Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  This meant that Xi had all along made his dad pretend to be his grandson in front of other people, he was not one hundred years old at all, and he had no elixir of life!

  "The swindler." The head of the work team understood, and nodded his head.

  Another cadre said, "whatever he's swindled you of, money, grain, women, just let us know-we'll settle accounts with him."

  Though they were spitting with anger, the men would talk only in vague terms, wouldn't spell things out in detail. The work team saw their difficulty, thought things over and over again, and at last came up with a solution: they got someone highly learned to mull it all over until he finally concluded that Long Stick Xi was guilty of moral bankruptcy plotting with landlords and tyrants colluding with bandits forcibly resisting land reform illegal commerce, and so on, producing a list of crimes ten items long which, in conclusion, made him a counterrevolutionary carbuncle who should be tied up double-quick.

  "So, d'you actually have an elixir of long life?"

  "No, no, I haven't." Long Stick Xi trembled all over before the work team. His arrogance had completely evaporated and snot was streaming from his nose.

  "What did you sell them?"

  "A… aspirin."

  "Why'd you lie like that?"

  "I… I… a counterrevolutionary stance, moral bankruptcy, plotting with landlords and tyrants…" He'd memorized the list of crimes item by item. Not one word was incorrect.

  "Got that?"

  "I've got a good memory, I don't like to blow my own horn, but-"

  "Cut it out! This is your criminal record. You have to confess honestly."

  "I confess, I confess."

  The work team sent him to the county seat under escort. A member of the People's Militia was responsible for the escort, but he must have eaten something funny on the way, because he started vomiting yellow, then green and black bile; he vomited till you could see the whites of his eyes-quite extraordinary, it was. Long Stick Xi knelt down and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, then found a bucket of water to sluice out his guts. When his condition had stabilized a little, he carried him on his back all the way to the county seat and handed him over, together with his gun holster. Of course, he also handed himself over. Apparently, people later on asked him, why didn't he take this opportunity to flee? He said, I couldn't run away, I just couldn't, I wanted to remold myself, escape the dung heap, serve the people.

  His law-abiding behavior while under escort was taken into account when the government judged his case, and his sentence was reduced by two years, after which he was sent to some farm for labor reform. Some people also said that the above version of events was incorrect, and that he didn't serve any part of his sentence; a senior officer took a fancy to him, bailed him out, and sent him to some mountainous mining area where he could make use of Xi's medical skill. Other people had seen him in teahouses in the county seat drinking tea. He had by then cut off his long hair and shaved his head. Oddly enough, his speech was not in the slightest bit rough any more. When he'd talked himself into a state of self-satisfaction, he wouldn't be able to resist some private boasting: in order to get off lightly, he'd first poisoned that soldier escort, then saved his life, thereby reducing his sentence by two years, and so on.

  I don't know how near the truth this version is.

  His old dad soon died. The signs of their roughness also soon disappeared from Maqiao, leaving only those few random words, like "tincture of iodine" and "soda," which so surprised me all those years later. Of course, he also left behind in Maqiao at least three sons, all three with that receding chin particular to him, who will appear in some of my subsequent entries, and who will be the focus of later stories about Maqiao.

  *Same Pot

  : Maqiao people don't talk in terms of same ancestry, or same clan, or same parents. They call sons of the same parents "same-pot brothers." When men remarry, they call their former wife "former-pot wife" and call the wife married after the death of the first "later-pot wife." This shows the importance they attach to blood ties doesn't equal the importance they attach to pots, that is to say the importance they attach to eating. After the Educated Youth arrived in Maqiao, seven people lived together in a household, all eating from the same pot. The fact that they had seven different surnames, were from seven different families, had seven different sets of blood ties was of no importance to locals; the fact that there was only one pot formed the basis for making a lot of important decisions. For example, there was the question of going to the market in Changle on the fifth day of every month. When it was the busy season for farming, the team leader decreed that each pot could at most spare one person to send to the market; everyone else had to stay in the village and work. The Educated Youth, who all wanted to go to town, argued themselves hoarse, protesting that they were not one family, that all had their own individual right to go to the market-to no avail. The household's communal pot stood behind them as cast-iron proof of the final verdict they were futilely disputing.

  At one time, the fires of love blazed between two Educated Youth who, as they settled down to begin their blissfully happy life together, separated their pot off from those footloose and fancy-free Educated Youth. This brought an unexpected bonus when the team leader was distributing oil. Because there was very little, it wasn't distributed according to labor capacity, or by person; in the end, each pot was allotted one catty, so that everyone could have a little oil to grease the pot and enjoy the "righteous glow of shared good fortune." When the storeman came to have a look at the Educated Youth's stove, he certified that they had two pots and allotted two catties of oil to them, fully double the amount they'd been expecting.

  They fried up a feast of profligate oiliness, wiping their greasy mouths in blissful happiness.

