: Three Ears' elopement with Tiexiang aroused a sense of moral outrage in Maqiao. In the past, it'd always been the women, particularly the women, who'd carped at Tiexiang behind her back, who'd poked their noses into her relations with the director of the Cultural Institute, with the young lad from the photography institute, who'd flared their nostrils and pursed their lips as her backside sashayed back and forth. Now, they suddenly felt these relationships were perfectly acceptable, could be overlooked. They even thought there was nothing much wrong in stealing someone-the important thing was, who stole whom. Although none of Tiexiang's affairs had been quite proper, this affair with Three Ears was definitely the worst thing she ever did. On this point, a great sense of injustice, a kind of protective group feeling suddenly welled up on behalf of Tiexiang, it agitated, moved, warmed them, as if Tiexiang was an athlete they'd entered for a competition, who'd lost the day at some sports meet due to some chance misfortune. It made them hopping mad. And Three Ears was just too undignified, simply beneath contempt, he'd never even washed his neck properly. Although he'd behaved properly toward his fellow villagers, he had no moral character to speak of, no family fortune, no decent education, no nothing, even his parents were the sort of people who'd end up lugging carrying poles all their lives; it was a joke, how could Tiexiang go off with him? And-as it turned out-get pregnant by him?

For a few months, they took this as a collective insult.

However much they thought it over, they couldn't figure Tiexiang out.

Only one thing could explain it: fate. In Maqiao dialect, people didn't much use the word "fate"; more often they'd use the word "root," as if they were comparing themselves to plants. They also read lines on the hand and on the foot, believing these marks were the precise embodiment of fate, the very image of roots. An old man passing by once read the roots on Tiexiang's hand: he said with a sigh that she was a threshold root, her ancestors had been beggars perhaps, had hung around the doorways of a thousand houses. This root was so long it hadn't been broken in her.

Tiexiang had giggled away disbelievingly. True enough, her father Dai Shiqing had been a beggar chief, but she'd married a Party Secretary, and the spouse of a Party Secretary was practically the Party Secretary- what doorway was she going to be found hanging around? Little did she realize that, all those years later, the words of that old man would turn out to be her fate when she followed Three Ears, a man so poor he had no choice but to hang around doorways, that she'd end her life wandering around destitute in distant parts. She was like a tree, desperately seeking sunlight and rainwater from up above, but after a thirty-year search, she discovered finally that no matter how much her own leaves grew, they couldn't escape their roots, couldn't flutter off into the sky.

Her palm was crossed with low-lying roots.

The phrase "return to your roots"-also related to the word "root"- signified not a wandering elder returning home, but "fatalism." This was how they put it: as mud is three inches deep, so man has three branches. During youth, everything remains in flux, but after completing the three branches of age-three dozen years, that is-people start to return to their roots, whether they're noble or base, wise or stupid, good or bad, all becomes clear after the age of thirty-six. Que sera and each to his own. It was during the very year of her thirty-sixth birthday that Tiexiang-as if possessed by the spirits-went off with a lazybones; this was her inescapable, inexorable doom. Or so they deeply, unshakably believed.

: "Riding a wheelbarrow" was a phrase that Tiexiang used to refer to what went on between her and Three Ears in bed. This was something Zhongqi had secretly overheard; people laughed for days after it'd spread about, and it subsequently became a Maqiao idiom.

Chinese has no lack of food-related vocabulary. For cooking methods, there's steam, boil, fry, stir-fry, quick-fry, saute, shallow fry, stew, cure, pickle, casserole, braise, and so on; for the action of the mouth there's eat, sip, suck, slurp, swallow, lick, gnaw, bite, chew, gulp, and so on; for the sense of taste, there's sweet, acrid, salty, bitter, hot, sour, fresh, spicy, crisp, slippery, numbing, clean, mellow, crumbly, powdery, and so on. But although sex is also a human need, there seem to be in comparison far fewer words relating to sex. As Confucius said: "food and sex are human nature." But our linguistic heritage has wiped out half of Confucius's venerable opinion.

There is still, of course, what's called low talk, mainly low-quality, perennially popular expressions, oral excretions you hear everywhere. Though there's no lack of them, their deficiencies are only too apparent. Firstly, they echo, they duplicate each other, they add nothing new; secondly, they lack content, they overgeneralize, they're all talk and no action, like politicians' speeches on state affairs, like cultural bureaucrats slapping each other on the back. Even worse, they're mainly borrowed words that don't even cover the meaning, that don't express the sense, that rely on tacit, contextual understanding; the effect produced is as ludicrous as putting Mr Zhang's hat on Mr Li, or calling a donkey a horse. "Clouds and rain," "grinding bean curd," "cannon firing," "steaming buns"… All these expressions sound like mafia codes. And so, left thus with no alternative, people begin to act like shifty mafiosi, while linguistic ethics equate sex with mafia crimes, with conspiracies that evade clear, precise expression.

This sexual vocabulary necessarily springs from the transformation of sexual feeling into something crude, formulaic, utilitarian, and furtive. The surging excitement of exchange between the sexes springs from a delicate, shimmering trembling from deep within the body, from anxiety, obduracy, sympathy, and an unnerving joy, all of which both clash with and support each other, from secret, storm-tossed explorations that, at dizzying emotional heights, sit poised on the cusp of destruction, infatuation, and hurtling descent, bringing every single part and process of one's being to life.… It's a great pity that all this has for so long been driven underground into a deep, linguistically unreachable blind spot.

A linguistic blank is a human abandonment of self-knowledge, an ignominious defeat, hinting at some form of enormous, lurking danger. Language serves as the link between humans and the world: once this link is broken or lost, people have as good as lost their control over the world. In this sense, it can perfectly justifiably be said that language equals the power to control. To chemistry experts, a complex chemistry laboratory is like their own backyard; to someone ignorant of chemistry, it's a terrifying minefield, covered in death traps. To those who've grown up in the city, a bustling city is their home territory, there's nowhere more convenient or comforting; but to people from the countryside with no knowledge or experience of the city, it's a thorny jungle where enemies, obstacles, and nameless, unshakable terrors lurk everywhere. There's a very simple reason for all this: a world hard to describe in words is a world beyond your control.

Sociological research has identified a kind of "marginal person," someone who leaves one culture and enters another, such as country people who go into the city, immigrants who leave their native country for distant lands. Language is the chief problem encountered by such people. Whether or not they have money, whether or not they have power, if they haven't grasped the new language, as long as they haven't yet gained a proficient linguistic grasp of their new environment, they'll never manage to shake off the feeling of rootlessness, of insecurity. When rich Japanese go to France, some of them suffer from "Paris syndrome." When courageous Chinese migrate to America, some suffer from "New York syndrome." Their limited foreign-language skills prevent them from blending into the unfamiliar turf of a foreign land. Neither their money nor their courage can protect them from their nameless anxiety, tension, terror, palpitations, rising blood pressure, paranoia, and the delusion they're being spied on. Any incomprehensible dialogue with neighbors or people on the street, any foreign object or vista they can't put a name to imperceptibly increases the psychological pressure on them, leaving them highly vulnerable to illness. Many people, in this kind of situation, closet themselves in desolate residences, continually fleeing from the outside world-just as people having sex seek to avoid the eyes and ears of others.