by Han Shaogong
Fucha told me that once, when Wanyu went to Longjia Sands to mill rice, a child asked him what his name was. He said he was called old officer Ye. The child asked him what he'd come to do. Mill your mommy's baba cakes, he said. The little child rushed back into the house in excitement and reported what he'd been told. There was a group of women gathered at home drinking ginger tea, and they burst into raucous laughter on hearing the news. The child's elder sister was furious, and set the dog onto Wanyu, who scurried away like a terrified rat before losing his footing and falling into the manure pit.
Covered in manure, he climbed up onto a ridge between fields, leaving a great big hole in the pit, as if an ox had been asleep there. On the way back, people asked him in surprise, "Miller Wan, why did you leap into the manure pit today?"
"I wanted to see… how deep the manure pit really is."
"Did you come to check on production then?"
He hurried off, muttering away to himself.
A few children followed behind him, clapping their hands and laughing, and he picked up a stone as a threat and twisted round a few times in preparation for throwing it, but even straining every muscle he lacked the strength to toss it a bamboo-pole length away. The children laughed even more uproariously.
From then on, "checking on production" became a Maqiao allusion, referring to a Wanyu-type of sticky situation and to covering up difficulties. For example, if someone fell over, Maqiao people would laugh and ask "Have you been checking on production too?"
Wanyu was Benyi's same-pot cousin. At one time, when there was a pretty female guest at Benyi's place, he would turn up at Benyi's almost every day to sit around, hands in sleeves, his girly voice shrilling out deep into the night. One evening, he casually barged his way with a chair into the circle of people by the fireside. "What are you doing here?" Benyi asked ungraciously.
"The young lady's ginger tea smells good, really good," he answered virtuously.
"We're having a meeting in here."
"A meeting? Oh good, I'llhave one too."
"This is a meeting for Party members. D'you understand?"
"That may be, but I haven't had a meeting for months. I really feel like one today, I'm getting desperate."
Uncle Luo asked "Eh, eh, eh, when did you become a Party member?"
Wanyu looked at the people around him, then looked back at Uncle Luo. "I'm not a Party member then?"
"Have you got a member?" said Uncle Luo, at which everyone guffawed.
Wanyu finally started to look embarrassed. "Bah, your humble slave stumbled into the royal sanctum, I take my leave, I take my leave."
Once he'd stepped outside the threshold, he exploded in anger, and said menacingly to a Party member on his way in, "When I feel like having a meeting, they don't let me come. Next time there's a meeting, don't ye come bothering me!"
As threatened, he subsequently attended no meetings, each time justifying his refusal with "Why did you stop me having a meeting when I felt like one? Fine, you have all the good meetings, then drag me along to the rotten leftover meetings-let me tell you, you can forget it!" As a result of his resentment at having been driven out of the Party meeting, he gradually started whining more and more. Once, for example, when helping a few women dye clothes, working up a happy sweat, he was talking away, getting more and more pleased with himself, until his mouth ran away with him. He said that Chairman Mao didn't have a beard-d'ycm reckon he looks anything like old Mother Wang San from Zhangjia District? He had two cherished portraits of the leader, he continued, one stuck on the front of his rice bucket, one stuck on the front of his piss bucket. If there was no rice in the bucket to scoop, then he'd give the portrait a clip round the ears. If there was no piss in the bucket to carry, he'd whack that portrait too.
Seeing the women grinning from ear to ear, he felt even more pleased with himself and said that next year he wanted to go to Beijing for a bit, to talk things over with Chairman Mao, ask him why the cold-water paddies have to be planted two seasons in a year.
Once his remarks reached the ears of a cadre, the cadre immediately got the People's Militia to grab their rifles, tie Wanyu up, and send him under guard to the commune. He returned a few days later, muttering away, somewhat paler than before.
"Well, what happened? Did the commune invite you to check on production?" people asked.
He rubbed his face and smiled bitterly: "Luckily the cadre who came with me had respect, the punishment wasn't too heavy, not too heavy."
