Binu and the Great Wall of China. Su Tong,

clothing. They stood silently, with downcast looks that befitted their station, as they gazed at horse-drawn carriages travelling up and down the road. Across the way, elderly men and boys sat lazily, cross-legged, several of them asleep, with their heads resting on their neighbours’ shoulders. One boy, unmindful of his station, had climbed a date tree by the road and was shaking the branches with all his strength, even though the dates had been picked long ago; all that fell to the ground were dry dead leaves.

      A man sitting beneath the tree shouted, ‘Stop that! You’ll kill the tree that way, and there won’t be any shade left. Then you’ll have to stand in full sun waiting to be sold, and sooner or later that will kill you.’

      The threat worked on the boy, who stopped shaking and sat still in the fork of the branches, from where he spotted an unfamiliar woman with a bundle on her head coming down from the mountain pass. A new target had presented itself. Reaching under his shirt, he took out a slingshot and shouted excitedly to the people below, ‘Here comes some new large livestock! Hand me some stones, hurry!’

      The others watched as Binu, with a bundle on her head, walked under the tree; the women across the street heard the stones bombard her body, but Binu merely looked up into the branches of the tree and said, ‘You cannot hurt me with your stones. But you had better be careful up there or you might fall and hurt yourself.’ Her warning caught the boy off-guard; he put away his slingshot and said to the man under the tree, ‘I hit her with my slingshot but, instead of scolding me, she cautioned me to take care not to fall out of the tree. The head of this large livestock has a problem.’

      Binu stood fast on the dirt road. Since the tree and its surroundings were men’s territory, she could not stop there. But across the road were all those women, whose fancy dresses rippling in the desolate autumn breezes struck her as somehow improper. So she stood in the middle of the road and took a good look at the Bluegrass Ravine people market. The finely attired young women were, at the same time, sizing her up.

      ‘Why is she carrying a bundle on her head? Isn’t she afraid of crushing her hairstyle?’

      ‘Hairstyle?’ one of them sneered. ‘It’s a rat’s nest, that’s what it is. Southern women don’t fuss over their hair.’

      Another woman’s attention was drawn to Binu’s face. With a combination of envy and ignorance, she said, ‘I didn’t know there were beauties down south too. Just look at her delicate moth eyebrows, her phoenix eyes and her willowy waist, a classic beauty.’

      A woman beside her added caustically, ‘Too bad she never learned how to wash her face or apply make-up. She’s actually smeared dust all over her face in place of rouge. Look at the dirt on that face; you could plant crops in it.’

      Binu was not immediately offended by the malicious gossip. From Peach Village all the way to Bluegrass Ravine, she had believed that women who congregated at the side of a road must be waiting to be taken to Great Swallow Mountain, and she expected to meet women from other towns who were also searching for their husbands, assuming they could travel north together.

      She walked up to a woman in green who was eating flatbread. ‘Are you waiting for a ride?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to Great Swallow Mountain?’