Zhongqi also thought of asking Father Mingqi, to open up an alternative path to finding Dragon brand soy sauce, to finding form. But Father Mingqi's form was so vast and Zhongqi so overcome by stammering that he failed repeatedly to find an opportunity to sidle up and talk to him. It was round about this time that Mingqi was busy in the commune making steamed buns, and directing all sorts of things in the village. If the team cadres were holding a meeting and saw him come in, they'd make room for him without even thinking about it. Listening to Benyi allocate work, he didn't feel in the least bit superfluous, nodding or shaking his head, expressing approval or disagreement; sometimes he'd interrupt before someone had finished talking, most of what he said totally unrelated to public affairs in Maqiao, related only to how the weather at the moment was too cold and the dough wasn't rising, to the shoddy workmanship at the yeast factory, to how the yeast wasn't working and so on-all steamed-bun-related matters. The team cadres would listen meekly, making an occasional contribution to his discussion of professional catering techniques. If one day he got carried away and held up the cadres for one or two hours, it didn't matter and no one ever asked him to leave-because he had form.

The great pity of the matter was that form easily went to a person's head; in the case of someone like Mingqi, who got form not through his own strengths but through a lucky chance, it was particularly easy to go mad with the success. The fame of his steamed buns spread far and wide, and when there was a big meeting in the county he'd sometimes be called upon to go and do the catering. On whichever occasion it was he went to the city, he met Widow Li, a floor-cleaner at the county government guesthouse, and the two of them became entangled in the course of various encounters. To cut a long story short, the widow had grown up in the city and knew how many beans made five, knew a few tricks in bed; in the meantime, the white steamed buns that Mingqi brought from the kitchens kept hunger at bay for the widow and her son; and so, as time went by, a pact of true love was forged. In the end, Mingqi finished what he'd started, sneaking out to the Li family a whole bag of special batch "Wealth and Power" flour (reserved exclusively for the head of the County Committee) and taking a pig's head with him while he was at it.

When the news got out, Widow Li was stripped of her post as floorsweeper, and afterwards lived by scavenging rubbish. Mingqi (minus the title "Father") returned dejectedly to Maqiao, never again to enjoy the opportunity of making steamed buns in the county seat or in the commune. His status in the village, moreover, went into dramatic decline: his appearance gradually became more and more wretched, his neck always shrunk down into his hunched shoulders whether it was hot or cold, as if he wanted to bury his face. He was, of course, stripped almost entirely of his speech rights. Whether it was a meeting for cadres or for every member of the commune, it was never his turn to speak. If there was some matter on which everyone had to express an opinion, he would stick his head out in panic, his voice about as loud as the buzz of a fly or mosquito, provoking Benyi to holler: "Speak up! Speak up! It's not like you haven't been fed!"

He was often assigned the hardest, most exhausting work, and his work points were lower than other people's.

Maqiao people hated iron that failed to become steel, they hated Mingqi for his greed and lust, for cutting the whole village off, just like that, from its gleaming portion of glory; it was as if everyone in the village had stolen a bag of flour and a pig's head. So they dealt with him by unwritten rule: they'd hiss "lost form" at him, just the once, driving him into chronic dejection and depression; before we left Maqiao to return to the city, his accumulation of melancholy had turned to illness and his soul had returned to the underworld. This rather brutal process taught me that "form" could also be collectivized. Mingqi's form took on the importance it did precisely because he was such a rare treasure for Maqiao, precisely because it'd become a source of capital shared by all the villagers in Maqiao. His casual throwing away of his form constituted a crime committed against everyone in the village.

Returning to Maqiao many years later, as I walked along the ridges between the fields I heard a child singing a folksong under a tree:

Mingqi bagged a wild bird,

Caught in the act he was,

They took him to Crotch County

Pulled off his pants, ripped his clothes

The police beat his bottom,

If you blow your own trumpet,

Once the trumpet's blown,

You'll be left with a bright red bum…

My heart skipped a beat. I'd never imagined that even all those years later Mingqi would still live on in Maqiao, in the folksongs of Maqiao's next generation, that such an immortal oral monument would have been erected to his bag of flour, to his loss of form, to his decline and fall. I expect this monument will be passed on from mouth to mouth, generation to generation in Maqiao, until Benyi, Fucha, or others, and I, and even the child singing under the tree, are no longer in this world.

As long as language still exists, perhaps he will always live on, deep into the future.

: Maqiao women's form usually came from men. For women who were already married, if their husband's family had form then they themselves had form, if their husband's family lost form then they themselves lost form; for women who weren't yet married, form was determined mainly by their fathers, after they no longer had a father, their form depended on their elder brothers.

There were, of course, exceptions. One I encountered once at the road-works construction site. A real free-for-all it was there, with laborers from every village come to help out, all fighting for tools, for earth, for rice and vegetables. The whistling winter wind billowed up wave upon wave of scree, muddying the sky and the heavens into a great yellowed expanse. Those hauling earth, tamping the ground, and pulling wheelbarrows were all blown around by the wind like dancers, like a shadow play without sufficient light, the old and young indistinguishable from each other.

There were no women on the construction site and the laborers took a piss or a crap whenever they wanted. I'd just finished shaking off the last couple of drops when I spotted some people who looked like cadres come to measure the earth and draw up lines of lime, among them someone wearing an old army uniform, a cotton cap over the head, a scarf over half the face, at that moment using a bamboo pole to direct two other people to run back and forth pulling the rope. Against interference from wind-noise and the high-pitched loudspeaker, this person was yelling something at someone, but seeing they hadn't heard, threw down the bamboo pole and ran over, hurling down the hillside a big stone that had been lying across the lime. I was pretty impressed by this cadre's show of strength: if it'd been me, I'd have had to call at least one other person over to give me a hand.

As soon as Fucha saw this person, he started to look worried: "What we've done, will it… do?" he asked, twisting his hands.

The person stuck the bamboo pole a few times into the land by the landfill area, then took out the pole, measuring how deep it'd gone into the ground. "Still needs tamping down a layer."

Fucha's tongue hung out.

"What about the people Commune Head He asked you to send?" the person asked.

Fucha pointed at me, then at another Educated Youth.

The person walked over and stuck a hand out at us. This was clearly a gesture that came from outside Maqiao; I stood there, stupefied, until I realized this was called shaking hands and we should also stick out our hands.