A Dictionary of Maqiao

by Han Shaogong

  Given that exceeding the birth quota was classified along with all those other things as a "violation of law and order," and that it lay within the range of his personal capabilities, it isn't hard to guess how he would unhesitatingly decide to act.

  His exceeding the birth quota was totally illogical, sprang not from any assessment of personal benefit, but from a habit of understanding, from an impulsive pursuit of all privileged behavior. Maybe it was because in the past he'd known a director or manager who'd produced a high-and-mighty brood of three while everyone else had to toe the line, maybe he'd always secretly envied him. And so once he'd done what ordinary people didn't dare do, or couldn't do, the thing in itself made him feel like he was head and shoulders above everyone else, like he was a director or manager. His efforts to conceal the facts of his transgression from the authorities concerned were about as strenuous as someone who'd blatantly embezzled a million yuan: he quietly crowed in self-satisfaction, endlessly savoring his rash audacity.

  What use was propaganda to people like him? What was the use of propaganda about legal disciplinary measures? Of course there was a use: to increase his excitement at taking desperate risks, to renew the temptation daily.

  I can't find any other way of explaining it.

  If the explanation given above is generally correct, then the whole affair comes down to a question of language, to an absurd coincidence of meanings interlocking and short-circuiting. In the end, the law-breaker lost his bowl of rice and paid a high price for one or two extremely ordinary words. The propaganda that the wielders of power directed at him had been entirely useless, had ended at cross-purposes: on encountering a totally alien dictionary, a totally impenetrable pair of ears, it had hastened along the birth of a furry-headed, bawling, screaming baby girl. This baby was superfluous to all parties concerned. But this mistake could never be covered up, or daubed away with correcting fluid, or deleted with an eraser.

  She'd grow up, grow up into the future.

  She was a mistranslated sentence made of flesh and blood.

  *'Bubbleskin (etc.)

  : In Maqiao during the 1990s, a lot of new words came into fashion and passed into common usage: "television," "paint," "diet," "operate," "Ni Ping" (a well-known television host), "disco dancing," "Highway 107," "seafood," "lottery tickets," "build the Great Wall" (play mahjong), "bump-the-butt" (motorbike), "hold the basket" (act as mediator), and so on. In addition, a mass of old words which hadn't been used much between the fifties and the seventies all turned up again. Anyone who didn't know this might have mistaken them for new words. For example:

  "Cut up"-originally a Red Gang (secret society) phrase, meaning to kill someone.

  "Sort out"-this also used to be a Red Gang term. Following its frequent usage in lawsuits, it later gradually grew in currency via itinerants, grew broader and broader in meaning, until it came to refer generally to any course of action that solved problems or difficulties. This word was also used in newspapers, in news headlines such as: "The Reforms Will Sort Everything Out."

  "Ox-head"-this referred to a mediator or arbitrator with the authorities, a role usually taken on by the noblest, the most senior and most prestigious of the elders. The ox-head was decided neither through election nor through official appointment: whoever acted as ox-head relied during his tenure on agreement naturally reached among the people.

  "Straw sandal money"-this used to refer to the tip that people who'd come from far away on public business would ask for from the person involved when the business had been completed. After this word made its reappearance at the end of the 1980s, its meaning stayed basically the same, the only difference being that straw sandal money by then was given mostly to cadres wearing leather or rubber shoes, to members of public security teams, to the well-meaning bringers of good or bad tidings and so on; and it was no longer paid in grains of rice, not like before.

  "Bubbleskin"-a lazy good-for-nothing, equivalent to the Mandarin expression "roughskin," but lacking the thuggish overtones of "rough," implying something more small-fry, more cowardly and obsequious, something that resembled the insubstantial fragility of a bubble.

  And so on.

