: Every year, on the third day of the third month of the lunar calendar, Maqiao people all ate rice dyed black with the juice from a type of wild grass, until every mouth was tar black. On this same day everyone sharpened knives. The earth trembled as every single family and household roared in unison and the leaves on the trees that lined the mountains shuddered and quivered uncontrollably. As well as axes, sickles, and hay cutters, each family also had to have a dagger which they polished until it shone snowy white, the icy gleam of the knife edge rippling, pulsating, scintillating, arousing a certain savagery in people. These knives, once sunk in deep, rusty sleep, now returned to glinting consciousness and exploded into life in the hands of the savages, the Savages of the Luo Clan, sowing subliminal tensions. If they weren't gripped tightly by the handle, it seemed they'd take on a life of their own, whizzing through doors, each making for their own targets, scaring the life out of people-sooner or later this was bound to happen. This custom could be seen as a new-year ritual linked to farming preparations, empty of all aggressive implications. But while sharpened hoes and ploughs were obviously needed for farming, it was never quite made clear why they sharpened daggers.
Once the knives gleamed, then spring would come.
On the third of the third, the air quivered on knife-edge.
*Maqiao Bow
: The full name for Maqiao is "Maqiao Bow." Bow means village, including the land covered by a village: it's obviously a traditional unit of area, one "bow" representing the stretch of land covered by the trajectory of an arrow. Maqiao Bow had forty-odd households, about ten head of cattle, and pigs, dogs, chickens and ducks, with two long narrow paddy fields hugging its perimeters. The eastern boundary lay where the village met the fields of Shuanglong Bow with a view of the Luo River in the distance; the northern edge was marked by the ridge that carried water from the top of Tianzi Peak to Chazi Valley, which you could see if you looked up toward the undulating skylines of the Tianzi mountain range. To the west, the village was bordered by Zhangjia District, and its southern reaches extended right up to Longjia Sands, where a narrow road linked up with the Chang Qin highway, built in the 1960s; anyone taking the bus to the county seat would have to travel by this road. It took a good hour to walk from the top to the bottom of the bow. The strength of the ancients is a source of perpetual wonder: what mighty warriors they must have been, to be able to shoot an arrow over such an expanse of land. Could it be that people are shrinking, generation by generation?
It's said that Maqiao (literally "Horsebridge") Bow was originally spelled differently, with the characters meaning "Motherbridge" Bow, but the only evidence is an old title deed. Maybe this is just a spelling mistake left over from the past. Thanks to the establishment of a fairly clear system of record-taking in the modern era, the changes to its name can be roughly summarized as follows:
– before 1956, called Maqiao Village, part of Tianzi Township;
– from 1956 to 1958, called Maqiao Group, part of Dongfeng Cooperative;
– in 1958, called 22nd production team, part of Changle People's Commune (Large Commune);
– from 1959 to 1979, called Maqiao Production Team, part of Tianzi People's Commune (Small Commune);
– since 1979, when the People's Communes were disbanded, up to the present day, Maqiao Village, along with a section of Tianzi Township, has become part of Shuanglong Township.
Most people in Maqiao were surnamed Ma, and it was roughly divided into an upper and a lower village, or an upper and a lower Bow. Previously, wealthy people, and those surnamed Ma, were concentrated in the upper part of the village. The prevalence of this surname in the village was far from normal for the area. The inhabitants of Zhangjia District (literally Zhang Family District) were in fact surnamed Li, and the inhabitants of Longjia Sands (literally Long Family Sands) were surnamed Peng. Though it struck me as rather strange that the name of the village and the clan surname were different, I'd estimate that this was the case in more than half the county.
