"Let you go and kneel on the street, you mean?"
"I'm begging for mercy, begging you to be kind masters, please, quickly, let me go and beg. See how my two feet are rotting away…"
The guard gave an icy smile: "Don't go playing your tricks on me."
"I'm not playing tricks. If you don't trust me, then send an armed escort in behind."
"Get going, you're supposed to be moving fired bricks this afternoon." The guard didn't want to waste any more breath on him.
"No-no-no, no good, I can't move any bricks."
"Doesn't matter if you can't, you've still got to: it's what we call labor reform. You still want to beg? Still want to live off the fat of the land, not lift a finger? This is the New Society-we're going to give your sort some backbone!"
And so, in the end, the guard wouldn't let him go and beg. One morning, a few days later, when the prisoners were eating breakfast they realized that Dai Shiqing was still shrunk down inside his quilt. Someone went to shake him awake but discovered that he'd already gone stiff. One eye was staring open, the other eye closed. Four or five blood-sucking mosquitoes flew out of the nest of straw by his pillow.
*Scattered
: When people told me the story of Dai Shiqing, they used the word "scattered." If he couldn't beg, they said, Tiexiang's old man just scattered. "Scattered," obviously, meant died.
This is one of my favorite words in this dictionary of Maqiao. Dying, expiring, snuffing it, croaking, passing away, going to the underworld, kicking the bucket, closing your eyes, breathing your last, giving up the ghost, and so on, all mean the same as "scattering," but all, by comparison, seem simplistic and superficial, none able to illustrate the process as precisely, vividly, or minutely as "scatter." Once life has finished, then all the different elements that hold life together disintegrate and disperse. Flesh and blood, for example, rot into mud and water, the rising steam turns into clouds and air. Or they are bitten by insects and channeled into autumnal chirping; absorbed by roots into green grassland and manyhued petals under the sunlight, stretching out into vast formlessness. When we fix our gazes upon the multifarious, diverse, unceasingly active wilds of the earth, we perceive all sorts of faint sounds and smells, such as at dusk, when dense golden mists, fresh and damp, seem to float restlessly under old maple trees. We know that life, that countless earlier lives are contained within-it's just that we don't know what they were called.
The moment that their heartbeat stops, their names and stories also disperse in fragments of human memories and legend, and after the passing of just a few years will end up utterly lost in the sea of humanity, never to return to their beginnings.
As the four seasons pass and clock hands rotate, the scattering of all matter is part of an inexorable linear progression, revealing the absoluteness of time. The second law of thermodynamics terms this a process of entropy: an ordered organism will slowly disintegrate into disorder, uniformly, homogeneously scatter into solitary, mutual isolation-once this state is reached, there's no qualitative difference between a corpse and the earth it's buried in, between Dai Shiqing's feet and his teeth.
To accumulate or cohere is, of course, the opposite of scattering. Cohesion is the basic condition of existence, of life. Blood and energy cohere to make people, clouds and mist cohere to make rain, mud and sand cohere to make rock, language and words cohere to make thought, days cohere to make history, people cohere to make families, political parties, or empires. A weakening of the power to cohere marks the onset of death. Sometimes, the more things expand and prosper, the more limited their power to sustain life becomes, the harder it becomes to maintain internal cohesion. Bearing this in mind, it becomes understandable that Maqiao people don't use "scatter" just to mean people dying, but also for any catastrophic predicament-and in particular, clouds that travel inside silver linings.
Many years later, listening to the old people considering the merits of television, I heard them remark in fearful tones: "If you watch television every day, till your head's full of it, won't you end up scattered?" They were simply expressing the anxiety that all the extra knowledge people picked up from watching television would stimulate more and more desires-and then how would they manage to cohere? And if they couldn't cohere, surely they were done for?
I can't say whether or not their terror of television was rational. But it did make me realize the connotations of "scattered" had by then extended far beyond what they had been twenty years ago. I also realized that Maqiao people retained their own sense of stubborn vigilance toward any form of scattering, toward the wild flights of fancy, the merging with the wider world one could experience while watching, for example, a color television.
