by Han Shaogong
Most of this talk was based on memories, for example recollections of some birthday banquet or funeral feast engraved on a deeply appreciative memory. All this talk, talk, talk would then turn into speculation and boasting. As soon as someone announced that they could eat three pounds of rice in one go, then someone else would announce that they could eat twenty stuffed buns. That was nothing, some superman would interrupt with a snort, he could eat ten pounds of pork fat with two pounds of noodles thrown on top, and so on. Arguments, and assiduous research, would inevitably ensue. Some refused to be convinced, some wanted to take bets, some proclaimed themselves referees, some suggested competition rules, some volunteered to watch over the combatants to prevent them from cheating, for example stopping them from burning the pork fat into crackling, and so on and so forth. This excitement reproduced itself endlessly and identically, and always when meal-times were still a long way off.
At moments like these, the local people would often speak of the year they "opened canteens"-this was the way they generally referred to the Great Leap Forward. They always recalled the past through their stomachs, giving past events a real texture and taste. "Eat grain" meant military service, "eat state grain" meant people going to the city to labor or do cadre work, "the last time they ate dog meat" meant some cadre meeting in the village, "eat new rice" meant early autumn, "make baba cakes" or "kill the new year pig" meant the new year, "there are three or four tables of people here" meant the numbers present at some group activity.
No one had enough to eat during what they called the "canteen" years. Although everyone's eyes were green from hunger, they still had to tramp through ice and snow to repair the irrigation works, and even women were forced to bare their upper bodies, breasts hanging pendulously down as they heaved earth on their backs, wielding red flags, drums, gongs, and slogan boards as they went, to demonstrate their undaunted revolutionary zeal. Unable to manage another breath, third father Ji (I never met him myself) toppled over and died on the construction site. Many young people, in the prime of life, couldn't bear the hardship and fled to Jiangxi. They didn't return for many years.
I later came across a man who had returned to Maqiao from Jiangxi to visit relatives; his name was Benren, and he was about forty years old. He offered me cigarettes, and called me "old chum." In response to my curious inquiries, he said that the reason he fled to Jiangxi that year was because of a pot of maize gruel (see the entry "Gruel"). He'd taken a pot of maize gruel home from the commune canteen, the evening meal for the whole family, but as he waited for his wife to get back from the fields, waited for his two children to come back from school, he felt just too hungry and couldn't help eating his own portion first. Hearing the voices of his children at the mouth of the village, he hurried to divide the gruel into bowls, but when he lifted the lid, he discovered that the pot was already empty. Anxiety turned everything black before his eyes. The gruel had been there a minute ago-where had it gone? Could he have wolfed down the lot without realizing it?
He searched all over the room, disbelieving and panic-stricken: there was no gruel anywhere, all the bowls, dishes, pots were empty, everything was empty. That year there were no dogs or cats who would come and steal food-even all the earthworms and locusts in the ground had long since been devoured.
No sound had ever been as terrifying as the footsteps of his children, growing nearer, and nearer.
He felt that he could not face a soul, let alone tell his wife, and ran panic-stricken to the slope behind the house where he hid in the clumps of grass.
He heard the faint sound of his family's cries, heard his wife calling out his name everywhere. He didn't dare reply, didn't dare release the sound of his own sobs. He never stepped into his home again. He said that he now worked in a valley in southern Jiangxi, chopping wood, burning coal, you know the kind of thing… Ten years had already passed, and he had a new nest of children there.
His original wife had also remarried, and bore no grudge against him, even had him over to her house, cooked him a meal with meat. The only thing was, her two children were shy with strangers; they'd gone to play in the hills and hadn't come back even after it got dark.
I asked him if he still planned to move back.
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized this was a very clumsy thing to ask.
He gave a brief, slight smile, and shook his head.
He said it was all the same, life over there was just the same. He said he might get to be a permanent laborer at the forestry center. He also said that he'd set up home with some other people who had left Maqiao, and their village was also called "Maqiao." The people over there also called Hunanese people "old chum."
A couple of days later, he returned to Jiangxi. A light rain was falling on the day he left, and he walked in front, his former wife following about ten paces behind, probably seeing him off for part of the way. They only had one umbrella, which the woman held but hadn't opened. When they crossed a ditch, once he had pulled the woman over, they quickly resumed their ten paces separation, one in front, one behind, battling forward through the thick misty drizzle. I never saw him again.
*Sweet
: Maqiao people have a very simple way of expressing flavors. Normally, one umbrella term suffices for anything that tastes good: "sweet." Sugar is "sweet," fish and meat are also "sweet," boiled rice, chilli pepper, bitter gourds are all "sweet."
Outsiders have found this hard to understand: was it because their sense of taste was crude, and therefore they lacked vocabulary to describe flavors? Or was it the other way around: had a lack of vocabulary to describe flavors caused their palate to lose the ability to differentiate? Their predicament is virtually unheard of in a country as gastronomically developed as China.
