by Han Shaogong
Yanzao howled and roared, feeling a particularly distressed kind of love for his grandmother. As soon as he saw her going on some irrational hunger strike or other, he'd whirl around and around in agitation, blue veins bulging out of his forehead, snarling and grimacing, shouting so loud that people in the upper village could hear. The small dining table in his house had already needed repairing several times, each time thumped to pieces by him in a fit of temper. I knew, of course, that this howling and thumping stemmed from his distress. Unfortunately, I also knew that every time he became distressed, his grandmother got more and more used to his distress and valued it less and less, until finally it became valueless to her, or she insensible to it. She'd just roll her eyes and mumble wistfully about Yanzao's younger brother Yanwu. It was indisputably Yanzao who'd made her cloth shoes, but she'd insist it was Yanwu who'd made them. It was indisputably Yanzao who'd carried her on his back to the clinic to see the doctor, but afterwards she'd insist it was Yanwu who'd carried her. No one could set her bizarre recollections straight.
Yanwu was at school in distant parts, studying painting or Chinese medicine; he'd never stayed at home to look after her, hadn't even gone to see her in the hospital when she'd been seriously ill. But whenever he happened to return home for a visit, the old woman would bend his ear enumerating Yanzao's faults one by one; sometimes, her face covered in smiles, she'd delve from out of her pocket a glutinous rice cake that she'd been keeping warm for the last few days, or a couple of shriveled grapefruits, and surreptitiously press them on him.
Yanwu's great talent was for blaming and criticizing, through expressing annoyance at his brother's howling, for example, "She's an old woman, old young old young, what's the difference-you've got to treat her like a kid, what's the point in getting mad at her?"
Yanzao silently accepted the criticism.
"When she wants to make a fuss, just let her make a fuss. Her spirit's up, too much yang in there, making a fuss'U release her energy, give her back her balance, make her sleep better at night."
A true man of learning, he was, who spoke with so much erudition he barely made sense.
Still no sound from Yanzao.
"I know she gets you down. There's nothing to be done. The more you argue, the more she gets you down, there's still no way out, she's still a person, isn't she? Even if she were just a dog, you couldn't just kill her like that, could you? How could you lay a finger on her?"
He was referring to the time, not long ago, when Yanzao had lashed out at his grandmother's hand-the hand that, at that moment in time, had been stuffing a ball of chicken shit into her mouth. After the event, Yanzao didn't know himself why he'd exploded like that, why his hand had fallen so heavily-after only two blows the old woman's hand had swelled up very badly and a few days later shed a layer of skin. People said Yanzao'd had too much contact with pesticide, that he was poisonous all over, that one blow from him would burn anyone's skin off.
"Her quilt needs washing, it reeks of urine. D'you hear me?" The man of learning said his piece and left. It was like this every time he came home: he'd have a meal, wipe his mouth, dictate a few instructions, then leave. Of course, he'd leave as much money as he could. Money-he had money.
I can't say that Yanwu's chiding and his money weren't a kind of generosity-even if he was reacting from outside and after the fact, generosity was still generosity. But the prerequisite for this generosity was precisely that he'd spent very little time at home, that he'd suffered very little torture at his grandmother's hands. Neither can I say that Yanzao's use of violence wasn't a kind of callousness-even though he was confronted with a masochist who refused to listen to reason, callousness was still callousness. This callousness was the desperation that resulted from the failure of all other methods, from the failure of love. In a situation like this, love and hate swapped places, just as when a negative is developed the black is filtered into white, and the white filtered into black. When confronted with this old poison woman of Maqiao, one person's generosity was filtered into callousness, and one person's callousness was filtered into generosity.
Maqiao people had a special word, yuantou, meaning "resentment," also a little like "grievance," which carried the double implication of love and hate. "Resentment" generally developed thus: after one party has lost all lovable qualities, a torpid feeling of love for them is drained of all emotion, becomes no more than an intellectual test of endurance. Imagine what it's like: when love is totally exhausted, burned out, withered away, when one party has squandered it and stamped it flat into the ground, when only the bones and dregs of love are left, full of bitterness, full of day-after-day of torture. This is "resentment." He who loves receives some reward, gets to keep the touching, personal memories that remain after giving out love. But he who resents gets no reward, is left with nothing, he's given out and given out until he's lost everything, including anything that implies or is reminiscent of love. By this stage, he who resents has lost his right to a clear conscience before the judges of morality and ethics.
Yanzao resented his grandmother.
In the end, his grandmother died. When they buried her, Yanwu rushed back home to weep in the most heartbroken way, kneeling in front of the coffin, refusing to let other people pull him away. Anyone could see from his crystalline tears that his grief was genuine. But Yanzao was just wooden: if someone wanted him to do something, then he'd do it, his gaze remaining cavernously blank. Perhaps what with all his bathing the old woman, dressing her in her longevity clothes, and buying her coffin over the last few days, he'd just been too busy to have time to cry, and now he had no tears left.
