At nighttime, we'd hear a familiar cry, a dog barking on the hillside near the house, calling for nights on end. Probably it found it all very puzzling: it could hear our footsteps from far off on the horizon, so why couldn't we hear its nearby cries for help?

At that time, we were busy looking for jobs to take us away from Maqiao and paid no attention. We didn't even notice when its cries stopped.

When I revisited Maqiao, however many years later it was, I did actually recognize it, recognized its three-legged limp. It threw a completely expressionless look at me, closed its eyes once more and went back to sleep at the foot of a wall. It was old and scrawny, able to do nothing but sleep for more than half the time; neither could it understand Changsha dialect. When I extended a hand to stroke its head, it twitched with a violent start, then unceremoniously turned its head to take a great bite; it didn't really bite, of course, just clamped its teeth heavily around my hand, to express menace and hatred.

This taciturn dog took another look at me, then went off, its head hanging.

: Although standard Mandarin has words like "sea-sick," "carsick," and "airsick," it doesn't have Maqiao's "streetsick." Streetsickness was an illness with symptoms similar to seasickness, but which struck sufferers instead on city streets, causing greenness of face, blurred eyesight and hearing, loss of appetite, insomnia, absent-mindedness, apathy, weakness, shortness of breath, fever, irregular pulse, sickness and diarrhoea, and so on; female sufferers would tend to get irregular periods and run out of breast milk after giving birth. A whole swathe of quacks in Maqiao had special decoction prescriptions for curing street-sickness, including wolfberry, tuber of gastridia, walnuts, all manner of things.

So although Maqiao people would visit nearby Changle, they very seldom spent the night there, even less lived there for any length of time. The year Guangfu from the upper village went to study in the county seat, he was seriously streetsick after a month or so, lost an enormous amount of weight, and returned to the mountains on the brink of death. Terrible, terrible, he said, the city's no place for humans! That he later read for a diploma and managed to feed himself by his teaching job in the city constituted a feat that, in Maqiao eyes, was no less than miraculous. His experience of dealing with streetsickness had taught him one pickles and often going barefoot did he manage to stick it out in the city for ten or so years.

Streetsickness was a frequent cause of disagreement between me and Maqiao people. This wasn't a real illness, I suspected, or it was at least a deeply misunderstood illness. The city didn't rock like cars, boats, and planes; there was, at worst, more smell of coal smoke, of gasoline, more chlorine in the tap water and more noise than in the countryside-hardly enough to make anyone ill. In fact, there were millions of city people who'd managed to escape this illness. After I left Maqiao, I read a few journals which increased my suspicion that streetsickness amounted to nothing more than a particular form of psychological suggestibility, rather like hypnosis. Providing you're psychologically suggestible, when you hear someone say sleep, then quite possibly you will really go to sleep; when you hear someone say ghosts and goblins, then you'll probably see them. By the same logic, someone who's received years of education in the principles of class struggle and identification of enemies will probably see enemies everywhere in life-then once his forecast of enmity has incurred hostility, affront, and even retaliation in kind from others, this state of actual enmity will continue to affirm his expectations in fact, giving him even more grounds for his feelings of enmity.

This range of examples has revealed a further range of facts; or rather, not facts in a strict sense, but second-degree facts, facts that are linguistically manufactured or regenerated.

Dogs have no language, and so dogs are never streetsick. Once humans become linguistic beings, they attain possibilities that other animals lack completely-they can harness the magical powers of language; language becomes prophecy, a mass hysteria that confuses true and false, and that establishes fictions, manufacturing one factual miracle after another. After I'd thought of this, I conducted an experiment using my daughter. I took her on a car journey, having pronounced beforehand that she wouldn't get carsick; and, as predicted, she was perfectly happy for the whole journey, didn't feel a trace of discomfort. The next time we traveled by car, I predicted she would get carsick; as a result, she became incredibly anxious, unable to sit still, until in the end her face went ashen, her brow creased over, and she leaned onto me, half-sick before the car had even started moving. I can't claim my experiment has been exhaustively tested, but it serves as proof that language isn't something to be sneezed at, it's a dangerous thing we need to defend ourselves against and handle with respect. Language is a kind of incantation, a dictionary is a kind of Pandora's Box capable of releasing a hundred thousand spirits and demons-just as the inventor of the word "streetsickness," someone I don't know, manufactured the physiology peculiar to generation after generation of Maqiao people and their long-held aversion to the city.

And what about "revolution," "knowledge," "hometown," "director," "labor reform criminal," "god," "generation gap"? What have these words already manufactured? What else will they manufacture?

Maqiao people wouldn't accept any of this.

I later learned that Benyi missed out on a job with the state because of his streetsickness. When he returned from the Korean War, he looked after the horses in the prefectural commission and could very likely have become a cadre later on; a glorious future stretched out before him. But, just like other Maqiao people, he felt that life in the city was no life at all. You hardly ever saw ginger salted bean tea, heard no sound of flowing water under the starry sky on summer nights, there was no roasting of knees and crotch by the fireplace… He had difficulty making his Maqiao dialect understood. Neither could he get up as early as city people. His colleagues were constantly snickering at his forgetting to button up his fly. He couldn't get used to calling the toilet hut "lavatory," or whatever it was, nor to differentiating between men's and women's toilets.

He did learn some of his colleagues' habits, using a toothbrush, using a fountain pen, for example, even messing about at basketball. The first time he played, he ran around so much his face streamed with sweat, and he didn't even manage one touch of the ball. The second time, when someone on the opposite team had grabbed the ball and was about to score a basket, he suddenly cried out: "Stop-." All eyes turned to him, no one knowing what had happened. Slowly, unhurriedly, he left the court, picked a booger, then returned to the court, waving at the players as if nothing had happened: "Slow down, slow down, easy there."

He didn't know why the people on the court burst out laughing and perceived some malice in the laughter. What was wrong with him picking his nose?

On hot summer days, it was much hotter and drier on the streets than in the countryside-mercilessly hot. Roaming the streets at night, he spotted some girl students run past in front of him, wearing really low clothes, shorts that revealed their thighs and legs. He also saw row upon row of bamboo beds in the shade of trees, on which unknown women lay fanning themselves and sleeping. A smell reminiscent of cooked meat floated from their chins, bare feet, the tufts of hair in their armpits or the rounds of snow-white skin accidentally exposed by their collars.