by Han Shaogong
Bandit Ma was Ma Wenjie's nickname.
Their audience was sympathetically scandalized: that's right, that's right, Bandit Ma's a skinflint, he landed a big official job but no one ever saw him give his wife a gold bracelet. That time he returned to his home village and invited his relatives over for a meal, he cooked only five catties of pork, filled everyone's bowls with radish!
Their 1948 was full of such topics of conversation. To sum up, in other words, the outside world of the time, as defined by their own mental horizons, was: the opium-smoking Sichuan army, the Shaoyang landmines that exploded without killing anyone, the Mongolian Tartars in the Japanese army, and so on-they might, at best, have heard vague rumors of the Third Changsha Campaign, too. They had no idea even what "1948" was, they'd never used the Gregorian calendar. The term "1948" remained unknown to them right up until the time I came to know them. They used some of the following terms to refer to this year:
1. The year of the Great Battle of Changsha.
This was obviously incorrect. Their Battle of Changsha was a piece of news that came nearly six years late, and was mistaken by them for an event that took place in 1948. If someone from outside Maqiao who had no clue about the Third Battle of Changsha relied solely on what Maqiao people said to gain a sense of history, they'd end up with a very muddled chronology.
2. The year Mao Gong was head of the Protection Committee.
You could say this was correct, you could also say this was incorrect. Maogong was from Maqiao Upper Village, but that year he was in fact covering for someone from Zhangjia District, and it was his turn to act as Head of the Protection Committee, with jurisdiction over the eighteen bows around. There was nothing much wrong in marking 1948 by this event. The problem, however, was that Maqiao people didn't know the Japanese had already surrendered and that the Protection Committees set up under Japanese coercion no longer existed in most places, that the "Good Citizen" card was no longer in use; because they were cut off from news, they were still doing things by the old rules, still using the term "Protection Committee"; this might lead to later confusion.
3. The year the bamboo in Zhangjia District flowered.
There was a grove of fine bamboo in Zhangjia District and in 1948, when a terrible drought came and not a single grain was harvested from the fields, a kind of seed-yielding white flower bloomed on all the bamboo. When people picked these seeds and threshed off the husk, they found bamboo rice-chaff, a pale red in color, which produced a heady scent when steamed and which tasted pretty much like nonglutinous red rice. After a bamboo flowered, it immediately died, but this grove of bamboo enabled the people who lived nearby to get through the famine; the locals were deeply grateful for its generosity, and named the grove "the merciful bamboo." This event made a very deep impression on Maqiao people, who henceforth remembered the year by it. There was, in general terms, nothing incorrect about this, it was just that outsiders wouldn't have known about the event itself. When the census register was taken, or recruits drafted, or school entrance exams registered for, those born in "the year the Zhangjia District bamboo flowered" and their parents would need to spend ages gesturing and explaining before managing to communicate to an outsider the age of the person concerned.
4. The year Guangfu got muddled in Longjia Sands.
To "get muddled" meant to start school, Guangfu, the son of Ma Wenjie, didn't have that much natural aptitude for learning; when he was little, he loved playing around and it took him seven years to finish primary school. Year upon year he had to repeat, which he found terribly embarrassing, and even after he grew up he hated admitting to this poor record, so on his curriculum vitae he put the time he got muddled forward three years, to 1951. If someone who didn't know these details were to calculate time only by Guangfu's curriculum vitae or by what Guangfu said, he'd dislocate Maqiao's whole history forward by three springs and three autumns. So this, too, is a very perilous way of conceptualizing time.
5. The year Ma Wenjie called an amnesty.
Ma Wenjie's amnesty was a great event: news of it spread near and far, everyone knew about it; it served as a highly convenient temporal marker for Maqiao people and was the easiest way of explaining things to people from outside the area.
There are a few things to be said about this amnesty, of course.
