He protested violently. "Carry a hoe? I'll look like an old water watchman! Horrible! Too horrible!"
The people from the Cultural Center said, "What do you know? This is art."
"Well, why don't I make it even more artistic by hauling a bucket of shit around?"
If Benyi hadn't been there supervising the rehearsal, the argument would never have ended. In fact Benyi wasn't that keen on the hoe himself, but since the county seat comrades said the hoe was good, the hoe stayed. "If they want you to carry it, you carry it." He scolded Wanyu: "You've got the wits of a pig, you have! You're going to look like an idiot on stage with nothing to do! What are you going to do when you start to sing?"
Wanyu blinked a couple of times, but remained blank.
Starting to get agitated, Benyi got up on to the stage to do a few sample actions to make Wanyu understand, holding the hoe upright, or carrying it on his shoulder, on his left shoulder for a bit, then on the right shoulder for a bit.
In the subsequent days of rehearsal, Wanyu's heart wasn't really in it as he stood on one side, a solitary figure holding a hoe. He was a good bit older than the other actors, and didn't seem able to join in with the chatter. Whenever any women came by to watch the fun, Wanyu's face always took on a shamed expression, his features screwed into a bitter smile. "Pray look not, ladies, it's too horrible."
In the end he didn't go with us to the county seat. The day we boarded the tractor in the commune, we waited and waited but there was no trace of him. When we finally saw him arrive, we discovered he hadn't brought his hoe. When asked where his hoe had got to, he mumbled no problem, no problem, I'll be able to borrow another in the county seat. The team leader said that the town wasn't like the country, where every household had a hoe-what if we couldn't borrow a suitable one, what would we do then? Quick, go back and fetch it! Wanyu just stood there hemming and hawing, with his hands in his sleeves. It was plain to see: he and that hoe just didn't mesh, and he didn't want to get on stage with it.
The team leader had no alternative but to go and borrow one from nearby. As we waited for him to borrow one, we discovered that Wanyu had disappeared, slipped away.
In fact, although he never made it to the county seat, he always very much wanted to go. From very early on, he was always washing his shoes and clothes, making preparations to go into town. He'd also secretly begged me that, when the time came, I should lead him across the roads in the city-he was terrified of cars. If a hooligan picked a fight with him, he would surely get the worst of it. The city women were good-looking, and he'd be so busy looking in all directions that he might lose his way. He hoped that I would rescue him as the need arose. But in the event he didn't go with us to the county seat, pitting himself against that hoe to the bitter end. He later explained that no matter how he tried, he simply couldn't remember the words to that song about manure pits, about digging the soil, scattering ox dung, watering the rice shoots. He just got confused and frustrated, and all that singing made him want to scream. If he'd really gone to the county seat to sing, there would have definitely been a major incident. It wasn't that he hadn't put in the effort, but even after he'd eaten pig brain, dog brain, ox brain, he still couldn't remember some of his lines, and then he was off on a spirit journey thinking about low doings between men and women. He had no choice but to slope off half-heartedly at the last minute.
Because he didn't say goodbye, Benyi later fined him fifty catties of grain.
This was how I saw it: Wanyu wasn't conscientious about a lot of things, but when it came to singing he was pretty conscientious. Many times he wouldn't stand firm, yet in his attachment to qoqo songs, none stood firmer. Quite simply, he was intent on martyring himself to art, prepared to give up this cushy number in town, to give up work points and put up with punishment and abuse from cadres, rather than put up with hoe art, with this pathetic womanless excuse for art.
*Ligelang
:One day, Wanyu saw the stonemason Zhihuang beating his wife so violently that she cried out for help; Wanyu went to mediate, saying that he'd seen what was going on and that Zhihuang shouldn't be so brutal. One look at his bald head and smooth, beardless face sent the stonemason into a blind rage: "What business is it of yours if I beat my cheating wife to death, you piece of shit?" Wanyu replied that the New Society said we should all be civilized, and women were female comrades, not punching bags, don't you know? After arguing a while, the stonemason finally smiled coldly and said, okay then, as your heart bleeds so much for female comrades, I'll strike a bargain with you. If you can take three punches from me, I'll respect what you say.
