"Cadre meetings are revolutionary work. You jealous, then?" Zhongqi said.

"What d'you mean, work? Aren't they just growing their lettuce jades?"

"You can't say that. If everyone grew a lettuce jade, lettuce jade would become too cheap, too common-d'you think it would've got into The Extended Virtuous Words like that?"

"I could've become a cadre during Land Reform." Shortie Zhao set full sail for a delicious, dreamy journey of remembrance.

"You-a cadre? You can't even write Shortie Zhao properly! If you ever got to be a cadre, I'd walk everywhere on my hands." Zhongqi thought this very funny and chuckled away for a while.

Zhaoqing said: "What about you, then, Zhong, you dragon you, carrying your quotation book around every day, wearing your Chairman Mao button, who're you trying to impress? D'ycm honestly think you can grow a lettuce jade?"

"I don't want one."

"You couldn't grow one."

"I'm not going to grow one, that way no one'll come and dig my grave."

"Reckon you're going to have a grave that people can come and dig?"

Zhaoqing's remark was rather below the belt. Since Zhongqi had no descendants, it was generally held that he ran the risk of having no one to bury him after he'd died; Zhaoqing, however, had produced five or six kids, so a remark like this from him was a blatant assertion of his superiority, and touched a raw nerve in his opponent.

"You stinking, farting scumbag, Zhao."

"You pig-sticker."

"Parents never washed your mouth out, did they?"

"No use if you did wash your mouth-your belly's so full of shit."

Their exchanges swiftly got wilder and filthier, before bystanders finally managed-with great difficulty-to intervene. In an effort to thaw the atmosphere a little, Fucha mentioned Secretary Zhou in the commune: what was Benyi compared to him? Benyi only got his mouth around some lard at his five meetings per month-that wasn't going to make much of a dent on a stomachful of sweet potato and brown rice. Only the commune cadres had it really good, touring here today, there tomorrow, always with a reception party at the ready, like it was New Year's every day. Just think about Secretary Zhou's juicy pink-and-white flesh, fattened on great vats of frying oil. His golden throat still sounded out clear as a gong even after a night of making reports, better even than Tiexiang's voice. He must be building up to an enormous lettuce jade.

Uncle Luo took over: "That's quite right: it's just as important to spot the big ones as to spot them at all. If Benyi's mouth grew a lettuce jade, it would be as big as a sweet potato at best, and even ten of them would be nothing to just one of Secretary Zhou's. You'd be far better off digging up Secretary Zhou's grave."

From Secretary Zhou, they moved onto Commune Head He, onto the bigwigs in the county, in the province, and finally to Chairman Mao. They all believed unanimously that Chairman Mao was the luckiest of all, his allotment of fortune the highest. His lettuce jade a hundred years from now would be something incredible, not just a panacea for all ills but a magical elixir of life. A national treasure like this, they reckoned, would need high-level chemical preservatives and a massive military guard day and night.

Having reflected on the matter, everyone concurred that was how it would be. By this time, the sun was already slanting to the west, so they hauled their rakes pensively onto their shoulders and headed for home.

A few days later, Secretary Zhou visited Maqiao to examine the brick recovery situation, and while he was about it asked me to help him write up some official materials on carbon paper, telling me again and again how elegant my imitation Song-style calligraphy was. Watching his beaming fat face, my thoughts kept on straying, as I imagined in his mouth a lettuce jade big as a parcel of vegetables that accompanied him everywhere he went. His voice was indeed resonant, always imitating the music in broadcasts, singing the newest song of praise for Beijing. He'd often ask me what I thought of his singing, listening to endless replays of my fawning compliments. He also asked me what sort of a Cultural Director I thought he'd make. Of course, I said, of course, you've got art in your bones, you're clearly the stuff Cultural Directors are made of. This made him even happier, kept him merrily humming away, and anyone he saw he'd greet warmly, ask them how their kids and their pigs were. The lettuce jade in his mouth began swelling to ever greater proportions, as if self-confidence dripped out of his very pores.