The atmosphere had been very tense that year. In the twelfth lunar month, a lot of people in the countryside were busy weaving grass mats to send over to the county seat in preparation for the wrapping of corpses. Rumor had it that the men from around Pingjiang had sworn alliance to the provincial army, which was under the generalship of "Donkey Peng" and was claimed to have mustered ten thousand men and three cannon, all ready for a fight to the death with Ma Wenjie and the men on both banks on the Luo River. Reckoning his number was up, Ma Wenjie divided up his family's property amongst the crowds and prepared his own coffin. He asked only one thing of Donkey Peng: he didn't want to fight in the city. So as to avoid bringing suffering on the people, the white mud embankment on the lower reaches of the Luo waters was the best place for the battle. Not having any of it, Donkey Peng cut off the head of the messenger Ma Wenjie had sent, and hung it on the bridge outside the east gate of Baisha Town. When the locals went out they didn't dare cross the bridge, and could cross only by wading through the water under the bridge.
When the news spread around, the ordinary people in the county seat fled in panic. After a while, though, after there was neither sound of cannon nor sighting of Donkey Peng's army approaching the city boundaries, it emerged that Ma Wenjie had issued a proclamation that he wouldn't fight. He had a new title, too: County Head and Head Commander of the Provisional Fourteenth Company. When he took people out to eat dogmeat in restaurants in Changle, people spotted that his followers all wore National Army uniforms and that a sprinkling of foreign-style machine guns gleamed in their possession.
As later opinion had it, Ma Wenjie did an incredibly stupid thing in going over to the GMD in the year of the GMD's great defeat. With regard to this, Guangfu explained to me over and over again how his dad had in the first place wanted to surrender to the Communist Party, but with the yin in a bad way and the yang tied up in knots he ended up surrendering at the wrong door. With his few years' experience of traveling around in the army, his dad had learned a thing or two, and knew vaguely about the Communist Party; he'd heard that the Communist Party killed the rich and helped the poor, that they were good fighters; he had no ill feeling towards them. While under pressure from the provincial army, he dispatched his sworn brother Wang Laoxuan to go and seek out the Communist Party. Wang Laoxuan had a brother-in-law who worked as a carpenter in Liuyang and who was very thick with the Communists. But things worked out very unfortunately: as soon as Wang Laoxuan set out, he was struck down by evil spirits and a huge carbuncle erupted on his back. He applied herbal medicine but it was still so painful he ended up knocked out for two whole days at an inn. By the time he hurried on to Liuyang, his brother-in-law had just left for Jiangxi.
"Two days, two rotten, measly days! If Wang Laoxuan hadn't got a boil, if he'd carried out his orders on time, wouldn't my dad have joined the Communist Party?"
Guangfu took a gulp of beer, fixing his eyes on me as he spoke.
Guangfu had reason to be regretful, of course. It was just those two short days that changed the fates of Ma Wenjie and his hundred or so followers, and that changed Guangfu's fate, too. Instead of finding the Communists, Wang Laoxuan was later introduced at Yueyang by the boss of a theater troupe to the aide-de-camp of a GMD Section B warlord. The Section B warlord offered Ma Wenjie amnesty and enlistment, for which arrangements began at that meeting.
By this time, it was nearing the end of 1948, exactly when the GMD's political power was beginning to collapse completely in the Mainland- but country-dwellers cut off by winter conditions didn't know this. I'd guess that the Section B warlord knew then that the game was already up, that amnesties and weapon handovers were happening everywh
ere, but wanted to make things just a little more stressful and difficult for the Communist Army as it prepared to head south. Or, as historical documents later made clear, it so happened that the Hunan Provincial Government Army belonged at the time to Section H of the GMD, between whom and Section B there was a rift; strife was both open and covert, but the friction never ceased. Section B was trying to enlist itinerant bandits on Section H's territory to increase their own power and contain Section H. Either way, the amnesty and generous support offered by Section B pleasantly surprised Bandit Ma, who, as a simple country bumpkin, was overjoyed to receive a certificate of appointment from his opposite number, as well as eighty guns and the assurance of a period of peace on both banks of the Luo River. He knew nothing of the factional struggle within the GMD, nor of the motives of the Section B commanding officer (even now, we can't be entirely sure of all this); he just thought that as long as they wore a uniform they were government troops, that they were to be feared by him, that he should sue for peace from them.
