The mud in the Great Gully was freezing cold, and there'd never used to be many bugs living there. But according to what the locals said, the bugs were all driven out into the open by the noise of the diesel engines; once the engines started up, the rushes on the mountain all swarmed with them. Where there were insects, of course, there'd have to be pesticide spread. When Fucha tried it out for a day, just for novelty's sake, he came back vomiting and foaming at the mouth; face green and legs swollen, he stayed in bed for three days, saying he'd been poisoned, after which no one dared touch the sprayer again. People were afraid that if the landlords and rich peasants were sent to do this unpleasant job, they'd poison the commune's cows, pigs, or cadres with pesticide. Having thought it over several times, Benyi decided Yanzao was the most honest, law-abiding traitor around, that he'd do.

When Yanzao started out, he also suffered from poisoning: his head swelled up like a melon and was kept wrapped up in a piece of cloth all day, however hot the weather got; he looked like a masked bandit, with only his eyes, blinking away, exposed to the outside. As the days went by, he probably slowly acclimatized to the poison and took the scarf off; he wouldn't even wear the mouth and nose scarf the Educated Youth gave him, or wash his hands first at the waterside before going home to eat. The most poisonous pesticide, 1059 or 1605, something like that, was absolutely nothing to him: the hand that had just spread the pesticide could a moment later be wiping his mouth, scratching his ear, grabbing a sweet potato and stuffing it into his mouth, cupping cold water to his mouth-all of which was astounding to onlookers. He had a ceramic bowl that was plastered with pesticide residue, that was specially used to spread pesticide. Once, in the fields, he caught a few mud loaches and chucked them in the bowl; a moment later, the loaches were writhing in agony. He lit a fire to the side of the field, roasted the loaches and gobbled them down one by one, suffering no ill effects whatsoever.

After various discussions about all this, the villagers decided he must have become a poisonous being and the blood flowing through his veins could no longer be human blood.

People also said that from this time on, he no longer needed a mosquito net while sleeping, that all mosquitoes gave him a wide berth: simply touching his finger meant instant death. For a mosquito flying over him, exposure to just one breath of his would send the little creature crashing to the ground, its head spinning. His mouth was more effective than the pesticide sprayer.

: Some words undergo a bizarre transformation once they pass into actual usage: their opposite meaning gestates and grows within until it bursts out of them, until they end up annihilating, totally negating themselves. In this latent sense, such words always carry within them their own antonyms-if only people realized it.

They harbor shadows that are very hard to glimpse.

The hidden meaning of "expose," for example, is in fact "hide." At first watching, the exposure of sex in a pornographic film can shock and stun viewers. But when films like this become commonplace, a dime a dozen, when they're coming out of your ears, their "exposure" will have no effect at all beyond leaving viewers increasingly numb, unmoved, and indifferent; show them endless pornography and they'll just yawn and yawn. Excessive sexual stimulation results in the exhaustion, even in the total annihilation, of sexual feeling.

Criticism is the hidden meaning of "praise." Criticizing someone is most likely to win that person more sympathy. Criticizing a film is most likely to lower audience expectations before people view it, so when they do watch it, it will make an unexpectedly favorable impression on them. Anyone experienced in the ways of the world can't fail to acknowledge the logic behind linking praise and criticism, can't fail to realize the terrifying potential of what Lu Xun called "being clapped to death." Praise can pile too much glory and honor onto the shoulders of enemies, attract envy, make the general public deliberately faultfinding in a way they might not have been otherwise, vastly increasing the risk of widespread resentment. Praise may also go to an enemy's head, encourage sloppiness, result in unforced errors in the future; his reputation will end up in tatters without anyone else needing to raise a finger in reproach. More often than not, the best way of dealing with enemies is in fact to praise and not criticize.

Then what about "love"? What about Yanzao's love for his grandmother? Did that also have a reverse side lurking behind it? After the feeling of love had ebbed away, had some unexpected residue been left behind?

Yanzao's grandmother was a very peculiar character. She'd sleep during the day, then climb down from her bed in the evening to chop wood and boil tea, sometimes even humming a song or two. Yanzao would help her over to the toilet hut, then she wouldn't relieve herself; then just as Yanzao had helped her to bed, she'd start to reek of piss and shit. She'd yell and shout about wanting to eat garlic bulbs, but when Yanzao had busted a gut to borrow some, she'd yell and shout she wanted to eat crispy rice and push the garlic heads out of her bowl, all over the floor. Then, when she'd eaten up all the crispy rice, she'd announce she'd had nothing to eat at all, that she was so hungry her stomach was stuck to her spine, she'd curse Yanzao for starving her to death, for being a disloyal, unfilial good-for-nothing. For a good many years now, Yanzao had been at his wits' ends over this old woman he looked after, this old woman who'd brought him and his brother up.

Yanzao howled and roared, feeling a particularly distressed kind of love for his grandmother. As soon as he saw her going on some irrational hunger strike or other, he'd whirl around and around in agitation, blue veins bulging out of his forehead, snarling and grimacing, shouting so loud that people in the upper village could hear. The small dining table in his house had already needed repairing several times, each time thumped to pieces by him in a fit of temper. I knew, of course, that this howling and thumping stemmed from his distress. Unfortunately, I also knew that every time he became distressed, his grandmother got more and more used to his distress and valued it less and less, until finally it became valueless to her, or she insensible to it. She'd just roll her eyes and mumble wistfully about Yanzao's younger brother Yanwu. It was indisputably Yanzao who'd made her cloth shoes, but she'd insist it was Yanwu who'd made them. It was indisputably Yanzao who'd carried her on his back to the clinic to see the doctor, but afterwards she'd insist it was Yanwu who'd carried her. No one could set her bizarre recollections straight.

Yanwu was at school in distant parts, studying painting or Chinese medicine; he'd never stayed at home to look after her, hadn't even gone to see her in the hospital when she'd been seriously ill. But whenever he happened to return home for a visit, the old woman would bend his ear enumerating Yanzao's faults one by one; sometimes, her face covered in smiles, she'd delve from out of her pocket a glutinous rice cake that she'd been keeping warm for the last few days, or a couple of shriveled grapefruits, and surreptitiously press them on him.

Yanwu's great talent was for blaming and criticizing, through expressing annoyance at his brother's howling, for example, "She's an old woman, old young old young, what's the difference-you've got to treat her like a kid, what's the point in getting mad at her?"