Maybe they weren't as angry as all that. But their emotions were always magnified in the collective: things changed as soon as the girls got together. They lost control of their cells and nerve-ends, felt pain where there was no pain, itched where they didn't itch, felt happy where they weren't happy, angry where they weren't angry, they had to make a huge fuss about everything-nothing else would do.

In the end, about ten of them secretly knotted grass as an oath that none of them was allowed to marry him, and whoever broke the oath would be condemned by the gods to change into a pig or a dog.

This was called "knotting the grass hoop."

Time went on, year by year. Fucha had no idea such a grass hoop existed, had no idea he'd provoked such a sacred covenant. In the end, he won no daughter of a dragon king, no princess of a jade emperor, he took a wife whose hair was always badly combed, who always looked as if she had a chicken's nest perched on top of her head. This chicken's nest was the bedraggled result of these women's decade-long vow of collective hatred. Of course, long before this time, one by one they'd left their parents' homes to become the wives of other men. Among them, three could have chosen otherwise, since Fucha's matchmaker came to each of their houses in succession to convey the wishes of Fucha's mom and of Fucha. But they had a prior agreement, they'd knotted a grass hoop that they couldn't go back on and be shamed before their sisters. They had a sense of loyalty toward their earlier oath, a sense of joy in revenge, a sense of collective excitement that forgot personal interests, and shook their heads resolutely.

In my opinion, a vow is like a curse, or a linguistic tyranny. One of the three girls mentioned above, Qiuxian from Zhangjia District, due to this coercive tyranny, later married a veterinarian. It can't be said this coercion had particularly dire results. She learned tailoring and the family ended up quite well-off-it was just that she wasn't a brilliant match with her husband. That was all.

One day, when it was about to rain, she was cycling back home, having finished her door-to-door business, harboring an unspecifiable feeling of discontent, and decided she didn't want to go back home, that she'd spend the night at the house of a same-pot uncle. On the way, she passed a man with a deeply wrinkled face hitting a child, and her heart suddenly thumped in her chest: the person inside this pair of shabby pants with one leg shorter than the other was none other than old Fucha! If this old man hadn't timidly ducked his head at her in something approximating a nod, she would certainly have thought she'd got the wrong person.

"Brother Fucha…" The words sounded unfamiliar to her.

"Humph…" The man's face bore the trace of a bitter smile, "This boy's driving me mad! It's about to rain, but he just won't move."

"Keke, want a ride on my bike?" Qiuxian's gaze was directed at the child.

The child's eyes lit up on seeing the woman and her bicycle.

"No, tell little uncle you don't, don't hold her up."

"It doesn't matter, I've got to pass through Maqiao anyway."

The child sneaked a look at his father, then a look at Qiuxian, and climbed on like a flash, scrambling with great expertise onto the front bar of the bicycle.

Fucha was at a total loss: since he couldn't very easily step forward to grab the child, he could only stamp his foot from where he was: "Are you getting off then? Are you getting off then? Asking for a spanking?"

"Keke, tell your dad it's no problem."

"Dad, it's no problem!"

"Ask your dad if he wants a ride too."

"Dad, d'you want a ride too?"

"No… I don't know how…"

"You want him to get on."

"Dad, little uncle wants you to get on!"

"No, no, off you go…"

Qiuxian hesitated a little, then, hearing the pattering sound of rain on the mountain over the way, pressed her own umbrella on Fucha, bestrode the bicycle, and rode off. The child was very excited to have the wind rushing right up against him and made horse-galloping noises for a bit, then made car noises for a bit-when they passed children who stared along the way, these noises got even louder.

"Keke, is your dad… nice… to your mom?"

"Very nice. Vrooooosh!"

"Do they argue?"

"Nope."

"They really don't?"

"My mom says my dad has a good temper, so he's no good at arguing."

"They haven't argued once?"

"Nope."

"I don't believe you."

"They really haven't…"

"Your mom's really… lucky."

Qiuxian's tone dripped with disappointment.

After falling silent for a while, she then asked:

"D'you… like your mom?"

"Yup."

"What d'you like about her?"

"She makes baba cakes for me."

"What else?"

"And… when I don't do my homework and Fucha's about to hit me, she shouts at him." Whenever he felt resentful, he used his father's proper name.

"Has your mom bought you games?"

"Nope."

"Or taken you to the city to look at the trains?"

"Nope."

"Can your mom ride a bike?"

"She… can't."

"That's a real pity, isn't it?" Qiuxian was clearly jubilant.

"No, it's not. I don't want her to ride a bike."

"Why not?"

"She might fall off. Her mom, Guixiang, was almost squashed to death by a tractor when she was riding a bike."

"What a bad boy you are-aren't you afraid your little uncle will fall off her bike?"

"If you fall off, that's nothing."

"That's nothing" meant that's nothing to worry about.

Qiuxian asked anxiously: "Why's it nothing?"

"You… you're not my mom. Peow-peow-peow." The child had spotted another slope and was happily making the signal to accelerate.

Dazed, Qiuxian suddenly felt a moistness well up and threaten to drop from her eyes. She set her teeth and pedaled forward. Luckily, a shower of autumn rain had already started to fall.

: The next time I saw Fucha, his head full of white hairs, one trouser leg shorter than the other, he rubbed his hands and insisted I come over to his house for a bit. I didn't really have time, but seeing as he just stood there, waiting to one side, not about to give up, I had no choice but to comply. I found out afterwards that he'd wanted to grab this opportunity to show me a book he'd written, drafted in tiny letters on a pile of sheets from an account book, bound in a plastic fertilizer bag, with a few strands of grass mixed in. The ink quality, faded and unclear in many places, wasn't great. But this, I discovered to my surprise, was the most daring piece of research I'd ever seen.

He wanted to correct, to overturn the universally acknowledged theorem of pi.

As I didn't understand math, I had no way of volunteering any opinions on his research-I was, in any case, pretty doubtful about his ground-breaking theorem.

He smiled faintly, rolled out some tobacco, and filled a bamboo pipe. Different professions were as far apart as different mountains, he said, so I wouldn't understand. Did I know of someone more senior?

"Who?"

"Someone who does math."

"No," I said quickly.

A glint of disappointment shone from his eyes but his smile didn't falter: "No problem, I'll keep looking."

After I went back to the city, he wrote me a letter: he'd put aside pi and started on some linguistic questions. For example, he considered the characters for "shoot" and "short" to be the inverse of each other. The character for "shoot" [ff] was made up of the characters for body [J^ and inch [~*f]: an inch-long body. The character for "short" [g?] contained the sign for "arrow" [^], thus implying "shoot." He'd written this up in a letter to the State Council and the State Committee for Character Reform, and was asking me to find an acquaintance to pass it on to, "someone who does language stuff."