by Han Shaogong
To be given a name is a right of life, the product of love and respect. People always give names to pampered pets, like "Kitty," or "Lulu." It's only the names of criminals that are usually ignored and replaced by numbers, as in stock-taking. We only refuse to acknowledge the names of people we most hate, "that so-and-so," "you scoundrel," and so on, depriving them of their linguistic position. Those we deem nameless vermin are those whose names have no function in public life or are used with such infrequency that they become erased. Thus, in the Cultural Revolution, names like "professor," "engineer," "Ph.D.," "artist" were expunged. The aim was not to abolish these professions and jobs, neither was it to physically annihilate these people. Instead, it expressed a yearning for every form of employment to develop exclusively in the name of revolution. Intense psychological pressure was exercised in order to weaken, even totally undermine, these individuals' rights to a professional label-because any form of title can provide the breeding ground for a body of thought or entire system of beliefs.
In ancient China, the study of names and principles infiltrated all philosophy. Naming is the fulcrum, the point of departure, the focal point and result of all theoretical debate.
In Maqiao, female unnamedness is in fact male namedness, which, of course, is not such a very unusual phenomenon. Even though the English language passed through the tumultuous baptism of humanistic enlightenment several hundred years ago, feminists still now continue to attack the masculinization of a range of prestige terms (for example, using "man" to mean "human," and words such as "chairman" and "minister"). But even though gender-neutral or unisex terms have carved out an enclave only under the shadow of male hegemony, English has never been masculinized to the same degree as Maqiao dialect, where female terms were completely deleted. I've had great difficulty in working out whether this linguistic misrepresentation had any influence on the sexual psychology or even sexual biology of Maqiao women-whether it had to any degree altered reality. From the looks of things, the women all seemed to use coarse, vulgar language, had even learned how to fight and curse. Once they gained the upper hand in relation to a man, they often became complacent. Their hands and faces were hardly ever clean, hardly ever fresh and bright, and their bodies were always hidden in masculine clothing that covered their female figures with loose, straight pants or stiff, rough-padded jackets. They were also embarrassed to talk about menstruation, and referred to it as "that thing." "That thing," again, is no kind of name. When I was laboring in the paddy fields, I hardly ever saw a woman ask to rest because of her period. They could ask for leave to go to the market, to deliver pigs, to help with farm work, and so on, but the period of leave would not be given over to their own health. I figured that in order to affirm their position in male roles such as "little big brother" they had to obliterate even their own periods.
*House of Immortals (and Lazybones)
: In Maqiao Upper Bow there was a stretch of cobbled road, along both sides of which stood a few cottages. The buildings on one side of the road were fronted by a perfectly ordinary wall of wooden planks, leaning this way arid that. They were, however, still crowned by a high, square terrace built out of bricks. Once you looked carefully, you realized that these platforms were trading counters from many years before, that these old houses retained the faint appearance of storefronts. Such trading counters represented the fossils of commerce. The Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion record that this area experienced a period of prosperity in the reign of the Qing emperor Qianlong, of which these damaged, peeling counters, besmirched with chicken and duck droppings, were probably material evidence.
Another mysterious relic from the past was a big iron pot, now full of holes, long cracks, and splits; abandoned in the woods behind the state granary and minded by no one, the bottom of the pot had filled with rotten leaves and rainwater. The pot amazed people by its size, which was big enough to steam two baskets of rice, and the spoon used to stir it would have had to be at least as big as a rake. Nobody could say to whom this pot had belonged in the past, why they'd needed such a big pot, why the pot's owner had subsequently discarded it. If this pot had been used to cook food for regular hired labor, its owner must have been a great village landlord. If this pot had been used to cook food for ordinary soldiers, then its owner must have been a general of no little standing. These conjectures were enough to unsettle me.
