Rubbing the head he'd somehow managed to keep on his shoulders, Kuiyuan said with lingering fear in his voice that the cell he'd been put in this time was neither one thing nor the other: it was a democracy, plain and simple. Three great rumbles had already been fought between the Sichuan gang, the Guangdong gang, and the Northeastern gang, without any decisive outcome. Even clapping the battle leaders in irons hadn't solved the problem for the disciplinary cadres. Terrified as he'd been every day, he hadn't had one good sleep.

I gave an icy laugh: "Got a lot of prison experience, have you?"

He anxiously leapt to his own defense: "No, no, no, nothing of the sort, I'm the most law-abiding person ever, if someone dropped their money in front of me, I wouldn't pick it up."

"How many times you been inside?"

"First time, absolutely the first time. Strike me down if I tell a lie, I swear. I've heard some things about prison from Brother Yanwu."

I couldn't remember who this was.

He couldn't believe it: "Can't you even remember Brother Yanwu? The board director, Yanzao's little brother! You know-didn't you used to play ball with him?"

When he mentioned Yanzao, it occurred to me that Yanzao, it seemed, had had a brother by this name. When I arrived in Maqiao, he was still in school, and I later heard he'd written some reactionary slogan on a stage and gone to prison-by that time, I'd already been transferred elsewhere. My memory, I realized, was getting worse and worse.

: Before I revisited Maqiao, a lot of people told me that Maqiao now had a Tiananmen, that it'd become a famous scenic spot (or almost), that even senior officials out on business came, that after visiting the shrine of Qu Yuan and the County Revolution Memorial, they'd always drive out to have a look.

Strictly speaking, Tiananmen wasn't actually in Maqiao, it was on the boundary with Zhangjia District, right next to what was later National Highway 107, but its link to Maqiao lay in its belonging to Maqiao's Yanwu. It was in fact a large residence, occupying a few dozen mu of land, with pavilions, terraces and turrets, a lotus pond, flower gardens, bamboo woods, a winding corridor set on the water, artificial mountains and rocks. The garden was divided up within itself, each part with its own name, one called "Garden of Eden," one called "The Xiang River Lodge," an indeterminate mix of East and West. Its construction was a bit crude: few of the tiles had been laid flat or clearly aligned, they were all skewed and encrusted with dried cement that hadn't been leveled off. Not many of the windows could be opened, being permanently stuck up with something or other. This caused inevitable anxieties: if Lin Daiyu- a famously sickly Chinese literary heroine-had spent all day in the gardens pushing and pulling at windows, she'd have had her work cut out for her-how'd she still have had time to bury flowers and burn poems? The days would've gone by without her managing to croak out much more than a few lines of karaoke.

People were at work on the skeleton of a small, two-storey Westernstyle hotel, and it was said that after it'd been finished they'd hire ten girls from around Jiangzhe as waitresses, especially to receive journalists, writers, and other guests.

I didn't get to see the owner: people said Yanwu lived mainly up in the county, coming back only now and then to take a look around the place and check up on a couple of factories around here. I glimpsed his house from far off, a small two-storey building in the center of the lotus pond. Three or four window air conditioners were visible around its perimeters, sticking out from each wall, far more than made logical sense; when I thought about it, even the toilets must have been terrifyingly, bone-chillingly cold. The whole house looked like a cement monster overgrown with iron tumors.

Some years earlier, I'd heard that the peasants around here had gotten rich and taken to buying seven or eight electric fans at a time. When they ran out of places to put them, they set them up in the pigpens. Then the next thing you knew, it was air conditioners that were all the rage. The guide was endlessly nagging at me to count the number of air conditioners and would start counting them for me in fives and tens whenever my concentration seemed to be slipping. Every excessively enunciated figure expressed a deep envy that was tinged also with a kind of pride, and that resonated inside my eardrum, as if these iron tumors were in some way part of him, as if he felt some inner compulsion to make me admire the dazzling results of the rich peasant policy.

The guide felt this was still not enough, and at some point went looking for a manager, a young man who knew me, apparently. I'd taught a few classes in days gone by and he'd been one of my students. He produced a key, wanting to take me on a visit to the house. I could hardly refuse the offer, and not having much choice in the matter, followed him across the twists of the winding corridor, through three iron sluice gates and, with a slam and a clatter of doors, into the mansion set in the lake. Its interior, a resplendent expanse of hanging lamps and wallpaper, was really quite nicely done. Unfortunately, as the electricity wasn't powerful enough, none of the air conditioners would start, so the manager had to give everyone a rush fan to stop them from sweating. The television wouldn't play any programs either-apparently the television tower in the neighborhood hadn't yet been put up. There were two telephones, one black, one red, and from the looks of the receivers, they weren't program-controlled, so you probably wouldn't get through to that many people here-people said the switchboard operator in the local government was never on the job and spent most of her time looking after her kid.

"Have some tea, have some tea," I was being given the full courtesy treatment.

"Okay." In fact, I'd rather have found some water to wash the sweat off me.

"Watch the TV, go on."

"Okay."

After the manager had spent ages tuning it with his bottom stuck in the air, the TV finally started flickering a little less and a brightly colored picture floated up out of nowhere, some tape of a foreign music video. It played and played, then started flickering again. Maybe the tape was broken, I said, and tried to change it for one that worked. After a lengthy search, I discovered there weren't any other tapes to watch, the only other one being a Hong Kong martial-arts movie in even worse condition.

By now, my face was streaming with sweat. Steam was billowing off the lotus pond and the scarlet carpet baking underfoot was roasting everyone till they smelled of cooked meat. Panting with the heat, I had to retreat outside the door until the others had finished watching the fragmentary singing and dancing.

I only later discovered that the name "Tiananmen" referred to the main building of the compound, which was a small-scale imitation of the architecture of Tiananmen Square. To give an idea of its size: a chicken chased to extremes of panic and desperation could probably have flapped its way up onto the top of the building. The building had arches, doorways, moats, and footbridges, and was painted deep red in imitation of palace walls. In front of the main entrance stood two grimacing stone lions. Unfortunately there was no water in the moat, only scattered clumps of grass out of which a couple of toads leapt sporadically. When you stood at the head of the building, no square or memorial lay ahead, only a row of commercial alleys, a gathering of desolate noodle stalls, odds-and-ends shops and the like, an empty pool table covered with yellow dust and a crowd of young men squatting under the eaves of buildings, some crouched on stools like roosting chickens, idling away their time.