A Dictionary of Maqiao

by Han Shaogong

  When taking a rest on the burial ground, Maqiao men would eye the tangled mass of skeletons, keeping as far away as possible, an odd blankness in their eyes. They'd all beg Wanyu to sing something-most likely as a way of bolstering their courage. Wanyu would curl himself up under an earthen step out of the wind, wipe a handful of snot from his frozen red nose and slowly sing this verse:

  Four brothers each with four ox horns

  Each goes their own way, carrying a horn

  Five hundred years on, the leaves return to their roots

  A palm can't leave the back of its hand.

  The eldest takes the southeast peak,

  The second over the northwest hills,

  The third goes down to the Bright Pearl Sea

  The fourth fords the River that Crosses Heaven.

  Five hundred years, five hundred years more,

  Waiting every day till the sun's gone down,

  The road to the west is wide and vast,

  When will the brothers' horns lock once more?

  *Old Forder

  : During the great road-works campaign, Zhaoqing was the least popular person in the workers' shed. People said when he turned up at the construction site, he brought nothing with him save his one naked dragon. He treated everyone else's belongings as common property. If, when mealtime was approaching, you discovered your chopsticks were gone, nine times out of ten he'd got there first and walked off with them, and was shoveling his food in with them right there and then. If you discovered your towel had gone, it would be him who'd got his paws on it and was wiping clean his bony chest or flat nose with it. The Educated Youth objected both to his flame-yellow teeth and to his long nasal hairs, but took particular exception to his stealing their towels. When you'd grabbed the towel back, even when you'd scrubbed at it violently with soap several times over, you'd still worry his nostril filth was left on the towel.

  He was as thick-skinned as they came, and would just laugh it off, or even have a go at the other person for being mean. Sometimes he'd even be shamelessly vulgar: "I didn't wash my wife's crotch with it-what're you so upset about?"

  Everything came back to crotches with Shortie Zhao. If someone's nose was bleeding: Has your period come? he'd say. If someone went for a pee: Bringing baldy out to see the sun? he'd ask. He could tell these two jokes a hundred times without getting tired of them, or sensing anything at all boring or repetitive about them.

  He'd also bring up the subject of his son Three Ears, about how this unfilial son of his had seduced and eloped with Tiexiang, "Before I'd had a chance, he got right in there and screwed that city woman-furious, I was!"

  It was the female Educated Youth who took the greatest exception to him. Whenever they came out to work, they never wanted to be put with him.

  At home, he'd never used soap. But he wouldn't let other people keep anything special for themselves, wouldn't let there be anything in the world he couldn't try himself. His interest in soap didn't take too long to develop and when he stole a towel he'd always nab the soap while he was about it. He'd get well into his washing, foaming up a huge basin of bubbles for one mandarin jacket-infuriating for the soap's owner.

  When Mou Jisheng got back from work and discovered the piece of soap he'd just bought had shrunk almost beyond recognition to a tiny lump, he couldn't stop himself getting angry. "You scumbag, Shortie Zhao, don't you have any sense of right and wrong? Stealing other people's property is against the law, don't you know that?"

  Zhao pulled a long face: "What're you shouting about? I'm a grandfather, my grandsons tend cows and gather wood, is using a bit of your soda (see the entry "Rough") against the law?"

  "But why're you using it? I want compensation! Compensation from you!"

  "I'llgive you compensation, if that's what you want! D'you think I can't afford a bit of soda? I'll give you ten bits. What a fuss!"

  "Your dragon, you'll give him compensation," some bystander snickered.

  Zhao's face went burning red: "Reckon I can't pay him back? My sow's just had piglets, they're eating a pot of slops every day-any day now, they'll be out of the pen."

  His antagonist still wanted to seek truth from facts: "You wouldn't want to pay me back even if your sow shat gold."

  "I'll pay, I'll pay! I'll pay him back with my pants."

  Mou Jisheng sprang to his feet: "I don't want your pants, d'you think I can wear those pants of yours?"

  "What're you talking about? I got them made less than a month ago."

  "They're like women's pants, there's no opening to piss or shit."

