Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  I heard someone behind me exclaim with a sigh: "When time is confused, it must be a time of confusion."

  As I hadn't heard footsteps approach, I didn't know when he'd appeared. He was so thin his temples were deeply sunken, and he was wearing a cotton hat and unlined cotton jacket unusually early in the day. As he upbraided me with a slight smile, his hands in his sleeves, it occurred to me this must be the owner of the house. The brim of his hat was just like that of other men round here, always worn twisted at a great angle.

  When asked, he nodded his head, and confirmed that he was Ma Ming.

  I asked him what he had just said.

  He gave another slight smile and said that these simplified characters had no logic at all. Full-form Chinese characters fall into six categories, the picto-phonetic type (in which one element represents meaning and the other sound) being easiest for communication. Take the full-form character for "time" [|^f]: its meaning derives from the left-hand element, the character for "day" [g]; its sound shi derives from the right-hand element, the character [=^], which is pronounced si. If it means [|E]] and sounds like [^f], why change something that works perfectly well? In simplified form [Hf], its side component became [~f], pronounced cun. The reader now had nothing to orient himself by and the character didn't lend itself to quick memorization. What was introduced as a measure to reduce confusion in fact completely confused the texture of Chinese characters. Time being thus confused, confused times could not be far-off.

  Such an educated remark gave me a fright, and also fell outside my range of knowledge. I quickly changed the subject and asked him where he had just been.

  He said he'd been fishing.

  "What, no fish then?" I saw that both his hands were empty.

  "Do you also fish? You must know that the fisherman's intent lies not in obtaining fish, but in the Dao. Big fish, small fish, fish or no fish at all, in fishing all has its own Dao, its own pleasure, of incalculable worth. Only the fierce and cunning will be blinded with greed, poisoning the water, setting off dynamite, casting nets, beating the water, ruining the atmosphere, vile evil practices, vile, vile, vile!" At this point, his face flushed with unexpected animation, and he burst into a fit of coughing.

  "Have you eaten?"

  He pursed his lips and shook his head.

  I was terribly afraid that next thing he would ask me to lend him some rice, so before he had finished coughing, I burst in with "fishing-good idea. Nice steamed fish."

  "What's so great about fish?" he grunted contemptuously. "Like eating dung, bleurgh!"

  "So, do you… eat meat?"

  "Ai, pigs are the most stupid of animals. Pork only wakes up after you've stabbed it. Oxen are the most idiotic, beef damages the intelligence. Goats are the most cowardly, eating goat will make you lily-livered. All no good."

  I'd really never heard anything like this before.

  Seeing that I was puzzled, he smiled dryly. "With heaven and earth this big, you're worried there's nothing to eat? Take a look, butterflies have beautiful colors, cicadas sing a clear song, mantises can fly over walls, leeches can divide up a body. The hundred insects are thus, they gather the essence of heaven and earth, collect the ingenuity of the old and the new. They are the most elusive delicacies. Delicacies. Tsk tsk tsk…" With insatiable gusto he smacked his lips and tongue, then suddenly thought of something, turning back to the side of his nest, where he took out a ceramic bowl and held out to me a long thin black something. "Here, have a taste, this is leftover pickled golden dragon. It's a pity there's only a bit left, it's really fresh."

  At one glance I took in that the golden dragon had started off life as an earthworm, and my entire digestive system did a back-flip.

  "Taste it, taste it." His mouth opened wide in enthusiasm, a gold tooth glinting out. A yellow cloud of vapor reeking of fermented urine hit my face.

  I stumbled out and fled.

  After that, it was a long time before I saw him again-I hardly ever had reason to cross paths with him. He never came out to work. The Four Daoist Immortals hadn't touched a pickaxe or carrying pole for the last ten years or more. Apparently it made no difference what rank of cadre went to argue with them or curse them, even tie them up with rope, it was all to no avail. If the authorities threatened to lock them up in jail, they seemed delighted, since being in jail saved them the trouble of cooking for themselves. Actually by this time they hardly ever cooked anyway, and their relish of jail was just part of a scheme to take laziness to an absolute, pure extreme.