*Bandit Ma (and 1948)
: Guangfu, a physical-education teacher in the county capital, was one of Maqiao's few intellectuals and, as it happened, the only person from Maqiao who settled in town with a state-allocated job. His father was the one great historical figure who came out of Maqiao. But for a very long time, Maqiao people were loath to mention this great man, would hedge vaguely about events from the past that involved him. It was only later that I found out this great man was called Ma Wenjie, and that his case was reexamined and he was rehabilitated only in 1982, after which the labels of "Bandit Leader" and "Reactionary Bureaucrat" were dropped in favor of "Performer of Outstanding Service in Uprising." At the time, Guangfu was on the standing committee of the County Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), of which he later became the vice-chairman, a fact which was not, of course, entirely unrelated to his father's rehabilitation. It was also at this time, the time I paid my visit to Guangfu, that I found out a little more of the story behind Ma Wenjie taking up the post of County Head under the GMD.
As I said, this was in 1982. It was on a rainy, overcast evening that I found myself in a small streetside beancurd shop by the river-when Guangfu couldn't be sure of earning enough to live on even as a Phys. Ed. teacher, he opened this little shop. I took down what he said in a small exercise book, the smell of soya bean dregs tickling my nose. A thought suddenly came to me: as far as I was concerned, as far as all I knew about Ma Wenjie was concerned, 1948 wasn't actually 1948 at all. It had been postponed and postponed, had fermented and soured. In other words, it had been postponed until it reemerged on this rainy evening of 1982, It was just like the bomb that blew up Maqiao's Xiongshi, that bomb from the Sino-Japanese War that had lain quietly in the mud, frozen for thirty years, this longstanding postponement waiting until a beautiful, bright spring to explode in a child's face.
In the case of something we don't know about, we can't say definitely that it exists, or at the very least we lack sufficient evidence to conclude it exists. Before 1982 came along, Ma Wenjie's 1948 was a total blank as far as I was concerned.
By the same reasoning, Ma Wenjie's 1948, Maqiao's 1948 was not, in fact, the 1948 of many history textbooks. The events that made up this year, the mass of developments and changes that made this year moving, significant, memorable-the GMD-CCP talks at Beiping, the battle of Liaoshen and the Battle of Huaihai, Mao Zedong's angry rejection of the USSR's suggestion to divide China at the Yangtze River, the intense struggles within the GMD between Chiang Kaishek's clique and Xiao Zongren's clique, and so on-neither Ma Wenjie nor any of his followers knew anything of this at the time. Thanks to the multilayered screen of the Jiulian mountain range, in addition to the chaos of war, a great drought and a few other factors besides, Maqiao Bow's contact with the outside world had been on the wane for some time. Maqiao people's understanding of the outside world extended no further than the fragmentary rumors of a few old soldiers returning to the countryside.
Most of these old-timers had served under Regiment Commander Ma Wenjie, messing with the Forty-second Army; they'd reached Shandong and Anhui before taking part in the Battle of Binhu, relieving the garrison of the Forty-fourth Army. They looked down on the Sichuanese Forty-fourth Army, the most ill-disciplined army of all, in which almost everyone smoked opium;
when the Japanese army disguised themselves in mufti and infiltrated their ranks, the army's command was finished off in one fell swoop. Of course, Regiment Commander Ma didn't have an easy ride either: once, in an ambush in Yuanjiang County, the hundred-odd landmines he'd buried all turned out to be duds. Just brought over from Shaoyang, the landmines exploded into two, like the halves of a melon: the explosions made quite a noise but failed to kill anyone. As they stood amidst the gunpowder, the Japanese found themselves not a single man down, and every one of them charged with a great cry of "ya-ya-ya," slashing the Forty-second Army into pieces in no time at all. Seeing the way things were going, Commander Ma had no choice but to order his followers to dump all the remaining mountain explosives in the river as quickly as possible and to scatter into guerrilla units. The Japanese were here to transport grain, and it was just a question of drawing things out toward winter, when the water in the holes and lakes would have dried up, when the Japanese boats would no longer be able to set out, and Ma's containment duties would be completed.
