masses meekly entered the public family without giving the matter much further thought.

On the other hand, though, when they talked about "public" and "private," they always attached the word "family" afterwards; this was quite different from usage in Western languages. "Private" in the West means private to the individual. Any talk of property between husband and wife or father and son brings with it clear demarcations of private rights. For Maqiao people, the term "private family" signifies something public within the private. There was never a division between this and that, you and me, within a family. In the West, "public" means public society; in English, "public" means a horizontal stratum of equal, private bodies, often with political and economic significance, distinct from private issues such as personal secrets. For Maqiao people, the "public family" signified things that were private within the public sphere: marital disputes, young loves, burying the old, children's study, women's clothes, men's bragging, hens laying, rats burrowing-all private matters came under the scrutiny of the public family, they all counted as the responsibility of the public family. The public family became one big Private.