: After Kuiyuan left my house, he didn't actually return to the village. About ten or so days later, there was a knock on my door and on opening it up I found a tousle-haired, dirty-faced boy who handed me an extremely crumpled cigarette box on the top of which were written in ballpoint pen two lines of characters. The nib had obviously run out of ink and in several places had poked through the card without leaving a mark, leaving me no choice but to guess what was in the blanks.

"Uncle Shaogong, you must must come safe (save) us, quick!" It was signed: "Yor nefew (nephew) Kuiyuan." I asked what this was meant to be. My messenger had no idea either. He didn't know of any Kuiyuan. All he knew was that today, without giving any explanation, someone had stuffed ten yuan into his hands and asked him to deliver this note-that was the long and the short of it. If he'd known before he started how hard my house would be to find, he wouldn't have done it for thirty yuan. He hung around for a while, only leaving when I gave him another five yuan.

It was clear as day: Kuiyuan had committed some crime and been put in jail.

I was both furious and worried, and if old Kuiyuan had been in front of me there and then, I'm afraid we might have come to blows. But the die being cast, the damage already done, I'd have to swallow my pride, grit my teeth, and brace myself for some contact with the seamy side of life. First of all, I had to make inquiries as to where the detention center was, which involved working out the distinction between county and municipal centers, between guard centers and temporary centers and interrogation centers, and so on. All the acquaintances who answered my questions listened to my patient explanations, umming and ah-ing before simply letting the matter drop, clearly still completely mystified. Then I went to my work unit to pick up some documentation that might be useful, scooped up some money and headed for the suburbs, straight into a billowing sand storm. Because I was speeding, I was stopped and fined twice on the way by transport police, and it was already dark by the time I found the detention center. Their business hours were over, so I had no choice but to come back the next day. The next day, after producing a great many smiles, platitudes, and cigarettes, and imitating every dialect there was to ingratiate myself with every big cheese there was, I finally jostled my way into the crowd of people encircling the office and managed to talk to a female police officer who spoke with a Sichuan accent. I finally learned the details of Kuiyuan's case: gambling in a group at the quay-which, although she said it came within the parameters of the "strike hard" campaign, wasn't considered too serious, added to which the cells were impossibly overcrowded, so it was-punishable by fine. I was pleasantly surprised by these last three words and thanked her repeatedly in Sichuan dialect.

I hadn't brought enough cash, so that afternoon I took another sum of money along, handed over enough for the fine, living costs, educational materials, and so on, and took him away. One tiny twist in the story remained before I took him away: probably because there were too many convicts, the prison warden didn't know which cell he was locked up in.

Rushed off their feet, they made me sit and wait for two or three hours before they finally took pity and made an exception to the rules, allowing me to enter the cells area and look through the cells, one by one, myself. I glimpsed two long rows of grey metal doors stretching off into the distance, each door with a tiny window inset, crammed with faces; or rather, each was a square of eyes compressed in at every angle, packed denser than a block of meat fresh out of the freezer. Every eye seized hold of me, waited for me. I started with Number One: my effortful request to each square meat brick to move aside for a moment opened out a slight crack of space into which I could shout Hu Kuiyuan's name, then press my ear up close, silently listening for a movement within. I heard a miscellaneous buzz of voices, smelled a sour, rotten odor of sweat and urine, but time and time again was disappointed-no one answered.

Twenty-odd windows had gone past and my throat was beginning to crack, when a thin, weak answer floated over as if from a distant, very distant horizon, a whisper transmitted to my ear by the iron bars, drifting in and out of hearing. I was astonished: every cell was at the most twenty or thirty meters square, how could a voice sound so distant? How come it seemed to come out of a universe of infinite depth and distance, that stretched out behind the iron bars?

"Ah-ah-ah-" It sounded like someone was pinching his windpipe.

He received back from the police the black leather bag with the unzippable zipper, said many words of sincere repentance to them, then uttered nothing further, just sat on the backseat of the motorbike, getting a surreptitious measure of the expression on my face. It was only after we'd gone a few kilometers that I sensed the person behind me was wiggling his feet, dispersing their bad smell a little on the wind.

Back home, the first thing I did was tell him to stand in the doorway and not move, not sit down, not touch a single thing in my house, to take off his clothes straightaway and go into the bathroom; every single item of his clothing was collected up into a bundle by my wife and stuffed into the washing machine.

As expected, my wife, yelping with alarm from over by the washing machine, soon discovered lice, bedbugs, and traces of blood on his clothes. Slinking out of the bathroom, Kuiyuan smirked with embarrassment, asking as he combed his hair, "Where's the mirror?"

I pointed.

"I was unlucky, this time I got into a democracy cell…"

I didn't understand.

"I only survived by the skin of my teeth."

"What d'you mean, democracy cell?"

"Don't you know what a democracy cell is?"

"I've never committed a crime."

"It's just… it's just… everyone's democratic, right."

"What's that mean?"

"Democracy means lice, bedbugs, fights, blood, lots of them."

I still didn't understand.

He started to eat. He said in a prison cell the prison king had the best time of it, when he ate, there'd be people fanning him, singing songs, offering a towel to wipe his face. When the food came, the prison king would have first pick, nabbing all the good things, like the meat, of course. Afterwards, the "Four Daoist Immortals" and "Eight Daoist Immortals," the prison king's direct subordinates, would eat, picking out another layer of good stuff. The scraps of soup and leftover rice remaining were all the little people ate. When the prison king wanted to sleep, he took the best place. When the prison king wanted to see the female convicts, only he stood in the window opening, lifted onto the shoulders of those below, who'd sometimes support him for up to two hours at a stretch, their legs trembling with exhaustion.

A newcomer had no choice but to fall into line. If you weren't prepared to follow the fiat of the prison king, the Daoist Immortals or those convicts in waiting for promotion as Daoist Immortals would soon beat you half to death. This was called "softening you up." Or they'd stick you in the frame, show the guards in charge of discipline a nail or razor blade to prove you'd broken prison rules, and you'd end up in chains or with a yoke round your feet. He said although a prison king was pretty vicious, in a prison king's cell, people were usually quite law-abiding, generally there was a leader in everything, there were no group fights, things were kept fairly clean and hygienic, the towels hung up neatly, the quilts folded one on top of another, which kept the disciplinary cadres happy. To convicts, the democracy cell was the most terrifying thing of all, when a prison king hadn't yet emerged, or when victory and defeat between two or three prison kings remained undecided-that was no life at all. One stray comment and there'd be shouting and fighting; you'd be doing pretty well to keep your eyes, nose, hands and feet on after a few months in a democracy