by Han Shaogong
Since I happened to be feeling aimless myself that day, I felt a stirring of curiosity about Low Songs and begged him to sing me a bit of one. He came over all bashful for a time, and put up a show of refusing before he agreed. "You want me to get into trouble, then?"
"I bought you soap and socks, don't I deserve any thanks?"
His energy dramatically returned, and he jumped out of bed, pacing round the room once, then twice before he considered his throat properly moistened and his concentration properly focused. Suddenly, he burned with strength, vigor, power, his sickly color swept away, two beams of electric light shining from his eyes.
After he'd sung a few lines, but before I'd managed to understand them, he started waving his hands and coughing violently; unable to get any words out, he slowly groped his way back to the edge of the bed.
"I'm afraid my singing days are over." He grasped my hand tightly between his icy palms.
"Not at all, you sing really well."
"Really?"
"Of course, of course."
"Stop putting me on."
"I'm not putting you on."
"D'you reckon I can still sing?
"Of course, of course."
"What d'you know about it?"
I took a drink of my water.
His eyes dulled and he heaved a long sigh, leaning his head back onto the bed. "My singing days are over, all over. It's all Commune Head He's fault."
He began muttering darkly once more about Commune Head He. I didn't quite know what to say, but just drank my bowl of water good and slowly.
One day, a few months later, an ominous explosion of firecrackers was heard far off in the distance. When I went out to inquire, I discovered that Wanyu had scattered, or died (see the entry "Scattered"). I heard that when he died there was no one at his bedside, and his corpse lay there for a day or more before it was discovered by his neighbor Zhaoqing. I also heard that when he passed away, he had no more than three broad beans to his name, certainly not enough to eat for the next day. He left a child of about ten, whom some time ago he'd sent off to an uncle who lived far away. I'd seen the bare interior of his house, covered in spiders' webs and duck droppings; there wasn't even a cupboard inside this empty shell-clothes were always heaped on a tattered hanging basket over which his neighbors' chickens would jump back and forth. People said that he'd suffered all his life at the hands of women-otherwise, surely, his wife wouldn't have divorced him and would have made certain he had hot meals to eat.
He didn't even have a coffin for the funeral, and in the end Benyi donated a basket of grain which, supplemented by another basket from the team leader, could be exchanged for two lengths of fir wood to make a coffin.
In accordance with local custom, people placed a small bag of rice in his coffin as a pillow and put a copper coin in his mouth. While they were changing his clothes, Zhaoqing suddenly discovered, "Hey, he's got no dragon!"
Everyone was dumbfounded.
"Really!"
"Really, really, he's got no dragon!"
One after another they went up to the corpse to have a look, one after another discovered this male really had no dragon, no male organ, and one after another came away dumbfounded.
By evening, the news had spread through the whole village, and left the women whispering among themselves in shock and disbelief. Only Uncle Luo was a little disdainful of all the gossip, pronouncing in highly considered tones that there was no need for conjecture, his appearance made everything clear: if he wasn't a eunuch, how come he didn't have a beard or eyebrows? He also said that a long time back he'd heard people say ten or so years ago Wanyu had been arrested immediately upon assaulting the wife of a local grandee. This landlord controlled Changle, and headed up the defence grouping of the puppet regime; no matter how much Wanyu begged for mercy, they still cut off his dragon with one stroke of the knife.
When people heard this, there were sighs all around. They thought back to the way that Wanyu endlessly curried favor with women, helping them with their work, taking their punches for them-why had he bothered? He'd suffered decades of thunder, with never a drop of rain; fed decades of pigs, without getting a single meatball-was he mad? It turned out even his only child wasn't his own flesh and blood-when people came to think about it, the child didn't look anything like Wanyu.
With Wanyu gone, the village was much quieter, with far fewer songs. Sometimes you seemed to hear a faint screeching, but when you listened carefully it turned out to be the wind, not Wanyu.
Wanyu was buried under Tianzi Peak. When subsequently I went into the mountains to cut wood, several times I walked over his body. At the grave-sweeping festival, I took a look at his grave: it was the most colorful grave, all the straggling grasses had been pulled off the mound and there were masses of paper ashes, burnt candles, and incense sticks. There was also bowl after bowl of rice, laid there as a sacrifice. I also saw women there, both familiar and unfamiliar faces, some from the village and some from far away, all come to weep and wail, eyes red from grief.
There was nothing furtive about their weeping, nothing timid; a fat woman from Zhangjia District even plonked herself on the ground, slapping her enormous legs, howling that Wanyu was her liver, her lungs, wailing that her liver and lungs had lived a life of poverty with only three broad beans left when he died. It was no less than a spontaneous convention of the feminine world. I was surprised their husbands didn't have anything to say about this outpouring of tears.
Fucha said that they wouldn't say anything because they all owed Miller Wan money for work done. I think there was perhaps another reason: they felt that Wanyu wasn't a real man, and couldn't have had any untoward relations with their women; it wasn't worth putting up a fight, there was no need to settle scores.
