A Dictionary of Maqiao

by Han Shaogong

  Old Master Nine Pockets was a beggar not only of scruples, but also of talent. By the river was situated a Five Lotus Zen temple in possession of a relic that had been requested back from Putuo Shan (a Buddhist mountain in eastern China); the incense attendants were doing very well out of it and, from the looks of it, some of the monks were growing plumper and plumper. Afraid of offending the Buddha, no one had ever come to beg a bowl of rice, and likewise no one would dare take anything by force. Unafraid of evil spirits, Old Master Nine Pockets Dai was determined to get a slice of this pie. He headed off alone and asked to see the Master Abbot, saying that he didn't believe the relic was really stored in the temple and that he wanted to see it with his own eyes. The monk didn't put up any opposition, and with great care took the relic out of its glass bottle and placed it in his hands. Without another word, he swallowed the relic down in one gulp, at which the abbot began shaking all over with fury, grabbed hold of him by the collar and started to beat him.

  "Terribly hungry, I was, just had to eat something," he said.

  "I'll beat you to death, you scum!" The monks brandished their staffs in agitation.

  "Don't you think that if you keep beating me like this, you'll make such a racket everyone in the street will come and see you bald coots have lost the relic?" he smartly, threateningly pointed out.

  And so the monks didn't dare raise a hand against him, but simply stood around him in circles, on the verge of tears, so they seemed.

  "How about this: you give me thirty silver dollars and I'll give you the relic back."

  "How will you give it back?"

  "That's not for you to worry about."

  His antagonists didn't have that much faith in what he said, but having no choice in the matter they swiftly produced the silver dollars. After checking over each and every one, Dai Shiqing graciously pressed this small gift to his bosom, then produced a croton berry he was carrying on him-a kind of strong laxative.

  After he'd swallowed the croton, with a roll of his eyes he soon released behind the Buddha Hall a large pool of diarrhea, the stench from which assaulted heaven itself. The Master and a few of his subordinates finally fished the relic out from amongst the mass of diarrhoea, washed it clean with fresh water and placed it once more in its glass bottle, giving thanks to heaven and earth.

  After this, nothing lay beyond his skills in begging or cadging; his fame grew and grew, and his power spread to Luoshui, in Pingjiang County. Even colleagues of rank similar to Nine Pockets from the great port city of Wuhan came from all that way to call on him, to repeat over and over how they revered him as Master. He'd burn a piece of tortoiseshell to divine when was the best time and which direction was most auspicious for begging, and no one who went out following his directions failed to make money. When people in the town held weddings or funerals, the place of guest of honor at the banquet was always reserved for him. If he didn't appear, people would worry that the meal wouldn't proceed peacefully, that beggars would come and disrupt the feast. One Mr Zhu, someone who'd been in government, even presented him with a plaque inscribed with a couplet in black and gold characters, made of high-quality pear-blossom wood and so heavy that several people were needed to carry it.

  The two couplets ran thus:

  Public opinion is as fleeting as the clouds and rain Both rich and poor are the same to the beggar whose mind is vaster than the universe.

  The horizontal inscription was: "a clear heart purifies the world," with Old Master Nine Pockets' name inlaid within.

  After Old Master Nine Pockets had been presented with this plaque by the government official, he bought a luxurious, blue-bricked residence with four wings and three entrances, made loans and received visitors, and took four wives. Now, of course, he didn't need to go out begging every day, except for the first and fifteenth of every month when he would make an imperial obeisance and take a turn around the streets, behaving, in total earnestness, just as his subordinates did. This kind of behavior might have seemed a little unnecessary, but those who knew him well knew that he simply couldn't not go begging; if, apparently, ten days or a couple of weeks passed without him begging, his feet swelled up, and if three or five days passed without him going barefoot, his feet would break out in red itchy blotches that he'd be scratching day and night until he drew blood.

  He attached the greatest importance of all to begging on the thirtieth day of the last lunar month. Every year on this day, he would refuse all banquet invitations and forbid any fires to be lit at home, would order his four wives each to take off their padded silks, each to put on tattered items of clothing; each would pick up a bag or a bowl and go out begging on her own. They could only eat what they brought back from their begging. When Tiexiang was only three years old, she'd been scolded and beaten, forced to follow him tearfully out the door and beg for food in snow and wind that cut right through you, knocking on door after door, kowtowing as soon as someone appeared.