According to the Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion, at the start of the reign of the Qing emperor Qianlong (1736-96), Maqiao Bow enjoyed a period of prosperity. At that time it was called Maqiao Prefecture, a settlement encircled by walls, with a population of more than a thousand. There were four blockhouses, and its defences were strongly fortified; there was no way vagrant bandits could break in. In the 58th year of Qianlong's reign, a certain Ma Sanbao, a resident of Maqiao Prefecture, suddenly went insane at a banquet in a relative's house and started proclaiming himself the offspring of a union between his mother and a spirit dog, saying he was the reincarnation of an ordained son of heaven, the Great Lord of the Lotus Flower, destined to found the Lotus Flower Kingdom. Three members of his clan, MaYouli, Ma Laoyan, and Ma Laogua, also promptly accompanied him into insanity: hair standing on end, shouting to whomever might listen, they thronged around Ma Sanbao and acclaimed him as king. They produced an imperial edict conferring the title of empress on his wife, who was of the Wu clan, and conferred the title of concubine on a niece of Ma Sanbao and on another girl surnamed Li. They spread notices everywhere, drumming up soldiers and rebellion, and managed to assemble unruly elements from areas up to eighteen bows away, seizing the goods of traveling salesmen, raiding government grain barges, and killing uncounted numbers of people. On the eighteenth day of the first month of the 59th year, the leader of the Zhen'gan forces, Ming Antu (a Mongol), with his deputy general Yi Sana (a Manchu), led a force of eight hundred men, divided into two columns, to suppress the rebellion. The left-hand column attacked Qingyu Embankment, charging directly at the stockade, taking guns and cannon along with them. They fired cannon at the robbers' stockade, which caught fire, forcing the robbers to flee to the river, where countless of them died. After the assault, the right-hand column crossed the river by laying down trees at Hengzipu and made a night-time raid on the bandits' lair, Maqiao Prefecture. At dawn, more than two hundred robbers broke out of the stockade and fled chaotically to the east, where they were headed off by the left-hand column of government soldiers, who surrounded them and killed every one, down to the last man; the heads of Ma Youli and his five phoney ministers were soon cut off and hung up as an example to all. Every single bandit stockade surrounding Maqiao that had joined the rebellion and helped the robbers was razed to the ground. Only those with a spotless record in helping quell the disorder could avoid persecution by government troops. They stuck in their threshold a red government-issued flag, on which were written the words "good people."
The Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion left me rather melancholy. The Ma Sanbao that the New County Annals included in its roll of "Peasant Rebellion Leaders"-the Ma Sanbao who in Maqiao legend was a Son of Heaven of bona fide dragon origin- made an extremely poor showing in this version edited by the Qing authorities. In his brief three months of rebellion, he never contemplated any bold vision for establishing government, founding a dynasty, resisting his enemies, and saving the world-all he did was appoint five imperial concubines. From the historical materials available, it appears he lacked a talent for rebellion: apparently, when the government troops arrived, his only strategy for warding off the metal guns and cannon of the government troops was to ask shamans to consecrate an altar and plead with the spirits, make paper cuts, and sprinkle beans (the idea being that generous use of paper and beans would produce generals and soldiers in similar quantities). He lacked also the morals of rebellion: once captured, he didn't have the integrity to lay down his own life, but wrote out a fulsome confession more than forty pages long, filling the sheets with groveling self-deprecations, "humble this," "humble that," obtaining only pity from his vanquishers. The lack of any coherence to his confession clearly demonstrated his insanity. In the rise and fall of the "Lotus Flower Kingdom" (according to official statistics), the death toll of peasants in Maqiao and its environs exceeded seven hundred, and even women who had left up to ten years earlier to be married in faraway places determinedly ret
urned from all directions in order to join their kinsmen and fellow villagers in a life and death struggle. Drenched in blood, they battled through fire and through water, only to put their own destinies in the hands of such a madman.
Was it a false confession? I truly hope so-that these confessions are part of a history fabricated by the Qing dynasty. I also hope that Ma Sanbao met his end soaked in paraffin, tied to a large tree and lit up like a magic lantern, not as he was described in the Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion, and that the fates of the seven-hundred-odd dead souls who followed him were not demeaned by such a madman.
Is there perhaps more than one version of history?
The disorder wrought by the "Lotus Bandits" is the most significant event in the history of Maqiao, as well as the main cause of Maqiao's decline. Henceforth, Maqiao people gradually began migrating in greater numbers to other areas, leaving fewer and fewer people behind. By the start of the century, the whole village had fallen into a state of dereliction. When the authorities were making arrangements for resettling Educated Youth, they normally looked for fairly poor villages, whose fields were sparsely populated; Maqiao was one of the villages that the authorities selected.