  Mou Jisheng had the utmost contempt for the pants the peasants wore: tied together with a piece of grass string, they had no leather belt or belt hoops, and absolutely no shape at all, just two baggy tubes they were, the back identical to the front. People were always swapping them from front to back, so the bottom often ended up at the front, ballooning out and making people feel as if their lower bodies were heading in the opposite direction from their torsos.

  "Well, what d'you want to do about it then?"

  Unable to think of anything even remotely appealing in the possession of Shortie Zhao, an exasperated Mou Jisheng had to postpone settlement over the soap till later.

  It was then that we realized why Maqiao people called Zhaoqing "Old Forder." Old Forder meant old miser, or stingy devil. In Maqiao vocabulary, a "ford" is the opposite of a "rock." "Rock" implies stupid, or straight-as-an-arrow honest, something mountainlike, while "ford" implies cunning, shrewd, watery: both meanings echo the ancient saying "the benevolent love mountains, the wise love water." Bearing in mind that in ancient times communications, commerce, calculations, and plans only came with the presence of flowing water, the word "ford" quite logically came to describe those who are calculating.

  During the few days I shared a bed with Zhaoqing, it was the grinding of his teeth, more than anything else, that drove me mad. No one knew what grudge he was bearing, or against whom, but all night, every night, he'd grind away, as if masticating on some stubborn, unyielding, unchewable mass of glass or nails, and the whole of the workers' shed shook with him. Even insomniacs several sheds away must've been ground down and chewed up by his teeth. I noticed that a lot of people got up in the mornings with red eyes, swollen eyelids, hair sticking up and limbs shaky, utterly weary, painfully exhausted, as if they'd been through a massive trauma.

  But Zhaoqing acted as if nothing had happened, bouncing along with a quick, light step, sometimes even flashing a grinning mouthful of yellow teeth, no trace left of the grievance he'd been venting all night.

  I raised the issue with him. He seemed rather pleased with himself: "You didn't sleep well? I wonder why I didn't hear anything? I didn't even turn over once, that's how well I slept."

  "You must've had a stroke, either that or your stomach's full of bugs!"

  "I should go see the doctor. Lend me a bit of money, three yuan, five yuan, whatever you have'll do."

  Borrowing money again. After bitter past experience of lending money and not getting it back, I exploded at him: "Still got the cheek to ask? What d'you think I am, a bank?"

  "Just lend it me for two or three days, two or three days, once the pigs are out of the pen I'll pay you back."

  I couldn't believe him. It wasn't just me, I knew; almost all the Educated Youth had made this mistake with him: once the money was out of your hands it was very difficult to get it back. For him, borrowing money was almost a hobby, an interest of his, a form of entertainment with little link to any concrete purposes-he often borrowed when he didn't need money at all. Once he let himself in for a savaging by Master Black, having borrowed one yuan off him in the morning, but, persuaded by his fist, returned the original article to him in the afternoon, without having done anything with it. Of course, borrowing the money was something in itself: with a note warming his pocket for a few hours, his heart could rest happy and easy. "Is all money the same?" he once remarked in all earnestness. "There's nothing special about using
money, anyone can use money. What kind of money you use though, and using it in a way that brings happiness-now that takes effort."

  He also said: "Man lives a lifetime, the grass for an autumn, what does money count for? People should just try to be happy."

  Quite the philosopher, he was.

  As he kept grinding his teeth, I ended up pushed beyond the limits of endurance and had to chase him out into another shed. He didn't have anything much to move: no quilt, no trunk, no bowl, no chopsticks either, he didn't even have his own carrying pole and hoe. No one in any of the work sheds was willing to take him in, due to his calculating lack of possessions: even his same-pot cousin begrudged him not having a straw bed-mat and wouldn't share a bed with him. Several days passed without him finding a nest to shelter in. This was no great problem to him: by day, he scraped by just like other people. Once night fell, the black night intensified his ability to take advantage. He'd wash his face, feet, and hands as hard as he could, grin as winsomely as he could and call on work shed after work shed, quietly honing in on his target, searching, groping, and clambering into an empty bed whenever he saw one. Drop your defences for an instant and he'd burrow into a corner of the bed. One more hesitation and he'd be faking a whistling snore. However much you thumped and swore at him, however much you yanked at his hair and ears, he wouldn't open his eyes, wouldn't budge.

