by Han Shaogong
I didn't get to see the owner: people said Yanwu lived mainly up in the county, coming back only now and then to take a look around the place and check up on a couple of factories around here. I glimpsed his house from far off, a small two-storey building in the center of the lotus pond. Three or four window air conditioners were visible around its perimeters, sticking out from each wall, far more than made logical sense; when I thought about it, even the toilets must have been terrifyingly, bone-chillingly cold. The whole house looked like a cement monster overgrown with iron tumors.
Some years earlier, I'd heard that the peasants around here had gotten rich and taken to buying seven or eight electric fans at a time. When they ran out of places to put them, they set them up in the pigpens. Then the next thing you knew, it was air conditioners that were all the rage. The guide was endlessly nagging at me to count the number of air conditioners and would start counting them for me in fives and tens whenever my concentration seemed to be slipping. Every excessively enunciated figure expressed a deep envy that was tinged also with a kind of pride, and that resonated inside my eardrum, as if these iron tumors were in some way part of him, as if he felt some inner compulsion to make me admire the dazzling results of the rich peasant policy.
The guide felt this was still not enough, and at some point went looking for a manager, a young man who knew me, apparently. I'd taught a few classes in days gone by and he'd been one of my students. He produced a key, wanting to take me on a visit to the house. I could hardly refuse the offer, and not having much choice in the matter, followed him across the twists of the winding corridor, through three iron sluice gates and, with a slam and a clatter of doors, into the mansion set in the lake. Its interior, a resplendent expanse of hanging lamps and wallpaper, was really quite nicely done. Unfortunately, as the electricity wasn't powerful enough, none of the air conditioners would start, so the manager had to give everyone a rush fan to stop them from sweating. The television wouldn't play any programs either-apparently the television tower in the neighborhood hadn't yet been put up. There were two telephones, one black, one red, and from the looks of the receivers, they weren't program-controlled, so you probably wouldn't get through to that many people here-people said the switchboard operator in the local government was never on the job and spent most of her time looking after her kid.
"Have some tea, have some tea," I was being given the full courtesy treatment.
"Okay." In fact, I'd rather have found some water to wash the sweat off me.
"Watch the TV, go on."
"Okay."
After the manager had spent ages tuning it with his bottom stuck in the air, the TV finally started flickering a little less and a brightly colored picture floated up out of nowhere, some tape of a foreign music video. It played and played, then started flickering again. Maybe the tape was broken, I said, and tried to change it for one that worked. After a lengthy search, I discovered there weren't any other tapes to watch, the only other one being a Hong Kong martial-arts movie in even worse condition.
By now, my face was streaming with sweat. Steam was billowing off the lotus pond and the scarlet carpet baking underfoot was roasting everyone till they smelled of cooked meat. Panting with the heat, I had to retreat outside the door until the others had finished watching the fragmentary singing and dancing.
I only later discovered that the name "Tiananmen" referred to the main building of the compound, which was a small-scale imitation of the architecture of Tiananmen Square. To give an idea of its size: a chicken chased to extremes of panic and desperation could probably have flapped its way up onto the top of the building. The building had arches, doorways, moats, and footbridges, and was painted deep red in imitation of palace walls. In front of the main entrance stood two grimacing stone lions. Unfortunately there was no water in the moat, only scattered clumps of grass out of which a couple of toads leapt sporadically. When you stood at the head of the building, no square or memorial lay ahead, only a row of commercial alleys, a gathering of desolate noodle stalls, odds-and-ends shops and the like, an empty pool table covered with yellow dust and a crowd of young men squatting under the eaves of buildings, some crouched on stools like roosting chickens, idling away their time.
There was a house with a large shop sign hung over it, "Tianzi International Culture Club," apparently provided by the owner of Tiananmen to serve his fellow villagers for free.
As part of the club, there was also a big theater stage to the left of the building. The guide said that in the first month of this year, the county theater troupe had come to sing opera here for three whole days, again paid for solely by Yanwu for the free entertainment of his fellow villagers.
