At this time of year, the dragon became a real kind of animal, even a creature with limited stocks of energy.
*Maple Demon
:Before I started writing this book, I hoped to write the biography of every single thing in Maqiao. I'd been writing fiction for ten or so years, but I liked reading and writing fiction less and less- I am, of course, referring to the traditional kind of fiction, which has a very strong sense of plot. Main character, main plot, main mood block out all else, dominating the field of vision of both reader and writer, preventing any sidelong glances. Any occasional casual digression is no more than a fragmentary embellishment of the main line, the temporary amnesty of a tyrant. Admittedly, there's nothing to say this kind of fiction can't approach one angle on the truth. But all you have to do is think a little, and you realize that most of the time real life isn't like that, it doesn't fit into one guiding, controlling line of cause and effect. A person often exists in two, three, four, or even more interlocking strands, outside each of which a great many other elements exist, each constituting an indispensable part of our lives. In this multifarious, scattered network of cause and effect, how valid is the domination of one main thread of protagonists, plot and mood? Anything left out of traditional fiction is normally something of "no significance." But when religious authority is all-important, science has no significance; when the human race is all-important, nature has no significance. When politics is all-important, love has no significance; when money is all-important, art has no significance. I suspect the myriad things in this world are in fact all of equal importance; the only reason why sometimes one set of things seems to have "no significance" is because they've been filtered out by the writer's view of what has significance, and dismissed by the reader's view of what has significance. They are thus debarred from all zones of potential interest. Obviously, judgement of significance is not an instinct we are born with-quite the contrary, it is no more than a function of the fashion, customs, and culture of one particular time, often revealing itself in the form into which fiction shapes us. In other words, an ideology lurks within the tradition of fiction, an ideology which reproduces itself only on passing through us.
My memory and imagination aren't totally in line with tradition.
I therefore often hope to break away from a main line of cause and effect, and look around at things that seem to have no significance whatsoever, for example contemplate a stone, focus on a cluster of stars, research a miserable rainy day, describe the random back view of someone it seems I've never met and never will meet. At the very least I should write about a tree. In my imagination, Maqiao couldn't do without a big tree. I should cultivate a tree-no, make that two trees, two maple trees-on my paper, and plant them on the slope behind Uncle Luo's house in lower Maqiao. I imagine the larger tree to be at least twenty-five meters tall, the smaller around twenty. Anyone visiting Maqiao would see from faraway the crown of the trees, the tips of whose branches would spread out to encompass a panoramic view.
This is excellent: writing the biography of two trees.
A village without big trees is like a home without parents, or a head without eyes-it just doesn't look right, as if it lacks a center. These two trees were just that, the center of Maqiao. There wasn't a child in Maqiao who hadn't breathed in their cool shade, who hadn't drunk in the chirps of the cicadas, or in whom the bark's gnarled tumors hadn't induced bizarre and terrified imaginings. They didn't need any particular looking after: when people had things to do, they could just be left to themselves and forgotten about. But they were perfectly willing at any moment to welcome and provide company for the lonely, who would find their melancholy gently soothed away by the rustling of the leaves, and who under the leafy screen, on a patch of silver that was stippled and studded, dispersing and overlapping, sometimes tranquil, sometimes stormy, could set sail for a cloudless dream land.
There was no way of knowing who had planted these trees, and the old-timers in the village production team wouldn't shed any further light on the matter. As regards the name "Maple Demons," apparently there'd been a mountain fire many years ago in which all the trees on the slope were burned to death, except for these two, which escaped safe and sound; even their leaves and branches weren't damaged in the slightest. Henceforth, people eyed the trees with increasing awe and respect, and legends concerning them multiplied. Some said the gnarled patterns in the bark were in fact human shapes; in violent storms they secretly grew several feet, and only shrank back to normal when they saw people coming. Ma Ming told an even spookier story. Once, unthinkingly, he'd fallen asleep under the trees, hanging his bamboo hat on a broken forked branch. In the middle of the night, he was startled awake by the sound of thunder and made out, by a flash of lightning, that his bamboo hat was now hanging on the top of the tree. Very peculiar.
