by Han Shaogong
"You filthy woman, you filthy whore, if you don't kill me, how's this thing going to end?…" Three Ears swore then whipped, swore then whipped until she rolled and writhed around everywhere. An observer looking on from afar would have seen and heard nothing, no one, nothing but grey, foggy waves of dust and sand, a pile of green potato leaves rolling here, turning there, making a rustling sound, a few shredded leaves flying up now and then. In the end, when her cries weakened and the leaves stopped moving, Three Ears finally stopped and dropped the whip.
He opened the cloth bag he'd brought with him, took out a new pair of leather shoes and a new pair of plastic sandals, and dropped them in the pile of now motionless potato leaves. "I'm still aching for you, you've seen that now!"
Then he stalked off.
At the intersection, he turned and shouted at the women: "Tell that piece of trash Benyi that I, Ma Xingli, stuck his wife twenty-five times, stuck her till she screamed-"
The people of Maqiao had almost forgotten he was called Ma Xingli.
*Nailed Backs
: Benyi's first thought was to seize Three Ears, right there and then. When he returned from the construction site and heard the news from Zhongqi that his wife had had an affair with Three Ears, he was overcome with a murderous rage. But in the end the little bit of brain he had left made it clear to him this was a major loss of face; what would it achieve to kick up a huge fuss putting Three Ears on display? Thinking it over, then over again, the only thing to do was lock the door and thrash his wife to pieces. He broke a clothes-washing pestle on his adulterous wife, who rolled all over the floor under his blows until she tremblingly admitted everything. She still had a bit of fight left in her, though, and went along with Benyi's plan of dragging Three Ears into the melee. While the two men were slugging it out, it looked like Benyi was getting the worst of it, and he yelled at his wife to come and help out. Her loyalty was still with her old man, and an inspired lunge mid-fracas at Three Ears' crotch area almost knocked him out cold.
With this, Benyi finally got his hands free, fetched the hemp rope he'd prepared long in advance, and tied Three Ears up as tightly as a zongzi- a glutinous rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo leaves.
But Benyi had never imagined that his adulterous wife would suddenly disappear the following year. Three Ears didn't cross his mind once: even if she'd eloped or been abducted, only the director of the Cultural Institute or the photographer came under suspicion. He thought he'd lost a simply inhuman amount of face and completely ignored public business for days on end, locked and bolted the door, stuck two plasters on his forehead, and slept right through. Murderous gall rose deep inside him again: Party Secretary or no, wherever he next found that devil woman, he'd finish her off with one knife-stroke.
Most of the villagers hadn't considered Three Ears either, would never have imagined that a woman as attractive as Tiexiang would abandon two kids still in school and go off with a lazybones like him. People merely supposed something was going on in the Cultural Institute, and even sent someone to the county seat to make inquiries.
The following autumn, a piece of very surprising news came over from Jiangxi. This news proved that Tiexiang had in fact eloped and that she'd robbed a grain truck on the highway with Three Ears; out of the bandits hunted down by the army and the People's Militia, one had been beaten to death and ten or so arrested. The final two had been tough nuts to crack, evading arrest by hiding here and there in the mountains. Afterwards, making use of information provided by a local peasant, the People's Militia searching the mountains finally pinned them down and forced them into a mountain cave. The militia encircled the mouth of the cave several times over and shouted out: having got no response, they finally hurled in a hand grenade and blew them to smithereens. The militia discovered afterwards that the two dead were a man and a woman, so thin they only weighed seventy or eighty catties each. The woman's stomach stuck out, several months into pregnancy. An official seal was discovered among their clothing and bags for starting a coppermining cooperative, or something of the sort. There were also two blank prescription letters, two sheets of special lesson preparation paper, and a few envelopes for official letters on which were written the name of this county and this commune. It was only thanks to this that Public Security contacted the area to send someone to identify them. Commune Head He went and identified, from the photographs left at the police substation, the blurred mass of flesh and blood that had been the faces of Tiexiang and Three Ears.
Commune Head He paid two of the local peasants twenty yuan to bury them.
