by Han Shaogong
When the news got out, Widow Li was stripped of her post as floorsweeper, and afterwards lived by scavenging rubbish. Mingqi (minus the title "Father") returned dejectedly to Maqiao, never again to enjoy the opportunity of making steamed buns in the county seat or in the commune. His status in the village, moreover, went into dramatic decline: his appearance gradually became more and more wretched, his neck always shrunk down into his hunched shoulders whether it was hot or cold, as if he wanted to bury his face. He was, of course, stripped almost entirely of his speech rights. Whether it was a meeting for cadres or for every member of the commune, it was never his turn to speak. If there was some matter on which everyone had to express an opinion, he would stick his head out in panic, his voice about as loud as the buzz of a fly or mosquito, provoking Benyi to holler: "Speak up! Speak up! It's not like you haven't been fed!"
He was often assigned the hardest, most exhausting work, and his work points were lower than other people's.
Maqiao people hated iron that failed to become steel, they hated Mingqi for his greed and lust, for cutting the whole village off, just like that, from its gleaming portion of glory; it was as if everyone in the village had stolen a bag of flour and a pig's head. So they dealt with him by unwritten rule: they'd hiss "lost form" at him, just the once, driving him into chronic dejection and depression; before we left Maqiao to return to the city, his accumulation of melancholy had turned to illness and his soul had returned to the underworld. This rather brutal process taught me that "form" could also be collectivized. Mingqi's form took on the importance it did precisely because he was such a rare treasure for Maqiao, precisely because it'd become a source of capital shared by all the villagers in Maqiao. His casual throwing away of his form constituted a crime committed against everyone in the village.
Returning to Maqiao many years later, as I walked along the ridges between the fields I heard a child singing a folksong under a tree:
Mingqi bagged a wild bird,
Caught in the act he was,
They took him to Crotch County
Pulled off his pants, ripped his clothes
The police beat his bottom,
If you blow your own trumpet,
Once the trumpet's blown,
You'll be left with a bright red bum…
My heart skipped a beat. I'd never imagined that even all those years later Mingqi would still live on in Maqiao, in the folksongs of Maqiao's next generation, that such an immortal oral monument would have been erected to his bag of flour, to his loss of form, to his decline and fall. I expect this monument will be passed on from mouth to mouth, generation to generation in Maqiao, until Benyi, Fucha, or others, and I, and even the child singing under the tree, are no longer in this world.
As long as language still exists, perhaps he will always live on, deep into the future.
*Clout
: Maqiao women's form usually came from men. For women who were already married, if their husband's family had form then they themselves had form, if their husband's family lost form then they themselves lost form; for women who weren't yet married, form was determined mainly by their fathers, after they no longer had a father, their form depended on their elder brothers.
There were, of course, exceptions. One I encountered once at the road-works construction site. A real free-for-all it was there, with laborers from every village come to help out, all fighting for tools, for earth, for rice and vegetables. The whistling winter wind billowed up wave upon wave of scree, muddying the sky and the heavens into a great yellowed expanse. Those hauling earth, tamping the ground, and pulling wheelbarrows were all blown around by the wind like dancers, like a shadow play without sufficient light, the old and young indistinguishable from each other.
There were no women on the construction site and the laborers took a piss or a crap whenever they wanted. I'd just finished shaking off the last couple of drops when I spotted some people who looked like cadres come to measure the earth and draw up lines of lime, among them someone wearing an old army uniform, a cotton cap over the head, a scarf over half the face, at that moment using a bamboo pole to direct two other people to run back and forth pulling the rope. Against interference from wind-noise and the high-pitched loudspeaker, this person was yelling something at someone, but seeing they hadn't heard, threw down the bamboo pole and ran over, hurling down the hillside a big stone that had been lying across the lime. I was pretty impressed by this cadre's show of strength: if it'd been me, I'd have had to call at least one other person over to give me a hand.
As soon as Fucha saw this person, he started to look worried: "What we've done, will it… do?" he asked, twisting his hands.
