"Just lend it me for two or three days, two or three days, once the pigs are out of the pen I'll pay you back."

I couldn't believe him. It wasn't just me, I knew; almost all the Educated Youth had made this mistake with him: once the money was out of your hands it was very difficult to get it back. For him, borrowing money was almost a hobby, an interest of his, a form of entertainment with little link to any concrete purposes-he often borrowed when he didn't need money at all. Once he let himself in for a savaging by Master Black, having borrowed one yuan off him in the morning, but, persuaded by his fist, returned the original article to him in the afternoon, without having done anything with it. Of course, borrowing the money was something in itself: with a note warming his pocket for a few hours, his heart could rest happy and easy. "Is all money the same?" he once remarked in all earnestness. "There's nothing special about using money, anyone can use money. What kind of money you use though, and using it in a way that brings happiness-now that takes effort."

He also said: "Man lives a lifetime, the grass for an autumn, what does money count for? People should just try to be happy."

Quite the philosopher, he was.

As he kept grinding his teeth, I ended up pushed beyond the limits of endurance and had to chase him out into another shed. He didn't have anything much to move: no quilt, no trunk, no bowl, no chopsticks either, he didn't even have his own carrying pole and hoe. No one in any of the work sheds was willing to take him in, due to his calculating lack of possessions: even his same-pot cousin begrudged him not having a straw bed-mat and wouldn't share a bed with him. Several days passed without him finding a nest to shelter in. This was no great problem to him: by day, he scraped by just like other people. Once night fell, the black night intensified his ability to take advantage. He'd wash his face, feet, and hands as hard as he could, grin as winsomely as he could and call on work shed after work shed, quietly honing in on his target, searching, groping, and clambering into an empty bed whenever he saw one. Drop your defences for an instant and he'd burrow into a corner of the bed. One more hesitation and he'd be faking a whistling snore. However much you thumped and swore at him, however much you yanked at his hair and ears, he wouldn't open his eyes, wouldn't budge.

You could've beaten him to death.

He had a small frame, wiry as a shrivelled toad's. Asleep on the corner of the bed, he resembled a tiny clenched fist; with his spine curled and feet tucked up, he didn't actually take up much space.

If on any one day the resistance was universally stiffer than usual and he couldn't in fact find a crack through which to squeeze himself, then he'd lay a couple of carrying poles down somewhere sheltered out of the wind and pass the night fully dressed on the poles. This was a unique skill of his. He even possessed talent at sleeping on one carrying pole: he could sleep like this for hours on end, not moving a muscle, not falling off-that spine of his would have astonished even tightrope walkers.

He preferred to give his carrying pole skill a showing every night rather than return home to fetch a straw bed-mat. The funny thing was that he slept in frost and dew without ever getting ill-he remained, in fact, as perky and chipper as a little cockerel. Whenever I woke up, he was already busy as a bee, twisting some grass rope or sharpening a piece of hoe in the hazy early morning light. By the time I turned up at the construction site, sleepy and bleary-eyed, he'd always worked up a sweat. When the sun came out, burning up the boundless expanses of mist that lay over the ground, it gilded Shortie Zhao's whole body with a reddish-gold glow. I remember his digging action as having a particular grace: it was as if the heavy harrow wasn't lifted by him but flew up voluntarily, descending in line with his steps, rising and falling with precision. The instant in which the harrow fell, a flick of the wrist deftly turned it, the head shattering the clods of earth with instantaneous economy. His feet stamped in perfect rhythm, in an action that lacked any trace of sloppiness, that wasted not a moment of time nor ounce of energy. His actions couldn't be analyzed separately, the one from the other: all his actions, in fact, were indivisible, were as one, were realized as a unity in which form followed thought, followed a smooth and easy progression, like a dance with no trips. Head lowered, he performed his dazzling, sublime dance in the gleaming orange mist.

This work machine, of course, got the most work points of all: if tasks were being timed, he'd often do in one day what took me two or three days, leaving envious incredulity in his wake. And yet he spent his nights on a carrying pole. I found out afterwards he often slept like this at home-with the seven or eight kids he had to raise, the tattered quilts on the two beds covered his kids but never stretched to him too.

When the family planning movement began, he was a prime target for a vasectomy. He was most unhappy about this: the Communist Party already governed heaven and earth, how come they wanted to govern the inside of his crotch as well?

But when the time came, off he trotted obediently to the commune clinic. There were various explanations as to why it was him and not his wife who went to be sterilized. He said his wife wasn't well and couldn't be sterilized. Other people said he was worried his wife would have affairs and that after being sterilized she'd cheat on him left and right. What crap, others said, everyone who got sterilized received a standard government reward of two packets of grape candy and five catties of pork; Shortie Zhao had never eaten grape candy, so he fought to go under the knife just to taste it once.

Ten or so days later, he re-emerged to come back out to work, his face clean-shaven and his complexion much rosier: grape candy, it would seem, could work miracles. The young men laughed at him and said only women went to be sterilized-when did you ever hear of a man going? Once you'd had the chop, didn't you become a eunuch? Deeply agitated, he said the government had guaranteed that wouldn't happen. Seeing the disbelieving faces massed around him, he pulled his pants down to give everyone a viewing, to clear his name of this slur.

Master Black, who still bore a grudge over the soap business, wouldn't let the matter lie: it may look the same, he said, but who knows if it still works?

"Just call your Miss Xia over, m'boy," said Zhaoqing, "then you'll know if it still works."

Miss Xia was a female Educated Youth, being courted at the time by Master Black.

Master Black reddened: "That no-good turtle-spawn hooligan!"

Shortie Zhao slowly tied his pants, "So, your heart aches at the mention of your Miss Xia? Those round buttocks of your Miss Xia, strike me down if…"

Before he'd finished his sentence, Master Black charged and threw him over his back with a Mongol-style wrestling move. When he raised his head, his whole face was covered with mud.

Muddy-faced, he clambered up and ran a long way away, swearing and yelling: "I've got grandsons watching the oxen, I've just had an operation, I'm a sick man just out of the hospital, even Commune Head He sent his regards and said I'd contributed to the nation, how dare you beat me, you little bastard? How dare you?"

He went back home cradling his stomach, managed to gasp out the beating had given him an internal injury and spent five or so yuan on herbal medicine. He'd walked off with a hoe belonging to Master Black, mortgaged for the time being for three yuan, a towel made up another half a yuan-Master Black had better return him the two-odd yuan he still owed him.

His vasectomy operation henceforth gave him justification for putting a premium on everything he did, became his proof of entitlement to preferential treatment wherever he went. Today he'd want to plough the fields (there were a lot of work points in ploughing) because he'd had a vasectomy; tomorrow he wouldn't want to plough (there were even more work points in pressing oil), also because he'd had a vasectomy; tomorrow he'd want the scales to be tipped (when the team head was allocating grain), because he'd had a vasectomy; today he'd want the scales to slip (when delivering manure to the team head), also because he'd had a vasectomy. He always got this to work for him, actually, and even tried his luck outside of Maqiao. When he went into the county with Fucha to buy seeds, they got on a bus at Changle. He absolutely refused to buy a ticket. He had the money all right, public family money, it wasn't earned by his own blood and sweat. But he had an instinctive, bitter, virulent aversion to parting with cash and grumbled endlessly and indignantly about any ticket price: "1.2 yuan? What d'you mean 1.2 yuan? For this hop and a skip? Should be two jiao at most!"