Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  *Nine Pockets

  : As I used to imagine them, beggars had to have shabby clothes and haggard faces. It would have been absurd, impossible to link beggars with extravagant living. It was only after coming to Maqiao that I realized I was mistaken, that there are all sorts of beggars in this world. Benyi's father-in-law was a beggar who lived off the fat of the land, who lived better than many landlords. But as he didn't have a single inch of land, he couldn't be classified as a landlord. He didn't have a shop either, so he couldn't be counted a capitalist. Forced to adjust to this, the first land-reform team reluctantly defined him as a "rich peasant beggar." The work team that checked and rechecked class status felt this term was neither one thing nor another, but since they couldn't actually find a policy clause that would furnish a better label, since they didn't know how to settle the question, they had to make do.

  This man was called Dai Shiqing and used to live in Changle. The place was a communications center on land and water, a collecting and distributing center for rice, bamboo, tea-tree oil, tung oil, and medicinal herbs through the ages. It was, of course, full of life, of brothels, opium shops, pawnshops, taverns, and other similarly intricate enterprizes; even the water running in the sewers reeked prosperously of oil, and just one mouthful of street air turned the stomachs of country-dwellers used to nothing but maize gruel. Because of this, Changle was nicknamed "Little Nanjing," and for the local villagers became something to boast about to outsiders. People traveled dozens of miles bringing a couple of tobacco leaves or to break a few lengths of bamboo strips, just to strut down one length of the main street; this they called "doing business." In fact, there was no commercial sense at all behind their journeys, they were just an excuse to see some of the action or listen to people singing and reciting stories. I don't know when the numbers of beggars, with their emaciated bodies and long hair, small faces and big eyes, and ill-fitting shoes of every hue, gradually began to increase, endlessly multiplying the pairs of eyeballs intent on swallowing up the cooking pots on the market street.

  Dai Shiqing, who came from Pingjiang, became the leader of these beggars. Beggars divided into various classes: One Pocket, Three Pockets, Five Pockets, Seven Pockets, and Nine Pockets. He was of the highest rank, a Nine Pockets, and was respectfully addressed as "Old Master Nine Pockets"-everyone in the town knew this. A bird cage always hung on his begging stick, inside which a mynah bird always called out "Old Master Nine Pockets is here, Old Master Nine Pockets is here." There was no need to knock on the door of whichever household the myna bird called out in front of, no need to say anything; no family would fail to come out and greet him with smiling faces. When they were confronted with ordinary beggars, one dipper of rice was quite enough. But Old Master Nine Pockets had to be appeased with a whole bamboo cup, sometimes even with large presents, his pockets stuffed with money or with cured chicken feet (his favorite food).

  Once, a newly arrived salt merchant who didn't understand the rules around here sent him on his way with just one copper coin. He was so angry he hurled the coin onto the ground with a clatter.

  The salt merchant, who'd never seen anything like it, almost dropped his glasses.

  "What d'you think this is?" Old Master Nine Pockets glowered.

  "You-you-you-what're you complaining about?"

  "I, Old Master Nine Pockets, have been through nine provinces and forty-eight counties and have never met such a gutless bloodsucking houseowner!"

  "This is all very odd-look here, who's doing the begging here? If you want it, then take it, if not then get out of here, stop holding up my business."

  "You think I'm begging? Me, begging?" Old Master Nine Pockets opened his eyes wide, feeling he owed it to this idiot to teach him a lesson or six. "Mysterious winds and clouds float across the heavens, from morning to night man meets good fortune and bad. In these unlucky times of ours, the country faces calamities, drought in the North and flooding in the South; government and people unite in concern. Although I, Dai Shiqing, am but one insignificant mortal, I accept that it is right to lead a loyal and filial life, placing country before family, family before self. Is it right that I should stretch my hand out to the government? No. Is it right that I should stretch out my hand to parents, brothers, kinsmen? Once more, no! I walk everywhere on my two bare feet, the true man of honor, strengthening my character without rest or repose, neither robbing nor stealing, neither cheating nor deceiving, conducting myself with dignity and respect, helping myself. And you expect me to put up with a stuck-up, cross-eyed bully like you! I've seen plenty of your sort, I have, once you've got a couple of stinking coppers to rub together your morals go out the window, it's just money money money…"

  The salt merchant had never heard such a stream of rhetoric: spattered into retreat, step-by-step, by showers of saliva, all he could do was raise his hands in self-defence, "okay, okay, okay, whatever you say, but I've still got business to do, off you go, off you go. Off, off."

  "Off? I'm going to get something through to you if I do nothing else today! I want you to tell me, clearly now: am I begging? Have I come to beg from you today?"

  Making a face, the salt merchant rummaged out a few more copper coins and pressed them against his chest with a kind of desperation that showed his resignation to defeat. "Okay, okay, you're not begging today, and you haven't come to beg from me."

  Instead of accepting the money, Old Master Nine Pockets plonked himself down on the threshold, panting with rage. "Stinking cash, stinking cash, all I beg for today is justice! If you'd only acted reasonably, I'd have given you all my money!" He took out a big handful of copper coins, far more than the salt merchant's coppers, that glinted and gleamed, and attracted the eyes of lots of little urchins.

