The two of them went to the government office to register. The government office said she was too young, she should come back in two years. When it became clear that nothing she said was having any effect, her apricot eyes hardened and she told the secretary who handled official seals: "If you don't register us, I won't go, I'll have the kid at your place and say it's yours. How'd you like that?" The secretary jumped in terror and scrambled to sort everything out, the sweat running down his face. He watched their back-views-hers and her bridegroom's-recede far off into the distance, his mind still unhinged with fear: that spirit woman, he said, d'you think she'll stay like that?

Bystanders also shook their heads and tut-tutted: she truly was Master Nine Pockets' daughter, they said, she'd eaten the food of every family in town and the skin on her face was thicker than shoe soles. If she was like this now, what would she be like later?

As Benyi afterwards slowly came to realize, it would be hard to say this marriage business had turned out well for him. Tiexiang was about ten years younger than him and so reserved the right to flare up into tempers at home; sometimes, when her spirit got quite carried away, it only took the slightest thing not to go her way, the tiniest provocation, and she'd be yelling about how god-forsaken Maqiao Bow was, how could anyone live there? She cursed Maqiao's roads for being uneven, cursed Maqiao's mountains for being too steep, cursed the gully holes for burying people alive, cursed the rice for having too much sand in it, cursed the firewood for being so wet you choked on the soot, cursed the way you had to run seven or eight li to buy a needle or soy sauce. What with her cursing this way and that, her curses inevitably ended up directed at Benyi. If she just cursed and left it at that, it would've been all right, but once in a particularly violent screaming fit she actually chopped off the head of an eel. What'd happened to patriarchal law? For better or for worse, Benyi was still her old man, for better or for worse a Party Secretary; how'd he gotten himself into this mess with eels' heads?

While Benyi's old ma was still alive, she too was helpless before her daughter-in-law, whose rages spared not even the old: "Are you never going to die, you old crock, I don't care how old you are, how heavy you are, will you never end? Just go and die! Why don't you just go and die?"

Generally speaking, Benyi turned a deaf ear to such remarks-he was, in fact, a little deaf. Even if sometimes, at the end of his tether, he yelled "I'll do you in!" all it took was for his wife to shut her mouth just for a moment and no real action would be taken. His moment of greatest authority was when one slap of his hand sent Tiexiang rolling into the middle of a flock of terrified ducks who scattered into the air in all four directions. That, as he put it, was the time that good overpowered bad, the east wind overpowered the west wind. When she clambered up again, Tiexiang would have thrown herself into the pond if she hadn't been stopped by the villagers. She had no choice but to run back to her parents' house, and nothing was heard of her for three months. Once again, it was Benren who, with two catties of potato flour and two catties of baba cakes, finally went to make peace with Tiexiang on behalf of his same-pot brother, and who drove her back on a dirt cart.

In the foregoing narrative, the reader may have noticed that the word "spirit" came up a few times. Maqiao people, it should by now be apparent, used the word "spirit" to describe any kind of unconventional behavior. People from around here were anxious above all else to affirm human ordinariness, to affirm that humans were conventional beings. Any unconventional behavior was, essentially, inhuman behavior, derived from the mysterious shadows of the netherworld, from superhuman forces of heaven or destiny. If the problem wasn't a spiritual (i.e., mental) matter, then it had to be a matter of spirits (i.e., ghosts or divinities). Maqiao people used the word "spirit" for both these two meanings, probably considering the difference between the two to be of little importance. Any story about spirits began with fantasies of a spiritually abnormal nature. People always babbled and danced insanely in front of altars to spirits. Maybe spiritual disorders were just spirits in worldly, vulgarized form. A whole bundle of expressions-"spirit-fast," "spirit-brave," "spirit-good," "spirit-weird," "spirit-pretty," "spiritsmooth"-referred to achievements that temporarily transgressed ordinary human limits, often witnessed in people close to the obsessive derangement of spiritual disorder, close to the spirits, and who were putting their mental state to positive use, either subconsciously or unconsciously.

A spirit like Tiexiang's, everyone said, just had to be possessed by evil forces.

: Tiexiang didn't much like spending time with Maqiao women, and after getting off work she'd hustle her way in amongst the men and really let herself go. Benyi didn't like this much, but there was nothing he could do. So although going to the mountains to cut down trees was men's work, she wanted to join in the fun too. When she got to the mountain, she grasped the axe as she would a chicken, gritted her teeth, but still didn't manage to chop even so much as a toothmark; the axe ended up ricocheting off to who knew where, while she collapsed onto her bottom in laughter, her body dissolving into waves of giggles.

After this fall, things got busy for the men. She ordered this one to beat dust off her, asked that one to extract the thorn from her finger, instructed this one to go look for the lost axe, commanded that one to hold the shoes she'd just trodden in the wet without realizing. Under the spell of her gaze, the men all hovered around in raptures. Her piercing cries, the tragic convulsions of her body, the possibility that at careless moments a wider expanse of dazzling white… something would glint out of her neckline or cuffs got the men (and their roving eyes) buzzing around.

Her fall had been far from heavy, but having tried a couple of steps on tiptoe she insisted it hurt too much to walk and demanded that Benyi carry her home on his back-never mind that Benyi was just then in conversation on the mountainside with two cadres visiting the forestry station.

"You spirit! Can't you get someone else to lean on?" Benyi's patience was low.

"No, I want you to carry me back!" she stamped her little foot.

"Just walk, you can walk."

"Even if I can walk, I still want you to carry me!"

"Firstly, there's no blood, secondly you haven't broken anything."

"My back hurts."

And so Benyi had no choice but to submit once more to his young wife, abandoning the forestry station to carry her down the mountain right in front of everyone. He knew that if he hadn't carried her off then, she might have announced her period had come, or something similar. She was someone who just wouldn't shut up, who'd publicize women's secrets at any opportunity, making her body a subject of general understanding and concern, a topic of conversation, the intellectual property of all men. Her periods were, in short, a great ceremonial event for the Maqiao collective. She wouldn't of course advertize them directly. But she'd say her back hurt, then remark meaningfully on how she hadn't been able to go near cold water for the last few days, then dispatch some man to the clinic to buy her some angelica, even yell at Benyi while they were in the fields to go back home and boil her some angelica or an egg- all this, of course, was quite sufficient to notify people of the phase her body was entering on, to underline her femininity, to excite male imaginations, to attract knowing smirks.