by Han Shaogong
Probably thanks to the efforts of some well-intentioned types, the character for "cheap" (pronounced pan) is hardly ever used when this expression is seen written down. When recording dialect, "cheap"pan is usually changed to the homophonic character pan meaning healthy. "Are you healthy" has a much nicer ring to it and has passed into everyday usage, to alleviate the harsh pitch of human life.
By this linguistic reckoning, Maqiao's cheapest life was a destitute cripple, called Old Pa Zisheng. He himself had no idea how many years he had lived-in any case he'd outlived his sons, grandsons, greatgrandsons… Even though his grandsons had met a premature death, his life still limped on. His ability to stay alive was starting to make him rather anxious: when he made up his mind to hang himself, the rope broke; having made up his mind to throw himself into the pond, he jumped only to discover that the water was too shallow. One evening, as he called on the Zhihuang household to borrow a bowl, the door was opened by Shuishui. Raising the lamp in her hand, she first saw the face of the old man, then taking a closer look, discovered that behind the old man were two round, shining balls, like two lamps. Rather surprised by this, she raised the lamp even higher. Her whole body went weak: they weren't lamps! It turned out that a large, downy head was breathing raspily behind Pa Zisheng, its towering spine dimly swaying in the darkness.
Tiger! Those two lamps they're tiger's ayaaaaaaaes!
Shuishui couldn't remember whether or not she had in fact cried out; all she could remember was yanking the old man inside, then bolting the door tightly, sticking in a broom then two hoes for good measure.
When her breathing had once more returned to normal, she sneaked a look out of the window, but the field was completely empty except for a faint suspension of moonlight. The two lamps had already gone.
The tiger never reappeared; most probably, it had just come upon Maqiao by chance. Far from rejoicing at this event, Pa Zisheng was filled with sorrow. "You see how cheap I am? Even tigers reckon there's no meat on me, they follow me along but can't even be bothered to take a bite. Where's the good in someone like me staying alive, hey?"
*Dream-Woman
: Shuishui was from Pingjiang County but was married in faraway Maqiao, on this side of the Luo River. Her little sister, it was said, was a famous actress in Pingjiang, a good opera singer, whose dainty lotus-flower gait had won her quite a following. It was also said that in the past Shuishui had been even more beautiful and talented than her sister, it was just that once she'd given birth to Xiongshi, her back began to ache, and her voice cracked and broke; as soon as her mouth opened, it produced a sound of breath hissing through her bronchial tubes, and any words came out harsh and splintered. From then on, her clothes were always in disarray and her gown was never buttoned up right, neither at the top nor bottom. Her hair was wild, her face unwashed; her features were always ringed in black. She would often weave cloth, hunt out pig fodder, sift rice chaff with women much older than she was; listening to them coughing up phlegm, clearing their noses, she probably didn't have to worry about her own appearance, didn't need to mark in any special way the passing of those drab, gloomy days.
Once females moved to their husband's house, particularly after they had had children, they became women, wives, and stopped taking any great care of themselves. However, it did seem that Shuishui's appearance was excessively unkempt, as if it was some kind of drive to abuse herself intentionally, a drive to hold herself hostage in obstinate retaliation against someone or other. There were plenty of times when she went out to look for pig food, hips swivelling to both sides, tramping along in a worn-out pair of men's shoes, yelling out raucously "heyaheyaheya" to chase the chickens out of the vegetable patch, the deep red menstruation stain in the crotch of her pants on full display to all she passed. It would be hard to say this was workaday carelessness.
