If he carried cotton, he carried so much that it covered his entire frame, so much that from a distance it looked like two mounded snowy mountains were moving of their own accord along the road, bobbing up and down as they advanced-very strange.

Once, he and I went to deliver grain, and on the way back home he actually put a big rock in his two empty baskets. He said that if he didn't have a bit of pressure like that, he couldn't walk properly. As soon as the carrying pole was twisted by downwards pressure over his shoulders, it became intimately fused with his body, the swishing movement of every muscle took on a dance rhythm, his step became elastic, and he bounded along the road out of sight, transformed from only a moment before, when ashen-faced he'd been carrying empty baskets, his steps unrhythmic and erratic.

He too was a traitor to the Chinese. It was only later that I found out that, in Maqiao terms, as his father was a traitor to the Chinese, he couldn't escape the label either. This was how he saw matters himself. When we Educated Youth were newly arrived in Maqiao, when we saw how much rotted ox manure he carried, how energetically he worked, we naturally nominated him as a model worker; momentarily aghast, he waved his hands in agitation, "That's awakened, impossible: I'm a traitor to the Chinese!"

The Educated Youth all jumped in fright.

Maqiao people felt that policies from above stipulating that lines should be drawn between enemies and their children were really rather de trop. By a similar logic, I expect, after Benyi became Party Branch Secretary and when his wife went to the supply and marketing cooperative to buy meat, the other women would remark with envy, "She's Secretary-who'd dare short-change her?" When Benyi's kids misbehaved at school, the teacher would actually scold them, "Secretary! Stop talking in class! And peeing!"

Yanzao later became a "Dumb-ox"-a mute, in other words. He hadn't been a mute to start with, it was just that he'd never had that much to say for himself. Being a traitor and having a poison woman in the family meant he couldn't find a wife, even by the time his forehead was starting to get wrinkles. His elder sister had once tried to trick him, people said, by finding him a blind girl; when the wedding day came, he scowled and refused to enter the house, spending the whole evening hauling pond silt outside the village. The next day, and the day after that…still the same. The poor blind girl wept for three nights in the empty bridal chamber. In the end, his elder sister had no choice but to take the blind girl back home and give her a hundred catties of grain as compensation for the retraction of marriage. When his elder sister yelled at him for being so hard-hearted, he just said he was a traitor to the Chinese and he shouldn't bring anyone else down with him.

His elder sister was married in faraway Pingjiang County, but every time she went back home to visit, she saw Yanzao didn't have one good thing to wear, that the cooking pot was always half full of freezing gruel, without a hint of warmth in it. Out of the few dozen catties of unhusked grain allocated to him by the work team, he had to save enough to give his little brother Yanwu, who was in school, to throw into the rice-pot at school; it left his elder sister's eyes continually red with tears. They were so poor they never had extra quilts and every time the elder sister went back home she always squeezed up with her younger brother in bed. One evening, when it was raining hard, the elder sister woke up in the night to discover the foot of the bed was empty, that Yanzao was sitting there, bowed over, not having slept at all, making a sobbing noise in the darkness. His elder sister asked him what was wrong. Yanzao gave no reply, and walked into the kitchen to twist grass rope.

Also sobbing, his elder sister walked into the kitchen and extended a trembling hand, reaching for the hand of her younger brother: if you can't bear it, she said, don't treat me like a member of the family, just treat me like I'm someone you don't know… I want you to know what women taste like.

Her hair was in a mess, her underclothes already undone, as she offered her jade white breasts up to her younger brother's stunned gaze. "Take me, it's not your fault."

He whipped his hand back and retreated a step.

"It's not your fault." His elder sister's hand moved down to her own trouser string, "We don't count as human anyway."

He fled as if for his life, his footsteps disappearing into the wind and rain.

Weeping noisily, he ran to his parents' grave. When he returned home early the next morning, his elder sister had already gone, leaving a bowl of steamed sweet potatoes and a few socks, washed and darned, laid out on the bed.

She never returned home again.

It was probably from this time onwards that Yanzao would talk even less, as if his tongue had been cut out. Whatever people told him to do, he did it. If people didn't tell him to do anything, he'd go off and sit squatting to one side; when people stopped issuing orders to him, he'd silently return home. As time went on, he just about became a real mute. At one point he, along with all the other members of the commune, was called up for road-mending work. Discovering on the construction site that his rake had disappeared, he began to search everywhere, his whole face flushed bright red with anxiety. The People's Militiaman who was supervising them asked him suspiciously, what the hell was he doing, darting in and out like that? He could only howl in response.

The People's Militiaman interpreted his incoherent mumbling as a form of trickery, and feeling a thorough investigation was required, pointed his rifle at his chest with a click: "Tell the truth now: what the hell are you up to?"

Sweat beaded on his forehead, his face reddened up to his ears and down to his neck, the muscles in his rigid face pulled half-askew, trembling and quivering like jelly, his eyes widening ever farther with every tremble; his mouth-that mouth on which bystanders were waiting so anxiously-was wide open all this time, but its expansion in vain, as not a single word was spat out.

"Talk!" The bystanders were also sweating with anxiety.

Panting, wheezing, after repeated efforts that locked his faculties and features into a terrifying, tortured, life-and-death struggle, a sound finally erupted forth: "Wah-rake!"

"What rake?"

His eyes bulged, but no further words came out.

"You a mute, hmm?" The Militiaman was getting increasingly irritable.

The muscles in his cheeks erupted into repeated bursts of twitching.

"He's a mute," someone standing nearby told him. "He hasn't got much to say for himself; he said everything he had to say in a previous life."

"Won't talk?" The Militiaman turned back to glance at him. "Say'Long Live Chairman Mao!'"

Yanzao got so agitated he howled even louder; he raised an index finger, then an arm, and made a gesture of cheering, to convey "Long Live." But the People's Militiaman wouldn't let it go, insisted that he say it. His face took a few punches that day, and his body a few kicks, but still he didn't manage to get this whole sentence out. Finally, at the very last gasp, he shouted out a "Mao."

Seeing that he was a real mute, the People's Militiaman punished him by making him haul another five carrying-poles of earth and left it at that for the time being.

From this time on, Yanzao's status as a mute was formally certified. There was of course nothing bad about being a mute: too much talking saps the strength and catastrophes start at the mouth, so less talk meant fewer arguments, or at least that Benyi no longer suspected him of saying bad, reactionary things behind his back, that he could ease up a bit on his watchfulness. When someone on the work team was needed to spread pesticide, Benyi thought first of him: maybe this spawn of a poison woman wasn't afraid of poison, he said, and now that he was a dumb-ox he wouldn't say anything to anyone, couldn't easily make a fuss, so they could send him off on the job alone.