  They didn't bunch together in a group at all, and never had a fixed time for eating; whenever one of them got hungry, he would disappear for a while, then return wiping his mouth, perhaps after having eaten some wild berries or bugs, or stolen a radish or some maize off someone's floor and just swallowed it down raw. For any of them, lighting a fire to cook food counted as the most incredibly laborious, unbearably tiresome thing for which they would be ridiculed by the other Daoist Immortals. None of them had any possessions, and the issue of ownership of the House of Immortals was of course extremely hazy. But neither was it the case that they owned nothing whatsoever: in Ma Ming's words, "the mountains and rivers have no owner, the idler is the master of all." They wandered around happily the whole day long, playing chess, humming operas, surveying the scenery, climbing up high to admire the view, taking in all that lay around, swallowing up the new and the old; it was as if they were borne aloft on the wind, freed from this world, had taken wing and become immortal. Those working on the land down below couldn't suppress their smiles when they first saw them standing on the mountains. The Daoist Immortals saw things differently, and instead laughed at the plodding work of the villagers, day in, day out, eating to work, working to eat, the old working for their sons, sons working for their grandsons, one generation after another suffering like beasts of burden-was this not pitiful? Even if they accumulated ten thousand strings of cash, a person could never wear more than five feet of cloth, or eat more than three meals a day, and how could this possibly compare with courting the friendship of the sun and moon, with taking the heavens and earth as their abode, enjoying beautiful scenery and experiences in luxurious leisure!

  Later on, people were no longer surprised to see them in broad daylight just standing still, looking around, and took no notice of them.

  The Daoist priest among the Four Daoist Immortals sometimes went to distant parts to perform a few rites. One Hu Erce once went to the county seat to beg and didn't return to the village for a month or more. There began to be talk in the county that it looked very bad if Maqiao people were going into town to beg for food. The village should impose strict controls and give assistance to those with real economic problems-people couldn't starve to death under socialism. The old village leader Uncle Luo had no alternative but to send the accountant Ma Fucha over to the House of Immortals with a basket of grain from the granary.

  Ma Ming was an extremely unyielding kind of person, and just glared and said: "Nay. This is the blood and sweat of the common people-how can it be right for you to give it away out of pity?"

  There was in fact something in what he said.

  Fucha had no choice but to carry the basket of grain back.

  Ma Ming didn't eat food that had been cadged, he didn't even use other people's water. He hadn't dug stones or hauled mud for the village well, so there was no way he would draw water from it. Off he'd go, wooden bucket in hand, to a stream two or three li down the road, often so exhausted the blue veins on his forehead bulged out, taking huge panting breaths, all the bones in his body twisted into one chaotic mass under the weight of the water bucket. Every few steps he'd have to rest, moaning and wailing, nose and mouth distorted into unrecognizable shapes. When they witnessed this, people did manage a little sympathy: the well was for all the villagers, how could we grudge you a mouthful of water? He would grind his teeth ferociously and say "as ye sow, so shall ye reap."

  Or he would put on a show of bravado in self-justificat
ion: "The stream water tastes sweeter."

  Once, someone treated him to a bowl of ginger-salted sesame vegetables and insisted that he swallow it down. After he'd swallowed it and before he'd walked ten steps, he threw up violently-so violently that long strings of saliva hung down from his mouth and you could see the whites of his eyes. He said it wasn't that he wasn't grateful, it was just that his guts couldn't cope with coarse food like that, and the well water stank of duck shit-how in heaven's name could he let it pass his lips? Of course, it wasn't quite the case that he received no charity at all: for example, the padded unlined jacket that he wore all year round, in summer and winter, was given to him by the village. At first he categorically refused it, until the old village leader took a different tack and said this wasn't charity, it was more a case of him helping out the village; if he went out of the village dressed too shabbily, it would be bad for Maqiao's face. Only then, as a special favor, just to keep people happy, did he accept, with enormous reluctance, the new jacket. Furthermore, whenever this matter was raised in the future, he acted as if a great misfortune had come over him, and said he hadn't cared how old and venerable the village head was, he'd absolutely refused to bow down-the jacket burned his bones, made him feel ill when he was perfectly healthy.