The person stuck the bamboo pole a few times into the land by the landfill area, then took out the pole, measuring how deep it'd gone into the ground. "Still needs tamping down a layer."
Fucha's tongue hung out.
"What about the people Commune Head He asked you to send?" the person asked.
Fucha pointed at me, then at another Educated Youth.
The person walked over and stuck a hand out at us. This was clearly a gesture that came from outside Maqiao; I stood there, stupefied, until I realized this was called shaking hands and we should also stick out our hands.
I was slightly surprised. This person's hand was not as bony and sinewy as I had anticipated, it was even rather soft. I took another look at that face the size of a palm, at its eyes with their extraordinarily big black pupils, which possessed an air of delicate prettiness as they fluttered open and shut, and which struck me as somewhat out of the ordinary.
We followed this person to the command office to help edit a quick report. On the way, we heard people address this person as "Teacher Wan," "Brother Wan," but on the whole this person wouldn't reply, would at most nod in the direction of the speaker, or give a faint smile. "This guy's got top form," my companion Educated Youth muttered to me, not expecting Teacher Wan/Brother Wan, a few meters away, to catch what he said. Wan turned, came to a halt, fixed shiny black eyes on my companion as a silent warning, scoured me with a sharp, knifelike stare, as a punishment to warn me off future transgressions, then steadily walked away.
We hadn't imagined this person's ears would be so sharp, nor that the return fire would be so swift or fierce. This struck us as a bad omen: you had to be extra careful around someone like this.
It wasn't until that afternoon that we discovered this Wan person was actually a woman. When he went off to relieve himself, my companion saw that as Wan took off the cotton cap, a head of long black hair rolled out. My companion was so surprised he didn't even visit the toilet hut but ran straight back to report, holding in his urine. Amazed by this, I also went to have a look and saw that Wan Whoever-it-was, squeezed in among a table of men, really had started out life a baby girl. According to local rules, women didn't eat at the table. As time went on, we got used to this rule, to the way things should look, and we actually found the discovery of a woman's face in front of a dining table surprising, even discomforting, as if someone had rubbed sand in our eyes.
It was only later that I discovered Wan was from Zhangjia Mill. Her full name was Wan Shanhong, and she'd taught in a locally run school for two years but hadn't wanted to stay there, so she returned to the village to study agriculture for two years-she could even plough just like a man. She was a proper high school graduate and a member of the commune youth group propaganda committee; whenever there was anything important to be done in the commune, they'd generally ask her to come and help write or add things up, people said they even wanted to train her to be a successor to someone or other. Because of this, people still respectfully called her "Teacher Wan" or "Propaganda Committee Wan." She didn't like the young men calling her "Brother Wan" but her objection was only one voice against many and popular feeling couldn't be resisted, so as time went by she had to put up with this name. I must admit that Brother Wan without her cap was not half bad looking: she had a good figure and there was a strong
line to her jaw, from ear to chin. She walked back and forth through crowds of men like a sharp scythe cutting back and forth through the grass. But she didn't seem to be much of a talker: during a winter spent with us repairing the highway, she did little more than fling instructions at us in her slightly raspy intonation, a few "okays," "no goods," "let's eats"; and when she spoke, her face was as expressive as a papaya.
Strange to say, the brusquer her words, the more authoritative they became, and the harder it was for anyone else to put up any resistance. As Maqiao people would put it, this was called having sha, or "clout." Sha implied authority or extreme competence, a homonym for the word meaning "kill"; it also meant completion. People with "clout" could be understood as those who had the last word, the ones who had the deciding vote in conversation. Brother Wan's was the only female face with clout that I came across down in the countryside.