Similarly, there is only one name for all sweet foods: "candy." Candied fruits are "candy," biscuits are "candy" sponge cake, shortcake, bread, cream, absolutely everything is "candy." The first time they saw popsickles in Changle, they called them "candy" too. There are, of course, exceptions: the specialities of the region each have their own name, for example "glutinous rice cake" and "rice cake." Use of the umbrella term "candy" is restricted to all foodstuffs that are Western, modern, or just from distant regions. Most Educated Youth bought biscuits from street stalls to take back home: these were called "candy." This always sounded strange to us, and we never quite got used to it.
Perhaps in the past, Maqiao people had had only just enough food to avoid starvation, and had never achieved a thorough understanding and analysis of food flavors. Years later, I met some English-speaking foreigners and discovered that they suffered from a similar poverty of vocabulary for taste sensations. For example, any piquant flavor-pepper, chilli, mustard, garlic, anything that made your head sweat-was described as "hot." I secretly wondered to myself, did they too, like Maqiao people, have a history of famine that prevented them from selecting their food and differentiating flavors? I can't joke about this, because I know what starvation tastes like. There was one time when, having groped my way back to the village in the darkness, I didn't bother to wash my hands or face (I was covered in mud from head to toe), didn't bother slapping at the mosquitoes (which were swarming densely around me), I just gulped five bowls of rice (each one holding half a pound of rice). After gulping it all down, I still couldn't say what I'd just eaten, what it tasted of. At that moment, I could see nothing, hear nothing, my only sensation was a violent wriggling in the stomach. All those words used by the upper classes to describe taste, all that precise, detailed, flatulent chatter, meant nothing to me.
The word "sweet" exposes a Maqiao blind spot with respect to food and drink, demarcating the boundaries of their knowledge in this area. But once you take a careful look at anything, you'll discover that everyone has all kinds of blind spots. The boundaries of human awareness do not snugly nestle back-to-back, and the weak flame of human perception is a long way from illuminating the whole world. Even today, the majority of Chinese people still have
great difficulty in distinguishing the facial types of western, northern, and eastern Europeans, and in making out cultural differences between the British, the French, the Spanish, the Norwegians, the Poles, etc. The names of each European people are no more than empty symbols in school textbooks, and many Chinese, when put on the spot, are still unable to make any link between them and corresponding characteristics in facial type, clothing, language, and customs. This baffles Europeans, just as it baffles the Chinese that Europeans cannot differentiate clearly between people from Shanghai, Canton, and the Northeast. Thus, the Chinese prefer to use the general term "Westerner" or even "old foreigner," just as Maqiao people prefer the word "sweet." This type of generalization will naturally seem ridiculous to a British person who objects to being lumped together with Germans, or to a French person who objects to being lumped together with Americans. Similarly, even today, the vast majority of Chinese, even the majority of economists, still can't make out any apparent differences between capitalism in America, capitalism in western Europe, capitalism in Sweden and other northern European countries, and capitalism in Japan. Neither is any significant distinction made between 18th-century capitalism, 19th-century capitalism, 20th-century prewar capitalism, 1960s capitalism, and 1990s capitalism. For many Chinese, the term "capitalist" is quite sufficient to convey their intended sense of admiration or of loathing.
When I was in America, I came across an anticommunist political journal in which I was perplexed to discover that the editors' sense of political taste was stuck at the same level as Maqiao people's "sweet." For example, sometimes they lambasted such-and-such a Communist Party for its false Marxism, for betraying Marxism, and at other times just lambasted Marxism (in which case, isn't falsification or betrayal of it a good thing?). On the one hand they exposed the extramarital affairs and illegitimate children of Communist Party members, on the other hand derided the asceticism of Communist Party members for their excessive oppression of human nature (in which case, aren't extramarital affairs and illegitimate children completely in harmony with human nature?). They perceived no confusion or contradictions in their logic; they only perceived that anything anticommunist was worth cheering on, was very good, was sweet. It was in this journal that I happened across a certain news item: a woman named Chen, who had just fled from Hainan Island to Hong Kong, was proclaiming herself an anticommunist dissident and, thanks to the kindness of a Western government, had been given asylum as a political refugee. A few months later, on meeting an official from this country's embassy, I was seized with deep indignation on behalf of his government. At the dinner table, I told him that I knew this Miss Chen. She'd never participated in any political activities on Hainan Island. All she'd done was organize an "Island Heat Literary Contest," in which she'd swindled young writers from all over the country out of nearly 200,000 yuan in entry fees, dumped a huge pile of competition entries in a hotel, then picked up her heels, along with the money, and fled to Hong Kong. She hadn't managed to persuade me to act as a judge for the contest, but this hadn't proved an obstacle: in the call for contributions that she placed in a newspaper, she had cited the names of ten world-famous writers, Marquez, Kundera, Borges, and so on, who had all, amazingly, become her judges. She had envisaged a Super Nobel Literature Prize, to be adjudicated on Hainan Island.
