THE IDEA FOR this book could perhaps be said to go back to many decades ago during those walks with my father, Mei Guangdi, in Zunyi, Guizhou, the location of Zhejiang University's last wartime campus during the War of Resistance against Japan. Zunyi was a small mountain town then, and when we ventured out in the cool of a summer evening it did not take us long to get out to the country, where my father often stopped to chat briefly with those winding up their labor in the fields. Noting little that seemed to be worthy of my attention, I would stand to the side and look at the sky, or idly trace designs in the dirt underneath my feet, impatient to get on our way and rather bored with the exchanges about this year’s weather or next year's crops. My father was then chairman of the Foreign Languages Department at the University and had spent almost twenty years in the United States as a student and then university professor, but in showing his concern for how the peasant was doing, he was in many ways carrying out the obligations of a traditional Confucian scholar. I had also heard from him in quite another connection that we could claim Mei Yaochen (1002-1060), whose poem “Tianjia yu” ("The Peasants' Words") I discuss in chapter 1, as an ancestor.