According to Maqiao's ancient rules, as Tiexiang was unchaste and Three Ears was unrighteous, as both had contravened family rules and national law and been disloyal, in death they had to have "nailed backs." In other words, after their deaths, they had to face downward in their graves and nine nails had to be hammered into their backs. Facing downwards meant they had no face to look other people in the face. Nailing their backs meant they would be forever locked in the netherworld, that they could never again be reincarnated or reborn to bring further disaster upon others.
As Maqiao people hadn't taken charge of their corpses, they couldn't nail their backs. When they mentioned this, the old people in Maqiao couldn't conceal their great sense of anxiety at not knowing what further trouble from them might lie in store.
*Root
: Three Ears' elopement with Tiexiang aroused a sense of moral outrage in Maqiao. In the past, it'd always been the women, particularly the women, who'd carped at Tiexiang behind her back, who'd poked their noses into her relations with the director of the Cultural Institute, with the young lad from the photography institute, who'd flared their nostrils and pursed their lips as her backside sashayed back and forth. Now, they suddenly felt these relationships were perfectly acceptable, could be overlooked. They even thought there was nothing much wrong in stealing someone-the important thing was, who stole whom. Although none of Tiexiang's affairs had been quite proper, this affair with Three Ears was definitely the worst thing she ever did. On this point, a great sense of injustice, a kind of protective group feeling suddenly welled up on behalf of Tiexiang, it agitated, moved, warmed them, as if Tiexiang was an athlete they'd entered for a competition, who'd lost the day at some sports meet due to some chance misfortune. It made them hopping mad. And Three Ears was just too undignified, simply beneath contempt, he'd never even washed his neck properly. Although he'd behaved properly toward his fellow villagers, he had no moral character to speak of, no family fortune, no decent education, no nothing, even his parents were the sort of people who'd end up lugging carrying poles all their lives; it was a joke, how could Tiexiang go off with him? And-as it turned out-get pregnant by him?
For a few months, they took this as a collective insult.
However much they thought it over, they couldn't figure Tiexiang out.
Only one thing could explain it: fate. In Maqiao dialect, people didn't much use the word "fate"; more often they'd use the word "root," as if they were comparing themselves to plants. They also read lines on the hand and on the foot, believing these marks were the precise embodiment of fate, the very image of roots. An old man passing by once read the roots on Tiexiang's hand: he said with a sigh that she was a threshold root, her ancestors had been beggars perhaps, had hung around the doorways of a thousand houses. This root was so long it hadn't been broken in her.
Tiexiang had giggled away disbelievingly. True enough, her father Dai Shiqing had been a beggar chief, but she'd married a Party Secretary, and the spouse of a Party Secretary was practically the Party Secretary- what doorway was she going to be found hanging around? Little did she realize that, all those years later, the words of that old man would turn out to be her fate when she followed Three Ears, a man so poor he had no choice but to hang around doorways, that she'd end her life wandering around destitute in distant parts. She was like a tree, desperately seeking sunlight and rainwater from up above, but after a thirty-year search, she discovered f
inally that no matter how much her own leaves grew, they couldn't escape their roots, couldn't flutter off into the sky.
Her palm was crossed with low-lying roots.
The phrase "return to your roots"-also related to the word "root"- signified not a wandering elder returning home, but "fatalism." This was how they put it: as mud is three inches deep, so man has three branches. During youth, everything remains in flux, but after completing the three branches of age-three dozen years, that is-people start to return to their roots, whether they're noble or base, wise or stupid, good or bad, all becomes clear after the age of thirty-six. Que sera and each to his own. It was during the very year of her thirty-sixth birthday that Tiexiang-as if possessed by the spirits-went off with a lazybones; this was her inescapable, inexorable doom. Or so they deeply, unshakably believed.
*Riding a Wheelbarrow
: "Riding a wheelbarrow" was a phrase that Tiexiang used to refer to what went on between her and Three Ears in bed. This was something Zhongqi had secretly overheard; people laughed for days after it'd spread about, and it subsequently became a Maqiao idiom.