  If the youth of today didn't understand what suffering was, he said, what would become of them later?

  He also said that it was a pity, a real pity that most people knew about the delicacies that came of the mountains and seas, but knew not that the fruits of begging tasted sweetest of all.

  He was later classified by the Communist Party as a "Rich Peasant Beggar" because he both exploited his employees (he exploited all the beggars below the rank of Seven Pockets) and was a dyed-in-the-wool beggar himself (even though only on the thirtieth of the last month); and so this rather unsatisfactory term had to do. On the one hand, he possessed a fired-brick mansion complete with four wives, on the other he still went around often barefoot and dressed in tatters-this fact had to be acknowledged somehow.

  This was most unfair, he felt. He said that the Communist Party were burning their bridges behind them-when they first arrived, they'd relied on him as an ally. At that time they were Purging Bandits and Fighting Local Tyrants, and the bandits were fleeing everywhere. Dai Shiqing had helped the work team out by dispatching beggars as scouts to keep an eye on the comings and goings of suspicious elements around the town, and to visit each house to "count bowls": this meant surreptitiously noting, under cover of begging, how many bowls each household was washing and gauging from this whether the household was feeding an extra guest, whether they were concealing a suspicious personage. This, of course, only lasted a short while, however. Dai Shiqing had never foreseen the revolution would turn on the beggars and transform him into Changle's Local Bully, have him tied up and paraded under escort to the country jail.

  In the end, he died of illness in custody. According to the recollections of his fellow unfortunates, when close to death he said: "This is the way of things for great men. When my star was rising, a thousand people couldn't topple me; now that I'm down on my luck, ten thousand couldn't raise me up."

  By the time he said this, he'd been unable to stand for some time.

  His illness started from his feet up-first they swelled so much he couldn't get either shoes or socks on, even after he'd cut them open at the sides. The line of his ankle bones disappeared, and his feet became as wide and round as two bags of rice. Later, as was to be expected, erythema developed and within a few months the red patches turned into purple patches. After another month, they turned into black patches. He scratched at them until there wasn't a scrap of healthy skin left on his feet, until they were nothing but a mass of scabs. All night long in the cells you'd hear his shouts and cries. He was sent to the hospital to be cured, but the penicillin the hospital gave him had no effect at all. He would kneel in front of the iron gates of the prison, shaking and clanging them, begging the guard:

  "Just kill me! Quick, just get a knife and kill me!"

  "We're not going to kill you, we want to reform you."

  "If you're not going to kill me then let me go and beg."

  "Let you go and kneel on the street, you mean?"

  "I'm begging for mercy, begging you to be kind masters, please, quickly, let me g
o and beg. See how my two feet are rotting away…"

  The guard gave an icy smile: "Don't go playing your tricks on me."

  "I'm not playing tricks. If you don't trust me, then send an armed escort in behind."

  "Get going, you're supposed to be moving fired bricks this afternoon." The guard didn't want to waste any more breath on him.

  "No-no-no, no good, I can't move any bricks."

  "Doesn't matter if you can't, you've still got to: it's what we call labor reform. You still want to beg? Still want to live off the fat of the land, not lift a finger? This is the New Society-we're going to give your sort some backbone!"

  And so, in the end, the guard wouldn't let him go and beg. One morning, a few days later, when the prisoners were eating breakfast they realized that Dai Shiqing was still shrunk down inside his quilt. Someone went to shake him awake but discovered that he'd already gone stiff. One eye was staring open, the other eye closed. Four or five blood-sucking mosquitoes flew out of the nest of straw by his pillow.

  *Scattered

  : When people told me the story of Dai Shiqing, they used the word "scattered." If he couldn't beg, they said, Tiexiang's old man just scattered.

  "Scattered," obviously, meant died.

