by Han Shaogong
Years later, on a visit to the county seat to attend a cadre meeting, he bumped into a certain Hu, one of his own old colleagues from the prefectural commission, a junior reporter in days gone by. This Hu was now an official who'd discussed at the meeting "the three crux issues," "the four links," and "the five implementations," all of which were completely lost on Benyi. Hu's way of smoking, of arranging his hair up and to the right, of gargling after meals and peeling his apples with a small knife all seemed very alien to Benyi, and filled him with amazement and envy. He felt all at sea in the guestroom at the hostel where his old colleague lodged, unable to look at the bright electric lamp with his eyes open.
"Hey, you were unlucky, you know, way back then, they shouldn't have punished you so hard for such a small thing." Hu mused on the past in the light of the present, passing him an apple he'd already peeled.
" 'Snot important, not important at all."
His old colleague heaved a sigh: "You're no good now, your cultural level's too low, it wouldn't be right for you to come back on the team. D'you have kids?"
"A boy and a girl."
"Good, good; how's the harvest?"
" 'Bout the same as you, still got food in the pot."
"Good, good; are your folks still alive?"
"Been sent up to the yellow earth commune work team in the sky."
"You still like your little joke, I see. Where's your wife from?"
"She's from Changle, she's nice enough, bit of a temper though."
"Good, good-good to have a bit of a temper."
Benyi didn't know what this "good, good" was supposed to mean; after these careful inquiries into his situation, he thought Hu was going to arrange something for him, do him some favor, but he never heard anything about it in the end. That was a happy evening, though. He was grateful to his old colleague for not having forgotten him, for being polite to him still, for giving him ten catties' worth of grain coupons. Thinking back to the good, round rump of that section chief's wife all those years back still sent him off on a happy spirit journey. The day the meeting broke up, his old colleague wanted to keep him there for another evening. Benyi wouldn't agree. He said he was getting on now, that his streetsickness was even worse, that he'd better go back; his old colleague wanted to send him back on his way in his jeep, but still Benyi waved his hands in refusal. He was afraid of the smell of gasoline, he said, if ever his path took him by a gas station, he usually had to make a long, twisty detour; there was no way he could sit in a car. A cadre standing nearby affirmed that he wasn't just being polite, that a lot of people from round Maqiao were afraid of gasoline and would rather walk than go by car. The County Automobile Transportation Company had, not long ago, extended the long-distance route to Longjia Bay, intending to make life more convenient for the masses, but since, contrary to all expectations, barely a handful of people had taken the bus in the past month, they'd had to cancel the regular bus service.
Only then did Old Hu believe him, waving as he watched Benyi's silhouette set off down the road.
*Colored Tea
: When Benyi was looking after the horses at the prefectural commission, city tea was the thing he found hardest to swallow. Normally, Maqiao people drank ginger tea, also known as pounded tea. Using a tiny bone pestle and mortar, they pounded chopped ginger, added salt, then poured on boiling water from a hanging kettle until it was brewed. The fairly affluent would use a copper kettle rather than a ceramic kettle, always polished till it dazzled with an extraordinary metallic gleam. Housewives put flavorings such as beans and sesame seeds into iron pots and stuck them in amongst the wood fire to roast. None of them was afraid of getting burned, and while firewood was burning under the cooking range, they'd often grab hold of the iron pot with their bare fingers to give it a shake, to prevent the flavoring ingredients inside from getting scorched. The rustling of the shaking, the exploding of the beans, and the cracking of the sesame seeds soon released a piping hot fragrance that coaxed smiles from the faces of guests.
Red dates and eggs could also be added, to make even grander sorts of tea.
Benyi could never understand why it was that city people, who weren't short of cash, insisted on drinking colored tea, tea with no spices in it, the lowest grade of tea. Colored tea wasn't freshly boiled, it was usually heated up in a big pan and stored in a big pot, one batch lasting two or three days, its only function being to quench thirst. Often enough, tea leaves weren't used for colored tea; instead, it was boiled up out of a few tea-tree twigs till it was as dark as soy sauce. Maybe this was where the name "colored tea" came from.
How could you fail to laugh at, to pity city people who drank only this and not pounded tea?
*Barbarian Parts
: Around here, the dialect changes three times every ten li. People from Changle all call any faraway place "over there," people from Shuanglong all say "over the way," and people from Dongluodong all say "over to the west"; but Maqiao people say "barbarian parts," whether they're talking about Pingjiang County, Changsha, Wuhan, or America. Whether they're cotton-pickers, hide-trappers, or sent-down youth and cadres, they're all people from "barbarian parts." The Cultural Revolution, fighting in Indochina, Benyi looking after horses in the prefectural commission-all these events took place in "barbarian parts." I reckon they must have always felt they were in the center, must always have had a deep sense of self-satisfaction and confidence. What justification did they have for regarding these places outside their own poor village as "barbarian"?
