This Russian folk song used to be very popular among the youth, but had been replaced by songs extolling the new society, the Party, and the leaders.

Little Five put down her head to pluck the strings. Muted soft notes arose, but she didn't seem to be listening, and looked listless. When she looked at him, he felt utterly confused. Somewhere in the room a cricket quietly chirped, and outside the small window the hot sun glared fiercely. The girl played a tune, stopped, and told Luo she didn't feel like singing. When she turned to him, she seemed to be looking somewhere above his head.

"If you don't want to sing, then don't," Luo said. "But come to see a movie tonight."

The girl smiled without answering, and put the guitar by die door. When she got as far as the main room, she turned and said, "I've got things to do at home!" Then she went off.

"The hell she has. As if I'd believe that crap," Luo said. "You really don't know how to flirt with girls. Don't you want to date her?"

He fell silent. Luo said there wasn't much of a future, so his group of losers often found girls to have a bit of fun, to play the guitar, and to sing together. Sometimes they went to the lake outside the city. They would have a swim or steal a small boat, row out to where the lotus grew in thick clumps, and steal some of the pods. Little Five went with them, and, at night in the middle of the lake, anyone could roam her body and she wouldn't complain. She was a very worldly wench. It was obvious Luo was in love with her, but he said he had a woman. The two of them had grown up together, but she had joined a song-and-dance troupe in a military zone and couldn't marry a vegetable seller like him. Anyway, she got pregnant. That was last winter. Getting an abortion in a hospital required a marriage certificate and a work card, but where could he get hold of these? On top of that, the woman was military personnel, and she had to obtain permission from her superiors to get married. If her workplace found out, she would, of course, be expelled from the army, lose that good job, and end up hating him for the rest of her life! Furthermore, the tiny income from the cooperative vegetable stall was barely enough to feed himself, how would he be able to support a wife and a child? Luckily, one of his maternal uncles was a doctor in a county town, and, thanks to his uncle persuading his associates at the county hospital, Luo was able to take her there, say they were married, and have the abortion performed.

"I went with her early on Sunday morning, and she had to get back to the song-and-dance troupe by ten o'clock that night for roll call. It was army regulation. We had to change buses on the way and were waiting by the bus-stop sign. It had been dark for some time, it was raining, and there wasn't anyone else around. She said she was still bleeding down there, and as I put my arms around her the two of us wept miserably. Afterward, we separated, just like that. Can this be expressed in writing?" Luo asked. "Where is this new life?"

Luo said he couldn't help being decadent. He had womanized in the two years he spent fishing. When the men on the island went out to fish on the high seas, there was no way of knowing if they would be back. He was a young boy just out of school, there was an abundance of sex-crazed women in the fishing village, and that was how it all started. There was nothing romantic to it, and, after he had had his fling, he knew that it was really fucking boring. There was no one he could have a conversation with, so he chose to come back and sell vegetables.

"What gave you the idea of being a fisherman?" he asked Luo.

"I had no choice, I had to find something to do. At the time, like you, I wanted to go to a prestigious university to study literature. Don't you know why I failed?" Luo asked.

"You were the most outstanding in the whole class and acknowledged as a poet by your fellow students. It didn't occur to me that you would fail," he said.

"It was all because of that fuckin' poetry," Luo said. "The year of the university entrance examination was just before the antirightist campaign. Hadn't they called upon people to speak out? The provincial publications got some young writers to take part in a meeting where they were encouraged to speak their minds. I joined with some other young writers and said that there were too many restrictions on topics. Poetry was poetry, why did it have to be divided into industrial themes, agricultural themes, and lives of young people? I also said that they had published my worst poems with the best lines deleted. Because of those comments, they sent in a report to the school. The principal had me in for a talk, and it was only then that I found out I was in trouble. I don't know what happened to the others. I was the youngest, and I had spoken less than the others. At least, I was able to come back to sell vegetables."

Afterward, he bought three tickets to the movies. He waited at the door of the theater until the show was due to start, when Little Five turned up running and out of breath. She said Luo had to go on night duty at the vegetable stall and couldn't come. He wasn't sure if it was Luo's intention to push Little Five onto him, but as soon as they went inside the darkened theater, he took Little Five's hand and they sat down in a couple of seats on the side. He had no idea what the movie was about and only recalled that he was holding the girl's soft hand all the time and that his hot palm was sweating.

He thought that as all the boys had felt the girl, why shouldn't he? Before that, he had never touched a girl. Love for him was something totally different.

At senior middle school, he fell in love with a girl from a lower grade and got to speak with her at the New Year school dance. Right through the night, whether they were playing at solving riddles written on lanterns or some other game, he kept close to that girl in a red pinafore with black flowers. In the hazy light of dawn, or maybe in the reflected light of the streetlights on the snow, he followed the girl as she walked home with some other girls. They were laughing and looking back at him from time to time, and he knew they were talking about him.

He did not think that he, too, could casually touch a girl. When he came out of the theater with Little Five, he deliberately avoided the main street and went into an alley, all the time holding her hand. The girl went along with him, looking at her shoes as she walked, and, now and then, kicking stones on the road. At a corner unlit by the streetlights, he took Little Five's arm and tried to draw her to him. She shook her head and looked at him wide-eyed.

"You men are all bad."

He said he wasn't like that and only wanted to kiss her.

"Why?" she asked with a frown, as the whites of her eyes showed.

He let go of her and said he had never kissed a girl before. Little Five said she'd have to think about it.

His hands fell to his sides, and he hung his head. He did not expect to hear Little Five say, "Then go ahead and kiss me."

He touched her tightly closed lips and immediately withdrew. Little Five closed her eyes, her lips relaxed, and he kissed her again. This time, her lips were thick and soft. He touched her firm breasts through her loose-fitting clothes, and the girl murmured, "Don't hurt me…"

His hand found its way inside her clothes and roamed over her swelling breasts. But he did not dare and had not considered having sex with a girl he did not love. He did not yet know about lust, but he could tell that the girl was really passionate. Afterward, at the university, he received a letter from Little Five. It was a simple letter asking whether he would be back for the summer vacation.

That summer he didn't return. It was the great famine that followed in the wake of the Great Leap Forward. During the summer vacation, university students were required to do voluntary labor, digging holes to plant trees in the Western Hills of Beijing. Everyone was swollen from hunger but nevertheless obliged to donate the whole vacation to carrying out these futile "good deeds." He regretted that he had not been able to sink into total depravity when he was fooling around with Little Five that summer vacation, and he secretly wanted to be totally decadent.