*Old Chum
: The end of the Ming Dynasty [1368-1644] witnessed even greater upheaval than the disorder caused by the "Lotus Bandits": when the rebel Zhang Xianzhong took up arms in Shaanxi, he clashed repeatedly with the Hunanese hatchets, the "Rake troops" in the government army. The heavy casualties Zhang suffered generated in him a deep hatred of all Hunanese, and on several later occasions he led an army into Hunan, leaving countless dead. He was dubbed "No Questions Zhang," meaning that he killed without asking name or reason. There were always human heads hanging from his soldiers' saddles, with strings of ears at their waists, to back up their demands for rewards. Hunan was overrun with Jiangxi people as a result of this bloodbath. It's said that because of this historical episode, Hunanese started calling all Jiangxi people "old chum" and grew to be on very close terms with them.
There are no major geographical barriers between Hunan and Jiangxi, so the population can move back and forth with little difficulty. There was at least one surge in migration from Hunan into Jiangxi, occurring at the start of the 1960s. When I had just arrived in Maqiao to start working the land, the favorite topic of conversation among the men, apart from women, was eating. When they uttered the word "eat" (chi), they pronounced it with the greatest intensity, using the ancient pronunciation qia, rather than the medieval qi, or modern chi. Qia was pronounced in a falling tone: the bold "a" sound of the syllable in combination with a light, crisply percussive falling tone displayed to the maximum the speaker's intensity of feeling. Qia chicken duck beef mutton fish dog, and meat-this last was the abbreviation for pork. Qia stuffed buns steamed buns fried dough cakes fried crispy cakes noodles rice-noodles glutinous rice cakes and, of course, rice (that would be boiled rice). We talked with great gusto, never bored with the topic, never bored with its minutiae, never bored with its repetitiousness. It was a source of constant talk, constant novelty, constant delight, and we talked compellingly, unstoppably, our hearts dancing, faces glowing, every word drenched in a deluge of saliva, then catapulted violently out of the mouth off the tongue, the reverberation of the explosion lingering in the sunlight.
Most of this talk was based on memories, for example recollections of some birthday banquet or funeral feast engraved on a deeply appreciative memory. All this talk, talk, talk would then turn into speculation and boasting. As soon as someone announced that they could eat three pounds of rice in one go, then someone else would announce that they could eat twenty stuffed buns. That was nothing, some superman would interrupt with a snort, he could eat ten pounds of pork fat with two pounds of noodles thrown on top, and so on. Arguments, and assiduous research, would inevitably ensue. Some refused to be convinced, some wanted to take bets, some proclaimed themselves referees, some suggested competition rules, some volunteered to watch over the combatants to prevent them from cheating, for example stopping them from burning the pork fat into crackling, and so on and so forth. This excitement reproduced itself endlessly and identically, and always when meal-times were still a long way off.
At moments like these, the local people would often speak of the year they "opened canteens"-this was the way they generally referred to the Great Leap Forward. They always recalled the past through their stomachs, giving past events a real texture and taste. "Eat grain" meant military service, "eat state grain" meant people going to the city to labor or do cadre work, "the last time they ate dog meat" meant some cadre meeting in the village, "eat new rice" meant early autumn, "make baba cakes" or "kill the new year pig" meant the new year, "there are three or four tables of people here" meant the numbers present at some group activity.
No one had enough to eat during what they called the "canteen" years. Although everyone's eyes were green from hunger, they still had to tramp through ice and snow to repair the irrigation works, and even women were forced to bare their upper bodies, breasts hanging pendulously down as they heaved earth on their backs, wielding red flags, drums, gongs, and slogan boards as they went, to demonstrate their undaunted revolutionary zeal. Unable to manage another breath, third father Ji (I never met him myself) toppled over and died on the construction site. Many young people, in the prime of life, couldn't bear the hardship and fled to Jiangxi. They didn't return for many years.
I later came across a man who had returned to Maqiao from Jiangxi to visit relatives; his name was Benren, and he was about forty years old. He offered me cigarettes, and called me "old chum." In response to my curious inquiries, he said that the reason he fled to Jiangxi that year was because of a pot of maize gruel (see the entry "Gruel"). He'd taken a pot of maize gruel home from the commune canteen, the evening meal for the whole family, but as he waited for his wife to get back from the fields, waited for his two children to come back from school, he felt just too hungry and couldn't help eating his own portion first. Hearing the voices of his children at the mouth of the village, he hurried to divide the gruel into bowls, but when he lifted the lid, he discovered that the pot was already empty. Anxiety turned everything black before his eyes. The gruel had been there a minute ago-where had it gone? Could he have wolfed down the lot without realizing it?
