His sister came in from the backyard carrying a pan of green leaves and dumped them in a large kettle of cold water, singing as she did. Yang recalled the stanza. It was from a skit his sister's class had performed for National Day a year ago. The girls had learned the song from a play that was mailed out to all the primaries, a short musical dramatization emphasizing the value of early warning and treatment of stomach cancer, China's number-one killer. His sister had stopped attending school after that year, speaking of plans to join the People's Liberation Army. Now she washed cabbage leaves and stacked them beside her aunt's wok – delicately, as though arranging expensive silks – while she sang:

How very fine, Yang agreed without raising his head from the work text; how commendable. But please explain if possible how one uses the principles of Prevention First when dealing with the diseases of the revolution itself? Wouldn't the very cure be dangerously counterrevolutionary?

He closed the big paperback on his finger and turned to watch his sister. She was long past fifteen and rounding out rapidly. In a few months someone would accompany the girl to their communal market for her first binding undergarment. In a few years Yang would not be able to pick her from dozens her same age – the same white shirt, the same black pants, the same pigtails. Perhaps that was why she wanted to join the PLA; if the uniforms were always ill-fitting and baggy they at least were less uniform than what all the other girls her age would be wearing.

Now his sister sang and swayed in unfettered innocence, still flushing with young patriotism. Yang could recall the sensation – a thrill to be part of something vast and exciting. He could remember feeling that his blood was tolling in cadence with every heart in the village, to a great shared rhythm. When he was nine, he remembered, there had come a dreadful plague of flies throughout all the land. To deal with the problem their Great Chairman had done a mighty and yet simple thing. Mao had launched an edict proclaiming that while it was not required it would be a very good thing if all the schoolchildren in the land should bring to their schoolteachers every morning dead flies. Yang had dedicated himself to the chore with all the fervor of a warrior of old serving his emperor.

He spent hours each afternoon stalking the pestiferous foe with a rolled newspaper, slaying scores past ten. Hundreds and hundreds were poured each morning from his paper cone into the teacher's waiting tray. Throughout the land other children were turning in comparable kills. In less than a month the flies were gone, all across China. Each schoolroom was sent an official pennant to hang in the window. The red silk had filled Yang with the sort of pride that made national songs rise to the throat.

Then he learned from his biology teacher that the year preceding the Great Fly Kill had been the year of the Great Sparrow Kill. That year Mao had been advised that there were such-and-so-many wild birds in China and, during its little life, each bird could be calculated to eat at least this-and-that-much grain. Which came to a whole lot. So Mao had edicted that all the kids should go out beneath all the trees where all the birds roosted, and beat clappers all night every night until they roosted no more. After three nights the birds were all dead from exhaustion and irritation. All across China! How very impressive and commendable. Except that, in the season after the birdless year, there were all those flies…

No, the slogan songs no longer brought the old tolling to Yang's blood. He still enjoyed hearing it in his sister's voice but he feared it was gone from him forever, that ring, cold and gone.

But not the wonder, he was glad to say. Not that. For instance, what had all those schoolteachers in all those classrooms all across China done with all those dead flies?

The approach of the Beijing Marathon and its international coverage brought about a relaxation of many edicts and a return to some neglected ceremonies. In the go parlors, waitresses were allowed to dress in traditional servant's gowns and pour tea for the players engrossed over their click-clicking go boards with the elaborated obeisance of old. In the food markets, children could sell cones of nuts and keep their profits, as long as they had personally gathered the nuts.

In Qufu, the small town near Yang's village in Shangong province, a group filed out of the old cemetery. In spite of the solemnity of the occasion, there was about the group an air of victory, of lost grounds regained. Many of the mourners carried unveiled birdcages, a sight forbidden until recently, and some of the women wore heirloom brocade, still musty from so many years secreted away. Yes, victory! For the loved one they had just left behind committed to the keep of the ancestors had not been reduced to the usual wad of yellow-gray ashes and smoke in the wind; he lay in a real grave, and the fresh mound of earth above him glowed like a monument.

Especially in Qufu was this burial sweet. Qufu was the birthplace of Confucius. For centuries the townspeople pointed with pride to inscriptions on family headstones that proved they were direct descendants of the famous philosopher. Then, in 1970 a regiment of Red Guards marched through the town to the ancient cemetery and toppled all those headstones. When they retreated from the cemetery they hung a huge red-and-white banner across the high stone entrance. The words on the banner left little doubt about the Chairman's attitude toward the ancestors:

WASTE NO MORE GOOD EARTH ON THE USELESS DEAD. CREMATE!

Confucius himself was exiled to the purgatory of fallen stars, along with countless poets and essayists who had expounded on his work over the centuries. Teachers like Yang's father who continued to mention the philosopher were stripped of their positions and their clothes and pilloried in town squares as "enemies of the collective consciousness." Many were sentenced to correction farms and the cultivation of cabbages and leeks instead of young minds.

Confucius's contemporary, Lao-tzu, was never officially excommunicated, oddly enough. Perhaps because his work is so scant and so obscure; perhaps because historians have never agreed on his identity, or if he was actually a living person at all. He may have been too much a myth to comfortably condemn.

The procession stopped on the slope outside the cemetery and gathered to admire the birds and speak with old acquaintances and colleagues. One of the professors pointed down the hill. A string of runners were angling off the highway onto the dirt road.

"It's our young warriors!" he cried. "For Beijing. Those two. I have them in class. The two in front!"

He continued to shout and point, though it was obvious to all which pair of athletes he meant; their new uniforms shined like chips of clear blue sky against the dingy gray outfits of their teammates.

When the two front-runners passed the bottom of the hill the excited teacher yelled, "Chi oh, boys; chi oh!"- a slang expression the professor heard around school for "pour on the gas."