  After that, if he hadn't suddenly needed to visit the toilet, the salt merchant would never have gotten him off his threshold. By the time he returned, the salt store had already been tightly bolted shut. He banged his stick on the door with all his might, but it wouldn't open; male and female voices shouted out filthy abuse from inside.

  The formal opening of the salt store came a few days later, and a few courtesy tables of meat and wine were laid out for the town's VIPs and the merchant's neighbors. Just after the firecrackers had been let off, a raggedy bunch of beggars suddenly descended, a dense agglomeration giving off an unspecified rancid odor, and who surrounded the salt store, shouting and yelling. If they were given steamed rolls, they'd say they were spoiled and throw them back one after another. If they were given a bucket of rice, again they'd say there was sand in the rice and spit it out all over the ground and street. There was nowhere for passers-by to tread and the guests who'd come for the banquet were repeatedly splattered on the nose or forehead by rice grains. Finally, four beggars beating a broken drum scurried in amongst the feast to perform a small drum dance in celebration of this happy event, their bodies covered in pig and dog shit. The terrified guests fled in all directions, holding their noses. The beggars then took the opportunity one after another to spit on the fine fare laid out on the table.

  It was only after a good half of the guests had fled that the salt merchant realized what a force Old Master Nine Pockets was to be reckoned with, and what a sticky situation he was in. He asked his neighbors to plead for mercy from Old Master Nine Pockets. Old Master Nine Pockets was asleep under a big tree at the quayside and took absolutely no notice. The salt merchant had no choice but to prepare two cured pig's heads and two vessels of matured wine, and go in person to apologize for his transgression; in addition, with help from his neighbors he shelled out to buy the favor of a Seven Pockets, second in rank only to Old Master Nine Pockets, to have him also intervene for him. Only then did Dai Shiqing raise his eyelid a tiny, tiny crack and remark bitterly that the weather was very hot.

  The salt merchant rushed forward to fan him.

  Dai Shiqing let out a yawn and waved his hand; I know, he said.

  His words were very veiled. But for the salt merchant to get this mu
ch out of him was no mean feat, and when he returned home he in fact discovered that the beggars had already scattered, with only four self-styled Five Pockets beggars remaining, stuffing their faces around a table of wine and meat; they were just stoking up for later, nothing excessive.

  The salt merchant smilingly told them to eat more, poured wine for them himself.

  It was no simple matter for Dai Shiqing to achieve such strict, orderly control over the comings and goings of vagrant beggars. Apparently, the original Nine Pockets had been a cripple from Jiangxi, a man of astonishing courage, a man of iron who surpassed all others in the beggars' gang. But he was also a crooked individual, who'd collected in too many of the takings; when dividing up the beggars' land all the best land went to his nephews-the most fertile plots, in other words, were never fairly-allocated. This was more than Dai Shiqing, at that time of the Seven Pockets rank, could bear, and finally one dark night, he and two other brothers under his leadership pounded this Nine Pockets to death with bricks. After he became the Nine Pockets, matters were managed more justly than under the previous dynasty: the beggars' fields were redivided, fertile land was balanced out with barren, and everything rotated at set times so that no one lost out and everyone had an opportunity to "rinse bowls" with prosperity. He also ruled that if members of the gang were ever ill and couldn't work in the fields, they could eat off common land and draw a guaranteed allowance from him; this, in particular, won him the unanimous gratitude of gang members.

  Old Master Nine Pockets was a beggar not only of scruples, but also of talent. By the river was situated a Five Lotus Zen temple in possession of a relic that had been requested back from Putuo Shan (a Buddhist mountain in eastern China); the incense attendants were doing very well out of it and, from the looks of it, some of the monks were growing plumper and plumper. Afraid of offending the Buddha, no one had ever come to beg a bowl of rice, and likewise no one would dare take anything by force. Unafraid of evil spirits, Old Master Nine Pockets Dai was determined to get a slice of this pie. He headed off alone and asked to see the Master Abbot, saying that he didn't believe the relic was really stored in the temple and that he wanted to see it with his own eyes. The monk didn't put up any opposition, and with great care took the relic out of its glass bottle and placed it in his hands. Without another word, he swallowed the relic down in one gulp, at which the abbot began shaking all over with fury, grabbed hold of him by the collar and started to beat him.

  "Terribly hungry, I was, just had to eat something," he said.

  "I'll beat you to death, you scum!" The monks brandished their staffs in agitation.

  "Don't you think that if you keep beating me like this, you'll make such a racket everyone in the street will come and see you bald coots have lost the relic?" he smartly, threateningly pointed out.

  And so the monks didn't dare raise a hand against him, but simply stood around him in circles, on the verge of tears, so they seemed.

  "How about this: you give me thirty silver dollars and I'll give you the relic back."

  "How will you give it back?"

  "That's not for you to worry about."

  His antagonists didn't have that much faith in what he said, but having no choice in the matter they swiftly produced the silver dollars. After checking over each and every one, Dai Shiqing graciously pressed this small gift to his bosom, then produced a croton berry he was carrying on him-a kind of strong laxative.