  It was from Kuiyuan that I heard the word "bubbleskin." In fact, Kuiyuan himself had something of the bubbleskin about him. That time in my living room, when I read him the riot act about his laziness, he immediately started nodding his head, yes-yes-yes-ing, like a chicken pecking at rice. He couldn't keep his eyes, hands or feet still, as he sought to agree with me in every possible ingratiating way. When I was his age, I said, I'd work ten hours a day; what did I mean ten hours, he said, surely fifteen hours, at the very least, I wouldn't see daylight at either end. Wasn't that right? Even in the countryside, I said, you still had a future, as long as you were willing to dig in, keep chickens, fish, pigs, you could end up with 10,000 yuan; what did I mean 10,000 yuan, he said, some became company directors, with offices abroad, surely I'd seen the stories on TV?

  He overdid it a bit, turning the interrogation around on me.

  In the end, stopping just short of slapping himself on the head, of shouting furiously for his own extermination, he hastily collected together the shorts and socks he'd just laid out to dry, stuffed them into the black leather bag with the broken zipper, asked me for some red plastic tape, and tightly bound the black leather bag a few times around. He took off the shirt I'd lent him and said he'd leave for home today, there was still time to catch the last boat from the quayside.

  He didn't even drink his tea.

  It was already late at night. I suddenly started to feel a bit bad about this abrupt departure. He didn't have to hurry back during the night, or return my shirt to me-he could at least finish his tea before he left.

  "You don't need to be in such a hurry. You came, you didn't find any work, but it's all right to stay a couple of days just to mess around before you go, who knows when you'll have another chance…" My tone had warmed up by several degrees.

  "We've messed around quite enough."

  "How about going tomorrow, after breakfast?"

  "When you've got to go, you've got to go-and anyway, it's cooler at night."

  He and the young man with him seemed to be racing against time, unwilling to lose a moment in their haste to return to the village. They were strangers in the city, utterly clueless as to whether they'd be able to find their way, whether they'd be able to find the bus to the quay, whether they'd be able to catch the last boat, how they'd spend this long night if they didn't happen to catch the right boat. My rebuke had suddenly electrified them: you could have set mountains of knives and seas of fire before them and still they'd have leapt in without a second thought. As I was heading off to find a friend to borrow a car, planning on taking them part of the way, they called out a few times from somewhere off in the distance before they slipped into the black night and, within the blink of an eye, disappeared without a trace.

  *Democracy Cell (as Used by Convicts)

  : After Kuiyuan left my house, he didn't actually return to the village. About ten or so days later, there was a knock on my door and on opening it up I found a tousle-haired, dirty-faced boy who handed me an extremely crumpled cigarette box on the top of which were written in ballpoint pen two lines of characters. The nib had obviously run out of ink and in several places had poked through the card without leaving a mark, leaving me no choice but to guess what was in the blanks.

  "Uncle Shaogong, you must must come safe (save) us, quick!" It was signed: "Yor nefew (nephew) Kuiyuan." I asked what this was meant to be. My messenger had no idea either. He didn't know of any Kuiyuan. All he knew was that today, without giving any explanation, someone had stuffed ten yuan into his hands and asked him to deliver this note-that was the long and the short of it. If he'd known before he started how hard my house would be to find, he wouldn't have done it for thirty yuan. He hung around for a while, only leaving when I gave him another five yuan.

  It was clear as day: Kuiyuan had committe
d some crime and been put in jail.

  I was both furious and worried, and if old Kuiyuan had been in front of me there and then, I'm afraid we might have come to blows. But the die being cast, the damage already done, I'd have to swallow my pride, grit my teeth, and brace myself for some contact with the seamy side of life. First of all, I had to make inquiries as to where the detention center was, which involved working out the distinction between county and municipal centers, between guard centers and temporary centers and interrogation centers, and so on. All the acquaintances who answered my questions listened to my patient explanations, umming and ah-ing before simply letting the matter drop, clearly still completely mystified. Then I went to my work unit to pick up some documentation that might be useful, scooped up some money and headed for the suburbs, straight into a billowing sand storm. Because I was speeding, I was stopped and fined twice on the way by transport police, and it was already dark by the time I found the detention center. Their business hours were over, so I had no choice but to come back the next day. The next day, after producing a great many smiles, platitudes, and cigarettes, and imitating every dialect there was to ingratiate myself with every big cheese there was, I finally jostled my way into the crowd of people encircling the office and managed to talk to a female police officer who spoke with a Sichuan accent. I finally learned the details of Kuiyuan's case: gambling in a group at the quay-which, although she said it came within the parameters of the "strike hard" campaign, wasn't considered too serious, added to which the cells were impossibly overcrowded, so it was-punishable by fine. I was pleasantly surprised by these last three words and thanked her repeatedly in Sichuan dialect.