In the presence of such clout, any interaction was pretty much no interaction at all; however well you knew her, you still seemed to be separated by 108,000 li. If she bumped into us, she acted as if she'd bumped into thin air; the gleam in her black eyes instantly skimmed over the tops of our heads, landing on some unknown spot in the distance. To begin with, we found this hard to get used to: offering an awkward greeting didn't feel right, but neither did offering no greeting at all; as time went on, however, we saw she acted the same toward everyone, so we accepted it as normal and didn't take it to heart. When I mentioned her name to people from Zhangjia Mill I came across, they'd smile: it's not just Maqiao Bow, there's no one even in the same village, the same stockade who's made friends with her, no one can make her out. She lives near us, but it's like she doesn't exist.
So: it seemed she couldn't get close to anyone.
She just represented official business, a concept, a symbol called Brother Wan that lacked any flicker of a smile, of emotion, warmth, or understanding, and so to many people she had an unreal quality; if you shut your eyes and thought about her, she was no more than an illusion, as if there, but not there. Some said she had a complicated past, that she was the illegitimate child of an important official, the seed of a work team leader planted during land reform; ten or so years later, her mother had brought her to the city, wanting to have a blood test and to voice her grievances. This had left her distinguished father with no choice but to keep her in the county seat and send her to high school, secretly providing for her living and education costs. I don't know how much truth there is in this. Some also said that when she'd been making noisy "Cultural Revolution" a few years ago in the county seat, she'd been a famous student leader who'd got to Beijing and Shanghai, who'd carried a rifle and gone to prison, who'd even been taken to a meeting in a car sent by the provincial military organization, who'd had her picture taken with some big cheese from the Central Committee. I don't know how much truth there is in this, either. Others said although there'd been no talk of marriage for Sister Wan even by the time she was twenty-five or twenty-six, in fact she had a long-term boyfriend, a former classmate of hers who'd joined the army. Every year she'd go to Guangdong for a time to see her boyfriend, people said. Unfortunately, the young lad had been misguided enough to join Lin Biao's clique in the 1971 coup d'etat; after it failed, he was thrown into prison and for several years no word of him was heard; his family and Brother Wan (who'd never been carried over the threshold) only received news after he'd died from illness in prison. Again, I don't know how much truth there is in this.
To me, she'd forever be the stuff of stories and rumors. Her youth washed away amidst such stories and rumors, gradually acquiring the darkened complexion of middle age.
Once, seeing her walking along the road, some uncouth young men decided to pick on her, to provoke her by singing low songs. Seeing that she was turning a deaf ear, they took revenge with filthy catcalls:
"Hey, why so stuck-up? Reckon you're so chummy with the higher-ups, don't you?"
"What kind of a flower d'you think you are, anyway? You must've been knocked up by that army guy ages ago, broken by that dead devil, or else how'd your tits get that big?"
"Forget her missy-prissy act, I don't believe she doesn't want it. Look at how she walks, bum sticking out up to the sky, isn't she just asking for it?"
A wave of laughter.
She acted as if she hadn't heard.
When Maqiao's Zhaoqing heard about this, he laughed at the lads, said they must've been really woman-crazy to pick on Brother Wan. They didn't even think who she was. D'you think you'd be able to stick (see the entry "Stick(y)") a woman with as much form as that?
His underlying message being that form is a male thing; once a woman's got it, she no longer counts as a woman, or at least no longer counts as a pure woman, and lowness from young men becomes inappropriate. Taking this one step further, form is a kind of scourge that eliminates gender; excessively high form can wound a person, even jeopardize the birth of later generations.
I don't know how much truth lay behind Zhaoqing's comments. But Brother Wan-no, Sister Wan actually-really did preserve her chastity and never married; when I left Maqiao she was still a powerful, lofty, single unit. But she didn't stay on in Maqiao for long: a year or so later her natural father's wife died and he was reinstated in his post, back from the May 7 Cadre School, so he had her recalled to the city.
People said she was sent to a big state-owned factory in Gansu Province.
*Jackal-Fiend
: In the layered folds of Tianzi Peak was hidden a small stockade, called Chazi Bow, to reach which you had to cross a small stream. The water wasn't deep and a few stepping-stones poked out of the surface; with three steps and a couple of jumps, you were across. The stones crouched among the clumps of waterweed, often draped with moss; there was nothing special about them.
