A Day in The Life . . . . . . Of China: Free to Fly Inside the Cage

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He has a point, and everyone knows it, even those guests who admit to having hired geomancers to locate and orient their homes, or those who keep black fish in aquariums in order to absorb "bad rays," or those who believe their country's former greatness was attributable to a national qi (vital energy) that even now is moving inexorably from the West to Japan on its way back to China, a shift that will once again confirm the Middle Kingdom as the center of the world. All these people know that the man is right because they know that the logic behind marrying dead people, to ensure them a peaceful afterlife, is dead wrong. The real if equally fanciful reason is that the unmarried dead are feared capable of becoming angry spirits who may disturb their living relatives. "Face it," says the stiff-burner, gesturing to the coffins now set in a common grave. "This thing we call a wedding is something we are doing for us, not for them."

"Enough!" shouts the mother of the groom. "This is their wedding day. I don't want to hear anymore. Let us leave quietly." Then, apropos of nothing more than the increasingly common disdain many Chinese appear to feel for the army they saw as their great protector before it marched on Tiananmen, this small, fine-boned woman with searing brown eyes and a complexion Margaret Thatcher would compare to a rose recites some lines of Du Fu, the 8th century poet famous for decrying the gulf between ruled and ruler in China: "So it is better to abandon a daughter at birth than to see her later married to a soldier."

The guests are stunned. Everyone realizes that the sentiment just expressed -- as well as the wedding itself -- could easily cause this gentle woman's expulsion from the Communist Party, a "home" she later says she "entered out of love and idealism" 32 years earlier. The guests glance about nervously. Has the woman gone too far? Is someone in the crowd an informer?

Oblivious to any danger, the woman stands stiffly and stares at the matching coffins. The silence puts on a little weight and becomes fat before she stoops to her handbag and takes out a small transistor radio. She carefully places it on the pine box of her daughter-in-law, in the grave that is the dead bride's new home. "What can it hurt?" she says, looking daggers at the stiff-burner. "Maybe they'll want to listen to some music."

Bi is a 32-year-old English teacher in a small town not far from Shanghai on China's eastern coast. He could have taken Russian in college but chose English because "there is no one to talk to in Russian and no one interested in learning it." Bi speaks English so well that only a careful listener might guess that it is his second language. He pays particular attention to his consonants, and the effect is riveting. It seems that everything he says has been carefully weighed and thought out.