Hei Danzi's eyes shone.

With effort, people figured things out for themselves: if this girl before them was Tiexiang, then she'd have been the sister-in-law for a time of Third Wife-no wonder she was asking about her. Swept along by enthusiasm, a few people took her off to find her. "Third Wife lives on the bamboo hill, you come with us," they said to Hei Danzi. Hei Danzi nodded her head, then hurried to follow them over a hill and through a bamboo grove, before far off in the distance she saw a house flash out from among the bamboo.

Her rather meddlesome guides had already run off ahead into the yellow mud house, yelling and calling, had passed through the few empty rooms but discovered no one home. Someone then went to the lotus pond, and shortly after shouts came over from that direction: "She's here, she's here!"

An old woman was at the side of the pond, washing clothes.

Hei Danzi flew over and threw herself before the old woman: "Brother Xiuqin, Brother Xiuqin, it's me, Tiexiang…"

The old woman carefully looked her up and down, to left and to right.

"Don't you recognize me?"

"Tiexiang who?"

"When I was in the hospital, it was you who sent me food and water. The evening I ran off, it was you I came and kowtowed to!"

"Why you're-you're-you're-you're…" Whatever thought had just come into the old woman's head, she never verbalized: her words choked in her throat, her eyes glinting with tears.

They said nothing else, just wept so bitterly in each other's arms that the bystanders didn't know what to do, didn't even dare come closer, just watched from far off. A clothes-washing pole fell into the water and slowly spun in circles. A twisted bundle of clothing also rolled into the water, scattered, then slowly sank.

: It's very hard to define this word precisely, as it's both abstract and ambiguous in sense. If you said you didn't believe in ghosts, you'd never seen ghosts, Maqiao people would flatly declare it was because your "flame" was too high. So what is flame, then?

If this question is a slightly tricky one to answer, then I could try rephrasing it as: what sort of people have a high flame? Maqiao people would say: city people, educated people, rich people, men, people in the prime of life, who've never been ill, state employees, people in daylight, people unplagued by disasters and difficulties, who live by highways, people on sunny days, in open country, people with lots of friends and relatives, people who've just eaten their fill…… And, of course, people who don't believe in ghosts.

This covers practically the full gamut of life's problems.

I'd surmise, then, that what they mean by flame is a general life view: in situations where humans find themselves in a weakened position, a person's flame goes low, is snuffed out, and ghosts and demons start to appear. The popular saying, "poor people see more ghosts" probably refers to the same sort of thing. Writing this reminds me of my own mother, who'd received a modern education, had been a teacher, and had never believed in ghosts. In the summer of 1981, because of a big septic boil on her back, an affliction that frequently reduced her to a state of semi-stupor, she started to see ghosts. Time and time again, she would cry out in terror in the middle of the night, shrinking, trembling back into the corner of the bed, claiming there was someone behind the door, a woman called Wang, come to assassinate her own ghost, and asking me to kill her with a vegetable knife. It was then that I was reminded of this word "flame." At that moment, I thought, her flame was definitely too low, she'd seen things I had no way of seeing, had entered a world I had no way of entering.

Afterwards, she hadn't the slightest recollection of what had happened.

The power of the intellect is without doubt the most important ingredient in flame: it's the mark of the strong, advancing revolution, science, and economic development; wherever it touches, ghostly shadows will disappear like smoke, ghostly talk will scatter like clouds, and dazzling sunlight will reign triumphant. The problem is, if you understand flame as Maqiao people do, then it's only relative: since the strong become weak before the even stronger, fear of ghosts may never be utterly, triumphantly dispelled. There are also times when the power of the intellect is thwarted, when it is insufficient, and disintegrates. My mother doesn't believe in ghosts. But when her sense of reason was sufficiently weakened so as to be rendered incapable of resisting a septic boil, on came the ghosts. Modern people don't place that much credence in ghosts, but when their sense of reason becomes incapable of overcoming difficulties such as war, poverty, pollution, indifference, becomes incapable of shaking off the weight of inner anxiety, then specters and superstitions of every shade and description will rear their heads once more in even the most scientific and developed cities of the twentieth century. Even those who categorically deny the existence of ghosts, even highly educated, modern people will still, perhaps, use ghostly imagery (think of modern painting), ghostly sounds (think of modern music), ghostly logic (think of modern surrealist poetry or fiction)… In a sense, modernist culture is the covert breeding ground for the biggest ghost town of this century, a scholarly cacophony of ghosts and spirits that derives from those members of modern society with the lowest flame: peasants, the uneducated, the poor, women, children and old people, sick people, people plagued by disasters and difficulties, refugees, people who live far from highways, with few friends and relatives, people at nighttime, on rainy days, who don't live in open country, people suffering from hunger… and people who believe in ghosts.

If you look into the biography of any important modernist writer or artist, you'll soon discover the shadowy forms and flashing eyes of people with low flame, people like those I have just listed.

I'm not arguing for the existence of ghosts. As I often remark, the ghosts Maqiao people discovered, including those ghosts which came from outside Maqiao, could only ever speak Maqiao dialect, they couldn't speak Mandarin, much less English or French; they obviously hadn't transgressed the intellectual bounds of their discoverers. This leads me to believe that ghosts are manmade things. Maybe they're just a kind of hallucination, a kind of imagining that springs forth at times when the body is weak (as in my mother's case) or the spirit is weak (like the despairing modernists)-the same as what happens, more or less, when people dream, get drunk, take drugs.

Facing up to ghosts amounts to facing up to our own weaknesses.

This is one way of understanding the term "flame."

And so I suspect that what's known as the Hei Danzi story never happened in Maqiao (see the entry "The Ghost Relative"), that Tiexiang wasn't really reincarnated. When I returned to Maqiao, Fucha categorically denied there was any truth to this story, rejected it as devil talk that misled the masses, as groundless gossip. I believed Fucha. Of course, I don't in the slightest suspect those who claimed to have seen Hei Danzi with their own eyes of deliberately deceiving me, no, they probably felt no compulsion to do that. It is simply the case that I see, in their scattered and contradictory narrative fragments, the dubiousness of this story. I once tried pursuing the story to its end: where was Hei Danzi now? Will she ever come back to Maqiao? They hemmed and hawed. Some said that Hei Danzi had eaten red carp-people who'd eaten this variety of fish no longer remember things from their past life, so she wouldn't come back. Some said Hei Danzi had followed her uncle down south to a city on the coast to make money and couldn't be found. Others said Hei Danzi was afraid of Benyi-which meant: she had neither the face nor the courage to come back. And so on, and so forth.