  He wasn't in fact afraid of the cold, and would often sleep out in the open. If, while walking somewhere, he didn't feel like walking anymore, he would yawn, lie down in his clothes, and curl up into a ball, sometimes under the eaves of a house, sometimes at the side of a well-and he'd never ended up ill from all his curling up. As he put it, when sleeping in the open your upper surface could be at one with the spirit of the heavens, and your lower surface could make contact with the spirit of the earth, from 11 P.M. to 1 A.M. you could absorb the yang in the yin, from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M. you could pick out the yin in the yang; this was the best way of making up deficiencies in the body. He also said that human life was a dream and that dreams were the most crucial part of life. If you slept next to an ants' nest, you could dream the dreams of emperors; if you slept among clumps of flowers, you could dream romantic dreams; if you slept in front of a pit of quicksand, you could dream golden dreams; if you slept on a grave, you could dream ghostly dreams.

  He would forego anything for the rest of his life, apart from dreams. During his whole life he was particular about nothing, except for where he slept. For him, the most pitiful of beings were those for whom life meant only the awakened state and who didn't experience the life of sleep. Sleeping-awakening-sleeping-awakening: it was always sleeping that had to come first. A life with no dreams was a life half lived, was, in fact, a gross outrage of the Way of heaven and earth.

  Other people regarded these remarks of his as the talk of a madman, or as a joke. This made his feelings of rancor towards the villagers grow ever deeper, made him even more stonily silent in public.

  He was, in point of fact, someone who lacked all public connections, someone who had no connections with Maqiao's laws, morality or any of its political changes. Land reform, the campaign against bandits and landlords, the mutual aid teams, the cooperatives, the People's Communes, the Socialist Education Movement, the Four Clean-ups, the Cultural Revolution, none of these had any effect on him, they weren't part of his history, they were no more than a play that he enjoyed from a great distance, but which was incapable of having any influence on him. The year they opened canteens, a cadre from outside the village-who wasn't in the know-tied him up with a rope and dragged him down to the construction site for labor reform. No matter how much they beat him with sticks or whipped him, he remained coldly contemptuous, preferring to die rather than labor, to die rather than stand up. He just lay there, stubbornly prostrate, rolling around in the soupy mud, refusing to get up. What's more, once they'd gotten him there, it wasn't so easy to get him home again: he repeated over and over that he wanted to die in front of the cadre, and wherever the cadre went, he would crawl after him; in the end, everyone had to lend a hand lifting him back to the House of Immortals. Since he didn't want to be counted as a person, he overpowered any authority. Having easily foiled society's last attempt to harass him, he henceforth became in Maqiao even more of a nothing, a blank space, a drifting shadow. As a result, when it later came round to checking class status, grain allocation, family planning, even carrying out the census-I helped the village do this-nobody thought about whether there was still a Ma Ming, and nobody felt he should be included in the calculations.

  He was definitely not included in the full national census.

  He was definitely not included in the worldwide census.

  Obviously, he didn't qualify as a person.

  If he wasn't a person, then what was he? Society means People, writ large. He rejected society, and society canceled his qualifications as a person. My guess is that he finally brought the situation to a head because he'd always wanted to become an immortal.

  The slightly surprising thing is that in the stretch of land near Maqiao, there were quite a number of creatures like Ma Ming who were perfectly happy to withdraw from the normal run of human society. Fellows like Maqiao's Four Daoist Immortals, it was said, were still to be found in most villages from far around; it was just that outsiders tended not to know of them. If an outsider didn't discover them by chance or curious inquiry, the locals wouldn't talk about these creatures, would even forget they existed. They were a world inside this world that has already caved in and disappeared.

