A Dictionary of Maqiao

by Han Shaogong

  When I first met him, his old granny was still alive. His old granny was what was known in local legend as a poison woman, someone who hid deadly poisonous powder made from snakes and scorpions in cracks in her nails and tried to kill enemies or strangers by secreting it into their drinks. Such people normally used poison to avenge a grievance or, some said, to shorten other people's lives in order to lengthen their own life spans. People said that Yanzao's granny only became a poison woman after the cooperatives were set up, because of her class hatred for poor and lower-middle peasants, because she wouldn't let things lie with the Communist Party. Benyi's mother had died many years ago, and Benyi had always suspected she'd been poisoned by this devil-woman.

  The wind had blown down Yanzao's thatched hut that day, and he entreated the villagers to come and help him mend it. I went along too, to help mix the putty. I caught a glimpse of this famous old woman's benign countenance as she stood over the stove tending the fire; to my amazement, it bore absolutely no resemblance to the picture of villainy painted by popular legend.

  The thatch was fixed in a morning. As people were carrying their own tools back home, Yanzao ran up behind them: "Why aren't you staying to eat?" he shouted, "Why are you going without eating? What's the sense in that?"

  Having smelled the fragrance of meat float out of the kitchen some time ago, I too felt there was no good reason for everyone to be going. Then I heard Fucha say that people not only wouldn't eat at his home, they wouldn't even dare touch the food bowls there. Everyone knew there was a poison woman in the family.

  I moistened my lips, and slipped off home with quickened steps.

  A short while later, Yanzao came pounding on the doors of houses to beg everyone once more to come and eat; he even pushed open the door of our house. Instantly thumping to his knees, he pounded out three crisp, resonant kowtows. "D'you want me to throw myself into the river? D'you want me to hang myself? Doing things for free, without getting fed, that's never been the way, not since the time of the three great emperors and five lords. You've walked over everyone in the Yanzao household today, I can't go on living, I'll just die here."

  Frightened out of our wits, we quickly pulled him to his feet, saying that we'd cooked at home and hadn't planned to eat out. In any case, we hadn't done anything much, it was embarrassing to eat his food, and so on and so forth.

  His face was sweating profusely with agitation; despite all this effort, he hadn't changed the mind of one single person, and was now on the verge of tears. "I know, I know, you're all afraid, afraid that old…"

  "Not at all, not at all, rubbish, total rubbish!"

  "Even if you don't trust that old woman, why shouldn't you trust me? D'you want me to cut out my heart, liver, and lungs, chop them into tiny pieces for you to see? Fine, if you're afraid, then don't eat. But right now, my little big brother's rinsing out the pots to cook all over again! If any of you are still worried, just go and watch her cook. This time I won't let that old woman anywhere near…"

  "Yanzao, why are you so upset?"

  "Generous, honorable people, please allow me to live." Saying this, he fell to his knees once more, his head pounding the floor as if he were crushing garlic with a pestle.

  One by one, he begged everyone who'd helped; he ended up pounding his forehead so much it bled, and still he hadn't managed to persuade anyone. It was just as he said: he really had thrown out three whole tables of already prepared food, thrown them into a ditch, and made his sister wash rice and borrow meat again to make another three tables-by this point, it was already time to start the afternoon's work. Some time ago, he'd tied up his granny with rope, a long, long way from the cooking area, under a big maple tree in the village, making a public example out of her. Out of curiosity, I went to have a look. The old woman was wearing only one shoe and seemed to be somewhere between sleep and consciousness, her eyes slanted downwards, focused on some spot on the upper face of a stone, her toothless mouth opening and closing, listlessly producing a few indistinct sounds. She'd wet her pants and stank of sourness. A few children watched her from far-off, not without fear.

  The tables of food were once more laid on the terrace in front of his house, but still there was no one to be seen. I saw Yanzao's elder sister sitting by the tables, wiping her eyes.

  Finally, we Educated Youth were unable to contain our greed-and didn't much believe in evil spirits, in any case. With one of us taking the lead, a few of the lads went and enjoyed a few pieces of beef each. One of them muttered, as his mouth ran with grease, that he hardly knew what the meat tasted like: he didn't care whether he was poisoned or not, he'd quite happily die of overeating.