  You could've beaten him to death.

  He had a small frame, wiry as a shrivelled toad's. Asleep on the corner of the bed, he resembled a tiny clenched fist; with his spine curled and feet tucked up, he didn't actually take up much space.

  If on any one day the resistance was universally stiffer than usual and he couldn't in fact find a crack through which to squeeze himself, then he'd lay a couple of carrying poles down somewhere sheltered out of the wind and pass the night fully dressed on the poles. This was a unique skill of his. He even possessed talent at sleeping on one carrying pole: he could sleep like this for hours on end, not moving a muscle, not falling off-that spine of his would have astonished even tightrope walkers.

  He preferred to give his carrying pole skill a showing every night rather than return home to fetch a straw bed-mat. The funny thing was that he slept in frost and dew without ever getting ill-he remained, in fact, as perky and chipper as a little cockerel. Whenever I woke up, he was already busy as a bee, twisting some grass rope or sharpening a piece of hoe in the hazy early morning light. By the time I turned up at the construction site, sleepy and bleary-eyed, he'd always worked up a sweat. When the sun came out, burning up the boundless expanses of mist that lay over the ground, it gilded Shortie Zhao's whole body with a reddish-gold glow. I remember his digging action as having a particular grace: it was as if the heavy harrow wasn't lifted by him but flew up voluntarily, descending in line with his steps, rising and falling with precision. The instant in which the harrow fell, a flick of the wrist deftly turned it, the head shattering the clods of earth with instantaneous economy. His feet stamped in perfect rhythm, in an action that lacked any trace of sloppiness, that wasted not a moment of time nor ounce of energy. His actions couldn't be analyzed separately, the one from the other: all his actions, in fact, were indivisible, were as one, were realized as a unity in which form followed thought, followed a smooth and easy progression, like a dance with no trips. Head lowered, he performed his dazzling, sublime dance in the gleaming orange mist.

  This work machine, of course, got the most work points of all: if tasks were being timed, he'd often do in one day what took me two or three days, leaving envious incredulity in his wake. And yet he spent his nights on a carrying pole. I found out afterwards he often slept like this at home-with the seven or eight kids he had to raise, the tattered quilts on the two beds covered his kids but never stretched to him too.

  When the family planning movement began, he was a prime target for a vasectomy. He was most unhappy about this: the Communist Party already governed heaven and earth, how come they wanted to govern the inside of his crotch as well?

  But when the time came, off he trotted obediently to the commune clinic. There were various explanations as to why it was him and not his wife who went to be sterilized. He said his wife wasn't well and couldn't be sterilized. Other people said he was worried his wife would have affairs and that after being sterilized she'd cheat on him left and right. What crap, others said, everyone who got sterilized received a standard government reward of two packets of grape candy and five catties of pork; Shortie Zhao had never eaten grape candy, so he fought to go under the knife just to taste it once.

  Ten or so days later, he re-emerged to come back out to work, his face clean-shaven and his complexion much rosier: grape candy, it would seem, could work miracles. The young men laughed at him and said only women went to be sterilized-when did you ever hear of a man going? Once you'd had the chop, didn't you become a eunuch? Deeply agitated, he said the government had guaranteed that wouldn't happen. Seeing the disbelieving faces massed around him, he pulled his pants down to give everyone a viewing, to clear his name of this slur.

  Master Black, who still bore a grudge over the soap business, wouldn't let the matter lie: it may look the same, he said, but who knows if it still works?

  "Just call your Miss Xia over, m'boy," said Zhaoqing, "then you'll know if it still works."

  Miss Xia was a female Educated Youth, being courted at the time by Master Black.

  Master Black reddened: "That no-good turtle-spawn hooligan!"

  Shortie Zhao slowly tied his pants, "So, your heart aches at the mention of your Miss Xia? Those round buttocks of your Miss Xia, strike me down if…"

  Before he'd finished his sentence, Master Black charged and threw him over his back with a Mongol-style wrestling move. When he raised his head, his whole face was covered with mud.