*Dragon (continued)
: Maqiao people always paint dragons in black, with horns, claws, snake bodies, ox heads, shrimp whiskers, tiger teeth, horse faces, fish scales, and so on-every single feature is necessary. These dragons are painted on walls, on mirrors, or carved onto beds, with billowing waves and clouds added on-sea, land, sky, everything present and correct. From this it seems that dragons belong to no animal species and bear no relation to the dinosaurs of prehistoric times. Dragons are a kind of Chinese-style synthesis of all animals, an abstracted summary of all life on the planet.
Dragons are a kind of concept. An exhaustive, all-inclusive, omnipotent concept.
Dragon Boats evolved out of the building of ships in the shape of dragons. When I was an Educated Youth in Maqiao, the Dragon Boat Festival had been criticized and prohibited as an old custom, because of the Cultural Revolution. I only heard from the villagers that the Dragon Boat race used to be very exciting, with both sides of the Luo River competing for supremacy; when the losing side got onto the bank each rower had to put his pants over his head and submit to endless mockery and humiliation. I also heard that the Dragon Boats were all painted hundreds of times over with tung oil, and that before starting to build the boats they burned incense and supplicated the spirits-endless fuss and ceremony-after which the boat couldn't get wet in the rain, or dry in the sun, or have water dropped on it, until the day of the race, when, thronged by drums and music, it would be lifted by the young men to the starting line. Even though the route was right along the side of the river, the men couldn't ride in the boat, instead the boat rode the men.
I asked why things were reversed this way.
They said that they'd wanted to let the dragon boat rest-it shouldn't be allowed to get tired.
At this time of year, the dragon became a real kind of animal, even a creature with limited stocks of energy.
*Maple Demon
:Before I started writing this book, I hoped to write the biography of every single thing in Maqiao. I'd been writing fiction for ten or so years, but I liked reading and writing fiction less and less- I am, of course, referring to the traditional kind of fiction, which has a very strong sense of plot. Main character, main plot, main m
ood block out all else, dominating the field of vision of both reader and writer, preventing any sidelong glances. Any occasional casual digression is no more than a fragmentary embellishment of the main line, the temporary amnesty of a tyrant. Admittedly, there's nothing to say this kind of fiction can't approach one angle on the truth. But all you have to do is think a little, and you realize that most of the time real life isn't like that, it doesn't fit into one guiding, controlling line of cause and effect. A person often exists in two, three, four, or even more interlocking strands, outside each of which a great many other elements exist, each constituting an indispensable part of our lives. In this multifarious, scattered network of cause and effect, how valid is the domination of one main thread of protagonists, plot and mood?
Anything left out of traditional fiction is normally something of "no significance." But when religious authority is all-important, science has no significance; when the human race is all-important, nature has no significance. When politics is all-important, love has no significance; when money is all-important, art has no significance. I suspect the myriad things in this world are in fact all of equal importance; the only reason why sometimes one set of things seems to have "no significance" is because they've been filtered out by the writer's view of what has significance, and dismissed by the reader's view of what has significance. They are thus debarred from all zones of potential interest. Obviously, judgement of significance is not an instinct we are born with-quite the contrary, it is no more than a function of the fashion, customs, and culture of one particular time, often revealing itself in the form into which fiction shapes us. In other words, an ideology lurks within the tradition of fiction, an ideology which reproduces itself only on passing through us.
My memory and imagination aren't totally in line with tradition.
I therefore often hope to break away from a main line of cause and effect, and look around at things that seem to have no significance whatsoever, for example contemplate a stone, focus on a cluster of stars, research a miserable rainy day, describe the random back view of someone it seems I've never met and never will meet. At the very least I should write about a tree. In my imagination, Maqiao couldn't do without a big tree. I should cultivate a tree-no, make that two trees, two maple trees-on my paper, and plant them on the slope behind Uncle Luo's house in lower Maqiao. I imagine the larger tree to be at least twenty-five meters tall, the smaller around twenty. Anyone visiting Maqiao would see from faraway the crown of the trees, the tips of whose branches would spread out to encompass a panoramic view.
This is excellent: writing the biography of two trees.
A village without big trees is like a home without parents, or a head without eyes-it just doesn't look right, as if it lacks a center. These two trees were just that, the center of Maqiao. There wasn't a child in Maqiao who hadn't breathed in their cool shade, who hadn't drunk in the chirps of the cicadas, or in whom the bark's gnarled tumors hadn't induced bizarre and terrified imaginings. They didn't need any particular looking after: when people had things to do, they could just be left to themselves and forgotten about. But they were perfectly willing at any moment to welcome and provide company for the lonely, who would find their melancholy gently soothed away by the rustling of the leaves, and who under the leafy screen, on a patch of silver that was stippled and studded, dispersing and overlapping, sometimes tranquil, sometimes stormy, could set sail for a cloudless dream land.