He meant that the commune had seen he was a poor peasant and only fined him one hundred catties of grain.
From then on, "have respect" or "the cadre had respect" also became a Maqiao allusion, meaning to explain away personal ridicule, or a grain fine.
When he first appeared in the propaganda team, he seemed really down on his luck: his thin, tattered jacket was held together with a straw cord, he wore a crooked woollen hat and his stockingless feet stuck out from pants that were too short for him, revealing a length of leg that was raw from the cold. He still had an ox whip in his hand, as he'd just come back from the fields. What on earth were we playing at! he said. One minute we wouldn't allow him to sing, the next we'd want him to sing, then we wanted him to go to the county seat to sing-he felt like a chamber pot at the foot of the bed, dragged out when needed, shoved back when he wasn't needed. Nothing good could ever come out of Commune Head He!
None of this, in fact, had anything to do with Commune Head He.
He asked mysteriously "Can I sing qoqo songs now? The Communist Party…?" He made a toppling over gesture.
"What are you blathering on about?!" I thrust a piece of paper at him, some lines about spring ploughing. "Memorize them today, tomorrow we rehearse, the day after the commune are going to come and check it."
Having studied it a while, he suddenly seized me by the arm. "Sing this? Hoes and rakes and carrying poles filling manure pits watering rice seedlings?"
I wasn't sure what he meant.
"Comrade, I have to put up with all this stuff every day in the fields, and now you want me to get on stage and sing about it? Just thinking about hoes and carrying poles makes me sweat, gives me palpitations. What d'you really want me to sing?"
"What do you think we asked you here to sing? You'll sing what we want you to sing, if you don't sing then go and do some work!"
"Ooooh, comrade, temper, temper!"
He didn't give the lines back.
I didn't find his voice as beautiful as people said it was; though it was clear and sharp, it was too abrupt, too stark, too direct, sung throughout in a monotone, a real girly screech it was, as piercing as a knife edge scraping on tiles. I felt that the sinuses of listeners must be contorting horribly, that everyone must be listening not with their ears, but with their nasal cavities, their foreheads, the backs of their heads, in order to cope with these repeated knife cuts.
This kind of scraping noise must have been known in Maqiao. Yet except for the Educated Youth, the locals all had a high opinion of his singing voice.
The Educated Youth were even less impressed with how smug he was about his choice of costume, and wouldn't let him wear his old leather shoes. He also wanted to wear his candle-wick silk pants, even put on a pair of glasses. As the people from the County Cultural Center pointed out, how on earth could there be a toffee-nosed intellectual right in the middle of the spring ploughing? No way. They paused to think, and decided that he should be barefoot, roll up his trouser legs, wear a bamboo hat on his head, and carry a hoe on his shoulder.
He protested violently. "Carry a hoe? I'll look like an old water watchman! Horrible! Too horrible!"
The people from the Cultural Center said, "What do you know? This is art."
"Well, why don't I make it even more artistic by hauling a bucket of shit around?"
If Benyi hadn't been there supervising the rehearsal, the argument would never have ended. In fact Benyi wasn't that keen on the hoe himself, but since the county seat comrades sa
id the hoe was good, the hoe stayed. "If they want you to carry it, you carry it." He scolded Wanyu: "You've got the wits of a pig, you have! You're going to look like an idiot on stage with nothing to do! What are you going to do when you start to sing?"
Wanyu blinked a couple of times, but remained blank.
Starting to get agitated, Benyi got up on to the stage to do a few sample actions to make Wanyu understand, holding the hoe upright, or carrying it on his shoulder, on his left shoulder for a bit, then on the right shoulder for a bit.
In the subsequent days of rehearsal, Wanyu's heart wasn't really in it as he stood on one side, a solitary figure holding a hoe. He was a good bit older than the other actors, and didn't seem able to join in with the chatter. Whenever any women came by to watch the fun, Wanyu's face always took on a shamed expression, his features screwed into a bitter smile. "Pray look not, ladies, it's too horrible."