After Xiongshi died, Shuishui became a dream-woman, what's known in Mandarin as a mentally ill person: her face often wore a flickering smile and she developed an absolute intolerance of potato plants- one look and she'd want to rip them out by the roots, as if she believed that her son was hiding under the ground and all she had to do was grab the potato plants, pull them up, then she could pull her son out of the earth. Usually, she was rather better in the mornings than in the afternoons, better on clear days than on rainy. At these times, her gaze was clear, and the way she behaved toward people and things and bustled around inside and out wasn't that different from ordinary people. She was, at best, someone of few words. Her worst, most agitated times came at dusk on rainy days. As the clouds drew in ever more gloomily, her breathing became rougher and heavier, and anything-the sound of the water drip-drip-dripping off the eaves, a withered leaf flying in the window, catching sight of the base of a wall or foot of the bed permeated with damp, the gradual blurring of neighbors' faces into darkness, or the melancholy cackle of ducks and chickens suddenly coming out of any part of the house-could send her into a state of trance. Moonlight was even worse: one glimpse of moonlight outside the window sent her body into a fit of uncontrollable trembling, she would put on a flowered head scarf, take it off, then put it back on, repeating this countless times.
If Zhihuang hadn't roped her hands together, she could have carried on like this all night. She would always say that the head scarf wasn't hers, and rip it off. She'd then say that her head was cold, she had to wear the head scarf, and put it back on.
In the end, Shuishui and Zhihuang got divorced and her parents took her back to Pingjiang. When I revisited Maqiao many years later, I asked about her. People were very surprised that I didn't know what had happened to Shuishui, almost as surprised as if I hadn't heard of Chairman Mao. Haven't you heard about her? You really haven't heard? They found my state of ill-informed ignorance insufferable and pitiful at the same time. Shuishui was really famous now, they said, her parent's home was always surrounded by cars, motorbikes, and bicycles; peddlers and traders all relied on her psychic powers to do business. People sought her out from miles and miles around to ask her to guess winning lottery numbers. At that time, tickets for the welfare lottery, the sports lottery, and so on were all selling like wildfire; the main street in town was in a depression, no one browsed around, and customers in teahouses and restaurants were few and far between-everyone was converting their money into lottery tickets. The rural cadres were all furiously agitating: if things went on like this, with no one even buying pesticide or fertilizer, then how would production continue? Would business still keep going?
Predicting the winning number became the most urgent topic of conversation. At this time, the mass focus of attention lay not on officials or big businessmen, even less on intellectuals, but on the insane. Suddenly people everywhere were asking for and searching out these lunatics, bowing and scraping before them, willing to bribe them with bundles of money, begging them to indicate the winning lottery number so that when they came to buy tickets, money and victory would roll in with one stroke of the pen. Word spread that in these matters, children were more gifted than adults, women more gifted than men, illiterates more gifted than the educated, but even more important, the insane were more gifted than the sane.
Shuishui, it must be said, stood out particularly prominently amongst her fellow lunatics; her predictions were said to hit the mark repeatedly, none failed, and she had already made lots of lottery players rich overnight. Her fame, of course, spread far and wide.
In the county seat, I met an editor from a broadcasting station who, surprised to hear I knew Shuishui, said that he'd also gone to search her out. This man, who'd spent four years at college, went on and on about it, about how he'd dashed to Pingjiang by long-distance bus, had waited almost five hours before he'd met Shuishui. He hadn't gained any concrete indication from her-the dream-woman would never have so easily revealed Heaven's designs to anyone. Shuishui took one look at him, and simply pointed at a picture on the wall which showed the sun rising out of a mountain. The editor, of course, was an intelligent man, and readi
ly took the hint; on returning, he immediately thought "the East is Red" (a famous revolutionary song of the Maoist era), took the numbers of the notation from the first line of the song The East is Red (5562) and filled in his lottery card accordingly. A few days later, when the result was publicly announced, he almost fainted in surprise: the winning number was 1162!
The chance of a fortune had rubbed shoulders with him and passed on!
He didn't feel resentful in the slightest, explaining at convincing length that you couldn't blame Shuishui for this, you could only blame his own mistaken understanding. He was too stupid, too, too stupid! It turned out he'd forgotten that the first line of The East is Red is "The East is red," but the second is "the sun rises"-its notation was 1162 exactly!
As he was telling me this, his face darkened, his voice convulsed with groans.
