All this, in fact, was a solo performance by him, and him alone. If you ever walked behind him for any length of time, you'd discover that he never shut up, that he argued indefatigably with himself, that he was capable of conducting entire debates single-mouthedly.

People called him "Big Gong Yi" and knew that things would be noisy wherever he went. The commune cadres were all rather deferential toward "Big Gong Yi." At one commune meeting, Benyi rolled up as if he were running the whole show, as usual going off first to poke his nose into the kitchen to check up on the smells being produced. Looking for a cigarette light from the stove, his face immediately fell when he spotted the foot basin, full of nothing but cut-up radish, without a single meat bone in sight: "What's this, then? Where's your feeling for poor and lower-middle peasants! Hmm?" Boiling with rage, he pushed up his sleeves and strode off, ignoring the meeting, straight to the butcher's in the supply and marketing cooperative to ask whether they had any meat. The butcher said the meat had just all been sold out. He lifted up a broadsword: grab me a pig, grab a pig over here, he said, chop chop! Commune regulations only permitted one pig to be killed every day, said the butcher. So, when the commune said we could eat for free from now on, did you believe that too? said Benyi, referring back to one of the unreliable promises made by the Communist state during the Great Leap Forward.

Wanyu, who just happened to be sitting nearby, sniggered: "Goody, goody, count me in for a bowl of pork soup today too."

Benyi glared: "What're you doing, sitting here?"

Wanyu blinked: "Good question, what am I doing sitting here?"

Short-tempered at the best of times, Benyi banged the broadsword: "Look at you, you useless loafer, what're you doing around here, when it's not New Year's or a holiday? You'd better come back with me, and look sharp about it! If you haven't hoed those acres of rape plants on the north hill by the end of today, I'll get the masses to struggle you to death!"

Wanyu wet his pants in terror at the sound of the broadsword and slipped out the door as quickly as he could; but a while later, his shiny scalp timidly poked back in: "You-you… what was it you just wanted me to do?"

"You deaf or something? I want you to hoe the rape plants!"

"Got it, got it. Keep your shirt on."

His shiny scalp retreated once more. Benyi finally calmed down and had rolled up a twist of tobacco when he heard a movement behind him; there, as he turned to look, was Wanyu's face again, smiling into contortions, "Sorry, I was in too much of a flap just then to hear right, you wanted me to hoe… hoe…"

I reckon he must've been so frightened he couldn't hear a single thing properly.

Only when Benyi roared the words RAPE-PLANTS into his ear was he finally rid of him.

After a series of oinks were heard from behind the shop, Benyi's color finally improved somewhat. He loved slaughtering pigs more than anything else and was very expert at it. After another round of oinks, he returned to the stove for a smoke, his face covered in splotches of mud and hands stained with blood. That same broadsword had just cleanly, neatly dispatched the pig. He kept careful watch at the butcher's shop, until it was time to invite a few of the lads from the supply and marketing cooperative to gather around the sizzling-hot cooking range; he ate some pork and drank some pig's blood soup before contentedly wiping his greasy mouth and belching with repleteness.

Despite his nonattendance at the meeting, the commune cadres didn't dare criticize him. When he returned to the hall, all red in the face, the cadres still felt obliged to invite him onto the stage to speak-a sufficient demonstration of the prodigious extent of his speech rights.

"I'm not going to talk for long today, just a couple of points I've got," he said.

This was the routine public announcement with which he prefaced every speech. Whether he in fact spoke on two, or three, four, five, or even more points, whether he produced two or three words or a lengthy disquisition, he would always declare in advance that he only wanted to speak on two points.

He talked and talked, blasting out smells of meat soup, then talked about his past experiences in the Korean War, made reference to his military prowess in fighting American soldiers as evidence that tasks such as irrigation repairs, crop planting, pig raising, and family planning would, could, must be achieved! He was always calling American tanks "tractors." On the 38th Parallel, he said, the earth shook when the American tractors arrived, scared the crap out of you, it did. But the volunteer troops were all heroes, real men: at 300 meters, no one fired, 150 meters, still no one fired, 100 meters, still no one fired, then finally, when the American tractor was right in our faces, one round of fire blew the fucker up!

He looked all around, very pleased with himself.

Once, Commune Head He corrected him: "It's not a tractor, it's called a tank."

He blinked: "Isn't it called tractor? I didn't get much education, I'm illegitimate."

What he meant was he was illiterate, that it wasn't surprising he couldn't distinguish clearly between tanks and tractors. He studied the word tank with some application but by the next meeting, once he'd got through the stressful 300-150-100 meters bit, he slipped as usual into saying tractor.

His confusion about such terms had no effect whatsoever on the respect listeners paid to his comments: "People only die of illness, not of work"; "Great natural disasters, bumper harvest; small natural disasters, small harvests"; "Everyone should work on their thinking, on making progress, on the world"^ none of this made much sense, but because they were said by Benyi, they gradually entered into common usage, were passed on. His hearing, too, was rather poor. Once, listening to the commune cadres, he heard "We must grasp the key to the road ahead" as "We must grasp the tree on the road ahead," which was obviously wrong, but since "tree" came straight out of Benyi's mouth, Maqiao people trusted it implicitly and instead laughed at us Educated Youth, saying we had to grasp the "key" to the road ahead-what was that supposed to mean?

: The 1960s and the 1970s were the decades of "Light the Sky Red." "Light the Sky Red" was a kind of big kettle lamp, with two long kettle spouts sticking out, from which protruded candlewicks as thick as a little finger and that burned cotton or diesel oil, spewing forth rolls of black smoke as they did so. During these decades, one of these lamps would often be hauled on a long bamboo pole to alleviate the heavy darkness when we were breaking in virgin mountain land, sowing grain in the fields, assembling the masses for a meeting, rallying a team for a march. These were decades during which there weren't enough hours of daylight and frenzied activity spilled over into nighttime. The blacksmiths produced batch after best-selling batch of "Light the Sky Red" lamps. Whenever cadres discussed a commune's or a team's revolutionary performance, they'd talk in these terms: "Just look at them, they use up at least ten Light the Sky Reds when they get going!"

When I was sent down to Maqiao, I was just in time for the "demonstrate loyalty" craze. In showing loyalty to the leader, one indispensable daily activity consisted of going to Fucha's living room every evening. Only his room was that bit bigger, big enough to contain the entire production team workforce. One dim Light the Sky Red was hung up too high, leaving the people beneath as no more than hazy black shadows, impossible to make out. If you bumped into someone, you couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman.