A Dictionary of Maqiao

by Han Shaogong

  "What?" My hairs were standing on end.

  "This burglar's face had no eyes, nose, or mouth-blank and flat it was, like a pancake…"

  We heard the sound of footsteps in the cave. A quick listen told us it was Fangying back from home. She'd said a little earlier that she was going to fetch a bit of baba cake.

  Ripping at the still-warm baba cake in his hand, Fucha said with a smile: "We're talking about ghosts, want to listen?"

  She made a terrified "uh" noise, her footsteps fleeing into the darkness.

  "Hey, aren't you afraid of the ghosts outside?"

  The sound of footsteps stopped.

  Fucha chuckled with delight.

  "Has it snowed outside?"

  No answer.

  "Is the sun about to come up?"

  Still nothing.

  "All right, all right, we won't talk about ghosts anymore, come and sit in here for a while, in the warm."

  After a moment of quiet, the rustling sound drew a little nearer. But still I couldn't see Fangying; only a metal buckle on her shoes floated up, flashed momentarily out of the darkness. This told me one of her feet wasn't too far from me.

  I don't know when, but I started to hear a thumping noise above my forehead, then after a while, another dull thumping started, a quake that made the lamplight quiver; it didn't sound as if it was coming from above my head, but as if it came from in front, or from the left, from the right, from all directions. An anxious expression clouding his face, Fucha asked me what was going on. I didn't know, I said. He said there was a mountain above us and it was nighttime, there shouldn't be any noise. I agreed, there shouldn't be any noise. Could we have dug down into a tomb? he asked. Had we really found ghosts? I said I didn't believe it. He said the old guard in the production team had told him Tianzi Peak used to have a cave which could take you through to Jiangxi, could it be we'd dug through? Could it be Beijing just outside, or America?

  You've been to high school, I said, d'you honestly think we've dug more than a few dozen meters? Reckon we haven't even dug as far as Benren's compost shed.

  He gave a small, sheepish smile: sometimes, he said, he could think things over and over in his head without finding a solution; when somewhere was far away, why did it always have to be so far? When something was a long time ago, why did it always have to be such a long time? Couldn't there be a way, a way of digging a hole, for example, of digging and digging until you reached another world?

  This had been one of my childhood fantasies-I'd burrow my head into the quilt and hope that when this head burrowed its way out again, it would find some dazzling miracle before it.

  We waited and waited for new noises, but heard nothing.

  Fucha yawned disappointedly: "That'll do, time's just about up, let's stop work."

  "Put out the light, will you," I said

  "Make sure you bundle up, it's cold outside," he said.

  The lamplight was now behind me. The shadow before me suddenly, dramatically expanded and swallowed me up in one gulp.

  *Officials' Road

  : When I look at it written down before me, the phrase "officials' road" conjures up visions of a narrow roadway paved with stone, twisting and turning as it stretched over the mountains to Maqiao-it wasn't just any old pathway that got to be called an "officials' road." I'd guess its history went something like this: way back in the past, someone from the village who'd left to take up an official post elsewhere had needed to ride back home to visit his elders; a good road being thus essential, his first act as an official was to build a road to his home village, an officials' road. Officials' roads were usually built by convicts. The official would allocate punishment through differing lengths of construction work, according to the respective gravity or levity of a crime: one hundred or two hundred feet, and so on. The construction of roads was not only a testament to wealth and honor: their growth rested on the crimes of bygone days.

  Neither the officials nor criminals of Maqiao's past left their names to posterity.

  As time went by, it fell into disrepair: some of the stone slabs shattered, or simply disappeared entirely. The fragments remaining sank into the surrounding topsoil, with only the part not yet grown over still poking out, trampled to a slippery gleam by passing bare feet, like a row of human spines lubricated with oil and sweat, eternally subjugated below our feet. I was once suddenly seized by an impulse to dig these spines out of the earth, to permit the skulls at the other end, slumped down into the soil, to rise up from their long darkness and look upon me-who were they?

  When the soil on the officials' road began to smell of dung, that was when you'd arrived at the village. A dazzling plum-blossom tree, a rustling burst of brightness, stood there marking the place.

  Panting, I turned to ask; "Aren't we in to Maqiao yet?"

  Fucha was hurrying along forward, as he helped us Educated Youth haul our luggage: "Almost there, almost there, can't you see it? That's it in front, not too far now, is it?"

  "Where?"

  "Underneath those two maple trees."

  "That's Maqiao?"

  "That's Maqiao."

  "Why's it called that?"

  "Dunno."

  My heart sank, as I took one step after another into the unknown.

  Afterword

  Humans are linguistic animals, but speaking is actually very difficult for humans.

  In 1988, I moved to the south of South China, to Hainan Island on China's southernmost tip. I couldn't speak Hainan dialect and, furthermore, I found their dialect very hard to learn. One day, going to the market with a friend to buy food, I spotted a fish I didn't know the name of, and so asked the salesman, a local. He said it was fish. I said I know it's fish, could you please tell me what fish? "Sea fish," he said, staring at me. I smiled and said, I know it's sea fish, could you please tell me what-sea-fish? He stared even more, seemingly impatient: "Big fish!"

  Afterwards, my friend and I couldn't help laughing when we thought back over this dialogue.

  Hainan has the largest coastal area in the country, countless fishing villages and a fishing industry with a long history. It was only later that I discovered they have the largest fish-related vocabulary of just about any people anywhere. Real fishing people have set vocabulary, have detailed, precise expressions and descriptions for all the several hundred types of fish, for every fishy part, every fishy condition, enough to compile a big, thick dictionary. But most of these can't be incorporated into standard Mandarin. Even the 40,000-odd characters in the Kangxi Dictionary, the largest compilation of definitions, are too remote from this island, have banished this abundant mass of deep feeling beyond its field of vision, beyond the controlling imperial brush and inkstone of scholars. When I speak standard Mandarin with the local people, when I force them to make use of a language they're not very familiar with, they can only fudge their way through with "sea fish" or "big fish."

  I almost laughed at them, I almost thought they were pitifully linguistically impoverished. I was wrong, of course. To me, they weren't the people I saw, they weren't the people I've been talking about, their chao-jiu-ou-ya-ji-li-wa-la mocking chirping spitting babbling gabbling gibbering crying jabbering was concealed behind a linguistic screen that I couldn't penetrate, was hidden deep in a dark night that standard Mandarin had no hope of illuminating. They had embraced this dark night.

  This made me think of my own hometown. For many years I've studied Mandarin. I realize this is necessary, it's necessary in order for me to be accepted by neighbors, colleagues, shop assistants, policemen, and officials, to communicate through television and newspapers, to enter into modernity. It's just that my experience in the market buying fish gave me a sudden jolt: I realized I'd been standardized. This implied that the hometown of my memories had also been standardized, that every day it was being filtered through an alien form of language-through this filtering, it was being simplified into the crude sketchiness of "big fish" and "sea fish," withering away bit by bit in the desert o
f translation.

  This isn't to say that hometowns can't be talked about. No, you can still use standard Mandarin to talk about them, you can also use Vietnamese, Cantonese, Fujianese, Tibetan, Wei language, every foreign language there is to talk about them, but is "Beethoven's Fifth" played on a Peking Opera violin still "Beethoven's Fifth"? Does an apple that has left its native soil, an apple that's been steamed and pickled, still count as an apple?

  Of course, dialect isn't the only linguistic obstacle, neither is region the only linguistic tie. Apart from regionalization, language at the very least also has epochal gradations. A few days ago, I was chatting with friends, sighing over how the development of transportation and communications was strengthening horizontal links across humanity, ever accelerating the process of cultural renewal; in the not-too-distant future, maybe regional differences in culture would be rooted out, would melt away, leading to a possible increase and intensification of epochal differences. People of the same era in the global village would eat the same kind of food, wear the same kind of clothes, live in the same kind of houses, propagate the same kind of ideas, even speak the same kind of language, but by then, for people of the 1950s to understand people of the 1930s, for people born in 2020 to understand people born in 2010, could be as difficult as it is now for Hunanese people to understand Hainanese culture, for Chinese people to understand British culture.

  This process has in fact already begun. Within any one dialect, the "generation gap" shows up not only in ideas about music, literature, clothing, employment, politics, and so on, it also shows up in language-we're already used to seeing an old person having to work up a real sweat to understand his children's vocabulary. "Three-in-one," "bean coupons," "team worker," "(class) status," a whole batch of Chinese terms have rapidly become archaisms, although they haven't yet been banished to ancient manuscripts, they haven't yet been withdrawn from daily life, they remain current in a few, fixed circles of exchange, just as dialect is still current in old village circles. It's not region but era, not space but time which are producing all these new kinds of linguistic communities.

  We could explore this question a bit further. Even if people can overcome the obstacles of region and era, can they still find any kind of common language? A linguistics professor once carried out a classroom experiment: he pronounced a word, such as "revolution," then got students to say the first image that flashed into their brains on hearing it. The responses were enormously varied: there was red flag, leader, storm, father, banquet, prison, politics teacher, newspapers, market, accordion… The students produced totally different subconscious interpretations of the word "revolution" according to their totally different individual life experiences. Of course, having entered into the realm of public exchange, they have to submit to standards of authority such as large dictionaries. This is the compromise the individual makes to society, the compromise of lived and living feelings to cultural tradition. But who can say for sure that the ephemeral images secretly omitted in these compromises won't be stored up in some dark layer of consciousness, evolving into language that could erupt at any given moment and change the course of events? Who can say for sure, while people search for and use a broadly standard form of language, while they are overcoming all kinds of linguistic obstacles in their quest for communication with other minds, that new divergences in sound, form, meaning, regulations aren't emerging at all stages? Aren't psychological processes of nonstandardization or antistandardization constantly, simultaneously in progress?

  Strictly speaking, what we might term a "common language" will forever remain a distant human objective. Providing we don't intend exchange to become a process of mutual neutralization, of mutual attrition, then we must maintain vigilance and resistance toward exchange, preserving in this compromise our own, indomitable forms of expression-this is an essential precondition for any kind of benign exchange. This implies, then, that when people speak, everyone really needs their own, unique dictionary.

  Words have lives of their own. They proliferate densely, endlessly transform, gather and scatter for short bursts, drift along without mooring, shift and intermingle, sicken and live on, have personalities and emotionSj flourish, decline, even die out. Depending on specific, actual circumstances, they have long or short life spans. For some time now, a number of such words have been caught and imprisoned in my notebook. Over and over, I've elaborated and guessed, probed and investigated, struggled like a detective to discover the stories hidden behind these words; this book is the result.

  This, of course, is only my own individual dictionary, it possesses no standardizing significance for other people. This is just one of the many responses from the linguistics professor's class experiment; once class is over, people can forget it.

  Glossary

  Ba: an ancient name for Sichuan, a large province in midwestern China.

  Catty: five hundred grams.

  CCP: the Chinese Communist Party

  Double Ninth Festival: Ninth day of the ninth lunar month.

  Educated Youth: high-school and university students sent down to labor in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

  Great Leap Forward: with the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), Mao Zedong hoped to achieve an economic breakthrough that would allow China to overtake the West. It in fact led to the worst manmade famine in human history, leaving approximately thirty million Chinese dead, most of them peasants.

  Guomindang (GMD): the Nationalist Party in power in Mainland China from 1911 to 1949.

  Journey to the West: one of the best-known novels of premodern China, written c. 1570, recounting the adventures of the monk Xuan Zang (Tripitaka) and the monkey Sun Wukung on a pilgrimage to India.

  Li: a traditional unit of length equivalent to 0.5 km or 0.31 mile.

  Lin Biao (1907-71): Communist leader and Mao Zedong's designated successor until his death in a plane crash following an unsuccessful coup d'etat. Lin Daiyu: the tragic, sickly, poetry-writing, garden-dwelling heroine of The Dream of Red Mansions, probably the most famous of all Chinese novels, written by Cao Xueqin c. 1760.

  LuXun (1881-1936): one of the most acclaimed figures in modern Chinese literature, renowned for his critical and satirical short stories and essays on modern China.

  Miao: an ethnic minority of southwestern China.

  Ming Dynasty: the Ming Dynasty ruled China from 1368 to 1644.

  Model Operas: Eight "politically correct" revolutionary operas from the Cultural Revolution.

  Mu: A Chinese unit of area equivalent to 0.067 hectares or 0.167 acres.

  Poor and lower-middle peasants: The two poorest, and therefore most politically correct, classes of peasants in Maoist China. Qing: the Qing Dynasty ruled China from 1644 to 1911.

  Qingming: the Chinese grave-sweeping festival, when ancestors are commemorated.

  Rice sprout dance: a traditional Chinese folk dance that Communist propaganda teams popularized from the 1940s, adding new political content. Dancers take a step forward, then a step back, in effect not moving from their original spot.

  Romance of the Western Chamber: a romantic work of drama written by Wang Shifu (c. 1300).

  Simplified characters: in the 1950s, the Communist government simplified the majority of Chinese written characters, reducing the number of strokes and often radically changing the appearance of the character. The original characters are now called "full-form" or "complex" characters.

  Struggle: to submit (a class enemy) to class struggle was a technique of mass intimidation used particularly in Maoist China, involving mass denunciation meetings and self-criticisms.

  Tujia: The Tujia nationality is found in Hunan and Hubei provinces.

  Zhang Xianzhong: one of the rebels who contributed to the fall of the Ming Dynasty.

  Zhan Tianyu (1861-1919): a railway engineer who invented a type of railcar coupler still in use today.

  Zhuangzi (c. 370-300 b.c): a great Daoist philosopher of ancient China.

  Guide to Princ
ipal Characters

  Bandit Ma: see Ma Wenjie.

  Benren: Benyi's same-pot brother; fled to Jiangxi during the Great Leap Forward.

  Benyi (also Ma Benyi): Party Branch Secretary in Maqiao.

  Commune Head He: leader of the local commune.

  Fucha: Maqiao's accountant.

  Kuiyan: "lazy" son of Zhaoqing.

  Long Stick Xi: a mysterious outsider who introduced "tincture of iodine" to Maqiao.

  Ma Ming: leader of Maqiao's "Daoist Immortals," inhabitant of the "House of Immortals."

  Ma Wenjie: Maqiao's most famous modern historical figure and former County Leader.

  Master Black (also Mou Jisheng): muscular but dim Educated Youth.

  Master Nine Pockets: renowned beggar king of Changle.

  Shuishui: wife of Zhihuang the stonemason, later a "dream-woman."

  Three Ears: unfilial son of Zhaoqing, one of the "Daoist Immortals," later lover of Tiexiang.

  Tiexiang: daughter of Master Nine Pockets, later wife of Benyi and lover of Three Ears.

  Uncle Luo: former village leader; Maqiao's oldest cadre.

  Wanyu: Maqiao's singing star.

  Xiongshi: son of Zhihuang and Shui Shui, killed in delayed blast of Japanese bomb.

  Yanwu: talented younger brother of Yanzao.

  Yanzao: "Traitor to the Chinese," persecuted and bullied for being a landlord's son.

  Zhaoqing: notoriously stingy inhabitant of Maqiao, father of Three Ears.

  Zhihuang: Maqiao's stonemason, famed for his stupidity, married toShuishui.

  Zhongqi: Maqiao's resident gossip and busybody.