  *Placing the Pot

  : When women leave home to get married, the most important of the wedding rites is when the bride places a new pot on the stove of her husband's family, draws water to wash the rice, chops wood to light the fire, and boils a pot of rice, showing she has become a member of her husband's family. This is called "placing the pot," synonymous with getting married. Placing the pot is normally scheduled for the winter, not only to avoid the busy season for farming, and not only because people can only afford the expense after the autumn harvest-there is a yet more important reason. I was told that only in winter could the bride wear the several layers of padded clothing needed to protect herself from the boisterous japes, punches, and kicks that young men go in for giving at weddings. Once Fucha dragged me along to one. Under the dusky light of oil lamps and candles, in which elegant shadows flickered and the smell of alcohol stung the nose, I sat squeezed into a seam of people in a corner cracking sunflower seeds when suddenly I heard a cry of alarm; a black shadow speedily loomed towards me and hurled me violently against the wall, pressing so hard I could barely breathe. Struggling to poke my head out from behind this black shadow, I discovered that it was a person; that it was in fact none other than the bride dressed in her flowery jacket, her face obscured by a tangled bird's nest of hair, and on the verge of tears. I was terrified, but before I had time to break free from the suffocating force that seemed to emanate from her legs and back, hands closed in from all sides to grab at her; amongst roars and cheers, she made her limping escape, sheltered against the chest of another male guest. Her shrill cries were drowned out by thunderous laughter all around.

  The next day, I heard that although the bride had wrapped herself in four layers of padded clothes, tightly tied up with six belts, she had still been mauled black and blue on several parts of her body, testament to the boisterous excess of the young men.

  There was no way the husband's family could register any objection.

  Quite the contrary; if people didn't get carried away, it meant a loss of face for the husband's family, made them the object of general contempt. When a villager called Zhaoqing held the reception for his eldest son, he did everything in a miserly way, watering down the wed
ding wine, cutting the pieces of meat too small. Highly disgruntled, the guests conspired to take revenge. And so it came about that nobody lifted a finger in the direction of the bride throughout the entire wedding night. If they saw her, they either hardly stirred and pretended not to have seen her, or scuttled away. The next day, the bride threw a huge tantrum: how could everyone have snubbed her like that, she wept, how could she ever show her face again? The two uncles who had come with her to place the pot also flew into a rage and, oblivious to the bride's feelings, heaved up the pot from the stove top and walked out of the door, carrying it back home on their backs. The bride hadn't originally intended her tantrum to extend to revoking her vows, but seeing the pot gone, there was nothing she could do but tearfully follow it back to the family home. A village marriage was thus annulled.

  *Little Big Brother (etc.)

  : "Little big brother" means big sister. Clearly, by the same token, "little little brother" means little sister, "little paternal uncle" means an aunt on the father's side, "little maternal uncle" means an aunt on the mother's side, and so on. I noticed very early on that because Maqiao and places nearby didn't appear to have an independent system for female nomenclature, most female names were formed simply by preceding the male name with the word "little," thus tying women forever to the diminutive. This meant, in effect, that women were people of little consequence, petty people. I can't be certain whether there's any link between this kind of ruling and ancient sayings such as Confucius's dictum that "women and petty people are hard to handle."

  Language, it seems, is never absolutely objective or neutral. A linguistic space will always be distorted under the influence of a particular set of beliefs. Bearing in mind the namelessness of females, it's easy to draw further conclusions about their social status around here; it's easy to understand why they always bound their chests flat, crossed their legs tightly, and lowered their eyes timidly onto steps or short grass, harboring a deep-felt fear and shame that sprang from their status as females.

  To be given a name is a right of life, the product of love and respect. People always give names to pampered pets, like "Kitty," or "Lulu." It's only the names of criminals that are usually ignored and replaced by numbers, as in stock-taking. We only refuse to acknowledge the names of people we most hate, "that so-and-so," "you scoundrel," and so on, depriving them of their linguistic position. Those we deem nameless vermin are those whose names have no function in public life or are used with such infrequency that they become erased. Thus, in the Cultural Revolution, names like "professor," "engineer," "Ph.D.," "artist" were expunged. The aim was not to abolish these professions and jobs, neither was it to physically annihilate these people. Instead, it expressed a yearning for every form of employment to develop exclusively in the name of revolution. Intense psychological pressure was exercised in order to weaken, even totally undermine, these individuals' rights to a professional label-because any form of title can provide the breeding ground for a body of thought or entire system of beliefs.

  In ancient China, the study of names and principles infiltrated all philosophy. Naming is the fulcrum, the point of departure, the focal point and result of all theoretical debate.

