The word "sweet" exposes a Maqiao blind spot with respect to food and drink, demarcating the boundaries of their knowledge in this area. But once you take a careful look at anything, you'll discover that everyone has all kinds of blind spots. The boundaries of human awareness do not snugly nestle back-to-back, and the weak flame of human perception is a long way from illuminating the whole world. Even today, the majority of Chinese people still have great difficulty in distinguishing the facial types of western, northern, and eastern Europeans, and in making out cultural differences between the British, the French, the Spanish, the Norwegians, the Poles, etc. The names of each European people are no more than empty symbols in school textbooks, and many Chinese, when put on the spot, are still unable to make any link between them and corresponding characteristics in facial type, clothing, language, and customs. This baffles Europeans, just as it baffles the Chinese that Europeans cannot differentiate clearly between people from Shanghai, Canton, and the Northeast. Thus, the Chinese prefer to use the general term "Westerner" or even "old foreigner," just as Maqiao people prefer the word "sweet." This type of generalization will naturally seem ridiculous to a British person who objects to being lumped together with Germans, or to a French person who objects to being lumped together with Americans. Similarly, even today, the vast majority of Chinese, even the majority of economists, still can't make out any apparent differences between capitalism in America, capitalism in western Europe, capitalism in Sweden and other northern European countries, and capitalism in Japan. Neither is any significant distinction made between 18th-century capitalism, 19th-century capitalism, 20th-century prewar capitalism, 1960s capitalism, and 1990s capitalism. For many Chinese, the term "capitalist" is quite sufficient to convey their intended sense of admiration or of loathing.

When I was in America, I came across an anticommunist political journal in which I was perplexed to discover that the editors' sense of political taste was stuck at the same level as Maqiao people's "sweet." For example, sometimes they lambasted such-and-such a Communist Party for its false Marxism, for betraying Marxism, and at other times just lambasted Marxism (in which case, isn't falsification or betrayal of it a good thing?). On the one hand they exposed the extramarital affairs and illegitimate children of Communist Party members, on the other hand derided the asceticism of Communist Party members for their excessive oppression of human nature (in which case, aren't extramarital affairs and illegitimate children completely in harmony with human nature?). They perceived no confusion or contradictions in their logic; they only perceived that anything anticommunist was worth cheering on, was very good, was sweet. It was in this journal that I happened across a certain news item: a woman named Chen, who had just fled from Hainan Island to Hong Kong, was proclaiming herself an anticommunist dissident and, thanks to the kindness of a Western government, had been given asylum as a political refugee. A few months later, on meeting an official from this country's embassy, I was seized with deep indignation on behalf of his government. At the dinner table, I told him that I knew this Miss Chen. She'd never participated in any political activities on Hainan Island. All she'd done was organize an "Island Heat Literary Contest," in which she'd swindled young writers from all over the country out of nearly 200,000 yuan in entry fees, dumped a huge pile of competition entries in a hotel, then picked up her heels, along with the money, and fled to Hong Kong. She hadn't managed to persuade me to act as a judge for the contest, but this hadn't proved an obstacle: in the call for contributions that she placed in a newspaper, she had cited the names of ten world-famous writers, Marquez, Kundera, Borges, and so on, who had all, amazingly, become her judges. She had envisaged a Super Nobel Literature Prize, to be adjudicated on Hainan Island.

My revelations seemed to puzzle the embassy official somewhat. He said, wrinkling his brow, maybe she had committed fraud, maybe she had acted badly, but couldn't her behavior be seen as a particular form of political opposition?

He gesticulated strenuously.

I dropped the subject. I didn't want to sway this diplomat's political standpoint over the dinner table. You can endorse or you can oppose any type of serious, scrupulous and peaceful political position, but you can't not respect it. I simply felt that I was in a difficult situation. Just as in the past I had no way of making Maqiao people distinguish linguistically between all the different kinds of "candy," neither did I at that moment have any way of making this diplomat distinguish between all the different kinds of "opposition" in China. In what he saw as a mysterious, alien country, fraud counted as no more than another piece of delicious "candy."

: The Chinese use a lot of popular names for industrial products. I was born in the city and reckoned myself really quite advanced, until I went down to the countryside. I knew about iodine solution, but I didn't know about tincture of iodine. In the same way, I'd got into the habit of calling mercury "red medicine," gentian violet "purple medicine," a storage battery "electric medicine," an ammeter "firemeter," a ceramic cup "foreign mug," an air-raid siren "nee-naa," whistling "tooting."

After I arrived in Maqiao, I often corrected the even more rustic terms used by the villagers. For example, a public square in a city should be public square, not "field," and certainly not "drying field."

So I was flabbergasted to discover that everyone here, men and women, young and old, all used a formal scientific term: tincture of iodine. They, on the contrary, didn't know what iodine solution was, and found it very strange that I used such an odd phrase. Even old grannies with clouded vision and foggy hearing talked in a more scholarly tone than I did. When they pronounced "tincture of iodine" in their Maqiao accent, it was as if they'd unconsciously uttered a secret code, a code that normally remained buried out of sight, only spoken in times of dire necessity, to make contact with the remoteness of modern science.

I inquired about the history of this word, since I got nowhere with my own conjectures. Maqiao had been visited neither by foreign missionaries (Westerners might have opened hospitals and used the scientific names of medical products) nor by large new-style armies (the soldiers might have been wounded and used the new names for medical products); most teachers would have studied in the county seat, and some would have gone even farther, to Yueyang or Changsha, but they wouldn't have brought back phraseology more modern than anything in use there. I finally discovered that this term was linked to one mysterious person.

Uncle Luo, the old village leader of the lower village, told me as he sucked on his bamboo pipe that a person called Long Stick Xi was the first person to use the phrase "tincture of iodine" here.