Confronted with this editor who believed so deeply in Shuishui, I realized the significance of the term "dream-woman": although people normally seen as remote from learning and reason (children, women, the insane, and so on) were mostly regarded as pitiful weaklings, at key, fateful moments they would suddenly become the people who were closest to truth, who were the most trustworthy and reliable.
I'm perfectly ready to admit that knowledge and reason are certainly not able to resolve all life's problems. But I'm still surprised at how much stronger the forces that reject knowledge and reason are than we often think. A long time ago now, the Austrian thinker Sigmund Freud used his study of psychoanalysis to produce a precise and systematic theoretical account of this. He had doubts about the power of reason and little belief even in consciousness, placing greater emphasis on the role of the unconscious; he believed that the confusion, the triviality, the secrecy of the unconscious were not lacking in their own significance. Quite the opposite, in fact: as the source and impetus of consciousness, the unconscious concealed a yet more important truth requiring careful exploration.
Freud believed that the unconscious emerged most often in children, women, the insane, and even more frequently in dreams-namely, wherever reason is in a weakened or collapsed condition. An expert in the explanation of dreams, this psychoanalyst wrote The Interpretation of Dreams. In his opinion, dreams marked the veiled emergence of the unconscious, were the most important point of entry into research on mental illness. No doubt he would be happily surprised to learn of the term Maqiao people used for a crazy female: dream-woman. He would also no doubt be able to understand the contradictory attitude that Maqiao people adopted toward dream-women: one of pity, at times when logical behavior produced results, but also of veneration, at times when the secrets of heaven's will were unfathomable.
The word "dream-woman" concisely and accurately summarized Freud's discoveries: dreams are the deepest repositories of normal people's insanity, and mental illness is a state of awakened, daytime dreaming.
The particular status of "dream-women" in Maqiao seems to support the crucial standpoint of anti-intellectualism: in Maqiao, this most unscientific of places, was concealed an even more abstruse science.
I don't know whether other languages carry this implication too. The etymological root of the word "lunatic" in English is "luna," namely "moon." Crazy people, in other words, are moon people. The moon only comes out at night, which of course is already close to dream-time. Readers will no doubt recall that Shuishui's spells of mental illness invariably occurred between dusk and nightfall, always against the backdrop of oil lamps or moonlight. Perhaps knowledge or intellect requires clarity, can't survive so easily in hazy darkness. Perhaps moonlight is the natural inducer of mental illness (the first implication of dream-woman) and of divinity (the second implication of dream-woman). Someone who loves moonlight, who loves above all to stare at moonlight or walk under the moonlight, whose behavior is poetic or dreamlike, is already wandering at the margins of the familiar world, possesses abnormal mental tendencies.
By this reckoning, all mental hospitals should consider moonlight the most dangerous of contagions.
By the same logic, all religious institutions, all absolute faiths and forms of consciousness that transcend science should consider moonlight to be the highest form of enlightenment.
*Stick(y)
(Ma): I searched through every dictionary I could find, including A Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects (Jiangsu Educational Publishing House), without managing to find the character I was looking for. The dictionary meaning of the character [g$] that in the end I reluctantly used for this word was "to tease or pester," which is not so very far from the sense I wanted to express. This character is pronounced "man," only slightly different from the "nia" I was looking for-I hope readers can remember this.
Nia, meaning "to stick" or "sticky," is often used as a dirty word. Maybe it's because of this that dictionaries for gentlemen, dictionaries for campuses and libraries, dictionaries that adults keep in hardback in their sitting rooms, all based on lofty linguistic ethics, have to ignore it, or at best lightly pass over it, or stick to hazy generalizations. But in real life, where Maqiao people live, nia is a word in constant use. Very often, people would use the word tens, even hundreds of times in one day- they didn't live by the dictionaries in general circulation.
Nia has many different uses in Maqiao:
1. Pronounced in second tone, nia means to stick. For example, when sealing an envelope, they'd say "nia the envelope properly." Of the thick, sticky quality of glue or paste, they'd say "really nia" or "good and nia" Magnetic rock is "nia (sticky) rock." A snot-nose is "nia."