Wanyu normally acted like a weedy scholar, terrified of pain; a leech bite in the fields would make him bellow and bawl, and his face turned ashen at Zhihuang's challenge. Despite his terror, he probably didn't want to lose face in front of onlookers and decided to see the thing through; he squeezed his eyes shut, and shouted yes, while he braced his outer cranium for the blow.
He'd overreached himself, and shutting his eyes any tighter wasn't going to help. After just the first punch from Zhihuang, he hurled himself howling and yelling into the ditch and failed to re-emerge.
With an icy snigger, the stonemason left him there and walked off.
With great difficulty, Wanyu got himself back onto his feet and shouted at a black shadow in front of him, "Keep 'em coming! On the chin!" The black shadow remained motionless, but he sensed the people standing around were laughing. He rubbed his eyes to steady his vision; he then saw that the black shadow wasn't the stonemason but a grain winnower.
He roared furiously at the front door of the Zhihuang household: "What are you running from? Come out and fight, if you've got any guts! You vicious dog's bladder, you can't even keep your word, you owe me two punches, you, you chicken you!" Despite his heroism, he'd staggered dizzily to the wrong place: the stonemason wasn't there but had gone off to the mountains.
He stumbled back home. People he met on his way back laughed when they saw him covered in mud. "Hey, miller, you been checking on production again?"
He merely laughed bitterly. "I'm going to report him! Report! When the People's Government deal with it, they're not going to worry about our precious Master Huang knocking them around!"
He added: "I'd sooner be torn limb from limb than worry about Commune Head He's favoritism!"
In all matters his thoughts turned to Commune Head He, believing they were the result of Commune Head He's conspiracies. Listeners couldn't make heads or tails of this unreasoned hatred; when asked, he always failed to account for it.
Wanyu was very used to taking blows for women. Time after time, he rolled involuntarily into the midst of marital disputes, leaping inevitably to the defense of the woman, which he paid for successively in terms of physical pain, even in hair and teeth. Some of the women whom he sheltered thought him too meddlesome, and turned on him with their husbands, showering his head with enraged blows, which left him feeling rather aggrieved. Generally, he wouldn't argue with these women. People used to say that he was the ligelang for these women, and hearing this made him very happy. Ligelang (pronounced lee-guh-lang) is an ono-matopoeic word, often used in describing tunes played in the traditional Chinese five-note scale; in Maqiao vocabulary, it's also used to refer to lovers and to lovers' talk. To be more precise, it's used for less formal, sincere, whole-hearted love; it has a more playful feel, the flavor of a burst of a tune on the fiddle, and stands for an ambiguous state somewhere in between love and friendship. For this very reason, the rather vague term ligelang has an unfixed meaning which can be elaborated into marginal, vague imaginings. Illicit fornication amongst clumps of grass is ligelang. Informal boistering and ribbing between men and women can also be called ligelang. It could be reasonably concluded that if Maqiao people saw ballroom dancing or men and women walking together in the city, they would place it firmly in the category of ligelang-a broad extramarital category lacking clear-cut analysis and explanation.
Maqiao people have
many sketchy and muddled areas of consciousness, of which ligelang is one.
*Dragon
: Dragon is a swear word, referring to the male organ. It often comes up in Maqiao insults: You, dead dragon, you!
Look at that stupid dragon!
Watch where you put your great big dragon feet!
Although Wanyu was no saint when it came to bad language, he couldn't bear other people calling him "dragon." Once thus insulted, he would grab the nearest likely weapon (stone, rake, whatever) and challenge his adversary to duel it out-I don't know why this was.
The last time I saw Wanyu was when I returned to Maqiao from the county seat and brought him the soap and women's socks he had asked me to buy for him. I spotted his son in front of his hut: he spat at me, guarding the door vigilantly. I said I'd come to see his dad.