Of the prosperity that the Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion described, there still remained one last corner in an old house in Maqiao Upper Bow. It was a house made of blue bricks and large tiles, whose main gate had disappeared; it was said a stone lion behind the main gate had been smashed during the revolution, but stone portals which came more-or-less up to people's knees gave an indication of how impressive it had looked in earlier days. Inside the house, a window casement that hadn't been ripped out still remained, on which flying dragons and dancing phoenixes were intricately and exquisitely carved, and which brought with it a faintly oppressive air of extravagant wealth. The local people jokingly referred to this ownerless construction as the "House of Immortals." It was only later that I found out the word "immortals" referred to its lazybones residents who didn't do honest work in the fields. These people were also known as Maqiao's "Four Daoist Immortals" and had lived here for a very long time.
I went to the House of Immortals once: dispatched by a cadre with orders to paint quotations by Chairman Mao everywhere in red and yellow paint, I couldn't leave out this corner of the village. When I went, I knew that all the other Daoist Immortals in the House of Immortals had either passed away or departed, leaving only one Ma Ming. He wasn't at home, and having received no response after coughing several times at the gate, I had no choice but to advance timidly up a few dilapidated stone steps into this dust-smothered darkness, into a state of hopeless and overpowering fear and trepidation. Fortunately, after proceeding sideways into the right wing of the house, I found a few tiles were missing from a corner of the house and a shaft of light had sneaked in, finally helping me out of the desperate obscurity. Only slowly did I begin to make out an expanse of brick wall, for some unknown reason bulging outwards, shaped like a Buddha's belly. The wooden plank wall was riddled with woodworm, and everywhere I went there were grass rushes and the crunching sound of broken tile residue. Next to the wall was a large coffin, also covered with rushes and a piece of torn polyethylene. I spotted the owner's bed, a piece of worn matting in amongst a grass nest in one corner. On top there was a mound of wadding as black as ashes-probably the end that kept his feet warm, bound tightly together with a length of grass rope, demonstrating the owner's ingenuity in keeping out the cold. To the side of the grass nest were two old batteries, a wine bottle, and a few multicolored paper cigarette packets- these must have been the few trophies in the House of Immortals seized from the world outside its door.
My nostrils encountered an aggressively pungent stench which, if I leaned a little over to one side, disappeared. If I leaned back, there it was again. I couldn't help but feel that the bad smell here was not caused by a gas, but was a formless solid, built up over a long period of time, already coagulated into a concrete form, a heavy mass. The owner of the house would surely have had to watch where he stepped to avoid stirring up such a deeply accumulated stench.
I also took care to avoid this solidified stench, and found a place where my nose could be more at ease to paint a board of quotations. They went like this: "When busy, eat dry food, when leisured eat liquid, at normal times eat half dry, half liquid." I hoped it would have some illuminative value for the owner of the house.
I heard someone behind me exclaim with a sigh: "When time is confused, it must be a time of confusion."
As I hadn't heard footsteps approach, I didn't know when he'd appeared. He was so thin his temples were deeply sunken, and he was wearing a cotton hat and unlined cotton jacket unusually early in the day. As he upbraided me with a slight smile, his hands in his sleeves, it occurred to
me this must be the owner of the house. The brim of his hat was just like that of other men round here, always worn twisted at a great angle.
When asked, he nodded his head, and confirmed that he was Ma Ming.
I asked him what he had just said.
He gave another slight smile and said that these simplified characters had no logic at all. Full-form Chinese characters fall into six categories, the picto-phonetic type (in which one element represents meaning and the other sound) being easiest for communication. Take the full-form character for "time" [|^f]: its meaning derives from the left-hand element, the character for "day" [g]; its sound shi derives from the right-hand element, the character [=^], which is pronounced si. If it means [|E]] and sounds like [^f], why change something that works perfectly well? In simplified form [Hf], its side component became [~f], pronounced cun. The reader now had nothing to orient himself by and the character didn't lend itself to quick memorization. What was introduced as a measure to reduce confusion in fact completely confused the texture of Chinese characters. Time being thus confused, confused times could not be far-off.