  This is one of my favorite words in this dictionary of Maqiao. Dying, expiring, snuffing it, croaking, passing away, going to the underworld, kicking the bucket, closing your eyes, breathing your last, giving up the ghost, and so on, all mean the same as "scattering," but all, by comparison, seem simplistic and superficial, none able to illustrate the process as precisely, vividly, or minutely as "scatter." Once life has finished, then all the different elements that hold life together disintegrate and disperse. Flesh and blood, for example, rot into mud and water, the rising steam turns into clouds and air. Or they are bitten by insects and channeled into autumnal chirping; absorbed by roots into green grassland and manyhued petals under the sunlight, stretching out into vast formlessness. When we fix our gazes upon the multifarious, diverse, unceasingly active wilds of the earth, we perceive all sorts of faint sounds and smells, such as at dusk, when dense golden mists, fresh and damp, seem to float restlessly under old maple trees. We know that life, that countless earlier lives are contained within-it's just that we don't know what they were called.

  The moment that their heartbeat stops, their names and stories also disperse in fragments of human memories and legend, and after the passing of just a few years will end up utterly lost in the sea of humanity, never to return to their beginnings.

  As the four seasons pass and clock hands rotate, the scattering of all matter is part of an inexorable linear progression, revealing the absoluteness of time. The second law of thermodynamics terms this a process of entropy: an ordered organism will slowly disintegrate into disorder, uniformly, homogeneously scatter into solitary, mutual isolation-once this state is reached, there's no qualitative difference between a corpse and the earth it's buried in, between Dai Shiqing's feet and his teeth.

  To accumulate or cohere is, of course, the opposite of scattering. Cohesion is the basic condition of existence, of life. Blood and energy cohere to make people, clouds and mist cohere to make rain, mud and sand cohere to make rock, language and words cohere to make thought, days cohere to make history, people cohere to make families, political parties, or empires. A weakening of the power to cohere marks the onset of death. Sometimes, the more things expand and prosper, the more limited their power to sustain life becomes, the harder it becomes to maintain internal cohesion. Bearing this in mind, it becomes understandable that Maqiao people don't use "scatter" just to mean people dying, but also for any catastrophic predicament-and in particular, clouds that travel inside silver linings.

  Many years later, listening to the old people considering the merits of television, I heard them remark in fearful tones: "If you watch television every day, till your head's full of it, won't you end up scattered?" They were simply expressing the anxiety that all the extra knowledge people picked up from watching television would stimulate more and more desires-and then how would they manage to cohere? And if they couldn't cohere, surely they were done for?

  I can't say whether or not their terror of television was rational. But it did make me realize the connotations of "scattered" had by then extended far beyond what they had been twenty years ago. I also realized that Maqiao people retained their own sense of stubborn vigilance toward any form of scattering, toward the wild flights of fancy, the merging with the wider world one could experience while watching, for example, a color television.

  *Bandit Ma (and 1948)

  : Guangfu, a physical-education teacher in the county capital, was one of Maqiao's few intellectuals and, as it happened, the only person from Maqiao who settled in town with a state-allocated job.

  His father was the one great historical figure who came out of Maqiao. But for a very long time, Maqiao people were loath to mention this great man, would hedge vaguely about events from the past that involved him. It was only later that I found out this great man was called Ma Wenjie, and that his case was reexamined and he was rehabilitated only in 1982, after which the labels of "Bandit Leader" and "Reactionary Bureaucrat" were dropped in favor of "Performer of Outstanding Service in Uprising." At the time, Guangfu was on the standing committee of the County Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), of which he later became the vice-chairman, a fact which was not, of course, entirely unrelated to his father's rehabilitation. It was also at this time, the time I paid my visit to Guangfu, that I found out a little more of the story behind Ma Wenjie taking up the post of County Head under the GMD.

  As I said, this was in 1982. It was on a rainy, overcast evening that I found myself in a small streetside beancurd shop by the river-when Guangfu couldn't be sure of earning enough to live on even as a Phys. Ed. teacher, he opened this little shop. I took down what he said in a small exercise book, the smell of soya bean dregs tickling my nose. A thought suddenly came to me: as far as I was concerned, as far as all I knew about Ma Wenjie was concerned, 1948 wasn't actually 1948 at all. It had been postponed and postponed, had fermented and soured. In other words, it had been postponed until it reemerged on this rainy evening of 1982, It was just like the bomb that blew up Maqiao's Xiongshi, that bomb from the Sino-Japanese War that had lain quietly in the mud, frozen for thirty years, this longstanding postponement waiting until a beautiful, bright spring to explode in a child's face.