Wanyu, lying on the bed inside, must have heard this. But he waited until I had reached the bed before suddenly pulling up the tattered, soya-black mosquito net. A face popped out. "What are you looking at, eh, eh? Here I am, like it or lump it!"
There was nothing comic about this. His face was waxy yellow, thin, and angular as a bunch of dead twigs-I had to hide my shock.
"I really missed you, I've been pining for days."
There was, once again, nothing comic about this.
After having asked about his illness, I said it was a pity he hadn't come to the city to sing. He waved his hands feelingly.
"Oh yes, very nice, very nice. Farming songs? That hoe and piss bucket, swing it here, swing it there stuff, you really call that singing?"
He sighed, and said the best times were past, from the first month to the eighth day of the third, when no one did any work, when all they did was enjoy themselves singing songs. This village would go perform in that village, this mountain in that mountain, now that was fun. The kids would sing "hallway songs," seated opposite each other to sing; once they'd completed a verse, they would shift their stool forward an inch, until the two stools were level with each other and the two singers snuggled up to each other, cheeks grazing, singing into each other's ear, their voices as quiet as the buzz of a mosquito, so that only their singing partner could hear clearly. This was called "earside singing." Wanyu's eyes shone with animation. "Tsk, tsk, tsk, those girls, they were like beancurd, squeeze 'em and the water'd come out!"
Since I happened to be feeling aimless myself that day, I felt a stirring of curiosity about Low Songs and begged him to sing me a bit of one. He came over all bashful for a time, and put up a show of refusing before he agreed. "You want me to get into trouble, then?"
"I bought you soap and socks, don't I deserve any thanks?"
His energy dramatically returned, and he jumped out of bed, pacing round the room once, then twice before he considered his throat properly moistened and his concentration properly focused. Suddenly, he burned with strength, vigor, power, his sickly color swept away, two beams of electric light shining from his eyes.
After he'd sung a few lines, but before I'd managed to understand them, he started waving his hands and coughing violently; unable to get any words out, he slowly groped his way back to the edge of the bed.
"I'm afraid my singing days are over." He grasped my hand tightly between his icy palms.
"Not at all, you sing really well."
"Really?"
"Of course, of course."
"Stop putting me on."
"I'm not putting you on."
"D'you reckon I can still sing?
"Of course, of course."
"What d'you know about it?"
I took a drink of my water.
His eyes dulled and he heaved a long sigh, leaning his head back onto the bed. "My singing days are over, all over. It's all Commune Head He's fault."
He began muttering darkly once more about Commune Head He. I didn't quite know what to say, but just drank my bowl of water good and slowly.
One day, a few months later, an ominous explosion of firecrackers was heard far off in the distance. When I went out to inquire, I discovered that Wanyu had scattered, or died (see the entry "Scattered"). I heard that when he died there was no one at his bedside, and his corpse lay there for a day or more before it was discovered by his neighbor Zhaoqing. I also heard that when he passed away, he had no more than three broad beans to his name, certainly not enough to eat for the next day. He left a child of about ten, whom some time ago he'd sent off to an uncle who lived far away. I'd seen the bare interior of his house, covered in spiders' webs and duck droppings; there wasn't even a cupboard inside this empty shell-clothes were always heaped on a tattered hanging basket over which his neighbors' chickens would jump back and forth. People said that he'd suffered all his life at the hands of women-otherwise, surely, his wife wouldn't have divorced him and would have made certain he had hot meals to eat.
He didn't even have a coffin for the funeral, and in the end Benyi donated a basket of grain which, supplemented by another basket from the team leader, could be exchanged for two lengths of fir wood to make a coffin.
In accordance with local custom, people placed a small bag of rice in his coffin as a pillow and put a copper coin in his mouth. While they were changing his clothes, Zhaoqing suddenly discovered, "Hey, he's got no dragon!"
Everyone was dumbfounded.
"Really!"
"Really, really, he's got no dragon!"