  Muddy-faced, he clambered up and ran a long way away, swearing and yelling: "I've got grandsons watching the oxen, I've just had an operation, I'm a sick man just out of the hospital, even Commune Head He sent his regards and said I'd contributed to the nation, how dare you beat me, you little bastard? How dare you?"

  He went back home cradling his stomach, managed to gasp out the beating had given him an internal injury and spent five or so yuan on herbal medicine. He'd walked off with a hoe belonging to Master Black, mortgaged for the time being for three yuan, a towel made up another half a yuan-Master Black had better return him the two-odd yuan he still owed him.

  His vasectomy operation henceforth gave him justification for putting a premium on everything he did, became his proof of entitlement to preferential treatment wherever he went. Today he'd want to plough the fields (there were a lot of work points in ploughing) because he'd had a vasectomy; tomorrow he wouldn't want to plough (there were even more work points in pressing oil), also because he'd had a vasectomy; tomorrow he'd want the scales to be tipped (when the team head was allocating grain), because he'd had a vasectomy; today he'd want the scales to slip (when delivering manure to the team head), also because he'd had a vasectomy. He always got this to work for him, actually, and even tried his luck outside of Maqiao. When he went into the county with Fucha to buy seeds, they got on a bus at Changle. He absolutely refused to buy a ticket. He had the money all right, public family money, it wasn't earned by his own blood and sweat. But he had an instinctive, bitter, virulent aversion to parting with cash and grumbled endlessly and indignantly about any ticket price: "1.2 yuan? What d'you mean 1.2 yuan? For this hop and a skip? Should be two jiao at most!"

  He wouldn't budge.

  The ticket seller gave as good as she got: "Who asked you to get on the bus? You want a ride, this is what it costs, don't want a ride, get off right now!"

  "Three jiao, how about three jiao7. Four jiao7. Four and a half?"

  "This is a public bus, I can't bargain with you!"

  "Funny that, business without bargaining-when we buy a bucket of manure we'll always talk terms."

  "You go and buy manure, then, no one asked you to get
on this bus."

  "What kind of talk is this from a young girl?"

  "Get a move on, one yuan two jiao, get your money out."

  "You-you-you what're you wanting so much money for? I just don't believe it: do the tires on a bus as big as this, with all these people on, really need to turn so much?"

  "Get off, get off." His adversary impatiently pushed him down the steps.

  "Help! Help!" Zhaoqing hung onto the bus door for dear life, plunking his bottom down onto the floor, "I've just had a vasectomy and the commune cadres all sent their regards to me, how dare you throw me off the bus?"

  Neither the driver nor the conductor could get him to understand and the passengers crowded onto the bus were starting to yell agitatedly at the driver to hurry up and get driving. Starting to feel a bit alarmed, Fucha hastily dug out the money to buy the ticket.

  Zhaoqing's face was not a pretty sight after all that: poking at the bus window, tugging at the cushions, spitting with fury, he wouldn't get off at their stop; even when, called several times by Fucha, he discovered he was the last person on the bus, he still only slouched off grudgingly. "Barbarian parts are full of crooks. For the cost of a catty of meat, you get to ride in a bus for about as long as it takes to have a piss."

  Followed by a stream of filthy abuse.

  On his return from the county, he said whatever happened he'd never ride on a bus again, he raged at all buses: when he spotted one on the street, a stream of "stinking whores," "fucking thieves," studded with constellations of spit, would chase at lightning speed after the bus. In the end, all buses became targets for his loathing, for his ferocious glares. That time he went to Huang City, he came upon a jeep that had run over and killed a peasant's duck and whose browbeating driver was refusing to compensate the owner of the duck-nothing to do with Zhaoqing at all. Possessed by a towering rage that came from nowhere, he pushed out of the crowd of onlookers and before anyone had time to put up any objections, with one punch toppled the driver over backwards onto the ground, face-up with a bloody nose. Although sympathetic all along with the owner of the duck, the onlookers had cowered in the face of the driver's bullying tactics and hadn't dared say anything. Now they'd seen someone else take the lead, a mass of yells and blows erupted, following which the driver and his companion paled with fright and hastily dug out some money to prevent further trouble.