by Han Shaogong
By the end of the 1950s, Bramble Street had become totally deserted, a stretch of wasteland; even the well had caved in, and mosquitoes and wigglers flourished in vast numbers.
In fact, it became a patch of good land, very fertile, so it was said, where cotton flowers and sweet potatoes would grow particularly well; it also produced a wonderfully sweet variety of melon that very quickly became famous. Sometimes, in an effort to drum up customers, the peddlers in the county capital would yell with particular vigor, "Get your Brambleland Embankment Brambleland Melons!"
Some people wrote this as "Baubleland Melons" on the signs for their melon stalls.
*1948 (continued)
: I used to think that time was measured equally everywhere, that it was something that traveled at uniform speed, a transparent fluid equally, evenly, and precisely distributed, drop by drop. But no: this, in fact, is just the time felt by our bodies: being born, growing up, getting old, dying, for example, all according to the prescribed order. But people aren't trees, or stones. Perhaps, apart from material time, it is felt time that is most meaningful to people. A person's period of childhood is always very long, just as periods of upheaval, danger, and distress are very long. There can be no doubt that a sense of longue duree springs from a person's special sensitivity of feeling, clarity of memory, and depth of new knowledge. For those who pass comfortable, dull days, in whose lives one day is replicated by one hundred, and one year is replicated by ten, we see the opposite occurring: time isn't drawn out, it isn't expanded or enlarged, but becomes increasingly hurried, increasingly shrunken, until it finally turns into a zero, a blink, then it's gone without a trace. One day, they suddenly discover to their wide-eyed horror that the old person in the mirror is themselves.
By a similar logic, time we know very little about, the time of the ancients, the time of distant nations, for example, is always hazy and so close to being invisible that it can be practically ignored, just as anything far away, anything at the very extreme of our worldview shrinks into specks of dust, into something barely distinct from air. When I used to read American fiction, I found that I often got the 1920s and the 1940s in America mixed up, and the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, even more so. I was frightened at myself: how could the entirely distinct, undeniable living and dying, and dying and living-several decades, even several centuries long-of all the generations that lay behind a novel, quietly escape me, why were they so frantically brief that they stimulated me only to skim quickly through a book, or even yawn?
The reason was very simple: I was too far away, I couldn't see everything clearly.
Time is a hostage to the powers of perception.
Human time only exists through perception, and people whose powers of perception are weakened, or even totally lost, human vegetables confined to their sickbeds, for example, lack a truly meaningful sense of time. This transparent fluid, time, has never trickled down in equal quantities, at uniform speeds, it quietly changes form according to different powers of perception, undetectably extending or shortening, concentrating or scattering, protruding or collapsing.
The problem is, everyone's perceptions are different, and one person's perceptions will constantly alter as a situation changes. Standing amongst a huge pile of crushed sensory fragments, do we still have a reliable, permanently fixed, abiding image of time? A unified time? When we discuss the year 1948, which perception of 1948 are we discussing? On that rainy, overcast evening, in that small beancurd stall, after Guangfu had had a cry about his dad, he got onto the subject of lotus root. He said the lotus root that year was incredibly sweet, unusually powdery after you'd boiled it-you couldn't get stuff like that to eat now. Lotus root nowadays, he said, grew from chemical fertilizer, was a hundred times inferior to lotus root back then.
What he said left me a little perplexed. I knew that nowadays some places did in fact use too many chemical fertilizers, that this did in fact affect crop quality. But most lotus root was still organic and not all that different from old Guangfu's lotus root of yore. I suspected it wasn't the flavor of the lotus root that had changed, but rather Guangfu's perception of its taste that had changed, as he grew older and older, as periods of famine or liver trouble receded further and further back in the past. This is a very common phenomenon. We often gloss over things from the past, lotus root or a book, some neighbor of ours, for example, because we've forgotten the specific circumstances which produced our original warmth of feeling. We may even feel that a distressing experience from the past was incredibly beautiful, because we've already become distant spectators, utterly removed from the danger of sinking back down into its mire. We're no longer in distress, we're simply enjoying the memory of that distress.
And so time, that hostage to perception, in fact corrodes our perceptions.
To what extent was the 1948 of which Guangfu spoke to me truthful, reliable, still uncorroded? To what extent were his unreliable recollections of the flavor of lotus root distinct from his own unreliable beliefs?
On the subject of the government's recent decision to rehabilitate the "Advisory Committee," Guangfu said that what the CCP did was far from easy for them: rectifying your own mistakes, swallowing down your own phlegm, none of this is easy. As he said this, he discovered that the box of tobacco was empty and told his son to go and buy some tobacco, and get two bottles of soda for the guest while he was at it. His son was twelve or thirteen years old, and at the mention of soda his eyes lit up and he ran barefoot out the door. When he returned with tobacco and soda, he didn't leave things at that: he frenziedly pryed off the cap of the soda bottle with the tip of a chopstick. Pop-he stood there, briefly dazed, before he began turning in every direction, climbing under the dark bed to grope around, his pointy buttocks sticking right up in the air. The tin bottle cap must have flown off somewhere.