They recalled how Ma Wenjie led them on expeditions to capture prisoners. The reward for capturing a Japanese soldier was 10,000 yuan. Every company had to capture four prisoners each month; if they didn't manage it, the failing would be marked heavily against the Company Commander and the next month's quota would be doubled. If they failed to fill the quota again, the Company Commander would be dismissed and flogged, as laid down by army law. Three strokes with a carrying pole always left the buttocks bleeding. The buttocks of one luckless Commander, who didn't manage to stay out of trouble very often, were permanently dented.
When they found a position to defend, they'd change into mufti, take up their "Good Citizen" passes and, thus disguised, carry out punitive raids into enemy areas. The braver among them would latch onto the "tail" of Japanese troops. One company, made up entirely of Miao people from Xiangxi, all good swimmers and courageous too, captured the most prisoners, but unfortunately they all died in the line of duty when caught in a surprise attack in Huarong County. Those few fellow villagers of Ma Wenjie who'd served under him had been pretty lucky, it seemed, to survive with their heads left on; it was just that every time they captured a prisoner, they brought back either a Mongolian or a Korean, not genuine Japanese goods. Although they were grudgingly allowed to report for completion of duties, they didn't get any reward. Even after they returned home, these Maqiao people would still simmer with resentment at this. Bandit Ma was being unreasonable, they'd say: Mongolian Tartars were the biggest in size, too big even for three or four people to lift. We had it rough, they reckoned: how come everyone else got a reward, and we got nothing but cold water?
Bandit Ma was Ma Wenjie's nickname.
Their audience was sympathetically scandalized: that's right, that's right, Bandit Ma's a skinflint, he landed a big official job but no one ever saw him give his wife a gold bracelet. That time he returned to his home village and invited his relatives over for a meal, he cooked only five catties of pork, filled everyone's bowls with radish!
Their 1948 was full of such topics of conversation. To sum up, in other words, the outside world of the time, as defined by their own mental horizons, was: the opium-smoking Sichuan army, the Shaoyang landmines that exploded without killing anyone, the Mongolian Tartars in the Japanese army, and so on-they might, at best, have heard vague rumors of the Third Changsha Campaign, too. They had no idea even what "1948" was, they'd never used the Gregorian calendar. The term "1948" remained unknown to them right up until the time I came to know them. They used some of the following terms to refer to this year:
1. The year of the Great Battle of Changsha.
This was obviously incorrect. Their Battle of Changsha was a piece of news that came nearly six years late, and was mistaken by them for an event that took place in 1948. If someone from outside Maqiao who had no clue about the Third Battle of Changsha relied solely on what Maqiao people said to gain a sense of history, they'd end up with a very muddled chronology.
2. The year Mao Gong was head of the Protection Committee.
You could say this was correct, you could also say this was incorrect. Maogong was from Maqiao Upper Village, but that year he was in fact covering for someone from Zhangjia District, and it was his turn to act as Head of the Protection Committee, with jurisdiction over the eighteen bows around. There was nothing much wrong in marking 1948 by this event. The problem, however, was that Maqiao people didn't know the Japanese had already surrendered and that the Protection Committees set up under Japanese coercion no longer existed in most places, that the "Good Citizen" card was no longer in use; because they were cut off from news, they were still doing things by the old rules, still using the term "Protection Committee"; this might lead to later confusion.