  Fucha once said that they weren't at all awakened (see the entry "Awakened"). Most of their parents weren't hard-up, and there was an insolent cleverness about them. As an early indication of what they'd become, though, they'd been a bit mischievous as children, not very diligent as students. Ma Ming, for example, never did his homework, but when it came to writing couplets, they'd spring from his mouth fully formed. One example: "See the national flag, everyone goes spare, do the rice sprout dance, we're got nowhere." Agreed, it was counterrevolutionary, but the sound and sense of the lines (in Chinese, at least) are flawless. Even while they were struggling him for it, everyone praised the kid's phenomenal literary aptitude. Once someone like him lost his parents, he started to turn bad, turned scientific (see the entry "Science"). Who knew what possessed him.

  *Science

  : When Maqiao people chopped firewood on the mountainside, they'd carry it home on their backs, then lay it out on the ground to dry in the sun before burning it. Wet firewood is very heavy, and carrying it on the back really bit into the shoulders. We Educated Youth later on came up with the idea of leaving the firewood, after it had been cut, to dry in the sun on the mountainside. Once it had dried, we would come back to carry it down the next time we came to cut firewood. We still carried a whole load of firewood every time, but as it was dry firewood, it was quite a lot lighter. Uncle Luo had heard that this technique was quite effective, and swapped loads with me to give it a try; eyes wide in astonishment, he agreed that it was a lot lighter. I said that at least half the water had evaporated out.

  He put my load down, then took up once more the wet firewood he had just cut and set off down the mountain. A little perplexed, I went after him to ask why he didn't give our method a try.

  "People who chop wood but won't carry it have missed the whole point."

  "It's not that we won't carry it, we just want to carry it a bit more scientifically."

  "What d'you mean scientific? You mean lazy! Those city automobiles, railroads, flying machines of yours-name me one that hasn't been thought up by a lazybones! Who else but lazybones would've thought up such a devilish set of names?"

  This outburst quite took my breath away.

  He went on: "With all these scientific comings and goings, we'll all be like Ma Ming before you know it."

  He was referring to the owner of the House of Immortals. Ma Ming, its resident-in-chief, had never come out to work, didn't even want to see to his own needs. Sometimes he would bring back a bit of gourd, but he was too lazy to light a fire, so he woul
d eat it raw. He'd got used to eating things raw like this, and so when he'd scavenged out some uncooked rice, he'd put it straight into his mouth and crunch away on the grains until the corners of his mouth were a mass of powdery rice starch. People would laugh at him, but still he came up with justification after justification, saying that cooked things lacked nutritional value; that tigers and panthers in the mountains had always eaten their food raw, and see how much stronger they were than humans, how much less prone to illness-so what could be wrong with it? He never used a urine bucket either, but instead poked a hole in the wall at crotch height, and fixed a length of hollow bamboo stem leading out of the house; any urine was discharged into the stem. He considered that this method was more scientific than hauling a urine bucket: the water flow was carried along, and it was better to let things run out than have them pile up.

  Once winter came, he never washed his face. A crust formed around his face, which fell off in pieces once he gave it a rub or pinched and picked at it. He wouldn't say he was afraid of cold water, but would argue that frequent washing of the face wasn't scientific-washing your face clean of its natural organic oils damaged the skin.

  The absurdest thing of all was the way it took him an hour to carry a load of water back home from the stream. Particularly when going uphill, he would walk in a Z-shape, taking ages twisting and turning back and forth, then still find he was only halfway there. Onlookers idling around the hillside would watch in bemusement: wouldn't it be better if you just put down your water buckets and sang us a song? Ma Ming said: "What do you know? This is the only way to preserve your strength when walking. Zhan Tianyu built the railroad at Badaling in a Z-shape."