by Han Shaogong
The earliest mention of this custom is in The Record of the Four Seasons in Jingchu, written at the time of the Southern Dynasties (440-589 a.d.) by Zong Bing, a man of Liang. Before this, no one spoke of commemorating Qu Yuan on the fifth day of the fifth month. In fact, dragonboat racing had long been a common sight in the south, a part of their ritual sacrifice to the spirits that lacked any verifiable connection to Qu Yuan. The link between the two was most probably fabricated by the historical fantasy of literati. It was done for Qu Yuan, but also for themselves. Therein lies the rationale of the ever more elaborate celebration of ritual sacrifices: aren't those who martyr themselves to civilization reassured by the promise of eternal glory as final compensation?
Qu Yuan never saw this glory, and in any case, not just any aspiring Qu Yuan could win this glory. Looking at things from the opposite angle, the way in which Maqiao people understood and used the word "awakened" concealed another viewpoint, concealed the dislike of their forefathers for the politics and foreign culture of a powerful state, concealed the necessary ambiguity between different historical positions. This use of the word "awakened" to mean "ignorant" or "stupid" is a fossil seam running through the unique history and beliefs of the Luo people.
* Asleep (Qo)
: The character pronounced jue in Mandarin is pronounced qo in the Maqiao accent, with a rising tone, and means "clever," the opposite of the Maqiao meaning of "awakened."
In fact, when pronounced jiao in Mandarin, this character happens also to mean not clever at all, but muddle-headed, confused, dazed, as in the phrase shuijiao, meaning "asleep."
"Awakened" and "asleep" are antonyms. Directly opposed to normal understanding in standardized Chinese thinking, this pair of antonyms exchanged places when their meanings were extended in Maqiao: as Maqiao people see it, regaining consciousness is stupid, while sleeping is in fact clever. This inversion always sounded rather odd to outsiders who were new to the village.
We have to allow that different people will judge cleverness and stupidity from different angles and using different yardsticks. We must, it seems, also permit that Maqiao people are perfectly entitled to draw from their own experience original metaphors from "awakened" and "asleep." Take Ma Ming: people can sigh about what a down-and-out he was, and laugh at how he was smelly and stubborn and crazy and stupid and how he lived, quite frankly, like a dog. But if we look at things from a different angle? From Ma Ming's angle? Far from lacking happiness or unfettered freedom, his existence could often be compared even with that of the immortals. And if we consider how act upon act of bitter farce have played themselves out: the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Cultural Revolution… far too much human brilliance dissipated into absurdity, far too much diligence turned into mistakes, far too much enthusiasm diverted into wrongdoing; at least Ma Ming, this distant onlooker, remained pure and unblemished, with no trace of blood on his hands. Even with all the natural hardships he endured, he lived to be healthier than most.
Now, does that make him stupid or clever?
Was he "awakened" or "asleep"?
Every pair of antonyms is in fact the fusing of different understandings, the intersection of different lives and paths of practice, leading in turn to two paradoxical extremes. This type of intersection is concealed in a secret language which often gives those traveling abroad pause for thought.
* Delivering Songs
: If you happen to spot Maqiao men getting together in twos and threes, squatting down by walls, or crouching by the fireplace, cupping their chins or covering their mouths in a way born of long habit, then you know they are singing. They have a secret way of singing: not only do they keep their voices low, they also avoid the eyes and ears of outsiders and do it in out-of-the-way places. For them, the activity of singing is closer in spirit to a game of chess within a small circle of friends than to a kind of public performance. Originally, T thought this resulted from fear of official censorship and political criticism; later, however, I found out that this secretive style of singing existed many years before the Cultural Revolution. I don't know why this was so.