Chinese has no lack of food-related vocabulary. For cooking methods, there's steam, boil, fry, stir-fry, quick-fry, saute, shallow fry, stew, cure, pickle, casserole, braise, and so on; for the action of the mouth there's eat, sip, suck, slurp, swallow, lick, gnaw, bite, chew, gulp, and so on; for the sense of taste, there's sweet, acrid, salty, bitter, hot, sour, fresh, spicy, crisp, slippery, numbing, clean, mellow, crumbly, powdery, and so on. But although sex is also a human need, there seem to be in comparison far fewer words relating to sex. As Confucius said: "food and sex are human nature." But our linguistic heritage has wiped out half of Confucius's venerable opinion.
There is still, of course, what's called low talk, mainly low-quality, perennially popular expressions, oral excretions you hear everywhere. Though there's no lack of them, their deficiencies are only too apparent. Firstly, they echo, they duplicate each other, they add nothing new; secondly, they lack content, they overgeneralize, they're all talk and no action, like politicians' speeches on state affairs, like cultural bureaucrats slapping each other on the back. Even worse, they're mainly borrowed words that don't even cover the meaning, that don't express the sense, that rely on tacit, contextual understanding; the effect produced is as ludicrous as putting Mr Zhang's hat on Mr Li, or calling a donkey a horse. "Clouds and rain," "grinding bean curd," "cannon firing," "steaming buns"… All these expressions sound like mafia codes. And so, left thus with no alternative, people begin to act like shifty mafiosi, while linguistic ethics equate sex with mafia crimes, with conspiracies that evade clear, precise expression.
This sexual vocabulary necessarily springs from the transformation of sexual feeling into something crude, formulaic, utilitarian, and furtive. The surging excitement of exchange between the sexes springs from a delicate, shimmering trembling from deep within the body, from anxiety, obduracy, sympathy, and an unnerving joy, all of which both clash with and support each other, from secret, storm-tossed explorations that, at dizzying emotional heights, sit poised on the cusp of destruction, infatuation, and hurtling descent, bringing every single part and process of one's being to life.… It's a great pity that all this has for so long been driven underground into a deep, linguistically unreachable blind spot.
A linguistic blank is a human abandonment of self-knowledge, an ignominious defeat, hinting at some form of enormous, lurking danger. Language serves as the link between humans and the world: once this link is broken or lost, people have as good as lost their control over the world. In this sense, it can perfectly justifiably be said that language equals the power to control. To chemistry experts, a complex chemistry laboratory is like their own backyard; to someone ignorant of chemistry, it's a terrifying minefield, covered in death traps. To those who've grown up in the city, a bustling city is their home territory, there's nowhere more convenient or comforting; but to people from the countryside with no knowledge or experience of the city, it's a thorny jungle where enemies, obstacles, and nameless, unshakable terrors lurk everywhere. There's a very simple reason for all this: a world hard to describe in words is a world beyond your control.
Sociological research has identified a kind of "marginal person," someone who leaves one culture and enters another, such as country people who go into the city, immigrants who leave their native country for distant lands. Language is the chief problem encountered by such people. Whether or not they have money, whether or not they have power, if they haven't grasped the new language, as long as they haven't yet gained a proficient linguistic grasp of their new environment, they'll never manage to shake off the feeling of rootlessness, of insecurity. When rich Japanese go to France, some of them suffer from "Paris syndrome." When courageous Chinese migrate to America, some suffer from "New York syndrome." Their limited foreign-language skills prevent them from blending into the unfamiliar turf of a foreign land. Neither their money nor their courage can protect them from their nameless anxiety, tension, terror, palpitations, rising blood pressure, paranoia, and the delusion they're being spied on. Any incomprehensible dialogue with neighbors or people on the street, any foreign object or vista they can't put a name to imperceptibly increases the psychological pressure on them, leaving them highly vulnerable to illness. Many people, in this kind of situation, closet themselves in desolate residences, continually fleeing from the outside world-just as people having sex seek to avoid the eyes and ears of others.
