: When Benyi was looking after the horses at the prefectural commission, city tea was the thing he found hardest to swallow. Normally, Maqiao people drank ginger tea, also known as pounded tea. Using a tiny bone pestle and mortar, they pounded chopped ginger, added salt, then poured on boiling water from a hanging kettle until it was brewed. The fairly affluent would use a copper kettle rather than a ceramic kettle, always polished till it dazzled with an extraordinary metallic gleam. Housewives put flavorings such as beans and sesame seeds into iron pots and stuck them in amongst the wood fire to roast. None of them was afraid of getting burned, and while firewood was burning under the cooking range, they'd often grab hold of the iron pot with their bare fingers to give it a shake, to prevent the flavoring ingredients inside from getting scorched. The rustling of the shaking, the exploding of the beans, and the cracking of the sesame seeds soon released a piping hot fragrance that coaxed smiles from the faces of guests.

Red dates and eggs could also be added, to make even grander sorts of tea.

Benyi could never understand why it was that city people, who weren't short of cash, insisted on drinking colored tea, tea with no spices in it, the lowest grade of tea. Colored tea wasn't freshly boiled, it was usually heated up in a big pan and stored in a big pot, one batch lasting two or three days, its only function being to quench thirst. Often enough, tea leaves weren't used for colored tea; instead, it was boiled up out of a few tea-tree twigs till it was as dark as soy sauce. Maybe this was where the name "colored tea" came from.

How could you fail to laugh at, to pity city people who drank only this and not pounded tea?

: Around here, the dialect changes three times every ten li. People from Changle all call any faraway place "over there," people from Shuanglong all say "over the way," and people from Dongluodong all say "over to the west"; but Maqiao people say "barbarian parts," whether they're talking about Pingjiang County, Changsha, Wuhan, or America. Whether they're cotton-pickers, hide-trappers, or sent-down youth and cadres, they're all people from "barbarian parts." The Cultural Revolution, fighting in Indochina, Benyi looking after horses in the prefectural commission-all these events took place in "barbarian parts." I reckon they must have always felt they were in the center, must always have had a deep sense of self-satisfaction and confidence. What justification did they have for regarding these places outside their own poor village as "barbarian"?

This word "barbarian" was used by the ancient people of the central plains to describe the small, weak, surrounding races. The Chinese character for this word combines the characters for "bow" [^5] and "people" [A]: [51]- What justification did Maqiao people have for believing that the inhabitants of those flourishing, developed cities that lay beyond the horizon still lived by hunting? Or that they were tribes who hadn't yet mastered agricultural techniques?

A professor of cultural anthropology told me that in ancient China, among the hundreds of disputing philosophies of the Warring States period (770-221 b.c). only one tiny school of thought contradicted the belief that China was the center of the world: the School of Logicians from the Spring and Autumn period (777-476 b.c). Finding the ideas of this school rather hard to stomach, some thinkers later expressed doubts over their nationality: their names, such as "Gongsun Longzi," sounded rather odd, very much like the kind of name that would be given to a foreign student or visiting scholar in China. When translating the oracle bones, the modern poet Guo Moruo came to believe China's Ten Heavenly Stems and Twelve Terrestrial Branches revealed an influence from Babylonian culture. Ling Chunsheng also conjectured that the tribe of the "Queen Mother of the West" written of in China's ancient historical annals was just a translation of the Babylonian word Siwan (moon spirit), thus inferring that foreign culture had flowed into China long before the Silk Road, and that the sources of ancient Chinese culture were perhaps very complex. All this increased people's suspicions about the origins of the Logicians. Of course, with an enormous entity such as Chinese culture, even if the disciples of Gongsun Longzi really were a group of foreign scholars, their voices were still very feeble and they never managed to shake the confidence of the Chinese race in its belief that it inhabited the "Middle Kingdom"; it would have been pretty difficult to weaken the Chinese sense of cultural complacency. This use of the word "barbarian" in Maqiao clearly displayed its ancient Chinese pedigree, containing within it contempt for and dismissal of anything that hailed from distant parts. Maqiao's forefathers never gave a moment's thought to the heartfelt warnings of Gongsun Longzi, and this obduracy has survived in its language up until the present day.

: Benyi said that people in the provincial capital didn't drink pounded tea, didn't know how to weave cloth shoes, that many families-imagine how pitiful!-hadn't enough cloth for pants and wore shorts no bigger than a palm, like the girdle that women wore on horseback, pulled in agonizingly tight at the crotch. Because of this, Maqiao people brimmed over with sympathy for city people and whenever they saw us Educated Youth about to return to the city, they'd always be urging us to buy more local cloth to take back and make up a few pairs of pants for our parents.

Thinking this very funny, we told them there was no shortage of cloth in the cities, and if shorts were made on the small side, it was to fit better, to look good, or for convenience when playing sports.

Maqiao people just blinked and looked doubtful.

As time went by, we discovered that it didn't matter what we said, that we couldn't dismiss Benyi's rumors as false-because we had no speech rights.

There isn't really a close synonym for "speech rights" in standard Mandarin, but it was a word of particular importance in the Maqiao vocabulary, signifying linguistic power, or in other words the right to claim a very definite portion of the sum total of linguistic clout. Possessors of speech rights bore no particular external marker or status, but everyone was aware of their existence as linguistic leaders, was aware of the force that sprang from their shadowy authority. They had only to open their mouths, or cough, or direct a look, and those standing around would immediately shut their mouths and listen respectfully, not daring to interrupt randomly the flow of words, even if they disagreed. This kind of hush was the most usual manifestation of speech rights, the most tacit, coordinated, voluntary submission to linguistic dictatorship. The words of someone without speech rights, by contrast, were as dust and nothingness: anything they said was wasted breath, no one cared what they said, didn't even care whether they had the chance to speak. Their words were inevitably scattered and lost in a wasteland of indifference, never to gain any response. When such occurrences became frequent, it wasn't easy for someone to keep up their vocal confidence, or even to preserve an ordinary kind of competence in speech production. The way that Yanzao ended up practically a mute represented an extreme example of loss of speech rights.