After I'd been transferred to work in the county, I heard the county public security bureau had hauled him into jail on suspicion of writing reactionary slogans. The reactionary slogans had been discovered at the joint arts performance on National Day, apparently written along the stage just before the performance. I never found out what they actually said. All I knew was the reason the public security bureau grabbed him: at the time he'd been backstage playing the huqin and voice-dubbing very close to the scene of the incident, he had a reactionary family background, he had culture, he had class, he had the strangest talent, so surely he was the person most likely to get up to reactionary shenani-gans under cover of darkness.

What I found surprising was that not only were all Yanwu's worshippers, the men and women, young and old of Maqiao totally unconcerned that their idol had been arrested, they even viewed his being reactionary as something that gave them face. Their response was perfectly calm, as if such an outcome was entirely natural. They'd snort with obdurate contempt whenever someone mentioned a suspect from a neighboring village: him, reactionary? Yanwu could produce handwriting as good as his with his feet, he'd never manage anything more reactionary than stealing a cow or some rice.

To them, being reactionary wasn't just petty thievery and pickpocketing, it wasn't the stuff of which ordinary men were capable. Yanwu was the most qualified to be reactionary, was the classiest reactionary: his riding off, ashen-faced, in the police car was every bit as glorious as a cavalcaded state procession to enroll at the university in the city.

There was no one else who could touch him.

People even came to blows over this business. Someone who'd come to drive pigs from Longjia Sands happened to mention in idle conversa-ion that someone in Longjia Sands had a relative who was also a great reactionary in Xinjiang, who'd been regiment commander a few years previously, who'd had his photo taken with bigwigs like Lin Biao. Maqiao's lads weren't going to stand by and listen to this: What d'you mean regiment commander, they said, we heard he was only a warehouse watchman, that he had no military rank at all. If Yanwu'd been born twenty years earlier, he'd have ranked head and shoulders above corps commander, never mind regiment commander. He'd probably have been a high-ranking official under Chiang Kaishek and right now he'd have been in Taiwan riding in cars everyday.

The man from Longjia Sands said: "Yanwu might be a strange talent, but he's not that much of a strange talent; when he paints Chairman Mao's portrait, the head's too big and the body's too thin, he looks like Oldie Wang from the supply and marketing cooperative."

"You reckon Yanwu can't paint a likeness?" the Maqiao people said. "He's reactionary, so 'course he paints like one."

"How'd his painting make him a reactionary?"

"You haven't seen him painting dragons, he can paint one in the blink of an eye."

"There's nothing special about painting dragons, any odd-job painter can knock one out."

"He can teach, too."

"Can't Li Xiaotang teach, too?"

"Oldie Li can't hold a candle to him."

A Maqiao lad gave an example: when Yanwu explained the word "neck," the explanation took a good ten minutes. What was a "neck"? It was the cylinder of body tissue in between head and shoulders containing hundreds of blood vessels that could shrink down and turn this way and that. Pretty good, hey? How much learning could Li Xiaotang show off? A neck is a neck, Oldie Li would just give his own neck a couple of pats and leave it at that. What kind of teaching was that?

"Way I see it," said the man from Longjia Sands, "I'd rather have a couple of pats."

Long and hard they argued: over the question of whether or not Yanwu was in fact a strange talent, over the question of whether he couldn't paint a likeness of Chairman Mao or whether he deliberately didn't paint a likeness, over the question of whether or not he was actually reactionary. Then the Longjia Sands man trod accidentally on someone's foot, the victim flared up into a temper and threw tea in his face quick as a flash. If there hadn't been people nearby to restrain them, there could've been a major incident.

As I said before, the word in Mandarin for "strange" is also "censure(d)." The phrase "strange talent" always made me secretly uneasy, made me feel that no good would ever come of it. And the public security bureau and Maqiao people ended up proving this point. When presented with reactionary slogans, they suspected neither Yanwu's same-pot brother Yanzao nor other bad elements from neighboring villages, principally because neither Yanzao nor anyone else in the area could match Yanwu's strange talent. With a feeling this was perfectly justified, perfectly natural, not even worth thinking about or seeking agreement on, they defined cleverness as the enemy, brilliance as treachery-even though they secretly worshipped cleverness and brilliance. They weren't trying to eradicate reactionary slogans, as such; it was more the case that they'd long sensed that the abnormality represented by the phrase "strange talent" would sooner or later need locking up. Despite his life-long displays of cleverness, Yanwu had unfortunately never scrutinized the implications of this word, its critical undertones in Maqiao dialect; he'd been so pleased for so many years with his own strange talent, with how he'd kept in with cadres and his fellow villagers, with how he'd managed his own fate like the strange talent he was, that he'd got a little bit over-optimistic.

Whether he woke up to this in jail, I couldn't say. All I know is that he remained pretty distinctive whilst in jail, he didn't let pass any opportunities to exercise his strange talent. There, where even belts were confiscated, he actually succeeded in attempting suicide. For several nights, he rolled around wildly on the floor clutching his stomach, yelling and groaning, until he got the doctor to come and gave him an injection. He secretly hoarded the injection bottle until finally he smashed it and swallowed the pieces.

Tears streaming down his face, his mouth filled with blood and he fell into a dead faint. The guards sent him to the hospital for emergency treatment, but when the doctor heard he'd swallowed fragments of glass, he said even a fluoroscopy wouldn't be able to make out where they were and an operation was of even less use, so there was no hope of saving him. As soon as the two little convicts who'd been ordered to carry him on their backs to the hospital heard this, they burst into piercing wails. The sound of their crying brought an old man from the hospital kitchens over: luckily, he'd had a bit of experience in such matters and suggested they pour leeks down into him. Unchopped leeks, he said, lightly boiled then poured into the stomach would wrap round and tie up glass fragments before they were finally shat out. Somewhat skeptical, the doctors did as he said, but were then amazed to see the balls of leeks in his faeces unroll one after another to reveal the glass fragments inside.