The visiting party was discussing something to do with one of the actresses in the troupe. Their argument caught the attention of the roosters perched under the eaves, finally giving their sallow gazes a focus.
I was, of course, surprised that Yanwu could build such a big mansion, and also that he'd built it in such a contentious style-if he'd built it ten or so years earlier, wouldn't it have been condemned as a counterrevolutionary conspiracy punishable by death? Only later, when I bumped into an old acquaintance, Zhihuang, did I learn the whole story that lay behind this. Zhihuang said that when Yanwu was in high school, when his family class status was very poor and he hardly counted as human, he'd once stuck a picture of Tiananmen on his bed, which had been confiscated by the class representatives. If poor and lower middle-peasants didn't own photographs like this, said the class cadre, what right did landlord scum like him have to pine for Chairman Mao? To see Tiananmen everyday? He was plotting to blow up the great leader with dynamite, now, wasn't he?
Presumably this incident had hurt him very badly, very deeply. Now that he had money, he built his very own Tiananmen before he did anything else.
In the past, he'd had no right to look at Tiananmen; now, he wanted to let everyone know that not only could he look at it, he could even build one, and build one right under all their noses. He could let his wife and two kids play with the crickets and dogs, eat sesame cakes, and sneeze in Tiananmen.
He took out large loans, was kidnapped several times by debt-collectors threatening to snap his tendons, was even taken away once in a police inspection-unit car-all for this project.
*Brutal
: In Maqiao, "brutal" means capable, skillful, a high level of technical know-how. The problem is, "brutal" at the same time implies ruthless, vicious, malicious. Uniting these two meanings in one word never made me all that comfortable. As I've said before, my handwriting was quite good, and during my time in Maqiao I'd often be ordered to paint displays of Chairman Mao's quotations everywhere in red and yellow oil paint. When the peasants saw me writing on the walls, neither using templates nor tracing out the characters, just climbing up the ladder and writing, there'd be astonished murmurs:
"This transfer kid's really brutal!"
I could never work out how much of this was admiration, how much was criticism.
Being able to write nicely was brutal, knowing a lot of characters was brutal, helping the team leader fix the grain threshing machine was brutal, being able to dive down and fill in the leaks in the pond was brutal, even factories from barbarian parts that manufactured appliances, diesel oil, chemical fertilizers, and sheet plastic (and therefore, of course, the workers) were clever, were brutal. When Maqiao people talked like this, maybe they were unaware that they were implicitly relegating knowledge and skill to the category of moral corruption, of savagery.
I suspect that, according to their past experience, people with a grasp of some particular knowledge or skill possessed a natural tendency toward violence and terror. The first time they saw a piece of rumbling machinery, it dropped Japanese bombs on them from the sky; the first time they saw a radio amplifier, it cut off their "capitalist tails" by confiscating their own private land. What was there to reassure them that clever people they later encountered wouldn't do them similar sorts of harm?
Under these circumstances, was there anything wrong in them using the word "brutal" in this way?
Maqiao language isn't unique on this point.
In a lot of places in Sichuan, people with a high level of skill are described as "fierce," a word close in meaning to "brutal." "Really fierce," that's what they say about someone with a great deal of skill.
In a lot of places in the north, people with a high level of skill are described as "wicked," again close in meaning to "brutal." "Wicked so-and-so," is what they call someone with a lot of skill.
In standard Mandarin Chinese, the term lihai (severe), widely used to refer to people possessing a high level of ability in some area, provides another example of the sting in the tail of praise, of the anxiety concealed within the pleasure. Li means fierce, severe, while hai, meaning evil or harm, provides a warning of even greater clarity and bluntness. In Hunanese, calling someone lihai refers to someone with ability who's always taking ill-intentioned advantage.