He got Benyi to take him to see the brick firing. I watched the lesser lettuce jade leading the greater lettuce jade-maybe soon we'd have baby lettuce jades carrying fired bricks I couldn't clear my befuddled head of these fantasies. I must've been digging too many graves lately, I thought, my head was full of bad stuff, full of the smell of corpses.

"Tell me, apart from imitation Song-style, what other calligraphy styles look good?"

"Lettuce jade."

"What did you say?"

"Er, what was it you…"

"I asked what other calligraphy styles look good."

I suddenly came to and hurriedly answered his question about calligraphy.

: Yellow vine was a highly poisonous species of plant: women who wanted to commit suicide usually went up the hillside and dug up some yellow vine, as did men planning to poison fish and shrimps in shallow, stagnant, slow-flowing bends in the river. A length of yellow vine knotted three times, with a piece of chicken feather inserted, or drenched in a bowl of chicken blood, presented to the enemy, was the final diplomatic communication before two sides met in war. Once this step had been taken, it meant things had already gotten pretty bad, and the conflict was irresolvable without some loss of life.

It was said that in the early years of the Republic, Maqiao people presented the vine to Longjia Sands. Returning home one day with an ox he'd bought, a certain Father Xingjia of Longjia Sands passed by a relative's house and popped in for a bite to eat and drink, leaving the ox tied up outside the main door. When he was, say, seventy or eighty percent drunk, he heard the sound of an ox lowing outside the door and asked a child to go outside and have a look. After taking a look, the child came back and said an unknown black ox had climbed onto the back of their ox. Father Xingjia was furious: he'd just brought his ox back from the market, what kind of a brute was this other animal? Raping it before he'd got his breath back?

Everyone jostled their way out the door, but found the owner of the black ox was nowhere to be seen. Rather the worse for wear and in a fit of drunken bravado, Father Xingjia's nephew grabbed a flaming branch and lashed out with it, jabbing it straight into the black ox's shoulder joint. With a great bray, the animal cantered off, taking with it the flaming branch, swinging and lurching as it went. Plunged deep in, the branch had, it would seem, wounded it to the very heart; after running home, the ox died that same day.

The ox was from Maqiao. The following day, Maqiao sent someone over with a yellow vine soaked in chicken blood.

The battle raged for ten days and Maqiao had by far the worst of it. The Peng family from Longjia Sands had a huge ancestral temple and, aiming to defeat Maqiao straight off, called up namesakes from a surrounding radius of thirty-six bows to come and help the village. Hopelessly outnumbered, the Maqiao forces had no choice but to ask an intermediary to make peace. Following the mediation, not only did the people of Maqiao not recover the money for the ox, they had to pull down houses and sell grain to compensate Longjia Sands to the tune of a copper gong, four pigs, and a six-table banquet, before the matter was settled. The Maqiao representatives dispatched to present compensation to Longjia Sands went banging drums: four old and four young there were, eight altogether, all with pants tied around their heads, all carrying bundles of rice straw on their backs to express the shame of defeat. Although they received ajar of wine from their adversaries as a gesture of friendship, they returned to the village with tears streaming down their faces, and kneeled, one after another, rooted to the ground before the ancestral tablet, intoning over and over how they'd betrayed their ancestors, how they no longer had the face to live. All night they drank, till their eyes were bloodshot, before finally swallowing yellow vine. On the morning of the following day, eight stiff corpses were carried out of the ancestral temple as the villagers all joined together in unanimous lament. Some of the abandoned graves I dug a few decades later, it was said, belonged to these people. Zhaoqing sighed, saying their descendants either died, or fled. Zhaoqing also said that the year the vine was presented happened to be a year of famine as well: none of the dead had had much to eat, none of them had had their fill of gruel, so of course their graves couldn't grow any lettuce jades.