Given that exceeding the birth quota was classified along with all those other things as a "violation of law and order," and that it lay within the range of his personal capabilities, it isn't hard to guess how he would unhesitatingly decide to act.

His exceeding the birth quota was totally illogical, sprang not from any assessment of personal benefit, but from a habit of understanding, from an impulsive pursuit of all privileged behavior. Maybe it was because in the past he'd known a director or manager who'd produced a high-and-mighty brood of three while everyone else had to toe the line, maybe he'd always secretly envied him. And so once he'd done what ordinary people didn't dare do, or couldn't do, the thing in itself made him feel like he was head and shoulders above everyone else, like he was a director or manager. His efforts to conceal the facts of his transgression from the authorities concerned were about as strenuous as someone who'd blatantly embezzled a million yuan: he quietly crowed in self-satisfaction, endlessly savoring his rash audacity.

What use was propaganda to people like him? What was the use of propaganda about legal disciplinary measures? Of course there was a use: to increase his excitement at taking desperate risks, to renew the temptation daily.

I can't find any other way of explaining it.

If the explanation given above is generally correct, then the whole affair comes down to a question of language, to an absurd coincidence of meanings interlocking and short-circuiting. In the end, the law-breaker lost his bowl of rice and paid a high price for one or two extremely ordinary words. The propaganda that the wielders of power directed at him had been entirely useless, had ended at cross-purposes: on encountering a totally alien dictionary, a totally impenetrable pair of ears, it had hastened along the birth of a furry-headed, bawling, screaming baby girl. This baby was superfluous to all parties concerned. But this mistake could never be covered up, or daubed away with correcting fluid, or deleted with an eraser.

She'd grow up, grow up into the future.

She was a mistranslated sentence made of flesh and blood.

: In Maqiao during the 1990s, a lot of new words came into fashion and passed into common usage: "television," "paint," "diet," "operate," "Ni Ping" (a well-known television host), "disco dancing," "Highway 107," "seafood," "lottery tickets," "build the Great Wall" (play mahjong), "bump-the-butt" (motorbike), "hold the basket" (act as mediator), and so on. In addition, a mass of old words which hadn't been used much between the fifties and the seventies all turned up again. Anyone who didn't know this might have mistaken them for new words. For example:

"Cut up"-originally a Red Gang (secret society) phrase, meaning to kill someone.

"Sort out"-this also used to be a Red Gang term. Following its frequent usage in lawsuits, it later gradually grew in currency via itinerants, grew broader and broader in meaning, until it came to refer generally to any course of action that solved problems or difficulties. This word was also used in newspapers, in news headlines such as: "The Reforms Will Sort Everything Out."

"Ox-head"-this referred to a mediator or arbitrator with the authorities, a role usually taken on by the noblest, the most senior and most prestigious of the elders. The ox-head was decided neither through election nor through official appointment: whoever acted as ox-head relied during his tenure on agreement naturally reached among the people.

"Straw sandal money"-this used to refer to the tip that people who'd come from far away on public business would ask for from the person involved when the business had been completed. After this word made its reappearance at the end of the 1980s, its meaning stayed basically the same, the only difference being that straw sandal money by then was given mostly to cadres wearing leather or rubber shoes, to members of public security teams, to the well-meaning bringers of good or bad tidings and so on; and it was no longer paid in grains of rice, not like before.

"Bubbleskin"-a lazy good-for-nothing, equivalent to the Mandarin expression "roughskin," but lacking the thuggish overtones of "rough," implying something more small-fry, more cowardly and obsequious, something that resembled the insubstantial fragility of a bubble.

And so on.

It was from Kuiyuan that I heard the word "bubbleskin." In fact, Kuiyuan himself had something of the bubbleskin about him. That time in my living room, when I read him the riot act about his laziness, he immediately started nodding his head, yes-yes-yes-ing, like a chicken pecking at rice. He couldn't keep his eyes, hands or feet still, as he sought to agree with me in every possible ingratiating way. When I was his age, I said, I'd work ten hours a day; what did I mean ten hours, he said, surely fifteen hours, at the very least, I wouldn't see daylight at either end. Wasn't that right? Even in the countryside, I said, you still had a future, as long as you were willing to dig in, keep chickens, fish, pigs, you could end up with 10,000 yuan; what did I mean 10,000 yuan, he said, some became company directors, with offices abroad, surely I'd seen the stories on TV?

He overdid it a bit, turning the interrogation around on me.

In the end, stopping just short of slapping himself on the head, of shouting furiously for his own extermination, he hastily collected together the shorts and socks he'd just laid out to dry, stuffed them into the black leather bag with the broken zipper, asked me for some red plastic tape, and tightly bound the black leather bag a few times around. He took off the shirt I'd lent him and said he'd leave for home today, there was still time to catch the last boat from the quayside.

He didn't even drink his tea.

It was already late at night. I suddenly started to feel a bit bad about this abrupt departure. He didn't have to hurry back during the night, or return my shirt to me-he could at least finish his tea before he left.

"You don't need to be in such a hurry. You came, you didn't find any work, but it's all right to stay a couple of days just to mess around before you go, who knows when you'll have another chance…" My tone had warmed up by several degrees.

"We've messed around quite enough."

"How about going tomorrow, after breakfast?"

"When you've got to go, you've got to go-and anyway, it's cooler at night."

He and the young man with him seemed to be racing against time, unwilling to lose a moment in their haste to return to the village. They were strangers in the city, utterly clueless as to whether they'd be able to find their way, whether they'd be able to find the bus to the quay, whether they'd be able to catch the last boat, how they'd spend this long night if they didn't happen to catch the right boat. My rebuke had suddenly electrified them: you could have set mountains of knives and seas of fire before them and still they'd have leapt in without a second thought. As I was heading off to find a friend to borrow a car, planning on taking them part of the way, they called out a few times from somewhere off in the distance before they slipped into the black night and, within the blink of an eye, disappeared without a trace.