So it seems that in a lot of Chinese dialects, knowledge and skill, and evil (or brutality, fierceness, wickedness, harm, etc.) are two sides of the same coin. Two thousand years ago, Zhuangzi expressed anxiety and hatred toward all forms of knowledge and skill. "There are few good people in the world, but many bad, there are few sages that benefit the world, many that harm it" (Zhuangzi, The Outer Chapters, chapter 10). He believed that only by exterminating knowledge would the thieves of the nation be routed; only following the destruction of jewels would the numbers of property thieves decline; only by smashing tokens and documentation would people grow honest and contented with their lot; only by breaking the scales would people be unable to haggle and argue; only by destroying laws and religion would people be able to comprehend nature and the Way of the ultimate in human life… Zhuangzi's resentment of knowledge has long since been submerged beneath the modern advance of technological progress, become a faint glimmer lying over the horizon, ignored by the majority. But in linguistic heritage, at least in the many southern dialects I mentioned above, it continues to eke out a stealthy existence.
*Strange Talent
: Maqiao dialect has another term for people who demonstrate great ability: "strange talent." The Origins of Words (Commercial Book Center, 1988) gives three definitions for guai, the word for "strange" in Mandarin: the first is bizarre or unique; the second is particularly, extremely, very-presumably the gradual evolution of the first meaning into a function word; the third is censure, blame. From the looks of it, in Chinese bizarre things are forever linked with censure and blame, are perilously out of the ordinary.
Maqiao's "strangest talent" was Yanwu. When the original batch of Educated Youth had all been transferred or retired due to illness, only two remained, of whom I was one. Those who could sing revolutionary operas had all gone, and when the arts propaganda team were ordered to go out and perform, we couldn't even get the gongs going, so someone suggested Yanwu to us. He was still studying at middle school, but he responded to the call and sang very well, as it turned out; though he didn't have time to come and rehearse, and was so short he couldn't get on the stage, he concealed himself in a dark spot behind the stage, where he sang through operas from start to finish, good guys, bad guys, male roles, female roles; he just learned the words and out they came, so all the people on stage had to do was mouth. The difficult high notes he hit without batting an eye, producing an astonishing stream of rich, full sound that reverberated in the night sky over the countryside. That head of his poked in and out at everyone else's waist height: it was impossible to see his face clearly without bending at the middle. So as not to miss class, he'd run off after having finished singing, disappearing into the darkness before I'd got a proper look at him.
His singing of Peking operas and model operas was hugely renowned, and whenever there was a joint performance being given in Pingjiang County, he'd be asked to help out.
I only got a proper look at him after he graduated and returned to the village. He had a round babyface, as if he hadn't yet lost his milk teeth, that bore no particular resemblance to his elder brother Yanzao's sharp mouth and monkeylike features. After watching me play a few games of chess, he coolly took to the board himself. I dropped my guard, thinking only to give him a lesson: within a few moves he'd decimated my pieces, ravaged my defences. In another game, he plundered and pillaged to left and to right with the ruthlessness of a grand master, an implacable opponent he was, cutting me no slack, relentless in pursuit and fearsome in attack, destroying at root and branch, prepared to massacre mistakenly rather than let a single piece escape.
I suffered, in secret amazement, a devastating defeat.
"I'm so sorry, I'm no good, no good at all," he said humbly. But his forehead bore a wrinkle of undisguisable satisfaction.
Afterwards, in secret, I furiously researched through chess manuals, but when I asked him for a rematch, he was full of excuses, having to fetch a prescription or work outside the village; he hid himself far, far away, denying me an opportunity to avenge my humiliation. I could imagine, when he saw for himself my anxious impatience, my desperation, the delight on his face once he turned his back.
He didn't work much in the village or spend much time at home; he didn't even come back when his old mother was seriously ill. When the team leader allocated irrigation repair duties to everyone, his were always done for him by Yanzao. Only Yanzao ever appeared on his family's plot of land. First, he studied to be a painter, and we once met on the road, him carrying a bag of tools and covered in paint from head to foot. When I next saw him, a while on, he'd changed to studying Chinese medicine: quite the expert he looked, treating people with acupuncture and taking their pulse. Afterwards, he studied portrait painting and carving as well-it was said he sold paintings and calligraphy in Changle and in the county, as well as carved Chairman Mao's poems in plain and cursive calligraphy on customers' fountain pens, while-you-wait and at a fair price. In short, there was nothing much he couldn't turn his hand to, nothing that could prevent him from showing off the superlative strangeness of his talent. The fame of his strange talent spread far and wide until everyone, both old and young, knew of him. Even though he was a "traitor to the Chinese" (see the entry "Traitor to the Chinese"), Maqiao people never bore any ill feeling toward him and were always very tolerant of his frequent mysterious journeying outside the village.