When he and his followers went out drinking to celebrate, he didn't know that the very step he had taken would drag him down into hell.
On the dry, exposed sandbank of the Luo River, 1948 slipped by, quietly bringing with it a swathe of enormous historical changes to the south. But for Bandit Ma and his followers, the 1948 they spent in their isolated, mountainous area was very different from the 1948 that appears in the official documents of the GMD Section B or Section H warlords. And again, when in later years the red county militia recalled a 1948 of overwhelming victory for the revolution, in which they launched a sudden machine-gun assault on Bandit Ma's few dozen "failed insurgents," their 1948 was very different from the 1948 that passed in Bandit Ma's isolated, mountainous area.
This is a dislocation of time.
*Daoist Ritual
: The bandits on either side of the Luo River each did things their own way. In relative terms, though, Bandit Ma stood out as the figure of greatest authority amongst these gangs: not only because his soldiers and horses were tough and strong, but also because he possessed mystical powers. He was a believer in the Blue Teachings, a sect of popular Daoism, and every day he'd perform the Daoist rituals, pay reverence at the incense table to the bodisattva Guanyin, make his subordinates sit cross-legged on mats and mumble incantations. Sitting like this for long periods would, apparently, pacify your heart, purify your spirit, deepen your understanding of the Dao, increase your strength. It was sitting like this that had cured him of his ten-year-long coughing trouble. And beyond this, there were regulations for sitting and standing wherever his cohort of followers found themselves; they'd abstain from food and drink for two days, then run, as if on winged feet, onto the battlefield to fight. Some told tales more incredible still of their fighting, that with their own eyes they'd seen them not bleed when cut, their flag resist piercing by bullets-all of which, of course, was thanks to their sitting on mats.
There was one more special thing about Bandit Ma's troops: they never wore shoes while on the march or in battle, and were exceptionally fleet of foot when climbing mountains or fleeing across ravines; nothing-neither sharp rocks nor iron nails-could hurt their feet. Ordinary people called them the "Barefoot Army" and said that every evening they had to chant the secret spells and incantations of the Thirteen Guanbao spirits before perfecting such art. This, Guangfu later told me, was exaggeration, of course. They went barefoot simply in order to be quicker on their feet: paper-mulberry juice and tung sapling were ground together into a paste, spread over the sole of the foot, reapplied after hardening and repeated several times over, until a crust tougher than the sole of any shoe had formed on the sole of the foot; his father had learnt this technique from the Miao people of Xiangxi, while traveling around in the army.
People marveled at this barefoot army. Wherever it went, there would be children or old women wanting to study their Daoist rituals and how to sit on mats. Naturally, some didn't sit in the right way and went insane after walking over fire or going into a trance. Bandit Ma urged ordinary people not to study from him, not to practice Daoism casually.
He said that a clear mind and temperate spirit were the most important elements in practicing Daoism, that you should follow the way of righteousness. At that time, grain was in critically short supply and everywhere gang members were turning to thievery. As soon as Ma Wenjie entered the city, he was waylaid by both men and women, young and old, all crying and complaining about injustices; some had had their money stolen, some had had their women stolen, and all looked to Boss Ma for justice.
In Changle, Ma Wenjie convened a meeting of the ringleaders of each gang; he'd let movable property go, he said, but human booty should be released, and grain and oxen had to be returned. When all the gang members saw this solitary figure tramp up in straw sandals to convene the meeting, without even a single soldier as bodyguard, not even a gun or a bullet on him, they were immediately struck by his aura of overpowering righteousness and had lost a good third of their nerve even before he'd started to speak. Some just stared until their vision clouded over, until a halo of white light appeared above his head, a purple cloud floating on top of that. Soon, everyone was nodding like idiots. Everyone sat at one table to drink, carved off a corner of the table as a pledge, then parted company and went home to enforce the agreement.