  Probably because of this act of face-giving, Yanzao henceforth felt exceptionally indebted to us. We practically never chopped our own firewood-he'd always carry it over before it was needed. He had a unique capacity for carrying heavy loads. As I recall, his back was almost never empty: if there wasn't a carrying pole of rotted manure then there'd be a carrying pole of firewood, or the whole, sprawling mass of a threshing machine. In winter, in summer, his shoulders could never be empty, neither on fine, nor rainy days. It looked strange and awkward if he wasn't carrying something on his shoulders: like a snail without its shell, it just didn't look right. It was like a deformity that made him uneasy, that made his heels slip up when he walked-when he wasn't carrying things he really did stumble along, stubbing his toe so much that the blood throbbed inside it.

  If he carried cotton, he carried so much that it covered his entire frame, so much that from a distance it looked like two mounded snowy mountains were moving of their own accord along the road, bobbing up and down as they advanced-very strange.

  Once, he and I went to deliver grain, and on the way back home he actually put a big rock in his two empty baskets. He said that if he didn't have a bit of pressure like that, he couldn't walk properly. As soon as the carrying pole was twisted by downwards pressure over his shoulders, it became intimately fused with his body, the swishing movement of every muscle took on a dance rhythm, his step became elastic, and he bounded along the road out of sight, transformed from only a moment before, when ashen-faced he'd been carrying empty baskets, his steps unrhythmic and erratic.

  He too was a traitor to the Chinese. It was only later that I found out that, in Maqiao terms, as his father was a traitor to the Chinese, he couldn't escape the label either. This was how he saw matters himself. When we Educated Youth were newly arrived in Maqiao, when we saw how much rotted ox manure he carried, how energetically he worked, we naturally nominated him as a model worker; momentarily aghast, he waved his hands in agitation, "That's awakened, impossible: I'm a traitor to the Chinese!"

  The Educated Youth all jumped in fright.

  Maqiao people felt that policies from above stipulating that lines should be drawn between enemies and their children were really rather de trop. By a similar logic, I expect, after Benyi became Party Branch Secretary and when his wife went to the supply and marketing cooperative to buy meat, the other women would remark with envy, "She's Secretary-who'd dare short-change her?" When Benyi's kids misbehaved at school, the teacher would actually scold them, "Secretary! Stop talking in class! And peeing!"

  Yanzao later became a "Dumb-ox"-a mute, in other words. He hadn't been a mute to start with, it was just that he'd never had that much to say for himself. Being a traitor and having a poison woman in the family meant he couldn't find a wife, even by the time his forehead was starting to get wrinkles. His elder sister had once tried to trick him, people said, by finding him a blind girl; when the wedding day came, he scowled and refused to enter the house, spending the whole evening hauling pond silt outside the village. The next day, and the day after that…still the same. The poor blind girl wept for three nights in the empty bridal chamber. In the end, his elder sister had no choice but to take the blind girl back home and give her a hundred catties of grain as compensation for the retraction of marriage. When his elder sister yelled at him for being so hard
-hearted, he just said he was a traitor to the Chinese and he shouldn't bring anyone else down with him.

  His elder sister was married in faraway Pingjiang County, but every time she went back home to visit, she saw Yanzao didn't have one good thing to wear, that the cooking pot was always half full of freezing gruel, without a hint of warmth in it. Out of the few dozen catties of unhusked grain allocated to him by the work team, he had to save enough to give his little brother Yanwu, who was in school, to throw into the rice-pot at school; it left his elder sister's eyes continually red with tears. They were so poor they never had extra quilts and every time the elder sister went back home she always squeezed up with her younger brother in bed. One evening, when it was raining hard, the elder sister woke up in the night to discover the foot of the bed was empty, that Yanzao was sitting there, bowed over, not having slept at all, making a sobbing noise in the darkness. His elder sister asked him what was wrong. Yanzao gave no reply, and walked into the kitchen to twist grass rope.

  Also sobbing, his elder sister walked into the kitchen and extended a trembling hand, reaching for the hand of her younger brother: if you can't bear it, she said, don't treat me like a member of the family, just treat me like I'm someone you don't know… I want you to know what women taste like.