In Maqiao, "singing" {changge) is also called delivering songs, or dealing songs (fage), similar in sense to "delivering a speech" at a meeting, or "dealing cards" at a card table. In Chinese, this word fa can also mean "incite" or "exhort," and in the Han (202 b.c-220 a.d.), Mei Sheng wrote the famous "Seven Exhortations," a type of fu rhapsody poem, mostly made up out of a question-and-answer structure. "Delivery of songs" in Maqiao is also structured around a question-and-answer opposition, one singer inciting, exhorting the other, but I have no way of knowing whether this is the same as the "exhortation" of the Han dynasty.
Young people like listening to people deliver songs, and react promptly to each phrase in the song with comments or cheers. If there's someone fairly generous in their midst, he may fish out some money to buy a bowl of wine or use "face" to buy a bowl on credit, as a reward for the singer. After the singer has finished singing a round, he'll take a sip of wine, after which, fueled with alcohol, he can of course make up lines that are even more vigorous, cutting, and impossible to answer, forcing his opponent into a corner, so heavily under siege that all around is blocked out, yet still the hand cupping the chin or covering the mouth won't be released.
Their songs have always derived from great affairs of state. One might ask an opponent, for example, who is the country's Premier? Who is the country's Chairman? Who is the country's Chairman of the Military Commission? Who is the elder brother of the country's Vice-chairman of the Military Commission? What illness has the elder brother of the country's Vice-chairman of the Military Commission had recently, and what medicine did he take? and so on. I was amazed by the difficulty of these questions. I read the newspapers every day, but I'm afraid I couldn't recite details about these remote great personages as if they were members of my own family, or recall with such exactitude their lung cancer or diabetes. I can only guess that the amazing memory of these men, who stank from head to foot of ox dung, must have developed out of a particular type of training. Just as vagabond barbarians did not forget their sovereigns, their ancestors must have had a tradition of paying attention to court affairs.
They later move on to delivering filial songs. The singers often find fault with each other, blaming their opponent for failing to fluff cotton wadding for their beloved parents, or for not having bought a coffin for their godfather when he died, or for not having sent cured meat over to their uncles on the fifteenth day of the first month, or saying that the fat on the meat wasn't even two inches thick, or even that the meat was swarming with maggots, and so on. They always sing with the force of justice behind them, calling their opponent to account: isn't this stingy miserliness? Isn't this rank ingratitude? Isn't this someone who, eating animals every day, has grown the heart of an animal? Of course, their opponent has to keep his wits about him under this barrage, use the weather or a lame foot as a pretext to exonerate himself from his own wrongdoing, then quickly launch a counterattack, seeking out his opponent's recent unfilial behavior-neither adversary balks in the slightest before exaggeration of the facts. They have to face up to sung interrogation; this kind of folk morality is strictly enforced.
The above forms the necessary opening struggle, setting up the stand-point of the adversaries.
After this has been delivered, they can relax and deliver a few qoqo songs. Qo can also mean "joke," for example "qoqo talk" can mean "funny talk." It can be further extended to mean indecent, and "qoqo songs," for example, often mean flirting songs. Qoqo songs excite the physical senses, and these are the numbers that animate young men the most. They can still be delivered in adversarial mode, as long as one side plays the male role and the other plays the female; one side has to love, and the other has to refuse this love. Here's one I wrote down:
Think of her and I lose my wits, When I walk on rocks, I don't feel a thing, When I'm eating, I can't hold my chopsticks, When I squat, I don't know
how to get up.
Another verse was even sillier:
Think of her and I get in a rage
I eat every day but never put on weight,
If you don't believe me, then look under my clothes,
I'm nothing but skin and bones.
Some were quite terrifying, such as this one about a foolish woman's secret plot to kill her husband:
My husband's ever so handsome and smart, My husband's like a stick of firewood, Three chops, two chops, he drops dead, All my friends come to have a barbecue.
Some were melancholy:
When I'm with you I hate to leave, I paint a picture and stick it on the wall, We haven't seen each other for weeks on end, Hugging your shadow, I cry awhile.