This word "barbarian" was used by the ancient people of the central plains to describe the small, weak, surrounding races. The Chinese character for this word combines the characters for "bow" [^5] and "people" [A]: [51]- What justification did Maqiao people have for believing that the inhabitants of those flourishing, developed cities that lay beyond the horizon still lived by hunting? Or that they were tribes who hadn't yet mastered agricultural techniques?
A professor of cultural anthropology told me that in ancient China, among the hundreds of disputing philosophies of the Warring States period (770-221 b.c). only one tiny school of thought contradicted the belief that China was the center of the world: the School of Logicians from the Spring and Autumn period (777-476 b.c). Finding the ideas of this school rather hard to stomach, some thinkers later expressed doubts over their nationality: their names, such as "Gongsun Longzi," sounded rather odd, very much like the kind of name that would be given to a foreign student or visiting scholar in China. When translating the oracle bones, the modern poet Guo Moruo came to believe China's Ten Heavenly Stems and Twelve Terrestrial Branches revealed an influence from Babylonian culture. Ling Chunsheng also conjectured that the tribe of the "Queen Mother of the West" written of in China's ancient historical annals was just a translation of the Babylonian word Siwan (moon spirit), thus inferring that foreign culture had flowed into China long before the Silk Road, and that the sources of ancient Chinese culture were perhaps very complex. All this increased people's suspicions about the origins of the Logicians. Of course, with an enormous entity such as Chinese culture, even if the disciples of Gongsun Longzi really were a group of foreign scholars, their voices were still very feeble and they never managed to shake the confidence of the Chinese race in its belief that it inhabited the "Middle Kingdom"; it would have been pretty difficult to weaken the Chinese sense of cultural complacency. This use of the word "barbarian" in Maqiao clearly displayed its ancient Chinese pedigree, containing within it contempt for and dismissal of anything that hailed from distant parts. Maqiao's forefathers never gave a moment's thought to the heartfelt warnings of Gongsun Longzi, and this obduracy has survived in its language up until the present day.
*Speech Rights
: Benyi said that people in the provincial capital didn't drink pounded tea, didn't know how to weave cloth shoes, that many families-imagine how pitiful!-hadn't enough cloth for pants and wore shorts no bigger than a palm, like the girdle that women wore on horseback, pulled in agonizingly
tight at the crotch. Because of this, Maqiao people brimmed over with sympathy for city people and whenever they saw us Educated Youth about to return to the city, they'd always be urging us to buy more local cloth to take back and make up a few pairs of pants for our parents.
Thinking this very funny, we told them there was no shortage of cloth in the cities, and if shorts were made on the small side, it was to fit better, to look good, or for convenience when playing sports.
Maqiao people just blinked and looked doubtful.
As time went by, we discovered that it didn't matter what we said, that we couldn't dismiss Benyi's rumors as false-because we had no speech rights.
There isn't really a close synonym for "speech rights" in standard Mandarin, but it was a word of particular importance in the Maqiao vocabulary, signifying linguistic power, or in other words the right to claim a very definite portion of the sum total of linguistic clout. Possessors of speech rights bore no particular external marker or status, but everyone was aware of their existence as linguistic leaders, was aware of the force that sprang from their shadowy authority. They had only to open their mouths, or cough, or direct a look, and those standing around would immediately shut their mouths and listen respectfully, not daring to interrupt randomly the flow of words, even if they disagreed. This kind of hush was the most usual manifestation of speech rights, the most tacit, coordinated, voluntary submission to linguistic dictatorship. The words of someone without speech rights, by contrast, were as dust and nothingness: anything they said was wasted breath, no one cared what they said, didn't even care whether they had the chance to speak. Their words were inevitably scattered and lost in a wasteland of indifference, never to gain any response. When such occurrences became frequent, it wasn't easy for someone to keep up their vocal confidence, or even to preserve an ordinary kind of competence in speech production. The way that Yanzao ended up practically a mute represented an extreme example of loss of speech rights.
The topics of conversation covered by the possessors of speech rights were taken up by the general multitude; their expressions, sentence structures, tones of speech, and so on fell into common usage; power was constituted in this linguistic diffusion, was realized and affirmed by these processes of linguistic expansion and outward radiation. The term "speech rights" exposes the linguistic basis of power. A mature governing regime or a powerful faction will always have its own powerful linguistic system, is always accompanied by a series of official documents, meetings, ceremonies, lecturers, key texts, memorials, theories, propaganda slogans, works of art, even new place-names or new reign titles, thus acquiring and establishing its own speech rights throughout all society. Power sources that fail to acquire their own speech rights are the rabble who follow those with wealth or might, bandits who manage to cut down the government troops a few times on their progress toward the capital city: even if they briefly gain the upper hand, their success is inevitably short-lived.