Such an educated remark gave me a fright, and also fell outside my range of knowledge. I quickly changed the subject and asked him where he had just been.
He said he'd been fishing.
"What, no fish then?" I saw that both his hands were empty.
"Do you also fish? You must know that the fisherman's intent lies not in obtaining fish, but in the Dao. Big fish, small fish, fish or no fish at all, in fishing all has its own Dao, its own pleasure, of incalculable worth. Only the fierce and cunning will be blinded with greed, poisoning the water, setting off dynamite, casting nets, beating the water, ruining the atmosphere, vile evil practices, vile, vile, vile!" At this point, his face flushed with unexpected animation, and he burst into a fit of coughing.
"Have you eaten?"
He pursed his lips and shook his head.
I was terribly afraid that next thing he would ask me to lend him some rice, so before he had finished coughing, I burst in with "fishing-good idea. Nice steamed fish."
"What's so great about fish?" he grunted contemptuously. "Like eating dung, bleurgh!"
"So, do you… eat meat?"
"Ai, pigs are the most stupid of animals. Pork only wakes up after you've stabbed it. Oxen are the most idiotic, beef damages the intelligence. Goats are the most cowardly, eating goat will make you lily-livered. All no good."
I'd really never heard anything like this before.
Seeing that I was puzzled, he smiled dryly. "With heaven and earth this big, you're worried there's nothing to eat? Take a look, butterflies have beautiful colors, cicadas sing a clear song, mantises can fly over walls, leeches can divide up a body. The hundred insects are thus, they gather the essence of heaven and earth, collect the ingenuity of the old and the new. They are the most elusive delicacies. Delicacies. Tsk tsk tsk…" With insatiable gusto he smacked his lips and tongue, then suddenly thought of something, turning back to the side of his nest, where he took out a ceramic bowl and held out to me a long thin black something. "Here, have a taste, this is leftover pickled golden dragon. It's a pity there's only a bit left, it's really fresh."
At one glance I took in that the golden dragon had started off life as an earthworm, and my entire digestive system did a back-flip.
"Taste it, taste it." His mouth opened wide in enthusiasm, a gold tooth glinting out. A yellow cloud of vapor reeking of fermented urine hit my face.
I stumbled out and fled.
After that, it was a long time before I saw him again-I hardly ever had reason to cross paths with him. He never came out to work. The Four Daoist Immortals hadn't touched a pickaxe or carrying pole for the last ten years or more. Apparently it made no difference what rank of cadre went to argue with them or curse them, even tie them up with rope, it was all to no avail. If the authorities threatened to lock them up in jail, they seemed delighted, since being in jail saved them the trouble of cooking for themselves. Actually by this time they hardly ever cooked anyway, and their relish of jail was just part of a scheme to take laziness to an absolute, pure extreme.
They didn't bunch together in a group at all, and never had a fixed time for eating; whenever one of them got hungry, he would disappear for a while, then return wiping his mouth, perhaps after having eaten some wild berries or bugs, or stolen a radish or some maize off someone's floor and just swallowed it down raw. For any of them, lighting a fire to cook food counted as the most incredibly laborious, unbearably tiresome thing for which they would be ridiculed by the other Daoist Immortals. None of them had any possessions, and the issue of ownership of the House of Immortals was of course extremely hazy. But neither was it the case that they owned nothing whatsoever: in Ma Ming's words, "the mountains and rivers have no owner, the idler is the master of all." They wandered around happily the whole day long, playing chess, humming operas, surveying the scenery, climbing up high to admire the view, taking in all that lay around, swallowing up the new and the old; it was as if they were borne aloft on the wind, freed from this world, had taken wing and become immortal. Those working on the land down below couldn't suppress their smiles when they first saw them standing on the mountains. The Daoist Immortals saw things differently, and instead laughed at the plodding work of the villagers, day in, day out, eating to work, working to eat, the old working for their sons, sons working for their grandsons, one generation after another suffering like beasts of burden-was this not pitiful? Even if they accumulated ten thousand strings of cash, a person could never wear more than five feet of cloth, or eat more than three meals a day, and how could this possibly compare with courting the friendship of the sun and moon, with taking the heavens and earth as their abode, enjoying beautiful scenery and experiences in luxurious leisure!