  I hadn't brought enough cash, so that afternoon I took another sum of money along, handed over enough for the fine, living costs, educational materials, and so on, and took him away. One tiny twist in the story remained before I took him away: probably because there were too many convicts, the prison warden didn't know which cell he was locked up in.

  Rushed off their feet, they made me sit and wait for two or three hours before they finally took pity and made an exception to the rules, allowing me to enter the cells area and look through the cells, one by one, myself. I glimpsed two long rows of grey metal doors stretching off into the distance, each door with a tiny window inset, crammed with faces; or rather, each was a square of eyes compressed in at every angle, packed denser than a block of meat fresh out of the freezer. Every eye seized hold of me, waited for me. I started with Number One: my effortful request to each square meat brick to move aside for a moment opened out a slight crack of space into which I could shout Hu Kuiyuan's name, then press my ear up close, silently listening for a movement within. I heard a miscellaneous buzz of voices, smelled a sour, rotten odor of sweat and urine, but time and time again was disappointed-no one answered.

  Twenty-odd windows had gone past and my throat was beginning to crack, when a thin, weak answer floated over as if from a distant, very distant horizon, a whisper transmitted to my ear by the iron bars, drifting in and out of hearing. I was astonished: every cell was at the most twenty or thirty meters square, how could a voice sound so distant? How come it seemed to come out of a universe of infinite depth and distance, that stretched out behind the iron bars?

  "Ah-ah-ah-" It sounded like someone was pinching his windpipe.

  He received back from the police the black leather bag with the unzippable zipper, said many words of sincere repentance to them, then uttered nothing further, just sat on the backseat of the motorbike, getting a surreptitious measure of the expression on my face. It was only after we'd gone a few kilometers that I sensed the person behind me was wiggling his feet, dispersing their bad smell a little on the wind.

  Back home, the first thing I did was tell him to stand in the doorway and not move, not sit down, not touch a single thing in my house, to take off his clothes straightaway and go into the bathroom; every single item of his clothing was collected up into a bundle by my wife and stuffed into the washing machine.

  As expected, my wife, yelping with alarm from over by the washing machine, soon discovered lice, bedbugs, and traces of blood on his clothes. Slinking out of the bathroom, Kuiyuan smirked with embarrassment, asking as he combed his hair, "Where's the mirror?"

  I pointed.

  "I was unlucky, this time I got into a democracy cell…"

  I didn't understand.

  "I only survived by the skin of my teeth."

  "What d'you mean, democracy cell?"

  "Don't you know what a democracy cell is?"

  "I've never committed a crime."

  "It's just… it's just… everyone's democratic, right."

  "What's that mean?"

  "Democracy means lice, bedbugs, fights, blood, lots of them."

  I still didn't understand.

  He started to eat. He said in a prison cell the prison king had the best time of it, when he ate, there'd be people fanning him, singing songs, offering a towel to wipe his face. When the food came, the prison king would have first pick, nabbing all the good things, like the meat, of course. Afterwards, the "Four Daoist Immortals" and "Eight Daoist Immortals," the prison king's direct subordinates, would eat, picking out another layer of good stuff. The scraps of soup and leftover rice remaining were all the little people ate. When the prison king wanted to sleep, he took the best place. When the prison king wanted to see the female convicts, only he stood in the window opening, lifted onto the shoulders of those below, who'd sometimes support him for up to two hours at a stretch, their legs trembling with exhaustion.