Bandit Ma also went by the name of Clear-Sky Ma. People said that Bandit Ma's troops asked for grain, not money, and didn't take anything away after they'd eaten their fill. In other words, wherever they went his followers were allowed to ask for food from ordinary people when they were hungry, but only for one meal; anything else they seized was viewed as harassment of the populace and would be punished once discovered. Once, having rubbed handfuls of tobacco ashes over their faces to avoid being recognized, two of his followers broke into the house of the head of the county middle school at night and robbed the head teacher's wife of two gold bracelets from around her wrist. A quick-thinking housekeeper in the head teacher's household scattered outside the threshold a bowl of wood ashes in which they left their footprints as they left; the next day, she asked Bandit Ma over to inspect the scene. Returning to examine soles of feet, Bandit Ma very quickly uncovered the two robber bandits and immediately imprisoned them in a cage. Both were locked in the metal cage for three days, their collarbones threaded through with metal wire, as an example to all, during which time the holes in their flesh where the wire had passed through rotted and began to smell foul. After this, one was burned alive, his body blazing yellow smoke, his skin crackling noisily. The other, who hadn't been the ringleader, received more lenient treatment: he was stabbed to death with a dagger, his corpse left intact-the daggers went straight in and out, without twisting. The blood spurted several feet high out of the hole the dagger made, dyeing red a large expanse of plaster wall nearby.
The two dead wrong-doers never begged for mercy, never cried out; not even a single groan.
That really was something! No one who witnessed it failed to be moved to admiration.
Even when the soldiers under Bandit Ma were avaricious, they were unflinchingly avaricious, and because of this, other gangs couldn't help viewing them differently.
From that time on, other gangs would never make trouble on whichever road Bandit Ma's soldiers took. If they guarded goods in transit, they wouldn't carry any arms, just walk alongside empty-handed. This was called "the guard of righteousness." When they came across members of other gangs, they'd exchange handshakes, mention the great name of Ma Wenjie, throwing in a bit of nomadic vernacular as they went, and thus turn bad luck into good, continuing peacefully on their way. Sometimes, people would be kind enough to leave food, to make a gift of a leg of beef or a couple of bottles of good wine, to establish friendship.
*On the Take
: The Modern Chinese Dictionary of Dialects (Jiangsu Educational Press, 1993) defines this term as follows:
1. Petty thievery: in times of famine or flight from armies, people
go on the take in abandoned cities.
2. Pulling a fast one: he's a sharp one, don't think about going on the take with him (don't think about pulling a fast one on him). Also: sponging off people is done overtly, while going on the take is a covert activity.
For Maqiao people, this term also implied a sense of something hugely diverting or enjoyable. It was specifically used in reference to the year Bandit Ma's troops drove Donkey Peng of GMD Section H out of town; as they broke into the county capital of Pingjiang, they were accompanied by a throng of more than ten thousand peasants drawn from a dozen or so of the surrounding villages in the Luo region, who ruthlessly set about finding themselves fortunes. Some stole salt, some stole rice, some put on something like a dozen women's gowns at once, ballooning ludicrously, overheating so much their faces ran with sweat. There were others who weren't so lucky and who didn't get a thing, save for a bucket or a wooden door they managed to carry off home. Benyi's dad, Ma Ziyuan, did quite the most incredible thing of all, hauling one hundred tiles out of the city, which exhausted him so much that, gasping for breath, he lagged behind everyone else. His fellow villagers laughed at how "awakened" he was: why didn't he haul a load of mud back while he was about it? Hadn't he seen there was mud at home? His family had no lack of salt or rice, nor clothes, he said complacently; all he needed was a few dozen tiles to finish off the pigsty. These fine Maozhou tiles he'd spotted were just the thing!
