He'd become more poisonous than a snake.

Curious, he ran to the tea plantation to rummage around by the roots of the tea trees, where a good number of clay-skin snakes always lurked. He held out his hand for the snakes to bite, then watched them one by one lie writhing and twitching at his feet, until finally, as if miraculously, they stopped moving.

When dusk came, he tied a great armful of them together with a dead snake and carried them back home; people who spotted him from a distance thought he was strolling back home with a bundle of cut grass.

: Up until this point, whenever I've spoken of Yanzao or other people, in the Chinese version I've always used the word to, meaning "he" or "him." In Maqiao, a close synonym of to, is qu. The only difference is that to refers to someone faraway, meaning "that him over there"; qu is people you can see, nearby people, meaning "this him over here.", Maqiao people, I imagine, must think it ludicrous the way Mandarin-speakers from outside their area don't differentiate between "that him" and "this him."

They use these words in jokes: for example, "Master there (to), Servant here {qu)" to ridicule someone who's humble to a person's face, arrogant behind a person's back-in this context, although the to and qu refer to the same person, they mean two very different things and couldn't be mixed up.

The ancients also used qu as a demonstrative pronoun. The Record of the Three Kingdoms contains the phrase: "My son-in-law came yesterday, he (qu) must be the thief." The ancients often used this word, which can also mean a small channel or stream, in poetry too: "For a spring (qu) to be as pure as this, there must be running water at its source"; "when the mosquito tries to bite an iron ox, there's nowhere he (qu) can sink his teeth…" (meaning not being able to get a word in edgeways). But these lines of poetry don't illustrate the distance-related meaning of qu. Privately, I've always felt that this stubborn fixation on differentiating spatial relationships linguistically perhaps stems purely from the meddlesome nature of Maqiao people-there's no particular need for it.

Until now, neither Mandarin Chinese (felt by those who use it to be quite adequate), nor English, French, Russian, and so on have made this distinction.

Returning to Maqiao all those years later, I felt my ears filling up once more with this qu, saw face after face of qu, both familiar and unknown to me. I didn't see Yanzao as qu. I started to remember how he'd often helped us carry firewood all those years back then, how we were forever fooling around with him, for example how we'd often steal his pesticide when he wasn't looking and mix it with grain to poison rats, ducks, and chickens, or just take it to the supply and marketing cooperative to exchange for flour, making him suffer endless injustices and abuse from the village cadres.

The picture that particularly stuck in my mind was what he looked like when anxious: his face would flood scarlet, the blue veins on his forehead would bulge out extravagantly, he'd flare up at whomsoever he saw, howling even more savagely at us to show his suspicions about our involvement in the conspiracy. But none of this fury prevented him from continuing to carry firewood or other stuff for us later on. All it took was for us to spot his shoulders were looking bereft, smile, gesture, and he'd head, muttering away to himself, toward the heavy object.

I didn't manage to find him. The villagers said someone in Longjia Sands had called him over to help out with some work. There was no need, in fact there was no way I could visit his home. His wife was completely awakened, couldn't even cook; when she was pulling up crops in the fields she'd just pull and pull until she fell over onto her great big behind into the mud-that's the sort of person she was!

But off I still went, off toward that pitch-dark door, while other people snickered away. Hanging on the walls I saw a few gourds holding seeds, along with several terrifying dried snakeskins, like multicolored wall-carpets. As anticipated, the lady of the house looked a complete mess, her cranium bizarrely outsized, as if everything she ate went straight to her head; an eye-catching scar, the cause of which I never discovered, shone on her forehead. She failed to laugh when she was meant to, then would suddenly let out a great guffaw when she shouldn't; I was a little confounded by the air of intimacy she struck up toward me, as if we were great friends of old. She brought me a bowl of tea, but I couldn't touch it; one glance at the greasy ring of black dirt round the edge of the bowl left me nauseated for some time afterwards. The floor inside the house of such a mistress would never be flat, would be more potted and bumpy than anything outside, and any slip in concentration when walking over it might leave you with a twisted ankle. Clothes of all different colors had merged into just one color, a kind of confused, murky grey, piled chaotically on the bed. When the mistress of the house suddenly pulled something out from under there, I almost jumped out of my skin. The thing turned out to have a nose and eyes: it was a child. It never actually made a sound, wasn't frightened by guffaws, remained oblivious to the flies climbing over its face, its eyes kept screwed shut.

I almost wondered if it were dead-had the mistress of the house brought it out just for show?

I hurriedly gave her twenty yuan.

This was rather stingy, of course, and rather hypocritical. I could have produced thirty yuan, forty yuan, fifty yuan, but I didn't. According to my unspoken calculations and assessment, twenty yuan was enough. What could this twenty yuan achieve? It wasn't quite sympathy for Yanzao; rather, it was payment for my own sense of yearning, a financial exchange for some kind of apology from me, buying back mental peace and contentment, buying back my own high self-esteem. If I imagined that twenty yuan could do all this, then that would be cheap indeed. If I imagined that twenty yuan could in an instant have me humming a ditty, fiddling with my camera, could immediately release me from this sickening, run-down slum, into the sunlight and birdsong, then that would be very cheap indeed. If I thought that twenty yuan could fill my subsequent memories with glorious rose-tinted poetry, then that really would be very cheap indeed.

I put down the bowl of tea, its cover unlifted, and left.

That evening, I stayed in a room in the county government guest house. There was a knock on my door; when I opened it, I could see no trace of anyone in the pitch-darkness outside, but a single, solitary log charged headlong into my room. I finally made out that Yanzao had accompanied it in: he was even thinner than before, the angle of every joint in his body very acute, his whole body the strange juncture of a mass of acute angles. His Adam's apple protruded with particular sharpness, as if it were about to decapitate him. When he smiled, his fleshy gums bulged everywhere, revealing more red than white inside his mouth.

His shoulders, as ever, hadn't been empty: they'd carried this log for about ten li.

He'd clearly come in pursuit of me. From his gestures, it looked like he wanted to give me this log as a gift, in repayment for my sympathy for and remembrance of him. I expect his home contained nothing of greater value.

He still wasn't a great talker, stammering out a few brief, random, and rather indistinct syllables. Most of the time, he responded to my questions with nods or shakes of the head; this kept the conversation moving along. I later realized that this, still, wasn't the principal obstacle to our conversing; even if he hadn't been a mute, we still wouldn't have found anything to talk about. Apart from elaborating for a time on the weather or on today's harvest, apart from politely refusing this log that I had no way of carrying off with me, I didn't know what to talk about, what would light up his eyes, what would move him to expression beyond a nod or a shake of the head. He fell silent, making me sense yet more acutely the superfluity of words. Lacking for words, I still groped for words: you went to Longjia Sands today, I've been to your home today, I saw Fucha and Zhongqi today too, and so on, like that. I talked this meaningless babble, struggling to piece stretch after stretch of silence into something resembling conversation.