Precisely because of this collective clan sentiment (public-family), people usually called cadres "parent officials." When Maqiao's Ma Benyi was only thirty, or thereabouts, and had just married, he was respectfully addressed by many as "Daddy Benyi" or "Public Benyi" (Benyi Gong), because of his status as Party Secretary.

This phrase, in fact, returned to the original sense of the word "public" in Chinese. The earliest usage of the word for "public," gong, in Chinese did not mean public at all; it referred to a tribal leader or to the king of a state, was synonymous with the word "lord." Strictly speaking, translating the Western word "public" as gong is not right at all. In transporting Western terms such as "private ownership system" and "public ownership system" wholesale to Maqiao, you run the risk, it would seem, of creating a chasm between name and reality.

Benyi was Maqiao's gong (in its sense in classical Chinese), at the same time as he represented Maqiao's gong (in its sense in English and other Western languages).

: In amongst the gully fields, there was one field called Taiwan, which to begin with I'd never taken much notice of. When we were fighting the drought by running the waterwheel, Fucha and I used to work deep into the night on a shift together, yawning as we climbed up onto the waterwheel, pedaling creakily away. Innumerable bare feet had already tramped the slow-turning wooden tread-weight into a radiant surface that gleamed with amazing brightness; one slip in concentration and my footing would be lost, my hands locked onto the handrail, and I'd be strung up yowling like a dog. At times like this, the waterwheel Fucha was turning under his feet could wreck your courage, the tread-weight spiraling unstoppably up over and over, pulverizing your feet black-and-blue or into a bloody mass. Fucha advised me not to watch my feet, as it was easy to miss your footing that way, but I couldn't allow myself to trust him, couldn't follow his advice. Time after time, he tried to get me talking, chatting, just to help me relax.

He loved more than anything else to hear me talk about things from the city, or things to do with science, stuff about Mars or Uranus, for example. He'd graduated from junior middle school and had a head for matters scientific; he understood how sticky (magnetic) rocks worked, for example, and said that if enemy planes should ever drop bombs again maybe we could make a huge sticky stone that enemy planes would stick to from out of the sky-wouldn't that be more useful than artillery guns or guided missiles?

Soberly pondering my objections, he very seldom expressed surprise at the various bits of scientific knowledge I boasted about, just as he was never usually miserable amidst great misery, or joyful amidst great joy, his baby-face retaining at all times its look of knowing sagacity. All his various emotions were filtered into a single expression of placidity, of shyness, his permanently limpid gaze radiating out at an unglimpsed angle. Once you'd met this gaze, you immediately felt it was omnipresent, that any move of yours would be apprehended and penetrated. There were eyes behind his eyes, a gaze behind his gaze, you felt you couldn't keep anything concealed from him.

He disappeared, then popped out again from somewhere, cradling a snake-melon, probably stolen from the garden of some house nearby. When we'd finished eating, he dug a hole in the ground and started carefully burying the melon skin and seeds: "It's midnight already; let's go to sleep."

There were a lot of mosquitoes around and I was slapping away at my legs.

He searched out some leaves from somewhere and rubbed them over my legs, hands, and forehead-to great effect, it turned out, as the buzzing of the mosquitoes lessened significantly.

As I gazed at the moonlight just burst out from among the mountains, listened to the croaking of the frogs, one rebbit after another rising up from the gullies, I felt a slight anxiety: "So we're going to… sleep?"

"When we work, we work, when we rest, we rest."

"Benyi Gong said he wanted the wheel to fill the field by tonight."

"That's his problem."

"Will he come and check?"

"Nope."

"How d'you know?"

"I don't need to know-he just won't!"

This I found rather strange.

He knew that I'd carry on asking him why. "It's superstition, peasant superstition, just forget it." He then collapsed at my side, turned his back to me, hugged his legs in tightly, and prepared to sleep.

I wasn't like him, couldn't sleep when I felt like it, couldn't not sleep when I didn't feel like it, all neat and simple. I really did want to sleep, but my eyes couldn't rest, so I asked him to tell me some more empty talk (see the entry "Empty Talk"), even superstitions would do. Eventually he capitulated, but insisted he'd heard it from elsewhere-whenever relating matters of great import, he'd first communicate the provenance of the story in order to absolve himself. He'd heard so-and-so say, he said, that the owner of this field had been called Maogong, a bitter enemy of Benyi. The year the lower-level agricultural producers' cooperative was established, Maogong stubbornly refused to join the cooperative until his was the only field still individually farmed out of all the surrounding fields. As head of the cooperative, Benyi wouldn't allow Maogong to take water from the fields above his. Maogong still refused to yield, preferring to haul his thick hide to the river to fetch water than beg for it. Finally, seizing the opportunity provided by Maogong's suffering an asthma attack, Benyi charged hollering onto the field at the head of a group of men, a bucket raised aloft, to claim his grain; this, he said, was "liberating Taiwan."

In the past, Maogong had been the head of the Protection Committee and owned a lot of land: he was a landlord traitor to the Chinese. That, of course, made his land "Taiwan." Come to mention it, though, that label of traitor was a little unfair. Before, this area had been the fourteenth district under the puppet regime set up by the Japanese, and it had a Protection Committee with jurisdiction over Maqiao and the surrounding eighteen bows; those with wealth or status took turns as Head of Committee for three months each; a gong was sent to the home of whoever's turn it was. As leader, you drew no particular salary, but the gong gave you the right to sound off about public affairs and you could pick up "straw sandal money" wherever you went; in other words, cream off a little profit for yourself under the cover of public duty. Maogong's turn came right at the last of the eighteen bows, and by the time it came around to him, the Japanese Army had already surrendered, so he didn't have to take the job; but because the locals didn't know what was going on outside, the gong was still passed to him.

Maogong was someone who enjoyed the limelight, and once the gong passed into his hands, he immediately dressed up in a long, white silk gown and took to wielding a staff, coughing and spluttering at great volume whenever he turned up on someone's terrace. Overly rapacious in collecting his straw sandal money, he demanded at least twice as much as his recent predecessors and took second helpings wherever he went. There was no end to the strange tricks he used. Once, while having a meal at Wanyu's house, he picked up, unobserved, a piece of string pecked at by chickens that Wanyu's dad had dropped under the stove, and hid it in his sleeve; when they sat at table and his host wasn't looking, he put it in the bowl of chicken. When he lifted his chopsticks and "discovered" the tape, he accused his host of tricking him and demanded five silver dollars off him. After his host had begged and pleaded with him, the matter was finally settled at two dollars. Another time, on a visit to a household in Zhangjia District, he first of all defecated outside on his own straw hat, so that a dog would come and chew it. After having sat inside the house for a while, reckoning that the dog would've chewed the hat to bits, he went back outside and made a huge fuss, accusing his host of deliberately antagonizing him, the Head of the Committee, and the imperial army, saying he couldn't even leave his straw hat alone, that he'd fed it to the dog behind his back. Nothing his host said was of any use, so he finally swallowed his anger and gave him an iron pot in compensation.