Once he'd opened his mouth, the civil administration cadre had ruined the whole meeting: it wasn't just Benyi who was put out, the gathered crowds also felt their spirits dampened. As I saw it, no one had understood that people hear things in different ways, that everything Benyi had said before "mad dog" had long been automatically applicable to things like irrigation, manure collection, logging, struggling landlords, school commencements, had been so overused that it went in one ear and out the other, had already merged so completely with the linguistic scenery that only an outsider would take any notice of it. This outsider was still too young, didn't understand the potential of language to create verbal flourishes, to misfit reality, to diverge from facts.

As the encrustations of linguistic camouflage, superfluous words- which include terms of respect-can rarely be speedily purged and buried. In certain circumstances, they can suddenly, dramatically proliferate and expand, like a linguistic amplification of human morality, a sort of linguistic collagen implant within the austerity of human truth. Anyone with any knowledge of the world ought to realize this.

Having knowledge of the world means having the ability to make use of superfluous words-or rather, developing the functions cultivated by the vast quantities of ethical and political superfluous words in the world.

I know of a foreign writer who venerated slang, who described slang as the most powerful, the most precious language there was. These views of his are a little overstated, of course, a little inaccurate. But there's one reason, there's one point on which I can empathize with this writer: this writer wrote in the most refined and elegant of countries. That he shocked his world and transgressed its norms in this way must be because he had been so long suppressed by the oceans of incomparably refined, affable, courtly superfluities used in his sophisticated interpersonal relations that irritation finally gave way to torrents of obscenities. He must have been suffocating so much under the weight of linguistic falsity that he couldn't stop himself from spewing forth filth: it was as if he'd ripped off everyone's pants, exposing the anus of language to one and all. The anus is just like the nose, ears, and hands: it doesn't matter whether it's pretty or not, it isn't born pretty or ugly. In a world congested with falsity, the anus becomes the final unimpeded outlet to truth, the last bastion of rebellion where life force is stored and preserved. It thus becomes only too understandable that after Benyi had closed his grand, stately mourning meeting, as soon as he walked out into the night, he couldn't stop himself from yelling out:

"Stick your fucking, fuck, fucker-"

He'd stubbed his toe on a stone, seemed to be swearing at the stone.

His swearing done, he felt the blood begin to flow much more smoothly around his body.

: Spring brought with it an unperceived seasonal change in language. A nephew of Uncle Luo from far away had come to the mountains to haul charcoal and, on reaching Uncle Luo's doorway, was asked by the master of the house: "Have you eaten?"

To ask someone on meeting whether they'd eaten or not was a Maqiao custom, and a waste of breath: generally speaking, it was a convention that didn't need to be taken seriously.

Similarly speaking, "I've eaten," the set response, was not to be taken seriously. Particularly not in springtime, as it was then, in the time of shortage when every family ate porridge, when most people were so hungry their hands and feet went weak and their knees knocked.

But the nephew turned out to be a bit dim and adamantly replied: "No, I haven't," which caught Uncle Luo off guard. "You really haven't eaten?" he asked. "I really haven't," the young man said. Uncle Luo blinked: "Out with it now, if you've eaten you've eaten, if you haven't eaten you haven't eaten, now have you eaten or not?" The young man's features twisted under the pressure: "I really haven't." Uncle Luo started to get angry: "I know you, you never give me a straight answer. When you've eaten you say you haven't, when you haven't eaten you say you have, what're you playing at?! If you really haven't eaten, I'll go and cook something, the firewood's ready, the rice is ready, a lick of flame and it'll be done. Otherwise, I can go and borrow a bowl from someone, easy as pie, don't hold back now!" The young man was quite swept away by this verbal torrent, couldn't understand what he'd just held back on and started to sweat beads of embarrassment: "I… I really…" Uncle Luo fiercely intoned: "You, you, you really need a wife you do, still talking rubbish you are, don't leave things out, keep it plain, can't you tell me the truth? When you're here you make yourself at home. We're not strangers. If you've eaten, then you've eaten, if you haven't eaten, then you haven't eaten."

Under unbearable pressure by this point, the young man lost the will to defend himself and could only stammer out: "I… ate…"

Uncle Luo slapped his thigh in excitement, "Didn't I know it? I saw through it at once, didn't I? You were putting me on. Almost sixty, I am, and you've never said one honest thing to me. Wicked boy. You sit down."

He indicated a stool by the threshold.

Not daring to sit down, the nephew just hung his head, drank a bowl of cold water, heaved his charcoal back onto his shoulder, and left. Uncle Luo wanted him to rest a while before going on, but the nephew murmured that it would get late if he rested any longer.

Your sandals are falling apart, said Uncle Luo, you should change them before going.

The nephew said that new sandals would rub his feet, he wouldn't change them.

Not long after, while crossing the Luo River, the nephew went down to wash in the river and drowned, due to his own carelessness. Having no descendants of his own, Uncle Luo shared in the descendants of this brother of his who lived far away. Probably because his brother and his wife were afraid he'd be heartbroken, that he'd blame himself, they hid the truth from him, telling him only that his nephew had gone to the city to look for work and that he'd been in too much of a hurry when he went to say goodbye. As a result, for a long time afterwards Uncle Luo would still mention his nephew every now and then, with a great big smile on his face. When someone wanted to borrow a log, he'd say, I want to keep the wood to make a bed for my nephew when he gets married, my nephew eats out of the state rice-bowl now, he knows all about foreign city things, he'll have to ask a city carpenter to make his new bed. When someone bought a mountain chicken for him, he'd smile and say, good, good, and set it over the fire to smoke, keeping it until his nephew came to eat it.

As time went by, rumors slowly spread to Maqiao: everyone heard his nephew had died young and began to suspect that Uncle Luo was still in the dark. When they heard him mention his nephew, they couldn't help but sneak looks at him. He seemed to pick something up from these looks, to have an uneasy flash of realization-he'd be about to say something, then suddenly become agitatedly forgetful.

The more people expected him to correct himself, the more, by contrast, he stuck to his stubborn guns: he wouldn't even allow people around him to turn his nephew into a taboo subject to be skirted carefully around. Sometimes, when he saw other people's children, he would suddenly, voluntarily blurt out:

"Don't wish their lives away. That nephew of mine, there he was one moment, playing in the chicken shit, then the next moment he's working for the state, isn't he now?"

"That's right, that's right…"