  In Maqiao, female unnamedness is in fact male namedness, which, of course, is not such a very unusual phenomenon. Even though the English language passed through the tumultuous baptism of humanistic enlightenment several hundred years ago, feminists still now continue to attack the masculinization of a range of prestige terms (for example, using "man" to mean "human," and words such as "chairman" and "minister"). But even though gender-neutral or unisex terms have carved out an enclave only under the shadow of male hegemony, English has never been masculinized to the same degree as Maqiao dialect, where female terms were completely deleted. I've had great difficulty in working out whether this linguistic misrepresentation had any influence on the sexual psychology or even sexual biology of Maqiao women-whether it had to any degree altered reality. From the looks of things, the women all seemed to use coarse, vulgar language, had even learned how to fight and curse. Once they gained the upper hand in relation to a man, they often became complacent. Their hands and faces were hardly ever clean, hardly ever fresh and bright, and their bodies were always hidden in masculine clothing that covered their female figures with loose, straight pants or stiff, rough-padded jackets. They were also embarrassed to talk about menstruation, and referred to it as "that thing." "That thing," again, is no kind of name. When I was laboring in the paddy fields, I hardly ever saw a woman ask to rest because of her period. They could ask for leave to go to the market, to deliver pigs, to help with farm work, and so on, but the period of leave would not be given over to their own health. I figured that in order to affirm their position in male roles such as "little big brother" they had to obliterate even their own periods.

  *House of Immortals (and Lazybones)

  : In Maqiao Upper Bow there was a stretch of cobbled road, along both sides of which stood a few cottages. The buildings on one side of the road were fronted by a perfectly ordinary wall of wooden planks, leaning this way arid that. They were, however, still crowned by a high, square terrace built out of bricks. Once you looked carefully, you realized that these platforms were trading counters from many years before, that these old houses retained the faint appearance of storefronts. Such trading counters represented the fossils of commerce. The Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion record that this area experienced a period of prosperity in the reign of the Qing emperor Qianlong, of which these damaged, peeling counters, besmirched with chicken and duck droppings, were probably material evidence. Another mysterious relic from the past was a big iron pot, now full of holes, long cracks, and splits; abandoned in the woods behind the state granary and minded by no one, the bottom of the pot had filled with rotten leaves and rainwater. The pot amazed people by its size, which was big enough to steam two baskets of rice, and the spoon used to stir it would have had to be at least as big as a rake. Nobody could say to whom this pot had belonged in the past, why they'd needed such a big pot, why the pot's owner had subsequently discarded it. If this pot had been used to cook food for regular hired labor, its owner must have been a great village landlord. If this pot had been used to cook food for ordinary soldiers, then its owner must have been a general of no little standing. These conjectures were enough to unsettle me.

  Of the prosperity that the Annals of the Ministry for the Suppression of Rebellion described, there still remained one last corner in an old house in Maqiao Upper Bow. It was a house made of blue bricks and large tiles, whose main gate had disappeared; it was said a stone lion behind the main gate had been smashed during the revolution, but stone portals which came more-or-less up to people's knees gave an indication of how impressive it had looked in earlier days. Inside the house, a window casement that hadn't been ripped out still remained, on which flying dragons and dancing phoenixes were intricately and exquisitely carved, and which brought with it a faintly oppressive air of extravagant wealth. The local people jokingly referred to this ownerless construction as the "House of Immortals." It was only later that I found out the word "immortals" referred to its lazybones residents who didn't do honest work in the fields. These people were also known as Maqiao's "Four Daoist Immortals" and had lived here for a very long time.

  I went to the House of Immortals once: dispatched by a cadre with orders to paint quotations by Chairman Mao everywhere in red and yellow paint, I couldn't leave out this corner of the village. When I went, I knew that all the other Daoist Immortals in the House of Immortals had either passed away or departed, leaving only one Ma Ming. He wasn't at home, and having received no response after coughing several times at the gate, I had no choice but to advance timidly up a few dilapidated stone steps into this dust-smothered darkness, into a state of hopeless and overpowering fear and trepidation. Fortunately, after proceeding sideways into the right wing of the house, I found a few tiles were missing from a corner of the house and
a shaft of light had sneaked in, finally helping me out of the desperate obscurity. Only slowly did I begin to make out an expanse of brick wall, for some unknown reason bulging outwards, shaped like a Buddha's belly. The wooden plank wall was riddled with woodworm, and everywhere I went there were grass rushes and the crunching sound of broken tile residue. Next to the wall was a large coffin, also covered with rushes and a piece of torn polyethylene. I spotted the owner's bed, a piece of worn matting in amongst a grass nest in one corner. On top there was a mound of wadding as black as ashes-probably the end that kept his feet warm, bound tightly together with a length of grass rope, demonstrating the owner's ingenuity in keeping out the cold. To the side of the grass nest were two old batteries, a wine bottle, and a few multicolored paper cigarette packets- these must have been the few trophies in the House of Immortals seized from the world outside its door.

  My nostrils encountered an aggressively pungent stench which, if I leaned a little over to one side, disappeared. If I leaned back, there it was again. I couldn't help but feel that the bad smell here was not caused by a gas, but was a formless solid, built up over a long period of time, already coagulated into a concrete form, a heavy mass. The owner of the house would surely have had to watch where he stepped to avoid stirring up such a deeply accumulated stench.

  I also took care to avoid this solidified stench, and found a place where my nose could be more at ease to paint a board of quotations. They went like this: "When busy, eat dry food, when leisured eat liquid, at normal times eat half dry, half liquid." I hoped it would have some illuminative value for the owner of the house.