People have little fear about revealing their own bodies. In the bathhouse, the gym, swimming pool, even-in some Western countries-on nudist beaches, people feel no great discomfort or terror. People only feel the need to shut curtains and doors when having sex, like rats trying to burrow into a hole in the ground. There are a lot of reasons for this crucial distinction, of course. But in my opinion, one reason that's always been overlooked is that people have a complete linguistic grasp of activities like washing, exercising, swimming, and so have effective control over themselves and other people, sufficient to exercize their sense of reason. It's only when people drop their pants and face the unbounded linguistic blind spot of sex that ignorance and confusion create insecurity, and the human subconscious slinks back into its lair. What are people afraid of? Not just moralizing public opinion: subconsciously, they're far more afraid of themselves, afraid of losing themselves in the unnamed darkness of sex. Once they drop their pants, they too experience anxiety, tension, terror, palpitations, a rise in blood pressure, paranoia, and the delusion of being spied on, just as if they'd been thrown into the Paris or New York they have yearned for, only to burrow themselves away in their apartments.
Statistics show that crime levels for "marginal people" are high, as is the occurrence of mental illness. Everything foreign that lies beyond the linguistic grasp of marginal people, beyond the power of their intellect, amounts to primal chaos, dissipating with the greatest of ease their consciousness and competence. By a similar logic, the linguistic blind spot of sex easily brings human irrationality to the surface. Perhaps this is the unspoken condition by which sexual adventures achieve their charm, and also, of course, the condition by which sexual desire leads to catastrophe. Schemes involving beautiful women can often bring down great political plans, economic strategies, and military structures. Common sense can often melt away in one night of dissolution, hurling people carelessly into the wilds of passion-just as it did with Tiexiang.
Maybe this was how things were:
1. Tiexiang was perfectly aware of how poor and inferior Three Ears was, but after the two locked in carnal embrace she was suddenly seized by a kind of charitable urge, a kind of passionate interest in using her body to achieve miraculous ends. If she'd already been bedded by several men of standing, a repeat of this experience would have held little interest for her. In Three Ears, she saw a new battleground, a more challenging mission. Poverty and inferiority held no terrors for her: quite the opposite, the idea of poverty and inferiority int
oxicated her; the thought of rebuilding a man's sense of pride made her heart thump uncontrollably.
2. Three Ears did a great many truly terrible things, coming to blows with his parents, for example, fighting with his brothers, never working in the village, stealing a bag of chemical fertilizer from the team leader, even climbing the wall of the women's toilet in the clinic, and so on; Tiexiang, too, snorted with contempt at these past offences. But she later decided to attribute all this to her own magical powers. Maqiao's melons all rotted because of her, Maqiao's animals all went mad because of her-could it not be that Three Ears had committed all these outrages because of her? Three Ears-no, she now preferred to call him Xingli, her own Xingli-was brave, chivalrous, a man who could put up with a lot: the way he'd stuck his neck out over Yanwu's schooling was proof enough. If he hadn't secretly adored her all along, if he hadn't been driven wild with unrequited love, he wouldn't have run headlong into all those disasters with quite such abandon. All this produced a sudden burst of realization that filled her with an enormous sense of well-being: a stream of warm, compassionate emotion flooded through her heart, sending her body into uncontrollable spasms of trembling.
3. Even after the so-called rape, Xingli often returned to the village looking for her, his face set into a mask savagery, and he would beat her till her nose went blue and her face puffed up, till she screamed for her parents. This made everyone in the village furious. Even though some suspected the rape hadn't been everything it seemed, that maybe there'd been an injustice, a real man shouldn't fight with a woman, the vendetta couldn't go on and on like this. Surely only a madman, a bandit would go on beating a person like this? Only Tiexiang, out of all Maqiao, failed to sense any malice in Three Ears' revenge: quite the opposite, she tasted sweetness in her own pain, tasted the immutable love of her adversary. She believed that only the person who loved you most could be pushed beyond desperation to such deep resentment and hatred. In their past life together, Benyi hadn't been exactly happy with her, but he'd hardly ever beaten her; more often than not, after he'd had a drink, he'd head out the door, hands behind his back, to a cadre meeting. The director of the Cultural Institute and the photographer had also been let down by her, but they were even less likely to strike out at anyone, they just rubbed their hands and slipped away without a trace. This tolerance and irresolution quite simply enraged her, prevented her from discovering her true position and power over these men. But she was addicted to the crack of the vine whip and rod, to men who left souvenirs of their wild obsession and crazed desire in the form of scar upon scar of heart-stopping pain. Several times (incredibly enough, even to her) orgasm would suddenly wash over her as she was being beaten, her cheeks burning bright red, her legs writhing uncontrollably.