Some expressed desperation in love:
What a waste for us to love each other,
Makes more sense to grind rice for other people's chickens,
Her children have already grown up,
But they don't call me father, just hey you!
All these were love songs. After reaching a certain point with love songs, the singers moved on to "low songs":
I see you, a girl twenty years old You don't bolt the door too tightly I see your face, peach-blossom pink My crotch is already soaked through
Nonstop shouting from your house
The water flowing out is thick and white
A thousand pounds are thumping down on your bed
Stamping out a hole in the ground…
Every time these songs started, any women in the audience would hastily depart, cursing as they went, their faces burning scarlet; the young men would follow the more eye-catching back views with their eyes, like a line of restless fighting cocks, necks stretched out, eyes red, spoiling for a fight, springing up, then squatting down, their faces contorting into bursts of scorching laughter. They would deliberately make their laughter resound exaggeratedly so that the women would hear far away.
There were also songs about female suffering; for example, one sung by Wanyu from the lower village, describing the scene as a woman watched her illegitimate child float off downstream in a wooden basin along the Luo River:
Go slow and steady, steady and slow, Don't crack your head on the rocks you pass, It's not that your ma doesn't want you here, You have no pa, she can't take the shame, Go slow and steady, steady and slow, Don't get wet in the wind and waves, It's not that your ma wants to let you go, Three times each night, she cries out loud…
In Wanyu's version, the wooden basin drifted into a whirlpool, made a circle and floated back, as if reluctant to leave, wanting to return wailing to its mother's bosom. When he'd sung up to this point, there wasn't one among the women listening whose eyes weren't red-rimmed, who hadn't begun to wipe her eyes on the edges of her clothes, each woman's snivels rising up one above another. Benren's wife's mouth fell at the corners, the basket of pig's fodder dropped from her hand, and she bent over another woman's shoulder and bawled.
*Striking Red
: I heard that taking a virgin bride used to be taboo in Maqiao, and that "striking red," as it was called, on the nuptial night was seen as something highly inauspicious. Contrarily, the husband's family would be very content with a female pregnant before marriage, whose stomach stuck out a long way. Li Minggao, a scholar of Dong minority customs from the provincial Cultural Association in Hunan, told me there was nothing odd about this: in areas and periods of low production rate, people were the most important productive force and giving birth was the most important task for women, much more important than maintaining moral chastity. It was pretty common in many parts of the South for men to favor a big stomach when choosing a spouse.
Since it seemed to be an explanation that made sense, T made a note of it for reference.
In connection with this custom, Maqiao men harbored animosity toward their first-born, viewing it as wild spawn of unascertainable origin, not of their flesh and blood, and they either stuffed it into the piss bucket or smothered it in the mattress; they were always glad to be rid of it. This type of custom was called "favoring younger brothers"-in other words, murdering the eldest-and was for a long time practiced tacitly by people in Maqiao. Those mothers unable to bear it would swaddle the baby in a padded jacket and place it on the main road before their husband had struck, or place it in a wooden basin to float downstream, entrusting the fate of their own child to heaven-a common occurrence, this was.
After the Communist Party arrived, they prohibited such brutality and very little more was heard about it. There's no way of telling whether or not some people continued the practice in secret. Of course, when Wanyu sang ballads such as "Farewell from the Riverbank," it's easy to understand how, as the sound of weeping rose up on all sides, the song evoked for its female listeners the misery of earlier days.
*The Qoqo Man
:The best singer in Maqiao was Wanyu, but I only got to know him a long time after I arrived in Maqiao. Orders had been issued for the village to organize an arts propaganda team to propagate Mao Zedong thought, which meant performing documents or editorials sent down from above to the sound of clappers. Performers were sent off to other villages banging drums and beating gongs, and other villages did the same thing. When the performance was finished, they would always have to yell a few slogans. Since everyone would be yelling at once, it was very difficult to yell them in a neat, coordinated fashion. Therefore, they would often divide up the long slogans into several sentences for the purpose of yelling, which created some unavoidable problems. There was one quotation from Chairman Mao which divided into three sentences: (1) Strike at poor peasants! (2) Means! (3) Strike at revolution! The first and last sentences thus became reactionary slogans. But everyone, as ever, raised their arms together and shouted, not hearing anything odd about it.