  A newcomer had no choice but to fall into line. If you weren't prepared to follow the fiat of the prison king, the Daoist Immortals or those convicts in waiting for promotion as Daoist Immortals would soon beat you half to death. This was called "softening you up." Or they'd stick you in the frame, show the guards in charge of discipline a nail or razor blade to prove you'd broken prison rules, and you'd end up in chains or with a yoke round your feet. He said although a prison king was pretty vicious, in a prison king's cell, people were usually quite law-abiding, generally there was a leader in everything, there were no group fights, things were kept fairly clean and hygienic, the towels hung up neatly, the quilts folded one on top of another, which kept the disciplinary cadres happy. To convicts, the democracy cell was the most terrifying thing of all, when a prison king hadn't yet emerged, or when victory and defeat between two or three prison kings remained undecided-that was no life at all. One stray comment and there'd be shouting and fighting; you'd be doing pretty well to keep your eyes, nose, hands and feet on after a few months in a democracy

  Rubbing the head he'd somehow managed to keep on his shoulders, Kuiyuan said with lingering fear in his voice that the cell he'd been put in this time was neither one thing nor the other: it was a democracy, plain and simple. Three great rumbles had already been fought between the Sichuan gang, the Guangdong gang, and the Northeastern gang, without any decisive outcome. Even clapping the battle leaders in irons hadn't solved the problem for the disciplinary cadres. Terrified as he'd been every day, he hadn't had one good sleep.

  I gave an icy laugh: "Got a lot of prison experience, have you?"

  He anxiously leapt to his own defense: "No, no, no, nothing of the sort, I'm the most law-abiding person ever, if someone dropped their money in front of me, I wouldn't pick it up."

  "How many times you been inside?"

  "First time, absolutely the first time. Strike me down if I tell a lie, I swear. I've heard some things about prison from Brother Yanwu."

  I couldn't remember who this was.

  He couldn't believe it: "Can't you even remember Brother Yanwu? The board director, Yanzao's little brother! You know-didn't you used to play ball with him?"

  When he mentioned Yanzao, it occurred to me that Yanzao, it seemed, had had a brother by this name. When I arrived in Maqiao, he was still in school, and I later heard he'd written some reactionary slogan on a stage and gone to prison-by that time,
I'd already been transferred elsewhere. My memory, I realized, was getting worse and worse.

  *Tiananmen

  : Before I revisited Maqiao, a lot of people told me that Maqiao now had a Tiananmen, that it'd become a famous scenic spot (or almost), that even senior officials out on business came, that after visiting the shrine of Qu Yuan and the County Revolution Memorial, they'd always drive out to have a look.

  Strictly speaking, Tiananmen wasn't actually in Maqiao, it was on the boundary with Zhangjia District, right next to what was later National Highway 107, but its link to Maqiao lay in its belonging to Maqiao's Yanwu. It was in fact a large residence, occupying a few dozen mu of land, with pavilions, terraces and turrets, a lotus pond, flower gardens, bamboo woods, a winding corridor set on the water, artificial mountains and rocks. The garden was divided up within itself, each part with its own name, one called "Garden of Eden," one called "The Xiang River Lodge," an indeterminate mix of East and West. Its construction was a bit crude: few of the tiles had been laid flat or clearly aligned, they were all skewed and encrusted with dried cement that hadn't been leveled off. Not many of the windows could be opened, being permanently stuck up with something or other. This caused inevitable anxieties: if Lin Daiyu- a famously sickly Chinese literary heroine-had spent all day in the gardens pushing and pulling at windows, she'd have had her work cut out for her-how'd she still have had time to bury flowers and burn poems? The days would've gone by without her managing to croak out much more than a few lines of karaoke.

  People were at work on the skeleton of a small, two-storey Westernstyle hotel, and it was said that after it'd been finished they'd hire ten girls from around Jiangzhe as waitresses, especially to receive journalists, writers, and other guests.