Ma Ming boasted that he used to be quite an artist when he was younger. He said that after painting these two trees, for three days afterwards his right hand swelled up dramatically and he ran a fever; he didn't dare try again.
You couldn't even paint them, much less cut them down. The two trees therefore grew taller and taller, and became a landmark for miles around. When someone had sawed off a branch, they hung a piece of red cloth from their door to ward off evil, or carved a wooden fish out of the wood, to beg the spirits to ward off misfortune; all of which was, apparently, very effective. Once, while taking part in an irrigation project, I went to the commune to draw up some plans. I went together with Teacher Fan from the Middle School (who had also been allocated to the project) to the county irrigation office and copied the map of the commune. I found out, as we choked on the archive room dust, that even after 1949 the government had still not drawn up a comprehensive map of the area, and that all plans were still based on the military maps left by the Japanese army at the time of their invasion of China. These looked to be the contour maps of great and resourceful strategists, drawn in black and white on a scale of 1:5000; the commune took up one large sheet. Instead of sea level, the map used the foundation stone of the Changsha city wall at Xiaowumen as its starting point for elevation. Apparently, before the Japanese invaded, they bribed Chinese traitors to draw up plans in secret. The ingenuity and thoroughness of their preparations are nothing short of astonishing.
I saw that on this map too, Maqiao's two maple trees were so awesomely imposing that they'd been ringed in red pen by the Japanese. Teacher Fan said knowledgeably that they'd been a landmark for navigating Japanese planes.
This set me to thinking that Maqiao people had actually seen Japanese planes. Benyi said that the first time they caught sight of this freak apparition, Benyi's elder uncle thought it was a big bird and yelled at some lads to spread grain on the ground to entice it down, and got everyone else to run and fetch ropes to catch it.
The plane didn't descend, and his uncle hurled abuse up at the sky:
I know you're up there! I know you're up there!
Only Long Stick Xi guessed then that it was a Japanese plane, come to drop bombs. Unfortunately, this outsider's rough speech was barely intelligible, and no one understood him. Benyi's uncle wondered how a Japanese bird could grow that big, since Japanese people were so very small.
For a day, the villagers watched and waited in vain for the plane to come and peck at the grain. The second time the planes came, they relieved themselves of bombs, setting off earth-shattering explosions. Benyi's uncle died right there, mouth blown off to the tree top, as if it wanted to nibble on the birds' nests. Benyi even today is still a bit hard of hearing, but I don't know if it's from the explosion or from the shock of seeing that mouth fly up the tree.
Three villagers were killed in the bombing. If you add Xiongshi (see the entry "Dear Life"), who died in a delayed explosion twenty years later, then the death toll rises to four.
When you think about it, if it hadn't been for those trees, would the Japanese planes have found their way there? Would they have dropped bombs? After all, there was no particular
reason for the Japanese to take any great interest in a small mountain village. If they hadn't used those trees as a navigation mark, they wouldn't necessarily have flown through, probably wouldn't have seen the crowd of people down below shouting and yelling, and probably would have dropped their bombs somewhere they considered more important.
Everything, including the deaths of four people and all that subsequently occurred, happened because of those two trees.
From that point on, there was always a flock of crows perched on these two trees, a fractured blackness erupting as they flapped their wings. Sometimes people would try to chase them away by burning or smashing their nests, but these creatures of ill omen waited until people's backs were turned, then flew back, stubbornly defending the tops of the trees.
The crows cawed year in, year out. I heard it said that three woman hanged themselves under this tree, one after another. I don't know their backgrounds; I only know that one had had a big argument with her husband, and she hanged herself after poisoning him. All this happened a very long time ago.
When I passed by these two trees, it was like passing any tree, any blade of grass, any stone-I wouldn't take too much notice of them. I wouldn't think, aha, there they are, lurking in the depths of the day, concealing unfathomable possibilities, harboring menace under their canopies, rumbling and erupting at portentous moments, sealing such-and-such a person's fate.