  In the case of something we don't know about, we can't say definitely that it exists, or at the very least we lack sufficient evidence to conclude it exists. Before 1982 came along, Ma Wenjie's 1948 was a total blank as far as I was concerned.

  By the same reasoning, Ma Wenjie's 1948, Maqiao's 1948 was not, in fact, the 1948 of many history textbooks. The events that made up this year, the mass of developments and changes that made this year moving, significant, memorable-the GMD-CCP talks at Beiping, the battle of Liaoshen and the Battle of Huaihai, Mao Zedong's angry rejection of the USSR's suggestion to divide China at the Yangtze River, the intense struggles within the GMD between Chiang Kaishek's clique and Xiao Zongren's clique, and so on-neither Ma Wenjie nor any of his followers knew anything of this at the time. Thanks to the multilayered screen of the Jiulian mountain range, in addition to the chaos of war, a great drought and a few other factors besides, Maqiao Bow's contact with the outside world had been on the wane for some time. Maqiao people's understanding of the outside world extended no further than the fragmentary rumors of a few old soldiers returning to the countryside.

  Most of these old-timers had served under Regiment Commander Ma Wenjie, messing with the Forty-second Army; they'd reached Shandong and Anhui before taking part in the Battle of Binhu, relieving the garrison of the Forty-fourth Army. They looked down on the Sichuanese Forty-fourth Army, the most ill-disciplined army of all, in which almost everyone smoked opium; when the Japanese army disguised themselves in mufti and infiltrated their ranks, the army's command was finis
hed off in one fell swoop. Of course, Regiment Commander Ma didn't have an easy ride either: once, in an ambush in Yuanjiang County, the hundred-odd landmines he'd buried all turned out to be duds. Just brought over from Shaoyang, the landmines exploded into two, like the halves of a melon: the explosions made quite a noise but failed to kill anyone. As they stood amidst the gunpowder, the Japanese found themselves not a single man down, and every one of them charged with a great cry of "ya-ya-ya," slashing the Forty-second Army into pieces in no time at all. Seeing the way things were going, Commander Ma had no choice but to order his followers to dump all the remaining mountain explosives in the river as quickly as possible and to scatter into guerrilla units. The Japanese were here to transport grain, and it was just a question of drawing things out toward winter, when the water in the holes and lakes would have dried up, when the Japanese boats would no longer be able to set out, and Ma's containment duties would be completed.

  They recalled how Ma Wenjie led them on expeditions to capture prisoners. The reward for capturing a Japanese soldier was 10,000 yuan. Every company had to capture four prisoners each month; if they didn't manage it, the failing would be marked heavily against the Company Commander and the next month's quota would be doubled. If they failed to fill the quota again, the Company Commander would be dismissed and flogged, as laid down by army law. Three strokes with a carrying pole always left the buttocks bleeding. The buttocks of one luckless Commander, who didn't manage to stay out of trouble very often, were permanently dented.

  When they found a position to defend, they'd change into mufti, take up their "Good Citizen" passes and, thus disguised, carry out punitive raids into enemy areas. The braver among them would latch onto the "tail" of Japanese troops. One company, made up entirely of Miao people from Xiangxi, all good swimmers and courageous too, captured the most prisoners, but unfortunately they all died in the line of duty when caught in a surprise attack in Huarong County. Those few fellow villagers of Ma Wenjie who'd served under him had been pretty lucky, it seemed, to survive with their heads left on; it was just that every time they captured a prisoner, they brought back either a Mongolian or a Korean, not genuine Japanese goods. Although they were grudgingly allowed to report for completion of duties, they didn't get any reward. Even after they returned home, these Maqiao people would still simmer with resentment at this. Bandit Ma was being unreasonable, they'd say: Mongolian Tartars were the biggest in size, too big even for three or four people to lift. We had it rough, they reckoned: how come everyone else got a reward, and we got nothing but cold water?