I don't pay much heed to or have much faith in this sort of legend, neither have I done any concrete research on the links between beauty and catastrophe: for example, does beauty tend to make people lose their minds, drive them wild, deranged, or crazy? Does it easily lead people into carelessness, into abandoning responsibilities? It's this word "rude" that I'm interested in. It conceals within an assumption that provokes an involuntary shiver: beauty is a form of evil, good is a form of danger, beautiful and good things will always bring disunity, instability, dissatisfaction, disputes, and animosity-rudeness. A "precious jade" (a beautiful woman) once provoked the State of Zhao to go to war with the State of Qin, Greece embarked on a ten-year war with Troy because of a beautiful woman called Helen-probably a useful footnote to all this. Ordinary people can only drift with the tide, turn to dust in the sunlight, stick to the bottom of the pile, and smear mud over their faces to maintain peace on earth.

"Rude" in Maqiao language was also widely used to mean excellence, to tower above others, to stand out from your peers, surpass the norm, and so on. Given that this word was used to describe Benyi's young wife Tiexiang, readers from outside Maqiao should now break into a cold sweat at the very mention of her.

: Maqiao people believed that pretty women had a particular kind of smell-a fragrant but harmful kind of smell. When Benyi's wife Tiexiang came over from Changle to be married in Maqiao she brought this smell with her. Two months after her arrival, every single one of Maqiao's daylilies were dead. You could pick flower after dazzling gold flower into your basket, but before you got them back home they'd have collapsed into soggy black blobs which refused to respond to any amount of primping. The old people said this was why Maqiao people would never grow daylilies again, why they could only grow malformed melons, eggplants, bitter gourds, pumpkins, walnuts, and so on.

Tiexiang's smell also disturbed all sorts of farm animals. The moment it saw Tiexiang, Fucha's family dog went mad-there was no choice but to shoot it. Zhongqi used to have a "foot-pig" (or breeding pig): from the moment it saw Tiexiang, it just couldn't be kept quiet anymore and had to be castrated; it was later slaughtered for its meat. Some people's chickens and ducks were struck down by epidemics, which their owners all blamed on Tiexiang's influence. In the end, even Three-Hairs the ox charged at Tiexiang while under Zhihuang's supervision. She screamed in terror, and if it hadn't been for Zhihuang's sharp eyes and quick hands pulling its halter up smartly, she might have been butted all the way down the hillside.

The women were all rather sniffy about Tiexiang, but Benyi's face as Party Secretary stopped them from coming straight out with it. Some of them weren't so easily put off and would search out some needling comment as soon as they saw her. They'd go on about how extravagant, how elaborate their obeisance ceremonies or pot-placing had been when they'd arrived in their husband's house in Maqiao, how everything had been just so. Of course there'd been First Uncle carrying the dowry, Second Uncle blowing the trumpet, Third Uncle firing the blunderbuss, Fourth Uncle holding up the red parasol-and so on and so forth went the exaggerations. There were bales of Hangzhou silk brocade, hundreds of Japanese mandarin jackets, the bracelets on wrists were this big, the rings on ears were this shiny-as they never tired of saying.

Tiexiang's face turned livid as she listened to all this.

Once, one of them feigned surprise: "Aiya, all you grand ladies, all so lucky, you just make me want to die of shame. When I was left in this rotten dump, I was carrying nothing but a parasol, just a lump of flesh I was, dressed in a mandarin jacket!"

Everyone laughed.

This woman was obviously referring to how poor Tiexiang had been when she first arrived. Unable to bear it, Tiexiang fled back home to have a good cry and pummel her pillow and quilt.

In fact, Tiexiang had grown up in a wealthy household, a house with nursemaids and servants, where food would always be accompanied by soy sauce, aniseed, or sesame oil; she knew what biscuits and cakes were, not like Maqiao people, who called everything "candy." But when she arrived in Maqiao, her father had died in prison and the family finances were in decline. When she scurried across Benyi's threshold, she really was carrying nothing but a parasol.

Aged sixteen at the time, with a bit of rouge smeared on, a big stomach sticking out in front, she'd rushed alone into Maqiao in a great fluster and asked who the Party member was around here. People eyed her curiously and finally gave her a couple of names only after repeated questioning on her part. She then asked who, out of these Party members, was still a bachelor. Benyi, people said. She asked for directions to Benyi's home, walked straight up to the thatched hut, and quickly sized up house and man:

"So you're Ma Benyi?"

"Mmm."

"You're a Communist Party member?"

"Mmm."

"D'you want to get married?"

"Whassat?" Benyi was cutting up pigfeed and hadn't been listening properly.

"I asked, do you want a wife or don't you?"

"Wife?"

She drew a long breath, put down the parasol she'd brought with her: "I'm not bad-looking, am I? I can have children as well, you can see that. If you're happy with that, then I…"

"Uh?"

"That's what I'm here for."

"Here for what?" Benyi still hadn't quite got it.

Tiexiang stamped her foot, "I'm yours."

"My what?"

Tiexiang twisted her neck and glanced over the door: "To sleep with!"

Benyi jumped in fright, too stunned to produce a single sentence, "You you you you where did you spring from you spirit woman… Bloody hell, where's my basket?"

He fled indoors. Tiexiang pursued him inside: "What's there to complain about? Look at my face, look at my hands, my feet, all there, all present and correct. Look, I'll be frank with you, I've even got some of my own money. You can relax, I've got an educated man's baby inside me, if you want it, you can have it. You don't want it, then get rid of it. I just wanted to show you I can have children, there's nothing wrong with my body…"

Before she'd finished, she heard someone slip out the back door.

"You must've stored up lots of secret good deeds in an earlier life to land someone like me-" Tiexiang stamped her foot in fury; a noisy sob followed shortly.

Later, Benyi dispatched his same-pot brother Benren to send this spirit woman on her way. When Benren came to the door, he discovered the woman was already chopping up pig grass; wiping her hands, she got up to bid him sit down and took out the kettle to boil some tea. She really wasn't bad-looking, either. Seeing that her full, round buttocks and thick legs were the properly child-bearing sort, he went a bit tongue-tied and failed again and again to come up with the words required to send her packing. He later told Benyi: "She may be a bit of a spirit, but she looks pretty healthy. If you don't want her, I'll have her."

That night, Tiexiang didn't go home-she stayed at Benyi's place.

Things worked out pretty simply: Benyi didn't get a matchmaker, didn't buy any betrothal gifts, he got it all on the cheap. Tiexiang also got what she wanted: as she put it later, she'd been fed up with government surveillance and with her four mothers weeping and wailing all day long, fed up with the daily threats and nags of the handyman next door. So she made up her mind, walked out of the door with nothing but a parasol, and swore she'd find a member of the Communist Party to look after her. As things turned out, she succeeded at the first attempt and a few days later really did take a demobilized revolutionary soldier and Party Branch Secretary back home with her. The neighbors on both sides eyed her with more respect and, after one look at the medal pinned on Benyi's chest for resisting America and helping Korea, the cadres became a few degrees politer to her family.