Sometimes I think that one tree is very unlike another, just as people are very unlike one another. Hitler, say, was also a human being. Suppose aliens happened to read of him: on the basis of his possession of five senses, four limbs, upright posture and frequent emission of regulated sounds to others of his kind, the aliens, on leafing through the dictionary that they might possess, would define him as human. This would not be incorrect. The Songs of Chu is the title of a book excavated in the Han dynasty. If a copy was given to a Hebrew man who understood no Chinese, on the basis of the shape of its characters, writing implements, and its state on being unearthed, the Hebrew man might, through sufficient ingenuity and erudition, conclude that the writing was Chinese. This, similarly, would not be incorrect. But how meaningful is this "not incorrect"?
Just as we call the Maple Demon a tree, a maple tree, how meaningful is this degree of correctness?
A tree lacks human will and freedom, but in life's complex network of cause and effect it can often occupy a position of quiet importance. In this sense, the difference between one tree and another can sometimes be comparable to the difference between Hitler and Gandhi, to the distinction between the Songs of Chu and the instruction manual for an electric razor-it can be much greater than we imagine. Even if we've read cartloads of botanical books, when confronted with an unfamiliar tree our knowledge seems rudimentary indeed.
The two maple trees finally disappeared in early summer of 1972, when I was away from the village. On the journey back, I couldn't see the crowns of the trees from far off and immediately felt there was something not quite right about the panorama before me; I almost thought I'd taken a wrong turn. After I entered the village, I found that the houses seemed much more spaced out, much lighter, and that there was a rather striking patch of bare, empty ground. It turned out the shade from the trees was no longer there. Everywhere I saw wood chippings and sawdust reeking of sap, and mounds of branches and leaves sandwiched with birds' nests and spiders' webs, yet no one was taking them home for firewood; the soil lay overturned in waves, testifying to the violent struggle that had taken place not long before. I smelled something rather peppery, but couldn't say where it came from.
The crunching sound of feet trampling leaves and branches was the sound of advancing old age.
The trees were cut down under commune orders, to make, it was said, rows of seats for the newly built commune assembly hall and also to dispel the superstitions surrounding the Maple Demons. When the time came, absolutely no one was prepared to put hand to axe or saw, and in the end, the commune cadres had no choice but to order a landlord under official surveillance to get on with it. They also added workers from two hard-up families, to whom they had to promise to cancel a ten-yuan debt before they could finally make them hesitantly start work. Later I saw in the commune row upon row of those spanking new maplewood chairs, used for Party meetings, family planning meetings, irrigation and pig-feeding meetings, and so on. I also saw filthy footprints left behind, as well as oily banquet remains. It was probably from this time on that a kind of skin irritation started to rage through dozens of nearby villages: when sufferers, male or female, happened to meet, they would scratch wildly, pulling up their clothes all over the place, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Some, unable to stand it, would place their backs to a wall and move up and down, or from side to side, or discuss instructions from the county with a hand down their pants all the while. Herbal remedies were tried, with no result. Apparently the county medical team were completely flummoxed, found it all very puzzling.
It was rumored that everyone had caught "maple pox," instigated by the Maqiao Maple Demons-they wanted to make people suffer for their arrogance, taking revenge on the murderers who'd chopped them down.
*Will/Willing (Ken)
: Ken (will/willing) is a word used to express wishes or preferences, to demonstrate desire and permission. For example, "ken with the head" (nod agreement), "ken do" (will do), "ken get my head around it" (will think about it) all describe a person's psychological inclinations. Maqiao people use ken in a much broader sense-not only for people and animals, but for anything in the whole world.
Some examples:
• This plot of land ken grow crops.
• It's strange, but the firewood at home ken not burn.
• This boat ken go quite a ways.
• This sky ken not produce a drop of rain in a month.
• Benyi's hoe ken not dig very deep.
And so on.