2. Pronounced in first tone, nia means intimacy, affection, pestering, skin pressed against hair-sticky. To "get nia" means to be actively intimate and affectionate with others. To "act nia" means to entice others, by expression or manner, to be intimate and affectionate, implying a passive mode of behavior. These phrases are often used for relations between parents and children, between men and women. When a young girl is in the passionate throes of a romance, she is always "very nia" towards her man; her tone of voice, the look in her eyes, and so on, all remind people of the quality of glue or paste.
3. In third tone, nia means to make fun of, tease, bother, and so on, not far in meaning from "provoke." For example, "don't nia trouble," "don't nia a quarrel." Maqiao people also have a saying about "Three People You Don't Nia": the young, the old, and beggars. They mean that these three kinds of people are very tricky to handle, that it's best not to have any dealings with them, let alone cross swords with them; even if you're in the right, the only thing to do is give in and run far, far away.
This is the same attitude people have towards glue and paste: they're afraid that once stuck, disengaging will prove difficult and they'll find themselves in a very sticky situation. Despite the many ways in which nia is used, a common seam of meaning clearly runs through them all, they all share a linguistic point of intersection.
4. In fourth tone, nia (to stick) means the heterosexual sex act. Northern dialects contain similar words, such as cao, screw, for example. This word was brought down south, to Maqiao, by soldiers and itinerant workers men from the north.
In fact, this northern cao [i^r] appears to be rather different from nia. Firstly, the shape of the character-a human radical on top, meat radical on the bottom-indicates that it's a male act; that it should have a crisp, brisk, forceful pronunciation is entirely fitting. Ma, however, is pronounced with slow, lingering softness, implying an act of gentleness. Bearing in mind the original meaning of nia, or at least the meanings linked with it, a state of nia, or sticking,naturally indicates a kind of adhesion, of close contact, intertwining, intimacy, teasing, a state reminiscent of glue or paste, lacking any violent, aggressive quality.
Almost all physiological surveys so far carried out confirm that females reach a state of sexual excitement much more slowly than males and that females often require a certain degree of tenderness before they can be aroused. This is a first-tone nia, second-tone nia, and third-tone nia kind of process, of which males need to b
e aware and to which they need to adjust. This leads me to a bold hypothesis: the word nia suits the particularities of the female physiology better than cao, is preferred by women. If such a thing as a female language exists in this world, the former word will be far more widely used than the latter in their sexual vocabulary.
A women's book has been discovered in Jiangyong County in Hunan Province, written in language that would only circulate and be used among women, thus attracting a great deal of attention from feminists. I do still strongly doubt that an independent female language could exist. But when you consider that even today many traces of matriarchal society still remain in the South, that historically the South developed into a male-dominated society one step behind the North, then female physiology and psychology may in fact find fuller expression in southern languages. I'd like to see nia as one proof of this bold hypothesis.
*Low (and X-Ray Glasses)
: Low, low-down, low doings: the etymological origins of this word lie in sexual behavior of a deviant, or even perfectly normal nature. Since the 1980s, Hunanese dialect has referred to hooliganism by the phrase "lowlife," obviously an extension and expansion of the word "low."
In terms of the design of the human body, the head is positioned on top, and so human thought and spirit have always appeared uplifted, have enjoyed symbolic status as "lofty," "sublime," "metaphysical"; sexual organs, however, are positioned down below, and so sexual behavior has always been termed "low."
Thinking about it like this, it becomes very hard to say that it's merely an accident of choice that temples are built on high mountains, criminals are imprisoned in hell, aristocrats live in high palaces, commoners kneel at the foot of steps, the victor's flag is raised aloft in the sky, the loser's flag is trampled underfoot… Surely all this must be the externalization, the product of some form of belief. I suspect all this started with cave-dwellers, with their sense of bemusement towards and earliest knowledge of their own bodies; from this time on, temples, aristocrats, and victors' flags all served as extensions of the heads of cave-dwellers, all became thus uplifted. And anything opposite to this was forever relegated down below, to the shameful ranks of the lower body.