Orders were also issued to perform model revolutionary operas. As resources in the countryside were limited, people had to make do with what was available-you couldn't be too particular about props and costumes. When the White-haired Girl got on stage, a length of flax hung from her head, transfixing the faces of small children with terror. The hero Yang Zirong didn't have a proper cape, and had to make do with a rush cape to go up the mountain and fight the tiger. Once in late autumn, a very strong wind blew over the wooden scenery, along with a door plank covered in cotton, and poor Comrade Yang Zirong, who had just finished fighting the tiger with his lofty ideals, was knocked sideways by the snowy mountain. His eyes glazed over, as he swayed left and right, before toppling over onstage. Luckily, the oil lamps on stage were quite dim, and the audience couldn't see very well, or even thought that the hero falling to the ground was planned as part of the fight, and gave him a round of applause.
The peasants said that although the old plays were still the best, the new ones were also fun in their own way.
Although Yang Zirong was injured, he still gave a pretty good performance. As his brain was a bit fuzzy, he forgot his lines, but he came up with an emergency solution. When he saw gongs and drums, he would sing "gong," "drum"; if he saw chairs and tables, he would sing "chair," "table." When he finally sang in one breath "Land Reform Cooperative and People's Commune repairing irrigation sowing rape plants," the whole theater burst into spontaneous cheers. Not having heard properly, the commune cadre said again and again how good it was. He decided to choose the Maqiao propaganda team to represent the whole commune at the theater festival in the county seat.
Going to the county seat was a very rare treat. Rehearsals, moreover, were bound to be a lot more relaxing than hauling pond sludge. The men and women could also make use of this rare opportunity to mix freely, make each other up, fiddle with each other's costumes, and so on. Everybody was overjoyed. The Party Branch Secretary in the village, Ma Benyi, felt it gave him face and explained to me in great excitement that he wanted a play with four girls. He didn't care what it was about, as long as it had four girls in it.
I asked why.
"Didn't you have four red mandarin jackets
made up last year? Those jackets cost the production brigade more than two carrying poles of grain, it's a shame to leave them locked in a case."
Back then, he hadn't wanted to sink two carrying poles of grain into the jackets.
Everyone thought this suggestion was spot on.
In order to improve the play, two people came from the Cultural Center in the county seat and suggested we add a mountain song to represent the folk characteristics of Maqiao. Benyi took a moment to think, then said, no problem: Wanyu had a fine pair of lungs, could do just about anything, funeral songs, comic songs, you name it. Let him sing!
All the villagers laughed-especially the women, who simply collapsed. Somewhat perplexed, 1 inquired who this person was, and they gave a brief description of someone who sounded vaguely familiar: beardless, eyebrows twisted but extremely thin, head always shaved smooth, rather like a shiny oiled radish. I remembered that he always left the village bearing a carrying pole, but I didn't know what he went off to do. I also remembered that when he stood looking on while others were singing, and people asked him to join in, he'd whine old-fashioned classical Chinese in shrill girlish tones: "Nay, nay, I'll sing not, thou must not jest with little me, comrades." He even blushed as he spoke.
He lived in two thatched huts in the lower part of the village, divorced, with a small child. It was said he was a bit of a lowlife: his high-pitched voice always appeared in places where there were a lot of women, and he always provoked guffaws or was chased away by them with stones. He'd started off as a miller, one of those people who came to the door to mill rice, and so had a lot of dealings with housewives. As time went by, the word "mill" started to take on connotations of low behavior because of its association with him. People would often ask him, so how many women have you actually milled? He would give an embarrassed laugh, "Tease me not, don't you know that in the new society we should be civilized?"