Quite the contrary: he was the pride of Maqiao, the communal pride of all the villages and stockades massed around the environs of Maqiao Bow. If rumor spread that such-and-such a place had produced a university student: what of it? Maqiao people would snort. What a pity Yanwu was a traitor to the Chinese, otherwise he could have studied at three or four universities. If rumor spread that someone from such-and-such a place had been recruited as a country irrigation technician and was working for the state: What-someone like that gets to be a technician? Maqiao people would snort. What a pity Yanwu's class status was too high, otherwise this nobody wouldn't have had a chance.
Once, when Benyi's child had been ill for ages and showed no sign of recovery, Benyi made plans to send him to the county seat. Maqiao people concluded that he was sure to die: if Yanwu's prescription couldn't cure him, what use would it be to send him to the county seat? Sending good money after bad, that was. Just two weeks later, Benyi's kid was cured, in the county seat. Still, Maqiao people weren't surprised, weren't lost for words. It wasn't that Yanwu's prescription was no good, they said, nothing of the sort: the only problem was that the prescription hadn't been made up properly in the countryside. Otherwise there'd have been no need at all for Benyi's child to go to the county seat, using all that money up and suffering like he did: he even went under the knife, had his heart, liver, and lungs dug out to be washed like pickled vegetables, must've taken a good ten years off his life expectancy.
Benyi himself fully concurred with this.
Benyi, the Party Branch Secretary and an enemy of Yanwu's father, endlessly repeated how Yanwu was even more strangely ta
lented than his old man, how he definitely had the makings of a future counterrevolutionary, of a convict. But this didn't have the slightest effect on his worship of Yanwu's strange talent, on his special regard for Yanwu: he'd ask Yanwu to come and check the pulses of his own family whenever they were ill. He wouldn't be able to rest easy before he'd done this.
Yanwu never charged for treating Maqiao's sick; and toward cadres, his manner was doubly reverent. Once, after bumming a cigarette off me, he turned and ran, disappeared in the blink of an eye. When I went to the lower village on an errand I discovered Commune Head He sitting on the grain-drying terrace, smoking away there and then on that Qiulu Mountain cigarette of mine, Yanwu standing to one side rubbing his hands, his face wreathed in simple, honest, slightly timid smiles, listening respectfully to the Commune Head's admonitions. I found out later that he didn't smoke, not because he didn't want to, but because he begrudged it. Working as a painter outside the village, as a doctor, as an artist and engraver, he carefully saved and hoarded up all the cigarettes he received as gifts, then eventually presented them with the greatest respect to cadres, and particularly to Benyi. Benyi's cigarettes were always a hodgepodge of brands for this very reason.
For a time, his relations with Commune Head He were particularly intimate: whenever Commune Head He wanted anything, he'd come as soon as he was summoned and smile as soon as he came, forever obedient, supremely gifted at demonstrating his learning whenever necessary, then returning the credit for his learning to the patronage and enlightenment of his leaders. One time, having hardly slept a wink for two days because of a painting job outside the village, he returned to Maqiao late at night, limping and staggering giddily from exhaustion. He heard from his neighbors that Commune Head He had sent a letter over, saying an alarm clock was broken and could he come and see about fixing it. Not daring to rest, he ran through the night to borrow tools from a clock-smith in Changle before hurrying on to the commune. When crossing Tianzi Peak, all it took was one lapse of concentration and you'd fall into the deep crevice. On the morning of the next day, he was eventually discovered by some passers-by, his face, hands, and exposed feet in particular plastered with stinging mountain leeches, as if his body had been overgrown with bright red fibrous roots. The passers-by all fell upon him, trying to beat the leeches off with such violence their hands were covered in blood. After they'd slapped him awake, he burst into terrified tears after one look at his blood-stained form.