He searched all over the room, disbelieving and panic-stricken: there was no gruel anywhere, all the bowls, dishes, pots were empty, everything was empty. That year there were no dogs or cats who would come and steal food-even all the earthworms and locusts in the ground had long since been devoured.
No sound had ever been as terrifying as the footsteps of his children, growing nearer, and nearer.
He felt that he could not face a soul, let alone tell his wife, and ran panic-stricken to the slope behind the house where he hid in the clumps of grass.
He heard the faint sound of his family's cries, heard his wife calling out his name everywhere. He didn't dare reply, didn't dare release the sound of his own sobs. He never stepped into his home again. He said that he now worked in a valley in southern Jiangxi, chopping wood, burning coal, you know the kind of thing… Ten years had already passed, and he had a new nest of children there.
His original wife had also remarried, and bore no grudge against him, even had him over to her house, cooked him a meal with meat. The only thing was, her two children were shy with strangers; they'd gone to play in the hills and hadn't come back even after it got dark.
I asked him if he still planned to move back.
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized this was a very clumsy thing to ask.
He gave a brief, slight smile, and shook his head.
He said it was all the same, life over there was just the same. He said he might get to be a permanent laborer at the forestry center. He also said that he'd set up home with some other people who had left Maqiao, and their village was also called "Maqiao." The people over there also called Hunanese peo
ple "old chum."
A couple of days later, he returned to Jiangxi. A light rain was falling on the day he left, and he walked in front, his former wife following about ten paces behind, probably seeing him off for part of the way. They only had one umbrella, which the woman held but hadn't opened. When they crossed a ditch, once he had pulled the woman over, they quickly resumed their ten paces separation, one in front, one behind, battling forward through the thick misty drizzle. I never saw him again.
*Sweet
: Maqiao people have a very simple way of expressing flavors. Normally, one umbrella term suffices for anything that tastes good: "sweet." Sugar is "sweet," fish and meat are also "sweet," boiled rice, chilli pepper, bitter gourds are all "sweet." Outsiders have found this hard to understand: was it because their sense of taste was crude, and therefore they lacked vocabulary to describe flavors? Or was it the other way around: had a lack of vocabulary to describe flavors caused their palate to lose the ability to differentiate? Their predicament is virtually unheard of in a country as gastronomically developed as China.
Similarly, there is only one name for all sweet foods: "candy." Candied fruits are "candy," biscuits are "candy" sponge cake, shortcake, bread, cream, absolutely everything is "candy." The first time they saw popsickles in Changle, they called them "candy" too. There are, of course, exceptions: the specialities of the region each have their own name, for example "glutinous rice cake" and "rice cake." Use of the umbrella term "candy" is restricted to all foodstuffs that are Western, modern, or just from distant regions. Most Educated Youth bought biscuits from street stalls to take back home: these were called "candy." This always sounded strange to us, and we never quite got used to it.
Perhaps in the past, Maqiao people had had only just enough food to avoid starvation, and had never achieved a thorough understanding and analysis of food flavors. Years later, I met some English-speaking foreigners and discovered that they suffered from a similar poverty of vocabulary for taste sensations. For example, any piquant flavor-pepper, chilli, mustard, garlic, anything that made your head sweat-was described as "hot." I secretly wondered to myself, did they too, like Maqiao people, have a history of famine that prevented them from selecting their food and differentiating flavors? I can't joke about this, because I know what starvation tastes like. There was one time when, having groped my way back to the village in the darkness, I didn't bother to wash my hands or face (I was covered in mud from head to toe), didn't bother slapping at the mosquitoes (which were swarming densely around me), I just gulped five bowls of rice (each one holding half a pound of rice). After gulping it all down, I still couldn't say what I'd just eaten, what it tasted of. At that moment, I could see nothing, hear nothing, my only sensation was a violent wriggling in the stomach. All those words used by the upper classes to describe taste, all that precise, detailed, flatulent chatter, meant nothing to me.
Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html Page 3