He re-emerged with a spider's web on his head: I couldn't see it, he said, I couldn't see it, then brushed off his hands and took the other bottle of soda off outside to drink, humming a tuneless popular song.
"So that's that, hmmm?" Guangfu asked him angrily.
"I looked everywhere, I couldn't see it."
"Did it grow wings? Fly off into the sky?"
I didn't know why Guangfu was attaching so much importance to a tin bottle cap. Maybe the little tin cap could be returned for money? Or was he furious about his kid's devil-may-care attitude?
He made the child have another look, interrupting his conversation with me, helping move a pile of charcoal away from a corner of the wall, along with a wooden bucket and hoe and other tools, huffing and puffing as he did so, subjecting every single suspicious hiding place to a thorough investigation. "Where the hell are you hiding?" he threatened the bottle cap, "I know you're hiding somewhere! Where've you gone to?"
Of course, he didn't forget to scold the child: "Get looking, you good-for-nothing! Look! Getting a bit big for your boots, are you? Let me tell you, if it wasn't for the Communist Party rehabilitating your grandfather, d'you think you'd be drinking soda? Or wearing shiny leather shoes? Or going to high school with a fountain pen in your pocket? I nearly died doing labor reform, I was so hungry I even picked out the grass from ox dung to eat…"
The child pouted, kicking sourly at a piece of wood ash.
"Kicking, are you, you pig-sticker!" (see the entry "Stick[y]"). The Phys. Ed. teacher whacked him on the top of his head.
The child raised his arms to ward off the blow; maybe he used a little more force than was necessary, for his father had to take a couple of steps back, almost slipped over. "So hit back at me, would you? You'd hit back, you good-for-nothing?" He snatched the bottle of soda from the child's hand, "I'll bury you alive, I will!"
Panting with fury, the boy ran outside screaming like a mad thing: "You old bastard! You old bandit! You old counterrevolutionary! What kind of teacher are you, hitting people like that?" A torrent of abuse ensued: "Reckon this is still the old society? Reckon you can bully everyone else, make everyone's lif
e miserable, humiliate the nation and forfeit its sovereignty, hmmm?" These two phrases he'd used sounded very scholarly. "Serves you right! Serves you right, picking over ox dung! My life'd be better if you went to prison. If I get to be premier when I grow up, I'll launch political movements! And tell you what, I won't be rehabilitating your type!…"
"I-I-I-"
Guangfu's angry response caught in his throat; even though he was a Phys. Ed. teacher, he still couldn't catch up with his son, but his whole body shook with anger; luckily, I was there to help him get back home and calm down. The boy's attitude toward him left me surprised and bewildered. Of course, the boy had spoken in anger, so his words shouldn't be taken too seriously. But the way he'd jabbed at his father's sore points proved at the very least that he had no acute sense of pain toward past events, and that no misjudgement of any case could compare in importance with his bottle of soda. It was at this moment that I was again made conscious of the ambiguities of time. Like a lot of people, Guangfu thought that most people would sympathize with his ordeals, that everything set in stone by Time should be forever preserved in its original form, universally recognized and admired like a precious cultural relic in a museum. Rooted in this belief as he was, he was like my parents or lots of people from earlier generations, always lecturing the younger generation by revisiting past events, talking about his time in prison, the famine, ox dung, or 1948.
What he hadn't realized was that time isn't a cultural relic, that there is no unified sense of time, existing for and appreciated by him and his son simultaneously. When the government returned to him a 1948 in which his father was pure as the driven snow, they failed to allocate one to his son as well. The boy's sullen kick at the pile of wood ash showed he was not only uninterested in, but resented all that came from the past, including 1948.
This, it would seem, was illogical. Despite having no personal experience of the past, he could at least be curious about strange events that took place in the past, just as children normally respond enthusiastically to classical legends, rather than kicking them angrily away. There was one plausible explanation for this: he didn't have any real hatred of the past, it was just that he hated the present past, which was to say the past of this overcast evening, the past that resonated with his father's scolding lectures and pomposity, the past that had snatched away his halfbottle of soda.
Guangfu's anger drove him to tears. This got me thinking about the policy that had made their whole family suffer injustice, a policy that had ruled that all personnel still serving in the old regime after 1947 at department and lieutenant-commander level and above were historically counterrevolutionary. This was applied across the board, to anybody, anywhere, in any temporal schema, the implication being: everyone lived within one, single time scheme, with no exceptions permitted. Years later, people finally realized that this policy was an oversimplification, and thanks to the revoking of this policy Guangfu's bitterness was replaced by sweetness. On the other hand, however, Guangfu was still trying to force his son to live in a single time scheme, again with no exceptions permitted. He was insisting on nothing less than a new timetable: the past that he detested so much, his son also had to detest; the present that he cherished, his son also had to cherish. The vast and momentous 1948 of his mind had to take on the same form and supremacy in his son's mind, it couldn't shrink, couldn't scatter, least of all disappear into nothingness. What he hadn't realized was that his son lived entirely outside his father's time-that in his son, a tiny little tin bottle cap could lead to a totally different conclusion:
"Served you right going to prison like that!"
