This was what Zhaoqing said.

It was he who told me. I remember.

: I didn't recognize Kuiyuan when I bumped into him again all those years later. Both he and his Adam's apple had grown, along with a little beard; he wore a suit with rolled edges, walked around in eye-catching leather shoes, wafted fragrant breezes from his washed hair and carried a black leather bag that wouldn't zip up. He was Kuiyuan, Ma Zhaoqing's youngest, he said: Don't you recognize me, Uncle Shaogong? What a memory you have, ha-ha-ha!

I had to puzzle away for ages before I finally dredged up a child's face from long, long ago, and drew one or two points of corroborating resemblance between it and the unfamiliar face before me. I also recognized a letter he produced, written by me, true enough, to Fucha a few years ago, discussing some language-related question.

He said he'd been missing me and that he'd come to the city especially to see me. I asked him, wonderingly, how he'd managed to find me. Don't ask, he said, he'd had a devil of a time finding the way. When he'd been set down on the quay, he'd asked everywhere where I lived, but no one he'd asked had known. In the end, he'd asked where the municipal government was-still no one knew. Losing his temper, he asked where the county government was, and someone finally pointed him in some sort of a direction. I thought you were looking for me, I laughed, what did you want with the municipal and county governments? He said he had a couple of outings every year, he'd been to Wuhan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, all sorts of places. He knew how to get about. This seemed to serve as his answer to my question.

He didn't say whether he'd actually found the government offices. But he complained about how my phone must be broken and how he hadn't been able to get through, however hard he tried. I later discovered that he hadn't in fact had my telephone number at all, so heaven only knew what number he'd been calling.

In the end, he got in a taxi and spent fifty yuan-almost all the money he'd had left on him-before finding out what university I was at. Not knowing what taxis cost here, he'd been ripped off by a crooked driver, no doubt about it.

This, of course, was no cause for worry-he'd always felt pretty detached about money matters. To sum up, he contacted the government, made a phone call, took a taxi, did everything an important visitor should, before he finally chanced across an acquaintance of mine who took him to where I lived. He'd never believed he wouldn't find me, he said, and everything had, as expected, come out in the wash: without any undue exertion, he'd miraculously pulled off a long-distance raid on my home, bringing along for good measure another young man I didn't know. Now he was home and dry, everything was fine and dandy; he took off his coat and watch, his shoes and socks, and rubbed the sweat and mud from his feet. Casting his eyes about the place, he was amazed to see I didn't have a real leather sofa, or a big, right-angled wide-screen color TV, or color-sprayed vinyl walls and mood lighting and laser-sound stereo karaoke-he knew a lot more about city life than I did. I said laser-sound stereo karaoke cost too much, forty, maybe fifty yuan for one disc. He corrected my mistake: what are you talking about, he said, a good disc would cost one, two hundred at least. Has the price gone up? I asked. It's never been less, he said. Unwilling to concede the point, I said that a friend of mine a couple of days ago had bought one at this price, a genuine, nonpirated disc. He said that wouldn't have been DDD, it wouldn't have been digital; no one serious about singing would've wanted anything to do with it.

Not understanding DDDs, I didn't dare take the matter any further and merely absorbed his instruction in silence.

After he'd washed, he put on some of my clothes and said with a smile he'd known all along he wouldn't need to bring a change of clothing: What sort of a person d'you think Uncle Shaogong is? he'd said to the folks back home. When I get to his place, there'll be clothes to wear, food to eat, work to do, no fear! When at home, rely on parents, away from home, you rely on friends… He slapped me affectionately on the back as he told me this.

I removed his hand.

Things weren't that simple, I said, but let's get you settled, and then we'll see.

I took them to a hotel. When they were registering, I discovered he was no longer surnamed Ma: the surname on his ID. card had been changed to Hu. That was how I found out that after his dad died, his mother hadn't been able to bring up all the kids and had given him away to someone else, along with an elder brother and elder sister given away elsewhere. I also found out that where they came from, adopted children had no inheritance rights before they'd "pressed names."

Pressing names was a ritual carried out to formalize entry to a clan, conducted after the funeral of the adoptive father, in which the clan elders sang the name of the adoptive father, the name of the adoptive grandfather, the name of the father of the adoptive grandfather, the name of the grandfather of the adoptive grandfather, the name of the father of the grandfather of the adoptive grandfather… of the person entering the clan. They sang the names of all the fathers they could possibly trace back to ensure that the person being adopted would inherit the ancestors' property and trade, and to prevent him from taking the property or land back to his original family later on. As they saw it, names were sacred and the names of the dead wielded an additionally mysterious kind of power, capable of defeating demons and punishing the unfilial. Kuiyuan said that the Hu family weren't short of property- the house was their own-but unfortunately the old man was long-lived, could still go out to work in the fields even at the age of eighty-seven. Last year he'd spend three months ill in bed, coughing up phlegm and blood, and it'd looked as if his number was pretty much up. No one had expected that, after all this time spent dying, he'd come back to life again… What on earth was he meant to do? Kuiyuan's eyes widened in astonished bemusement. What he meant was that he hadn't yet been rewarded for his pains, he hadn't yet pressed names and so didn't yet have rights of ownership over the house.

And so he couldn't wait forever: he had to try and make his way in the city.

: I had a friend, a big boss in the city, who employed an engineering team. 1 introduced him to Kuiyuan and the young man who'd come with him and they got taken on as unskilled workers-I reckoned that would just about earn them a bowl of rice.

A few days later, they were banging on my door, both faces a picture of woe: it was impossible, they said. No, it really was impossible.

"What happened?"

"Nothing, really."

"Are you streetsick?"

"I've never gotten streetsick, it was just we got… burned."

"D'you mean sunburned?"

"Right, mmm."

"Didn't you wear a hat?"

"Hat didn't do any good."

"Don't you get sunburned in the village?"

"I've… never worked in the fields."

"Well what did you do all day, then?"

"Nothing much, sometimes I'd help brother Yanwu harvest a bit of grain, collect a few debts, most of the time I'd just mess about, play cards, sit around other people's houses." Kuiyuan flashed a smile, exchanging glances with the young man who'd come with him, who just then was taking a sidelong glance at the television as he cracked sunflower seeds, but who also smiled at that moment.