Later on, people were no longer surprised to see them in broad daylight just standing still, looking around, and took no notice of them.
The Daoist priest among the Four Daoist Immortals sometimes went to distant parts to perform a few rites. One Hu Erce once went to the county seat to beg and didn't return to the village for a month or more. There began to be talk in the county that it looked very bad if Maqiao people were going into town to beg for food. The village should impose strict controls and give assistance to those with real economic problems-people couldn't starve to death under socialism. The old village leader Uncle Luo had no alternative but to send the accountant Ma Fucha over to the House of Immortals with a basket of grain from the granary.
Ma Ming was an extremely unyielding kind of person, and just glared and said: "Nay. This is the blood and sweat of the common people-how can it be right for you to give it away out of pity?"
There was in fact something in what he said.
Fucha had no choice but to carry the basket of grain back.
Ma Ming didn't eat food that had been cadged, he didn't even use other people's water. He hadn't dug stones or hauled mud for the village well, so there was no way he would draw water from it. Off he'd go, wooden bucket in hand, to a stream two or three li down the road, often so exhausted the blue veins on his forehead bulged out, taking huge panting breaths, all the bones in his body twisted into one chaotic mass under the weight of the water bucket. Every few steps he'd have to rest, moaning and wailing, nose and mouth distorted into unrecognizable shapes. When they witnessed this, people did manage a little sympathy: the well was for all the villagers, how could we grudge you a mouthful of water? He would grind his teeth ferociously and say "as ye sow, so shall ye reap."
Or he would put on a show of bravado in self-justification: "The stream water tastes sweeter."
Once, someone treated him to a bowl of ginger-salted sesame vegetables and insisted that he swallow it down. After he'd swallowed it and before he'd walked ten steps, he threw up violently-so violently that long strings of saliva hung down from his mouth and you could see the whites of his eyes. He said it wasn't that he wasn't grateful, it was just that his guts coul
dn't cope with coarse food like that, and the well water stank of duck shit-how in heaven's name could he let it pass his lips? Of course, it wasn't quite the case that he received no charity at all: for example, the padded unlined jacket that he wore all year round, in summer and winter, was given to him by the village. At first he categorically refused it, until the old village leader took a different tack and said this wasn't charity, it was more a case of him helping out the village; if he went out of the village dressed too shabbily, it would be bad for Maqiao's face. Only then, as a special favor, just to keep people happy, did he accept, with enormous reluctance, the new jacket. Furthermore, whenever this matter was raised in the future, he acted as if a great misfortune had come over him, and said he hadn't cared how old and venerable the village head was, he'd absolutely refused to bow down-the jacket burned his bones, made him feel ill when he was perfectly healthy.
He wasn't in fact afraid of the cold, and would often sleep out in the open. If, while walking somewhere, he didn't feel like walking anymore, he would yawn, lie down in his clothes, and curl up into a ball, sometimes under the eaves of a house, sometimes at the side of a well-and he'd never ended up ill from all his curling up. As he put it, when sleeping in the open your upper surface could be at one with the spirit of the heavens, and your lower surface could make contact with the spirit of the earth, from 11 P.M. to 1 A.M. you could absorb the yang in the yin, from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M. you could pick out the yin in the yang; this was the best way of making up deficiencies in the body. He also said that human life was a dream and that dreams were the most crucial part of life. If you slept next to an ants' nest, you could dream the dreams of emperors; if you slept among clumps of flowers, you could dream romantic dreams; if you slept in front of a pit of quicksand, you could dream golden dreams; if you slept on a grave, you could dream ghostly dreams.