  Her hair was in a mess, her underclothes already undone, as she offered her jade white breasts up to her younger brother's stunned gaze. "Take me, it's not your fault."

  He whipped his hand back and retreated a step.

  "It's not your fault." His elder sister's hand moved down to her own trouser string, "We don't count as human anyway."

  He fled as if for his life, his footsteps disappearing into the wind and rain.

  Weeping noisily, he ran to his parents' grave. When he returned home early the next morning, his elder sister had already gone, leaving a bowl of steamed sweet potatoes and a few socks, washed and darned, laid out on the bed.

  She never returned home again.

  It was probably from this time onwards that Yanzao would talk even less, as if his tongue had been cut out. Whatever people told him to do, he did it. If people didn't tell him to do anything, he'd go off and sit squatting to one side; when people stopped issuing orders to him, he'd silently return home. As time went on, he just about became a real mute. At one point he, along with all the other members of the commune, was called up for road-mending work. Discovering on the construction site that his rake had disappeared, he began to search everywhere, his whole face flushed bright red with anxiety. The People's Militiaman who was supervising them asked him suspiciously, what the hell was he doing, darting in and out like that? He could only howl in response.

  The People's Militiaman interpreted his incoherent mumbling as a form of trickery, and feeling a thorough investigation was required, pointed his rifle at his chest with a click: "Tell the truth now: what the hell are you up to?"

  Sweat beaded on his forehead, his face reddened up to his ears and down to his neck, the muscles in his rigid face pulled half-askew, trembling and quivering like jelly, his eyes widening ever farther with every tremble; his mouth-that mouth on which bystanders were waiting so anxiously-was wide open all this time, but its expansion in vain, as not a single word was spat out.

  "Talk!" The bystanders were also sweating with anxiety.

  Panting, wheezing, after repeated efforts that locked his faculties and features into a terrifying, tortured, life-and-death struggle, a sound finally erupted forth: "Wah-rake!"

  "What rake?"

  His eyes bulged, but no further words came out.

  "You a mute, hmm?" The Militiaman was getting increasingly irritable.

  The muscles in his cheeks erupted into repeated bursts of twitching.

  "He's a mute," someone standing nearby told him. "He hasn't got much to say for himself; he said everything he had to say in a previous life."

  "Won't talk?" The Militiaman turned back to glance at him. "Say'Long Live Chairman Mao!'"

  Yanzao got so agitated he howled even louder; he raised an index finger, then an arm, and made a gesture of cheering, to convey "Long Live." But the People's Militiaman wouldn't let it go, insisted that he say it. His face took a few punches that day, and his body a few kicks, but still he didn't manage to get this whole sentence out. Finally, at the very last gasp, he shouted out a "Mao."

  Seeing that he was a real mute, the People's Militiaman punished him by making him haul another five carrying-poles of earth and left it at that for the time being.

  From this time on, Yanzao's status as a mute was formally certified. There was of course nothing bad about being a mute: too much talking saps the strength and catastrophes start at the mouth, so less talk meant fewer arguments, or at least that Benyi no longer suspected him of saying bad, reactionary things behind his back, that he could ease up a bit on his watchfulness. When someone on the work team was needed to spread pesticide, Benyi thought first of him: maybe this spawn of a poison woman wasn't afraid of poison, he said, and now that he was a dumb-ox he wouldn't say anything to anyone, couldn't easily make a fuss, so they could send him off on the job alone.

  The mud in the Great Gully was freezing cold, and there'd never used to be many bugs living there. But according to what the locals said, the bugs were all driven out into the open by the noise of the diesel engines; once the engines started up, the rushes on the mountain all swarmed with them. Where there were insects, of course, there'd have to be pesticide spread. When Fucha tried it out for a day, just for novelty's sake, he came back vomiting and foaming at the mouth; face green and legs swollen, he stayed in bed for three days, saying he'd been poisoned, after which no one dared touch the sprayer again. People were afraid that if the landlords and rich peasants were sent to do this unpleasant job, they'd poison the commune's cows, pigs, or cadres with pesticide. Having thought it over several times, Benyi decided Yanzao was the most honest, law-abiding traitor around, that he'd do.