In the end he didn't go with us to the county seat. The day we boarded the tractor in the commune, we waited and waited but there was no trace of him. When we finally saw him arrive, we discovered he hadn't brought his hoe. When asked where his hoe had got to, he mumbled no problem, no problem, I'll be able to borrow another in the county seat. The team leader said that the town wasn't like the country, where every household had a hoe-what if we couldn't borrow a suitable one, what would we do then? Quick, go back and fetch it! Wanyu just stood there hemming and hawing, with his hands in his sleeves. It was plain to see: he and that hoe just didn't mesh, and he didn't want to get on stage with it.
The team leader had no alternative but to go and borrow one from nearby. As we waited for him to borrow one, we discovered that Wanyu had disappeared, slipped away.
In fact, although he never made it to the county seat, he always very much wanted to go. From very early on, he was always washing his shoes and clothes, making preparations to go into town. He'd also secretly begged me that, when the time came, I should lead him across the roads in the city-he was terrified of cars. If a hooligan picked a fight with him, he would surely get the worst of it. The city women were good-looking, and he'd be so busy looking in all directions that he might lose his way. He hoped that I would rescue him as the need arose. But in the event he didn't go with us to the county seat, pitting himself against that hoe to the bitter end. He later explained that no matter how he tried, he simply couldn't remember the words to that song about manure pits, about digging the soil, scattering ox dung, watering the rice shoots. He just got confused and frustrated, and all that singing made him want to scream. If he'd really gone to the county seat to sing, there would have definitely been a major incident. It wasn't that he hadn't put in the effort, but even after he'd eaten pig brain, dog brain, ox brain, he still couldn't remember some of his lines, and then he was off on a spirit journey thinking about low doings between men and women. He had no choice but to slope off half-heartedly at the last minute.
Because he didn't say goodbye, Benyi later fined him fifty catties of grain.
This was how I saw it: Wanyu wasn't conscientious about a lot of things, but when it came to singing he was pretty conscientious. Many times he wouldn't stand firm, yet in his attachment to qoqo songs, none stood firmer. Quite simply, he was intent on martyring himself to art, prepared to give up this cushy number in town, to give up work points and put up with punishment and abuse from cadres, rather than put up with hoe art, with this pathetic womanless excuse for art.
*Ligelang
:One day, Wanyu saw the stonemason Zhihuang beating his wife so violently that she cried out for help; Wanyu went to mediate, saying that he'd seen what was going on and that Zhihuang shouldn't be so brutal. One look at his bald head and smooth, beardless face sent the stonemason into a blind rage: "What business is it of yours if I beat my cheating wife to death, you piece of shit?" Wanyu replied that the New Society said we should all be civilized, and women were female comrades, not punching bags, don't you know?
After arguing a while, the stonemason finally smiled coldly and said, okay then, as your heart bleeds so much for female comrades, I'll strike a bargain with you. If you can take three punches from me, I'll respect what you say.
Wanyu normally acted like a weedy scholar, terrified of pain; a leech bite in the fields would make him bellow and bawl, and his face turned ashen at Zhihuang's challenge. Despite his terror, he probably didn't want to lose face in front of onlookers and decided to see the thing through; he squeezed his eyes shut, and shouted yes, while he braced his outer cranium for the blow.
He'd overreached himself, and shutting his eyes any tighter wasn't going to help. After just the first punch from Zhihuang, he hurled himself howling and yelling into the ditch and failed to re-emerge.
With an icy snigger, the stonemason left him there and walked off.
With great difficulty, Wanyu got himself back onto his feet and shouted at a black shadow in front of him, "Keep 'em coming! On the chin!" The black shadow remained motionless, but he sensed the people standing around were laughing. He rubbed his eyes to steady his vision; he then saw that the black shadow wasn't the stonemason but a grain winnower.
He roared furiously at the front door of the Zhihuang household: "What are you running from? Come out and fight, if you've got any guts! You vicious dog's bladder, you can't even keep your word, you owe me two punches, you, you chicken you!" Despite his heroism, he'd staggered dizzily to the wrong place: the stonemason wasn't there but had gone off to the mountains.