  After he'd swallowed the croton, with a roll of his eyes he soon released behind the Buddha Hall a large pool of diarrhea, the stench from which assaulted heaven itself. The Master and a few of his subordinates finally fished the relic out from amongst the mass of diarrhoea, washed it clean with fresh water and placed it once more in its glass bottle, giving thanks to heaven and earth.

  After this, nothing lay beyond his skills in begging or cadging; his fame grew and grew, and his power spread to Luoshui, in Pingjiang County. Even colleagues of rank similar to Nine Pockets from the great port city of Wuhan came from all that way to call on him, to repeat over and over how they revered him as Master. He'd burn a piece of tortoiseshell to divine when was the best time and which direction was most auspicious for begging, and no one who went out following his directions failed to make money. When people in the town held weddings or funerals, the place of guest of honor at the banquet was always reserved for him. If he didn't appear, people would worry that the meal wouldn't proceed peacefully, that beggars would come and disrupt the feast. One Mr Zhu, someone who'd been in government, even presented him with a plaque inscribed with a couplet in black and gold characters, made of high-quality pear-blossom wood and so heavy that several people were needed to carry it.

  The two couplets ran thus:

  Public opinion is as fleeting as the clouds and rain Both rich and poor are the same to the beggar whose mind is vaster than the universe.

  The horizontal inscription was: "a clear heart purifies the world," with Old Master Nine Pockets' name inlaid within.

  After Old Master Nine Pockets had been presented with this plaque by the government official, he bought a luxurious, blue-bricked residence with four wings and three entrances, made loans and received visitors, and took four wives. Now, of course, he didn't need to go out begging every day, except for the first and fifteenth of every month when he would make an imperial obeisance and take a turn around the streets, behaving, in total earnestness, just as his subordinates did. This kind of behavior might have seemed a little unnecessary, but those who knew him well knew that he simply couldn't not go begging; if, apparently, ten days or a couple of weeks passed without him begging, his feet swelled up, and if three or five days passed without him going barefoot, his feet would break out in red itchy blotches that he'd be scratching day and night until he drew blood.

  He attached the greatest importance of all to begging on the thirtieth day of the last lunar month. Every year on this day, he would refuse all banquet invitations and forbid any fires to be lit at home, would order his four wives each to take off their padded silks, each to put on tattered items of clothing; each would pick up a bag or a bowl and go out begging on her own. They could only eat what they brought back from their begging. When Tiexiang was only three years old, she'd been scolded and beaten, forced to follow him tearfully out the door and beg for food in snow and wind that cut right through you, knocking on door after door, kowtowing as soon as someone appeared.

  If the youth of today didn't understand what suffering was, he said, what would become of them later?

  He also said that it was a pity, a real pity that most people knew about the delicacies that came of the mountains and seas, but knew not that the fruits of begging tasted sweetest of all.

  He was later classified by the Communist Party as a "Rich Peasant Beggar" because he both exploited his employees (he exploited all the beggars below the rank of Seven Pockets) and was a dyed-in-the-wool beggar himself (even though only on the thirtieth of the last month); and so this rather unsatisfactory term had to do. On the one hand, he possessed a fired-brick mansion complete with four wives, on the other he still went around often barefoot and dressed in tatters-this fact had to be acknowledged somehow.

  This was most unfair, he felt. He said that the Communist Party were burning their bridges behind them-when they first arrived, they'd relied on him as an ally. At that time they were Purging Bandits and Fighting Local Tyrants, and the bandits were fleeing everywhere. Dai Shiqing had helped the work team out by dispatching beggars as scouts to keep an eye on the comings and goings of suspicious elements around the town, and to visit each house to "count bowls": this meant surreptitiously noting, under cover of begging, how many bowls each household was washing and gauging from this whether the household was feeding an extra guest, whether they were concealing a suspicious personage. This, of course, only lasted a short while, however. Dai Shiqing had never foreseen the revolution would turn on the beggars and transform him into Changle's Local Bully, have him tied up and parade
d under escort to the country jail.

  In the end, he died of illness in custody. According to the recollections of his fellow unfortunates, when close to death he said: "This is the way of things for great men. When my star was rising, a thousand people couldn't topple me; now that I'm down on my luck, ten thousand couldn't raise me up."

  By the time he said this, he'd been unable to stand for some time.

  His illness started from his feet up-first they swelled so much he couldn't get either shoes or socks on, even after he'd cut them open at the sides. The line of his ankle bones disappeared, and his feet became as wide and round as two bags of rice. Later, as was to be expected, erythema developed and within a few months the red patches turned into purple patches. After another month, they turned into black patches. He scratched at them until there wasn't a scrap of healthy skin left on his feet, until they were nothing but a mass of scabs. All night long in the cells you'd hear his shouts and cries. He was sent to the hospital to be cured, but the penicillin the hospital gave him had no effect at all. He would kneel in front of the iron gates of the prison, shaking and clanging them, begging the guard:

  "Just kill me! Quick, just get a knife and kill me!"

  "We're not going to kill you, we want to reform you."

  "If you're not going to kill me then let me go and beg."