One after another they went up to the corpse to have a look, one after another discovered this male really had no dragon, no male organ, and one after another came away dumbfounded.
By evening, the news had spread through the whole village, and left the women whispering among themselves in shock and disbelief. Only Uncle Luo was a little disdainful of all the gossip, pronouncing in highly considered tones that there was no need for conjecture, his appearance made everything clear: if he wasn't a eunuch, how come he didn't have a beard or eyebrows? He also said that a long time back he'd heard people say ten or so years ago Wanyu had been arrested immediately upon assaulting the wife of a local grandee. This landlord controlled Changle, and headed up the defence grouping of the puppet regime; no matter how much Wanyu begged for mercy, they still cut off his dragon with one stroke of the knife.
When people heard this, there were sighs all around. They thought back to the way that Wanyu endlessly curried favor with women, helping them with their work, taking their punches for them-why had he bothered? He'd suffered decades of thunder, with never a drop of rain; fed decades of pigs, without getting a single meatball-was he mad? It turned out even his only child wasn't his own flesh and blood-when people came to think about it, the child didn't look anything like Wanyu.
With Wanyu gone, the village was much quieter, with far fewer songs. Sometimes you seemed to hear a faint screeching, but when you listened carefully it turned out to be the wind, not Wanyu.
Wanyu was buried under Tianzi Peak. When subsequently I went into the mountains to cut wood, several times I walked over his body. At the grave-sweeping festival, I took a look at his grave: it was the most colorful grave, all the straggling grasses had been pulled off the mound and there were masses of paper ashes, burnt candles, and incense sticks. There was also bowl after bowl of rice, laid there as a sacrifice. I also saw women there, both familiar and unfamiliar faces, some from the village and some from far away, all come to weep and wail, eyes red from grief.
There was nothing furtive about their weeping, nothing timid; a fat woman from Zhangjia District even plonked herself on the ground, slapping her enormous legs, howling that Wanyu was her liver, her lungs, wailing that her liver and lungs had lived a life of poverty with only three broad beans left when he died. It was no less than a spontaneous convention of the feminine world. I was surprised their husbands didn't have anything to say about this outpouring of tears.
Fucha said that they wouldn't say anything because they all owed Miller Wan money for work done. I think there was perhaps another reason: they felt that Wanyu wasn't a real man, and couldn't ha
ve had any untoward relations with their women; it wasn't worth putting up a fight, there was no need to settle scores.
*Dragon (continued)
: Maqiao people always paint dragons in black, with horns, claws, snake bodies, ox heads, shrimp whiskers, tiger teeth, horse faces, fish scales, and so on-every single feature is necessary. These dragons are painted on walls, on mirrors, or carved onto beds, with billowing waves and clouds added on-sea, land, sky, everything present and correct. From this it seems that dragons belong to no animal species and bear no relation to the dinosaurs of prehistoric times. Dragons are a kind of Chinese-style synthesis of all animals, an abstracted summary of all life on the planet. Dragons are a kind of concept. An exhaustive, all-inclusive, omnipotent concept.
Dragon Boats evolved out of the building of ships in the shape of dragons. When I was an Educated Youth in Maqiao, the Dragon Boat Festival had been criticized and prohibited as an old custom, because of the Cultural Revolution. I only heard from the villagers that the Dragon Boat race used to be very exciting, with both sides of the Luo River competing for supremacy; when the losing side got onto the bank each rower had to put his pants over his head and submit to endless mockery and humiliation. I also heard that the Dragon Boats were all painted hundreds of times over with tung oil, and that before starting to build the boats they burned incense and supplicated the spirits-endless fuss and ceremony-after which the boat couldn't get wet in the rain, or dry in the sun, or have water dropped on it, until the day of the race, when, thronged by drums and music, it would be lifted by the young men to the starting line. Even though the route was right along the side of the river, the men couldn't ride in the boat, instead the boat rode the men.
I asked why things were reversed this way.
They said that they'd wanted to let the dragon boat rest-it shouldn't be allowed to get tired.
Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html Page 9