On hearing these remarks, I couldn't stop a thought forming in my mind: everything has a will, a life of its own. Fields, firewood, boats, sky, hoes, and so on, they're all the same as men, should even have first names and last names of their own, stories of their own. Maqiao people in fact spoke to their objects as a matter of course, cajoling or cursing, praising or promising. For example, if they gave a plough a really savage talking-to, it would then move much more quickly along the ground. Then again, resting their axe at the top of the wine jar to soak up the alcohol fumes strengthened it enough to chop wood. If they hadn't been forced to submit to outside interference, if it hadn't been for the spread of science, Maqiao people perhaps would never have acknowledged that these were lifeless objects lacking the capacity to feel and think for themselves.
With these assumptions in mind, we've reason to feel sad at the death of a tree, even to cherish its memory. In places where trees are toppled one after another without provoking any sadness, the trees have never lived, have never been anything but an inert natural resource, a form of revenue. People from these places wouldn't use the word ken like they did in Maqiao.
When I was little, I also had lots of strange fantasies involving personifications and spirits. For example, I used to turn blossoms on trees into the dreams of the tree roots, or rugged mountain paths into a conspiracy plotted by the forest-all very childish, of course. After I got bigger and stronger, I used my knowledge of physics or chemistry to explain blossom or mountain paths-or should I say, rather, that because I could use my knowledge of physics or chemistry to explain blossom and mountain paths, I started to get bigger and stronger. The problem, though, is whether big and strong modes of thought are correct modes of thought. For a long time, men were bigger and stronger than women-does that mean that men were correct? The great imperial powers were bigger and stronger than the colonies-does that mean that the great powers were correct? If in an alien galaxy there exists a race of beings much more advanced and much stronger than mankind, should their mode of thought be used to exterminate and replace that of mankind?
This is
a question, a question I can't answer, a question that pulls me this way and that. Because I yearn both to be big and strong, and to go back to my small, weak childhood, to tree-root dreams and mountain conspiracies.
*Dear Life
: One winter's day, Zhihuang's snot-nosed son Xiongshi was playing with a few ox-herder lads on the hillside to the north. They'd dug out a snake hole, planning to extract a hibernating snake to roast. They unearthed a heavy, rusty iron carbuncle but had no idea what it was; Xiongshi banged it hard with a sickle, saying he wanted to use the two ends of the carbuncle to hammer out a few kitchen knives for his mother to sell in the market. His banging set off an explosion that blasted the lads, who were some distance away hunting snake holes, a good few feet off the ground, arms and legs flailing helplessly in mid-air. After falling painfully, they looked back, but Xiongshi, oddly enough, was nowhere to be seen-there was only a light shower of leaves and earth, along with a few icy drops of rain, floating down from the sky. The boys were surprised to discover that these droplets were red and seemed rather like… blood?
Having no idea what had happened, they still thought that Xiongshi was hiding somewhere, so they set about yelling for him at the tops of their lungs. There was no answer. One of them, frightened by the discovery of a bloodied, fleshy lump of finger, took it back to show the grown-ups.
Later on, people from the commune came and busied themselves for a while. People from the county seat also came and busied themselves for a while, before a conclusion was produced: a bomb dropped by Japanese planes in 1942 had detonated after a thirty-year delay. This meant that the Sino-Japanese War in Maqiao lasted right up to the year when it claimed the life of Xiongshi.
Zhihuang and his wife were utterly grief-stricken. Zhihuang took it particularly badly: since previously he'd always thought there'd been something between his wife and Wanyu, and that Xiongshi was most likely illegitimate, he'd never been terribly affectionate toward his son. After Wanyu died, the discovery that Wanyu was hardly a man dispelled this cloud of suspicion, and he turned a far more genial, fatherly face to Xiongshi, picking wild chestnuts and other things for him on his way home from the mountain quarry. Little had he imagined that from that time on, there would no longer be a pair of little hands to receive those chestnuts. Xiongshi wasn't at home, in the fields, by the stream, near the mountains; he was nowhere. His son had become a resounding explosion, before scattering and disappearing into eternal quiet.
Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html Page 10