This point is neatly illustrated by the great stock the holders of power set by documents and meetings. Documents and meetings are both the key to safeguarding power and the best way of reinforcing speech rights. Mountains of paperwork and oceans of meetings are a fundamental or integral part of, and genuine source of excitement within, the bureaucratic way of life. Even if meetings are river upon river of empty talk, even if they haven't the slightest real use, most bureaucrats still derive a basic level of enjoyment from them. The reason is very simple: it's only at these moments that the chairman's podium and the mats of the listening masses will be placed in position, that hierarchies will be clearly demarcated, giving people a clear consciousness of the existence (or lack thereof) and degree (large or small) of their own speech rights. Only here do the speech rights of those with power and influence, on passing through the ears of the masses, through notebooks, megaphones, and so on, enjoy support from coercive forms of dissemination and broadcasting. Only in this kind of an environment do those with power and influence, immersed in the language with which they themselves are familiar, become aware that their power is receiving the warm, moist, nurturing, nourishing, safeguarding protection of language.
All this is often far more important than the actual aims of the meeting.
And by the same basic principle, those with power and influence are filled with a natural sense of vigilance and animosity toward language they are not themselves used to or familiar with. During the Cultural Revolution, Marx and Lu Xun enjoyed the highest respect in China, became the only two out of a few last, great figures who could still be found in the empty, deserted bookshops. And even so, reading Marx and Lu Xun then was still extremely dangerous. A book of Marx's that I had in the countryside nearly became proof of my "reactionary" crimes- "That Educated Youth's reading a book by Marx," the commune cadre said, "not a book by Chairman Mao! What on earth is he thinking? What on earth is he feeling?"
I realized that the commune cadres neither meant nor dared to oppose Marx; neither did they know what that book by Marx (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) said, whether it subverted their controls over forestation or family planning or evening out resources. No, they had no idea about all this, and neither did they much care. They glared and raged at any language they didn't understand very well, feeling their speech rights implicitly challenged and threatened.
Throughout the twentieth century, as modernism broadened its influence, abstract painting, absurdist theater, stream-of-consciousness novels, and surrealist poetry disrupted the status quo, bringing antiorthodox cultural phenomena such as hippies, feminism, rock music, and the like in their wake. Interestingly, as these new phenomena emerged, almost every single one was viewed as a sinister political conspiracy. Bourgeois newspapers attacked Picasso's abstract paintings as "evil Soviet trickery aimed at the downfall of Western democratic society," as "propaganda for Bolshevik ideology," while Elvis Presley and John Lennon, the representative member of the Beatles, were suspected by churches and governments alike of being "underground spies for the Communist Party," of aiming to "corrupt the younger generation, to destroy them before the battle with communism had begun"-their music was continually prohibited on US army bases in Europe. All Red regimes, meanwhile, do pretty much the same thing, and over the last few decades all modern art, whether high or low, has been officially denounced, defined in official documents and university textbooks as the "avant-garde of peaceful evolution," as "the declining and degenerate ideology of the Western bourgeoisie," as "spiritual toxins aimed at poisoning youth," and so on.
These reactions represent, of course, a defensive excess. This fact was later gradually recognized by both sides, which, to greater or lesser degrees, relaxed their levels of surveillance, even became willing to make use of the expressive power of these various new cultural forms for their own purposes, using rock music to praise Yanan (Mao's revolutionary center in Northwest China) or Nanniwan (a barren area of Northwest China where the Communist army struggled for self-sufficiency), for example; or using abstract paintings to promote the export of clothes.
Of course, it would be overly ingenuous to regard these reactions merely as forms of defensive excess. Any unfamiliar form of language, in fact, is an uncontrollable form of language, and hence an uncontrollable form of power. Regardless of its external political markers, it will exercize a real centrifugal force, creating obstructions and interruptions within information channels, resulting, to varying degrees, in the weakening, in the dissolution of the speech rights of power-holders.
Maqiao people, it seemed, had achieved a penetrating understanding of power-holding, had seen through it all a long time ago, in summarizing power thus as speech rights, as talking.
Let's see who in Maqiao had speech rights:
1. Women didn't generally have speech rights. They were used to not interrupting when men were speaking and just stayed on the sidelines, breast-feeding a child or stitching shoe soles. The cadres never asked them to join in the big Village Meetings of the People.
2
. Young people didn't have speech rights. From a very young age, they got used to hearing age-old admonitions such as "children listen as grown-ups talk," and would always let older people have their say first. Even if they disagreed or, more often than not, muttered behind their backs, it would have been an unthinkable heresy to talk back to their faces.
3. Poor families didn't have speech rights. The wealthy could huff and puff, while the poor could only wheeze: feeling they lacked dignity, poor people were usually unwilling to show their faces where there were a lot of people about, and so inevitably missed out on a great many opportunities for talking to others. And there was another custom in Maqiao: those in debt, even if they only owed half a pint of unhusked grain, weren't allowed to take important roles at village weddings and funerals, such as master of ceremonies, master of sacrifices, matron of honor, so as not to bring the host family bad luck. The place nearest the tea cabinet, by the brazier in each household, was the most prominent place to sit and was called the head place; no guest except the creditor could casually sit down there, unless an insult to the host was intended. All these regulations ensured that speaking power was amassed in the wealthy fists of those with lending power.