He stumbled back home. People he met on his way back laughed when they saw him covered in mud. "Hey, miller, you been checking on production again?"
He merely laughed bitterly. "I'm going to report him! Report! When the People's Government deal with it, they're not going to worry about our precious Master Huang knocking them around!"
He added: "I'd sooner be torn limb from limb than worry about Commune Head He's favoritism!"
In all matters his thoughts turned to Commune Head He, believing they were the result of Commune Head He's conspiracies. Listeners couldn't make heads or tails of this unreasoned hatred; when asked, he always failed to account for it.
Wanyu was very used to taking blows for women. Time after time, he rolled involuntarily into the midst of marital disputes, leaping inevitably to the defense of the woman, which he paid for successively in terms of physical pain, even in hair and teeth. Some of the women whom he sheltered thought him too meddlesome, and turned on him with their husbands, showering his head with enraged blows, which left him feeling rather aggrieved. Generally, he wouldn't argue with these women. People used to say that he was the ligelang for these women, and hearing this made him very happy. Ligelang (pronounced lee-guh-lang) is an ono-matopoeic word, often used in describing tunes played in the traditional Chinese five-note scale; in Maqiao vocabulary, it's also used to refer to lovers and to lovers' talk. To be more precise, it's used for less formal, sincere, whole-hearted love; it has a more playful feel, the flavor of a burst of a tune on the fiddle, and stands for an ambiguous state somewhere in between love and friendship. For this very reason, the rather vague term ligelang has an unfixed meaning which can be elaborated into marginal, vague imaginings. Illicit fornication amongst clumps of grass is ligelang. Informal boistering and ribbing between men and women can also be called ligelang. It could be reasonably concluded that if Maqiao people saw ballroom dancing or men and women walking together in the city, they would place it firmly in the category of ligelang-a broad extramarital category lacking clear-cut analysis and explanation.
Maqiao people have many sketchy and muddled areas of consciousness, of which ligelang is one.
*Dragon
: Dragon is a swear word, referring to the male organ. It often comes up in Maqiao insults:
You, dead dragon, you!
Look at that stupid dragon!
Watch where you put your great big dragon feet!
Although Wanyu was no saint when it came to bad language, he couldn't bear other people calling him "dragon.
" Once thus insulted, he would grab the nearest likely weapon (stone, rake, whatever) and challenge his adversary to duel it out-I don't know why this was.
The last time I saw Wanyu was when I returned to Maqiao from the county seat and brought him the soap and women's socks he had asked me to buy for him. I spotted his son in front of his hut: he spat at me, guarding the door vigilantly. I said I'd come to see his dad.
Wanyu, lying on the bed inside, must have heard this. But he waited until I had reached the bed before suddenly pulling up the tattered, soya-black mosquito net. A face popped out. "What are you looking at, eh, eh? Here I am, like it or lump it!"
There was nothing comic about this. His face was waxy yellow, thin, and angular as a bunch of dead twigs-I had to hide my shock.
"I really missed you, I've been pining for days."
There was, once again, nothing comic about this.
After having asked about his illness, I said it was a pity he hadn't come to the city to sing. He waved his hands feelingly.
"Oh yes, very nice, very nice. Farming songs? That hoe and piss bucket, swing it here, swing it there stuff, you really call that singing?"
He sighed, and said the best times were past, from the first month to the eighth day of the third, when no one did any work, when all they did was enjoy themselves singing songs. This village would go perform in that village, this mountain in that mountain, now that was fun. The kids would sing "hallway songs," seated opposite each other to sing; once they'd completed a verse, they would shift their stool forward an inch, until the two stools were level with each other and the two singers snuggled up to each other, cheeks grazing, singing into each other's ear, their voices as quiet as the buzz of a mosquito, so that only their singing partner could hear clearly. This was called "earside singing." Wanyu's eyes shone with animation. "Tsk, tsk, tsk, those girls, they were like beancurd, squeeze 'em and the water'd come out!"