My revelations seemed to puzzle the embassy official somewhat. He said, wrinkling his brow, maybe she had committed fraud, maybe she had acted badly, but couldn't her behavior be seen as a particular form of political opposition?
He gesticulated strenuously.
I dropped the subject. I didn't want to sway this diplomat's political standpoint over the dinner table. You can endorse or you can oppose any type of serious, scrupulous and peaceful political position, but you can't not respect it. I simply felt that I was in a difficult situation. Just as in the past I had no way of making Maqiao people distinguish linguistically between all the different kinds of "candy," neither did I at that moment have any way of making this diplomat distinguish between all the different kinds of "opposition" in China. In what he saw as a mysterious, alien country, fraud counted as no more than another piece of delicious "candy."
*Tincture of Iodine
: The Chinese use a lot of popular names for industrial products. I was born in the city and reckoned myself really quite advanced, until I went down to the countryside. I knew about iodine solution, but I didn't know about tincture of iodine. In the same way, I'd got into the habit of calling mercury "red medicine," gentian violet "purple medicine," a storage battery "electric medicine," an ammeter "firemeter," a ceramic cup "foreign mug," an air-raid siren "nee-naa," whistling "tooting."
After I arrived in Maqiao, I often corrected the even more rustic terms used by the villagers. For example, a public square in a city should be public square, not "field," and certainly not "drying field."
So I was flabbergasted to discover that everyone here, men and women, young and old, all used a formal scientific term: tincture of iodine. They, on the contrary, didn't know what iodine solution was, and found it very strange that I used such an odd phrase. Even old grannies with clouded vision and foggy hearing talked in a more scholarly tone than I did. When they pronounced "tincture of iodine" in their Maqiao accent, it was as if they'd unconsciously uttered a secret code, a code that normally remained buried out of sight, only spoken in times of dire necessity, to make contact with the remoteness of modern science.
I inquired about the history of this word, since I got nowhere with my own conjectures. Maqiao had been visited neither by foreign missionaries (Westerners might have opened hospitals and used the scientific names of medical products) nor by large new-style armies (the soldiers might have been wounded and used the new names for medical products); most teachers would have studied in the county seat, and some would have gone even farther, to Yueyang or Changsha, but they wouldn't have brought back phraseology more modern than anything in use there. I finally discovered that this term was linked to one mysterious person.
Uncle Luo, the old village leader of the lower village, told me as he sucked on his bamboo pipe that a person called Long Stick Xi was the first person to use the phrase "tincture of iodine" here.
*Rough
: I know very little about Long Stick Xi. No one knew where he came from, what class status he had, or why he moved here. No one even knew his real name-"Xi" was a pretty odd-sounding surname. Some remarked on how his receding chin and his eyelids were different from other people's. It was only much later that I came to understand the significance of these features.
From all the various legends I heard, I concluded that he most probably came to the village in the 1930s, and lived there for ten or so years, or twenty or so years, or even longer. He brought an old man with him, who helped him cook food and look after a few caged birds. He talked "rough," which meant he spoke with an accent from outside Maqiao that people found difficult to understand. Take, for example, "tincture of iodine." Another example: he would replace "see" with "regard"; "play" with "mess about"; "soda," meaning soap, also became very common here and afterwards spread to neighboring areas for miles around.
One might guess that he was someone who had some knowledge of "New Studies," or at the very least knew something about chemistry. Since he apparently liked to eat snake, it isn't entirely fanciful to imagine him as a snake-eating Cantonese.
He left a rather complex impression on Maqiao people. Some were well-disposed toward him: when he arrived in the village, he'd brought with him foreign medicine, cloth, and fire, which he'd exchanged for grain at a fair price. If he came across someone with a snake to exchange, he would beam and happily negotiate a discount. He could also cure disease, and even deliver babies. The local quacks used to rail against him en masse, saying it was no more than black magic and mumbo-jumbo, even the yin, yang, and eight hexagrams were blocked – he couldn't cure his way out of a cloth bag! How could anyone who ate poisonous stuff like chessboard snake not have a poisoned mind
? This kind of talk, however, later petered out. A woman from Zhangjia District was having a difficult labor, rolling around on the ground in agony, mooing like a cow, neighing like a horse, yelling so much the quack had run out of ideas and the villagers were at their wits' ends. Her uncle finally volunteered to take action: picking up a kitchen knife, he sharpened it on the stone steps and prepared to split open her stomach.
But just as the kitchen knife was put in position, Long Stick Xi luckily rushed over and yelled out, scaring the knife wielder into staying his hand. Slowly and calmly, he had a drink of his tea, washed his hands, and shouted at idle onlookers to get out of the room. After an hour or so, the sound of crying was heard from inside the room and again, slowly and calmly, he strolled out to have a drink of tea. When the crowd went in to have a look, the child had been born, and the woman, amazingly enough, was safe and peaceful.