  When Yanzao started out, he also suffered from poisoning: his head swelled up like a melon and was kept wrapped up in a piece of cloth all day, however hot the weather got; he looked like a masked bandit, with only his eyes, blinking away, exposed to the outside. As the days went by, he probably slowly acclimatized to the poison and took the scarf off; he wouldn't even wear the mouth and nose scarf the Educated Youth gave him, or wash his hands first at the waterside before going home to eat. The most poisonous pesticide, 1059 or 1605, something like that, was absolutely nothing to him: the hand that had just spread the pesticide could a moment later be wiping his mouth, scratching his ear, grabbing a sweet potato and stuffing it into his mouth, cupping cold water to his mouth-all of which was astounding to onlookers. He had a ceramic bowl that was plastered with pesticide residue, that was specially used to spread pesticide. Once, in the fields, he caught a few mud loaches and chucked them in the bowl; a moment later, the loaches were writhing in agony. He lit a fire to the side of the field, roasted the loaches and gobbled them down one by one, suffering no ill effects whatsoever.

  After various discussions about all this, the villagers decided he must have become a poisonous being and the blood flowing through his veins could no longer be human blood.

  People also said that from this time on, he no longer needed a mosquito net while sleeping, that all mosquitoes gave him a wide berth: simply touching his finger meant instant death. For a mosquito flying over him, exposure to just one breath of his would send the little creature crashing to the ground, its head spinning. His mouth was more effective than the pesticide sprayer.

  *Resentment

  : Some words undergo a bizarre transformation once they pass into actual usage: their opposite meaning gestates and grows within until it bursts out of them, until they end up annihilating, totally negating themselves. In this latent sense, such words always carry within them their own antonyms-if only people realized it.

  They harbor shadows that are very hard to glimpse.

  The hidden meaning of "expose," for exa
mple, is in fact "hide." At first watching, the exposure of sex in a pornographic film can shock and stun viewers. But when films like this become commonplace, a dime a dozen, when they're coming out of your ears, their "exposure" will have no effect at all beyond leaving viewers increasingly numb, unmoved, and indifferent; show them endless pornography and they'll just yawn and yawn. Excessive sexual stimulation results in the exhaustion, even in the total annihilation, of sexual feeling.

  Criticism is the hidden meaning of "praise." Criticizing someone is most likely to win that person more sympathy. Criticizing a film is most likely to lower audience expectations before people view it, so when they do watch it, it will make an unexpectedly favorable impression on them. Anyone experienced in the ways of the world can't fail to acknowledge the logic behind linking praise and criticism, can't fail to realize the terrifying potential of what Lu Xun called "being clapped to death." Praise can pile too much glory and honor onto the shoulders of enemies, attract envy, make the general public deliberately faultfinding in a way they might not have been otherwise, vastly increasing the risk of widespread resentment. Praise may also go to an enemy's head, encourage sloppiness, result in unforced errors in the future; his reputation will end up in tatters without anyone else needing to raise a finger in reproach. More often than not, the best way of dealing with enemies is in fact to praise and not criticize.

  Then what about "love"? What about Yanzao's love for his grandmother? Did that also have a reverse side lurking behind it? After the feeling of love had ebbed away, had some unexpected residue been left behind?

  Yanzao's grandmother was a very peculiar character. She'd sleep during the day, then climb down from her bed in the evening to chop wood and boil tea, sometimes even humming a song or two. Yanzao would help her over to the toilet hut, then she wouldn't relieve herself; then just as Yanzao had helped her to bed, she'd start to reek of piss and shit. She'd yell and shout about wanting to eat garlic bulbs, but when Yanzao had busted a gut to borrow some, she'd yell and shout she wanted to eat crispy rice and push the garlic heads out of her bowl, all over the floor. Then, when she'd eaten up all the crispy rice, she'd announce she'd had nothing to eat at all, that she was so hungry her stomach was stuck to her spine, she'd curse Yanzao for starving her to death, for being a disloyal, unfilial good-for-nothing. For a good many years now, Yanzao had been at his wits' ends over this old woman he looked after, this old woman who'd brought him and his brother up.