His underlying message being that form is a male thing; once a woman's got it, she no longer counts as a woman, or at least no longer counts as a pure woman, and lowness from young men becomes inappropriate. Taking this one step further, form is a kind of scourge that eliminates gender; excessively high form can wound a person, even jeopardize the birth of later generations.

I don't know how much truth lay behind Zhaoqing's comments. But Brother Wan-no, Sister Wan actually-really did preserve her chastity and never married; when I left Maqiao she was still a powerful, lofty, single unit. But she didn't stay on in Maqiao for long: a year or so later her natural father's wife died and he was reinstated in his post, back from the May 7 Cadre School, so he had her recalled to the city.

People said she was sent to a big state-owned factory in Gansu Province.

: In the layered folds of Tianzi Peak was hidden a small stockade, called Chazi Bow, to reach which you had to cross a small stream. The water wasn't deep and a few stepping-stones poked out of the surface; with three steps and a couple of jumps, you were across. The stones crouched among the clumps of waterweed, often draped with moss; there was nothing special about them.

I crossed over here several times on my way to Chazi Bow to paint Chairman Mao's quotations or to carry seedlings. Once, my traveling companion asked me if I'd noticed anything different last time I crossed the stream. I paused to think, then said I hadn't. Think again, he said. I thought again, and still said I hadn't. D'you remember a big, long rock in the water? he asked. I couldn't remember, and only his repeated promptings brought back a vague recollection. The last time I'd crossed the stream, there seemed to have been a long rock, probably near a clump of water willow in the middle of the current, that I'd stepped on, even squatted down on to drink a couple of mouthfuls of water. Maybe.

My companion smiled. That wasn't a rock, he said. Oh no. The last time the river was up, a few young oxherders on the mountain had spotted that long rock suddenly stand erect, stir up a murky whirlpool in the stream, then travel downstream with the floodwater-turned out it'd been alive: a jackal-fiend.

A jackal-fiend was a jackal fish, another name for which was jackal mute. Maqiao people said this fish didn't eat plants but other fish; it was the fiercest of all fish, but could also at times be the most stoic: people could tread over it for months on end without it moving.

After this, whenever I saw big rocks or big lumps of wood, I'd always feel a tremor of anxiety or apprehension. I was worried they'd suddenly start writhing, come alive, scurry away. Anything covered in moss might suddenly crack open a cavernous black eye and wink nonchalantly at me.

: Benyi had a nickname: "Dribbler." It was Zhihuang who picked out this nickname. While working on the construction site, during one mealtime he noticed Benyi's eyeballs bulging, his chopsticks scraping noisily against the side of his bowl, locked in life-and-death chopstick-to-chopstick combat with everyone else's in the plate of meat. In a tone of surprise, Zhihuang suddenly asked: "How come you're dribbling so much?"

Discovering that everyone's gaze was fixed on him, Benyi wiped his mouth a couple of times, "what dribble?" He wiped off a string of saliva, but failed to wipe off the rice grains and drops of oil on his stubble.

Zhihuang pointed at him and laughed, "You dribbled again!"

Everyone else laughed too.

Benyi tugged at his cuff to have another wipe but still didn't manage to wipe himself clean; he muttered something and looked a bit hangdog. By the time he'd picked up his bowl and chopsticks again, he discovered that in the blink of an eye the dish of meat had emptied. He couldn't stop himself peering around at the mouths surrounding him, as if with his own eyes he wanted to track down the whereabouts of those lumps of fat meat, as they sank into those rotten guts.

He cast a somewhat baleful look at Zhihuang afterwards. "Eating is eating, what were you fussing about?"

In general, Benyi wasn't unused to ridicule, he wasn't that good at protecting his own prestige outside public affairs. When confronted with less than respectful comments, sometimes he could only pretend to be deaf-he was actually rather deaf. But his sense of hearing was unusually sharp that day and he was very anxious about face because there were people from outside the village on the construction site: Commune Head He and Sister Wan from Zhangjia Mill. Zhihuang was just being precious, making a big thing of his dribble on an occasion like this.

"Precious" meant stupid; "preciousness" meant stupidity. Zhihuang's preciousness was renowned throughout all Maqiao. For example, he didn't understand you had to give up your seat to cadres, he didn't understand how to fake when tamping down earth, it took him a very long time to figure out that women have periods every month. That he used to beat his wife so violently showed how precious he was. His wife later divorced him and went back to her family home in Pingjiang, but from time to time he'd send the dream-woman food and clothing-this showed he was even more precious. The three quarries on Tianzi Peak were gouged out by him, one by one, hammer blow by hammer blow. You could've built a mountain out of all the rocks he'd hammered out, and people bought them, hauled them away, used them who knows where. Even so, as soon as his thoughts began to wander, he'd start viewing all these rocks as his own property. A lot of people just couldn't make him come to his senses, couldn't do anything about how precious he was on this point. All they could do was rain curses down on him, and that was how he got the name "Precious Huang."

Once he went to someone's home to clean the millstone, to recondition the old stone. While the two of them were idly chatting, the conversation got around to operas; the householder's opinion differed from his and they ended up arguing till they were red in the face. Just go, go, said the peasant, I don't want my millstone washing. Zhihuang gathered up his tools, got up, and had gone out the door when something occurred to him, and he turned back to add: "Whether you have it washed or not, this millstone still isn't yours. Just as long as you understand that."

The peasant pondered this for some time, but still didn't understand anything at all.

After Zhihuang had walked another few steps away, he turned around again in a fury: "Got that? It's not yours!"

"Well, it's not going to be yours, is it?"

"It's not mine either, it's my dad's."

What he meant was, the millstone had been hammered out by his dad, so it was his dad's.

There was another time when someone from Shuanglong Bow came to the quarry weeping and wailing, saying his uncle had died and he had no money for the funeral; his great fear was that his uncle wouldn't have a decent burial, and he begged Zhihuang to sell him a tombstone on credit. Zhihuang saw how pitifully he was sobbing and said, don't worry about credit. Just take it, give your uncle a decent burial. Having said this, he hauled out a piece of top-quality blue-and-white stone and chiseled out a stele, even tied it up with some rope and helped him carry it down the mountain, taking him back part of the way. By this time, the quarry had been reclaimed into the collective. When the accountant Fucha discovered that he'd given a memorial stone to someone for nothing at all, he insisted that he chase after him to get the money back, saying he just didn't have the right to take pity on people like that. The two of them had a big row. Zhihuang's face darkened: "I dynamited the rock, I broke it, I carried it, I chiseled it, so how come it belongs to the team leader now? What's the sense in that!"