There was no way of knowing who had planted these trees, and the old-timers in the village production team wouldn't shed any further light on the matter. As regards the name "Maple Demons," apparently there'd been a mountain fire many years ago in which all the trees on the slope were burned to death, except for these two, which escaped safe and sound; even their leaves and branches weren't damaged in the slightest. Henceforth, people eyed the trees with increasing awe and respect, and legends concerning them multiplied. Some said the gnarled patterns in the bark were in fact human shapes; in violent storms they secretly grew several feet, and only shrank back to normal when they saw people coming. Ma Ming told an even spookier story. Once, unthinkingly, he'd fallen asleep under the trees, hanging his bamboo hat on a broken forked branch. In the middle of the night, he was startled awake by the sound of thunder and made out, by a flash of lightning, that his bamboo hat was now hanging on the top of the tree. Very peculiar.
Ma Ming boasted that he used to be quite an artist when he was younger. He said that after painting these two trees, for three days afterwards his right hand swelled up dramatically and he ran a fever; he didn't dare try again.
You couldn't even paint them, much less cut them down. The two trees therefore grew taller and taller, and became a landmark for miles around. When someone had sawed off a branch, they hung a piece of red cloth from their door to ward off evil, or carved a wooden fish out of the wood, to beg the spirits to ward off misfortune; all of which was, apparently, very effective. Once, while taking part in an irrigation project, I went to the commune to draw up some plans. I went together with Teacher Fan from the Middle School (who had also been allocated to the project) to the county irrigation office and copied the map of the commune. I found out, as we choked on the archive room dust, that even after 1949 the government had still not drawn up a comprehensive map of the area, and that all plans were still based on the military maps left by the Japanese army at the time of their invasion of China. These looked to be the contour maps of great and resourceful strategists, drawn in black and white on a scale of 1:5000; the commune took up one large sheet. Instead of sea level, the map used the foundation stone of the Changsha city wall at Xiaowumen as its starting point for elevation. Apparently, before the Japanese invaded, they bribed Chinese traitors to draw up plans in secret. The ingenuity and thoroughness of their preparations are nothing short of astonishing.
I saw that on this map too, Maqiao's two maple trees were so awesomely imposing that they'd been ringed in red pen by the Japanese. Teacher Fan said knowledgeably that they'd been a landmark for navigating Japanese planes.
This set me to thinking that Maqiao people had actually seen Japanese planes. Benyi said that the first time they caught sight of this freak apparition, Benyi's elder uncle thought it was a big bird and yelled at some lads to spread grain on the ground to entice it down, and got everyone else to run and fetch ropes to catch it.
The plane didn't descend, and his uncle hurled abuse up at the sky:
I know you're up there! I know you're up there!
Only Long Stick Xi guessed then that it was a Japanese plane, come to drop bombs. Unfortunately, this outsider's rough speech was barely intelligible, and no one understood him. Benyi's uncle wondered how a Japanese bird could grow that big, since Japanese people were so very small.
For a day, the villagers watched and waited in vain for the plane to come and peck at the grain. The second time the planes came, they relieved themselves of bombs, setting off earth-shattering explosions. Benyi's uncle died right there, mouth blown off to the tree top, as if it wanted to nibble on the birds' nests. Benyi even today is still a bit hard of hearing, but I don't know if it's from the explosion or from the shock of seeing that mouth fly up the tree.
Three villagers were killed in the bombing. If you add Xiongshi (see the entry "Dear Life"), who died in a delayed explosion twenty years later, then the death toll rises to four.
When you think about it, if it hadn't been for those trees, would the Japanese planes have found their way there? Would they have dropped bombs? After all, there was no particular reason for the Japanese to take any great interest in a small mountain village. If they hadn't used those trees as a navigation mark, they wouldn't necessarily have flown through, probably wouldn't have seen the crowd of people down below shouting and yelling, and probably would have dropped their bombs somewhere they considered more important.
Everything, including the deaths of four people and all that subsequently occurred, happened because of those two trees.
From that point on, there was always a flock of crows perched on these two trees, a fractured blackness erupting as they flapped their wings. Sometimes people would try to chase them away by burning or smashing their nests, but these creatures of ill omen waited until people's backs were turned, then flew back, stubbornly defending the tops of the trees.
The crows cawed year in, year out. I heard it said that three woman hanged themselves under this tree, one after another. I don't know their backgrounds; I only know that one had had a big argument with her husband, and she hanged herself after poisoning him. All this happened a very long time ago.
When I passed by these two trees, it was like passing any tree, any blade of grass, any stone-I wouldn't take too much notice of them. I wouldn't think, aha, there they are, lurking in the depths of the day, concealing unfathomable possibilities, harboring menace under their canopies, rumbling and erupting at portentous moments, sealing such-and-such a person's fate.
Sometimes I think that one tree is very unlike another, just as people are very unlike one another. Hitler, say, was also a human being. Suppose aliens happened to read of him: on the basis of his possession of five senses, four limbs, upright posture and frequent emission of regulated sounds to others of his kind, the aliens, on leafing through the dictionary that they might possess, would define him as human. This would not be incorrect. The Songs of Chu is the title of a book excavated in the Han dynasty. If a copy was given to a Hebrew man who understood no Chinese, on the basis of the shape of its characters, writing implements, and its state on being unearthed, the Hebrew man might, through sufficient ingenuity and erudition, conclude that the writing was Chinese. This, similarly, would not be incorrect. But how meaningful is this "not incorrect"?
