The big ox's desperate fierceness toward me meant it must be the calf's mother. It was only later that I found out this animal was called "Boss Hong": because it had been born with a bit of its ear missing, people identified it as the reincarnation of someone who'd come from near Luo River. This person, Boss Hong, had been a great bully with seven or eight wives and had also had a bit of his left ear missing. People said he'd done so many bad things that Heaven had condemned him to a lifetime as an ox, pulling ploughs, drawing harrows and being whipped to atone for the sins of his previous life.

People also said that Heaven must really have eyes in its head to have sent Boss Hong to be reborn in Maqiao. The year the Red Army came to incite the peasants to attack local bullies, Maqiao people hadn't dared make a move at first; but when they saw a tyrant in Longjia Sands had been brought down, had had his head cracked open, and that nothing had come of it, they itched to have a go themselves. Unfortunately, by the time they'd got the peasants' association together, drunk the chicken's blood wine and made a red flag, they discovered their moment had already passed: all the certified bullies in the vicinity had already been struck down and all the granaries emptied, bar a few rats. None too happy about this, they made a few inquiries back and forth before finally heading across the Luo River, spears and blunderbusses in hand, to make revolution in Boss Hong's village. Little did they expect that the peasants there would also be making revolution: Boss Hong was their bully, they said, only they could revolutionize him, not people from other villages, and the Hong family's grain could only be divided between them, not between people from other villages. You don't go watering other people's fields, do you, now? The peasants' associations of the two villages negotiated without reaching any agreement and in the end it came to blows. The people from around Maqiao (not just Maqiao itself) thought the people from over the way were protecting the bully, that they were a fake peasants' association, making fake revolution, and built a pine tree cannon to bomb the village. The people from over the way showed no signs of weakening either: banging an almighty racket out of their gongs, they took down the wooden doors of the whole village, moved a few threshing windmills, and blocked the road that led into the village. They also fired at will, until the leaves hidden deep in the forest trembled and fell to the ground in a tattered flurry.

Two men from round Maqiao were injured and a good bronze gong was lost in the struggle, the whole squadron of men and horses was swimming in sweat and grime and no one had had anything to eat all day. Unable to believe that the revolutionary consciousness of their peasant brothers over the way could be so low, they gave it some thought and seized on the idea that it was all down to Boss Hong's plotting. And this was how their deep feelings of animosity and hatred toward Boss Hong were sealed.

Now they were perfectly satisfied, with everything fair and just: Grandfather Heaven had sent Boss Hong to shoulder the plough for Maqiao, to be used to death in Maqiao-this settled the debt. One summer, after the higher-ups had transferred some of the oxen to plough the tea fields, only two were left in Maqiao. After having ploughed the last paddy of late summer rice, a panting and wheezing Boss Hong lay down to sleep in the mud, never to clamber up again. When it was sent to the slaughterhouse, it was discovered its lungs had completely filled up with blood, that almost every bubble in its lungs had burst; they lay abandoned in a wooden basin, like a pile of blood-dyed melon pulp.

: There's another ox I want to talk about.

This ox was called "Three-Hairs," a fearsome character over whom, in all Maqiao, only "Precious" Zhihuang had any jurisdiction. People said it hadn't been born of a heifer, it had burst out of a stone like Monkey Sun in Journey to the West. It wasn't in fact an ox at all, it was a stone come to life. As Precious Huang was a stonemason, of course it followed very naturally that he should look after this lump of stone. This line of reasoning was universally accepted by all.

Cited in connection with this line of reasoning was the fact that the cry Zhihuang used for calling oxen was quite different from everyone else's. When most people wanted to catch oxen, they all went "chuh-chuh-chuh"; only Zhihuang used "slippy-slip slip" to catch Three-Hairs. "Slip" was a word often used by the stonemason. "Slip the son of heaven" meant hit with the iron hammer; therefore, all stones must, will fear getting the "slip." If Three-Hairs got into a fight with other oxen, however hard people tried to calm things down, the usual methods would never persuade Three-Hairs to let things lie. Only after hearing Zhihuang shout "slip" would it leave off, head hanging, panicked, and meek as a bale of cotton.

As I recall, Zhihuang's ox-handling skills were excellent: his whip never touched the ox's body and even after a day of ploughing the fields, he'd be clean as a whistle, not a speck of mud on him; he'd look just like he was returning, immaculately dressed, from a visit to some relatives, not like he was coming from the fields. In the fields that he'd ploughed, the churned black mud was like page after page of a book, lying smooth, glossy, flawless, elegant, neat, and even, amidst the rising currents of warm air; they exuded an air of natural smoothness that was both perfectly controlled and relaxed, in possession of both spirit and form, that made you feel you couldn't bear to touch or destroy it. If you looked at them closely, you'd discover his furrows had hardly any botched lines: regardless of how irregular the shape of the paddy field, how difficult it was for the ploughman to place the furrow, he still proceeded without skipping over ridges, very rarely intersecting or repeating a furrow; his were the sparing brushstrokes of a grand master, with never a drop of paint wasted. Once, I noticed he'd ploughed the final circuit with a tiny dead end remaining before him which, from the looks of it, would have to be abandoned with regret. Suddenly, to my total astonishment, he leapt with a great cry into action, seizing the plough, tilting it to one side, and in the blink of an eye the dead end was neatly turned over.

Unbelievable.

I would swear that dead end hadn't been turned over by a plough. I can only believe he possessed some kind of magic power, a kind of invisible force that he'd spread, via his palms, through the whole iron plough till it burst out of the snow-bright plough tip, springing, leaping, scattering deep into the mud. At any given moment, any distant dead end he wanted to turn over-in the places his strength reached but his plough couldn't, his energy reached but his strength couldn't, his intent reached but his energy couldn't-would turn itself over.

As I recall, he didn't have much confidence in the ox-herders and their little tricks, and always wanted to let the oxen out himself, taking them far, far away in search of clean water and grass that would suit their palates; he'd only take care of himself after he'd settled the oxen. For this reason, he was often the last to get off work, a lonely black spot on the mountainside, sometimes moving, sometimes still against the blazing reddish-purple backdrop of the sky, as the sound of cowbells merged in and out of the silence, scattered in amongst the fiery clouds that soared through the sky. It was about this time that star after isolated star would be coming awake.

Maqiao would have been unimaginable, dusk would have been unimaginable without the sound of oxbells. Dusk without these muted bells was like a river without flowing water, a spring without flowers, would have left only a magnificent wasteland.