I crossed over here several times on my way to Chazi Bow to paint Chairman Mao's quotations or to carry seedlings. Once, my traveling companion asked me if I'd noticed anything different last time I crossed the stream. I paused to think, then said I hadn't. Think again, he said. I thought again, and still said I hadn't. D'you remember a big, long rock in the water? he asked. I couldn't remember, and only his repeated promptings brought back a vague recollection. The last time I'd crossed the stream, there seemed to have been a long rock, probably near a clump of water willow in the middle of the current, that I'd stepped on, even squatted down on to drink a couple of mouthfuls of water. Maybe.
My companion smiled. That wasn't a rock, he said. Oh no. The last time the river was up, a few young oxherders on the mountain had spotted that long rock suddenly stand erect, stir up a murky whirlpool in the stream, then travel downstream with the floodwater-turned out it'd been alive: a jackal-fiend.
A jackal-fiend was a jackal fish, another name for which was jackal mute. Maqiao people said this fish didn't eat plants but other fish; it was the fiercest of all fish, but could also at times be the most stoic: people could tread over it for months on end without it moving.
After this, whenever I saw big rocks or big lumps of wood, I'd always feel a tremor of anxiety or apprehension. I was worried they'd suddenly start writhing, come alive, scurry away. Anything covered in moss might suddenly crack open a cavernous black eye and wink nonchalantly at me.
*Precious
: Benyi had a nickname: "Dribbler." It was Zhihuang who picked out this nickname. While working on the construction site, during one mealtime he noticed Benyi's eyeballs bulging, his chopsticks scraping noisily against the side of his bowl, locked in life-and-death chopstick-to-chopstick combat with everyone else's in the plate of meat. In a tone of surprise, Zhihuang suddenly asked: "How come you're dribbling so much?"
Discovering that everyone's gaze was fixed on him, Benyi wiped his mouth a couple of times, "what dribble?" He wiped off a string of saliva, but failed to wipe off the rice grains and drops of oil on his stubble.
Zhihuang pointed at him and laughed, "You dribbled again!"
Everyone else laughed too.
Ben
yi tugged at his cuff to have another wipe but still didn't manage to wipe himself clean; he muttered something and looked a bit hangdog. By the time he'd picked up his bowl and chopsticks again, he discovered that in the blink of an eye the dish of meat had emptied. He couldn't stop himself peering around at the mouths surrounding him, as if with his own eyes he wanted to track down the whereabouts of those lumps of fat meat, as they sank into those rotten guts.
He cast a somewhat baleful look at Zhihuang afterwards. "Eating is eating, what were you fussing about?"
In general, Benyi wasn't unused to ridicule, he wasn't that good at protecting his own prestige outside public affairs. When confronted with less than respectful comments, sometimes he could only pretend to be deaf-he was actually rather deaf. But his sense of hearing was unusually sharp that day and he was very anxious about face because there were people from outside the village on the construction site: Commune Head He and Sister Wan from Zhangjia Mill. Zhihuang was just being precious, making a big thing of his dribble on an occasion like this.
"Precious" meant stupid; "preciousness" meant stupidity. Zhihuang's preciousness was renowned throughout all Maqiao. For example, he didn't understand you had to give up your seat to cadres, he didn't understand how to fake when tamping down earth, it took him a very long time to figure out that women have periods every month. That he used to beat his wife so violently showed how precious he was. His wife later divorced him and went back to her family home in Pingjiang, but from time to time he'd send the dream-woman food and clothing-this showed he was even more precious. The three quarries on Tianzi Peak were gouged out by him, one by one, hammer blow by hammer blow. You could've built a mountain out of all the rocks he'd hammered out, and people bought them, hauled them away, used them who knows where. Even so, as soon as his thoughts began to wander, he'd start viewing all these rocks as his own property. A lot of people just couldn't make him come to his senses, couldn't do anything about how precious he was on this point. All they could do was rain curses down on him, and that was how he got the name "Precious Huang."