Because of the class status of Yanzao's family, not many people attended the old poison woman's funeral, and no one was asked to sing filial songs. The whole business was desperately bleak. The few relatives on her mother's side who came couldn't stop themselves venting their grievances toward Yanzao: at least Yanwu had some filial piety, they said, at least his eyes were red from crying, he could bring himself to kneel, but that Yanzao had no sense of decency, had treated the old woman badly, so they said, fighting with her every other day; he didn't have a word to say even now, his eyes were dry as a bone. You'd be more upset if a dog had died, wouldn't you? Should be struck by lightning, that rotten old curmudgeon, shouldn't he?
Yanzao remained silent before this sea of voices.
*Scarlet Woman
: There were a lot of snakes in the mountains.
Particularly on the evenings of hot days, snakes would burrow out of clumps of grass to enjoy the cool, length after length stretched out across the road, their exquisitely patterned bodies shimmering, presenting a vision of lush greenness to passers-by, their forked tongues shooting out, quivering, glimmering, fresh and bright. At such moments, they weren't in fact necessarily dangerous. Once, as I sleepily returned home late at night, staggering dazedly to the left, then to the right, one momentary lapse of concentration led to me treading barefoot on something fresh, cool, and soft, that had suddenly come to life; before I'd had time to work out what it was, my instincts had me leaping around like a madman, trying to kick both feet above my head. Without pausing for breath, I ran ten or twenty meters, with only one word squeezing its way out of my brain: Snaaaaaake! Mustering all the courage I could, I took a look at my feet but found no wound. When I turned to look, I could see no snake's tail in pursuit.
Around here, the mountain people said, there were "Chessboard snakes": their bodies, when coiled up, happened to look just like a chessboard. There was the "Bellows-wind" too, also known as the Spectacles snake, which moved faster than the wind; when its hiss rang out, even the mountain pigs were frozen in their tracks.
The mountain people also believed that snakes were lecherous. For this reason, snake-catchers always drew the image of a woman on a piece of wood and smeared on rouge-if a woman could be made to spit on it, better still-then stuck it at the side of the road or on the mountainside for a night; when they went back to look, a snake wou
ld very likely be found coiled up, stock-still on the wood, as if dead drunk. The snakecatcher could then at his own leisure entrap his prey in a snake basket. By the same logic, they said, people walking at night who were nervous around snakes were best off carrying a stick or a piece of bamboo. It was said that bamboo was lover to the snake, and snakes, generally speaking, wouldn't dare do anything rash to someone with bamboo in hand.
If they met a venomous snake on the road, poised to attack, the mountain people still had one escape route: shouting "scarlet woman." Shouting this, apparently, confused snakes and gave you enough time to make your getaway. What history lay behind these words, that they had to be spoken and no others? No one had a convincing explanation.
Once, while spreading pesticide on the northern slope, Yanzao was bitten by a snake and ran back, howling. His number was up, he thought, but after running a while he discovered that his feet were neither swollen nor painful, that he was suffering neither cramps nor shivers. He sat down for a while, and managed to stay alive quite successfully, could still drink water, still see the sky, still pick his nose. Puzzled and perplexed, he turned back to look for the sprayer, but gaped, dumbstruck, when he reached the place where he'd left it: a clay-skin snake, a good three feet long, the very one that had just bitten him, lay stiff and dead on the cotton-flower field.
He'd become more poisonous than a snake.
Curious, he ran to the tea plantation to rummage around by the roots of the tea trees, where a good number of clay-skin snakes always lurked. He held out his hand for the snakes to bite, then watched them one by one lie writhing and twitching at his feet, until finally, as if miraculously, they stopped moving.
When dusk came, he tied a great armful of them together with a dead snake and carried them back home; people who spotted him from a distance thought he was strolling back home with a bundle of cut grass.
*This Him (Qu)
: Up until this point, whenever I've spoken of Yanzao or other people, in the Chinese version I've always used the word to, meaning "he" or "him." In Maqiao, a close synonym of to, is qu. The only difference is that to refers to someone faraway, meaning "that him over there"; qu is people you can see, nearby people, meaning "this him over here.", Maqiao people, I imagine, must think it ludicrous the way Mandarin-speakers from outside their area don't differentiate between "that him" and "this him."
They use these words in jokes: for example, "Master there (to), Servant here {qu)" to ridicule someone who's humble to a person's face, arrogant behind a person's back-in this context, although the to and qu refer to the same person, they mean two very different things and couldn't be mixed up.
The ancients also used qu as a demonstrative pronoun. The Record of the Three Kingdoms contains the phrase: "My son-in-law came yesterday, he (qu) must be the thief." The ancients often used this word, which can also mean a small channel or stream, in poetry too: "For a spring (qu) to be as pure as this, there must be running water at its source"; "when the mosquito tries to bite an iron ox, there's nowhere he (qu) can sink his teeth…" (meaning not being able to get a word in edgeways). But these lines of poetry don't illustrate the distance-related meaning of qu. Privately, I've always felt that this stubborn fixation on differentiating spatial relationships linguistically perhaps stems purely from the meddlesome nature of Maqiao people-there's no particular need for it.
Until now, neither Mandarin Chinese (felt by those who use it to be quite adequate), nor English, French, Russian, and so on have made this distinction.