"I'd be better off if you were in prison!"
Maybe, from this evening onwards, in this tiny little beancurd stall, an irrevocable chasm opened up between their pasts, a chasm that included 1948, and that was practically unbridgeable.
*Army Mosquito
: A very small variety of mosquito, this was, and very dark in color; if you examined it carefully, though, you'd see there was a small white dot on its black head. Its sting produced a red bite, not that big but unbelievably itchy, that lasted about three days. Maqiao people called it the "army mosquito." People said Maqiao didn't used to have this sort of mosquito, only the vegetable mosquito, a large, greyish creature. Although the bites it produced were big and extremely itchy, they disappeared pretty quickly. Maqiao people also said that the army mosquito had been brought by the provincial army, the year that Donkey Peng's provincial army had fought their way up to Changle. They'd been stationed there for ten days, leaving behind piles of pig bristles, chicken feathers, and this vicious breed of mosquito.
That's how the army mosquito got its name.
It was during my time in the countryside that these mosquitoes taught me just how fierce they were. Particularly in the summer, when work finished very late, mosquitoes would swarm around your face and legs, making a deafening buzz, forming clouds so dense they could almost lift you off the ground. We were too hungry when we got home for our hands to take care of anything besides eating and drinking. And so, wolfing and gulping as we held our bowls, we had to keep our legs jigging about in a mealtime dance that we had to get used to: if you stopped for only a moment, a swarm of mosquitoes would mercilessly descend. If your hand happened to shoot out to rub your leg, you'd rub a few mosquito corpses off. People were quite used to rubbing rather than swatting mosquitoes, because in the end hands and feet were your own flesh and wouldn't put up with getting slapped all the time.
When it got late, the mosquitoes, too, seemed to get tired and rest, and the buzzing noise would grow fainter.
*Public Family
: Maqiao's paddy fields were unusually shaped, interlocking like fangs, and lay on a strip of valley between two mountains, slowly descending, one step at a time, to the drifting chimney smoke or evening moonlight of Zhangjia District. This stretch of land was called the "Great Gully," a name which should tell outsiders there were a lot of gully fields in the area. These "gully fields" were a type of paddy field to be found in mountainous areas where residual water exceeded flowing water, thereby producing a cold, swampy mud that concealed a great many deep gully holes; once you'd stepped in one, you could be in up to your forehead. The gully holes weren't easy to spot from the surface, and only people often in the fields would get to know the position of each and every one.
Maqiao's oxen also knew where the gully holes were, and if they suddenly stopped short somewhere, the plougher would know to tread very carefully indeed.
Each of these fields had its own name, derived either from its shape- turtle patch, snake patch, melon strip patch, silver carp patch, wooden bench patch, straw hat patch, and so on-or from the quantity of grain it ought to produce-three-peck patch, eight-peck patch, and so on; some were named after political slogans-unity patch, leap forward patch, four purifications red flag patch, and so on. Even so, naming them thus still wasn't enough to identity all those scattered fields, and people's names had to be used, or placed in front of the field names, in order to tell them apart: "Benyi's family's three-peck patch" and "Zhihuang's family's three-peck patch," for example, differentiated these two pieces of land.
It should thus be apparent that these fields used to be privately owned, or had been allocated to private owners during Land Reform; it was thus very natural that they should be linked with the names of the landowners.
Considering that collectivisation had happened a good ten years before I arrived, I was surprised they all still remembered so determinedly what had once belonged to their own families. Even the children, once they'd reached a certain age, all knew where the fields that had originally belonged to their own families were and whether rice would {ken) grow there. When putting down fertilizer, they'd put a bit extra down there. If they needed to pee, they'd relieve themselves there. Once, a child stepped on a piece of china, almost carving his foot open, and hurled it angrily onto another field. A woman standing nearby immediately glared at him:
"Where d
'you think you're throwing stuff, eh? Want a smack, do you? Or a poke with my chopsticks!"
That patch had originally been her family's-a long, long time ago.
This woman's continuing recollection of her family's private field proved that public ownership of land in Maqiao, right up to the early 1970s, was no more than a system, that it hadn't yet permeated to the depth of a feeling, or at least not to the depth of a whole-hearted feeling. Systems and feelings are, of course, two very different sorts of things, and all that seethes below the surface of a system is different again. Within the matrimonial system, a husband and wife could share a bed while dreaming different dreams, while having changes of heart. (Can this still be termed "marriage"?) In an absolutist system, factions can operate behind the scenes after great power has waned. (Can this still be called "absolutist"?) By a similar logic, for as long as many Maqiao people would hold in their urine in order to release it over what had previously been their own private fields, their grasp of the concepts of public ownership, of the "public family" had to be a little shaky.