Returning to Maqiao all those years later, I felt my ears filling up once more with this qu, saw face after face of qu, both familiar and unknown to me. I didn't see Yanzao as qu. I started to remember how he'd often helped us carry firewood all those years back then, how we were forever fooling around with him, for example how we'd often steal his pesticide when he wasn't looking and mix it with grain to poison rats, ducks, and chickens, or just take it to the supply and marketing cooperative to exchange for flour, making him suffer endless injustices and abuse from the village cadres.
The picture that particularly stuck in my mind was what he looked like when anxious: his face would flood scarlet, the blue veins on his forehead would bulge out extravagantly, he'd flare up at whomsoever he saw, howling even more savagely at us to show his suspicions about our involvement in the conspiracy. But none of this fury prevented him from continuing to carry firewood or other stuff for us later on. All it took was for us to spot his shoulders were looking bereft, smile, gesture, and he'd head, muttering away to himself, toward the heavy object.
I didn't manage to find him. The villagers said someone in Longjia Sands had called him over to help out with some work. There was no need, in fact there was no way I could visit his home. His wife was completely awakened, couldn't even cook; when she was pulling up crops in the fields she'd just pull and pull until she fell over onto her great big behind into the mud-that's the sort of person she was!
But off I still went, off toward that pitch-dark door, while other people snickered away. Hanging on the walls I saw a few gourds holding seeds, along with several terrifying dried snakeskins, like multicolored wall-carpets. As anticipated, the lady of the house looked a complete mess, her cranium bizarrely outsized, as if everything she ate went straight to her head; an eye-catching scar, the cause of which I never discovered, shone on her forehead. She failed to laugh when she was meant to, then would suddenly let out a great guffaw when she shouldn't; I was a little confounded by the air of intimacy she struck up toward me, as if we were great friends of old. She brought me a bowl of tea, but I couldn't touch it; one glance at the greasy ring of black dirt round the edge of the bowl left me nauseated for some time afterwards. The floor inside the house of such a mistress would never be flat, would be more potted and bumpy than anything outside, and any slip in concentration when walking over it might leave you with a twisted ankle. Clothes of all different colors had merged into just one color, a kind of confused, murky grey, piled chaotically on the bed. When the mistress of the house suddenly pulled something out from under there, I almost jumped out of my skin. The thing turned out to have a nose and eyes: it was a child. It never actually made a sound, wasn't frightened by guffaws, remained oblivious to the flies climbing over its face, its eyes kept screwed shut.
I almost wondered if it were dead-had the mistress of the house brought it out just for show?
I hurriedly gave her twenty yuan.
This was rather stingy, of course, and rather hypocritical. I could have produced thirty yuan, forty yuan, fifty yuan, but I didn't. According to my unspoken calculations and assessment, twenty yuan was enough. What could this twenty yuan achieve? It wasn't quite sympathy for Yanzao; rather, it was payment for my own sense of yearning, a financial exchange for some kind of apology from me, buying back mental peace and contentment, buying back my own high self-esteem. If I imagined that twenty yuan could do all this, then that would be cheap indeed. If I imagined that twenty yuan could in an instant have me humming a ditty, fiddling with my camera, could immediately release me from this sickening, run-down slum, into the sunlight and birdsong, then that would be very cheap indeed. If I thought that twenty yuan could fill my subsequent memories with glorious rose-tinted poetry, then that really would be very cheap indeed.
I put down the bowl of tea, its cover unlifted, and left.
That evening, I stayed in a room in the county government guest house. There was a knock on my door; when I opened it, I could see no trace of anyone in the pitch-darkness outside, but a single, solitary log charged headlong into my room. I finally made out that Yanzao had accompanied it in: he was even thinner than before, the angle of every joint in his body very acute, his whole body the strange juncture of a mass of acute angles. His Adam's apple protruded with particular sharpness, as if it were about to decapitate him. When he smiled, his fleshy gums bulged everywhere, revealing more red than white inside his mouth.
His shoulders, as ever, hadn't been empty: they'd
carried this log for about ten li.
He'd clearly come in pursuit of me. From his gestures, it looked like he wanted to give me this log as a gift, in repayment for my sympathy for and remembrance of him. I expect his home contained nothing of greater value.
He still wasn't a great talker, stammering out a few brief, random, and rather indistinct syllables. Most of the time, he responded to my questions with nods or shakes of the head; this kept the conversation moving along. I later realized that this, still, wasn't the principal obstacle to our conversing; even if he hadn't been a mute, we still wouldn't have found anything to talk about. Apart from elaborating for a time on the weather or on today's harvest, apart from politely refusing this log that I had no way of carrying off with me, I didn't know what to talk about, what would light up his eyes, what would move him to expression beyond a nod or a shake of the head. He fell silent, making me sense yet more acutely the superfluity of words. Lacking for words, I still groped for words: you went to Longjia Sands today, I've been to your home today, I saw Fucha and Zhongqi today too, and so on, like that. I talked this meaningless babble, struggling to piece stretch after stretch of silence into something resembling conversation.