3. The year the bamboo in Zhangjia District flowered.
There was a grove of fine bamboo in Zhangjia District and in 1948, when a terrible drought came and not a single grain was harvested from the fields, a kind of seed-yielding white flower bloomed on all the bamboo. When people picked these seeds and threshed off the husk, they found bamboo rice-chaff, a pale red in color, which produced a heady scent when steamed and which tasted pretty much like nonglutinous red rice. After a bamboo flowered, it immediately died, but this grove of bamboo enabled the people who lived nearby to get through the famine; the locals were deeply grateful for its generosity, and named the grove "the merciful bamboo." This event made a very deep impression on Maqiao people, who henceforth remembered the year by it. There was, in general terms, nothing incorrect about this, it was just that outsiders wouldn't have known about the event itself. When the census register was taken, or recruits drafted, or school entrance exams registered for, those born in "the year the Zhangjia District bamboo flowered" and their parents would need to spend ages gesturing and explaining before managing to communicate to an outsider the age of the person concerned.
4. The year Guangfu got muddled in Longjia Sands.
To "get muddled" meant to start school, Guangfu, the son of Ma Wenjie, didn't have that much natural aptitude for learning; when he was little, he loved playing around and it took him seven years to finish primary school. Year upon year he had to repeat, which he found terribly embarrassing, and even after he grew up he hated admitting to this poor record, so on his curriculum vitae he put the time he got muddled forward three years, to 1951. If someone who didn't know these details were to calculate time only by Guangfu's curriculum vitae or by what Guangfu said, he'd dislocate Maqiao's whole history forward by three springs and three autumns. So this, too, is a very perilous way of conceptualizing time.
5. The year Ma Wenjie called an amnesty.
Ma Wenjie's amnesty was a great event: news of it spread near and far, everyone knew about it; it served as a highly convenient temporal marker for Maqiao people and was the easiest way of explaining things to people from outside the area.
There are a few things to be said about this amnesty, of course.
The atmosphere had been very tense that year. In the twelfth lunar month, a lot of people in the countryside were busy weaving grass mats to send over to the county seat in preparation for the wrapping of corpses. Rumor had it that the men from around Pingjiang had sworn alliance to the provincial army, which was under the generalship of "Donkey Peng" and was claimed to have mustered ten thousand men and three cannon, all ready for a fight to the death with Ma Wenjie and the men on both banks on the Luo River. Reckoning his number was up, Ma Wenjie divided up his family's property amongst the crowds and prepared his own coffin. He asked only one thing of Donkey Peng: he didn't want to fight in the city. So as to avoid bringing suffering on the people, the white mud embankment on the lower reaches of the Luo waters was the best place for the battle. Not having any of it, Donkey Peng cut off the head of the messenger Ma Wenjie had sent, and hung it on the bridge outside the east gate of Baisha Town. When the locals went out they didn't dare cross the bridge, and could cross only by wading through the water under the
bridge.
When the news spread around, the ordinary people in the county seat fled in panic. After a while, though, after there was neither sound of cannon nor sighting of Donkey Peng's army approaching the city boundaries, it emerged that Ma Wenjie had issued a proclamation that he wouldn't fight. He had a new title, too: County Head and Head Commander of the Provisional Fourteenth Company. When he took people out to eat dogmeat in restaurants in Changle, people spotted that his followers all wore National Army uniforms and that a sprinkling of foreign-style machine guns gleamed in their possession.
As later opinion had it, Ma Wenjie did an incredibly stupid thing in going over to the GMD in the year of the GMD's great defeat. With regard to this, Guangfu explained to me over and over again how his dad had in the first place wanted to surrender to the Communist Party, but with the yin in a bad way and the yang tied up in knots he ended up surrendering at the wrong door. With his few years' experience of traveling around in the army, his dad had learned a thing or two, and knew vaguely about the Communist Party; he'd heard that the Communist Party killed the rich and helped the poor, that they were good fighters; he had no ill feeling towards them. While under pressure from the provincial army, he dispatched his sworn brother Wang Laoxuan to go and seek out the Communist Party. Wang Laoxuan had a brother-in-law who worked as a carpenter in Liuyang and who was very thick with the Communists. But things worked out very unfortunately: as soon as Wang Laoxuan set out, he was struck down by evil spirits and a huge carbuncle erupted on his back. He applied herbal medicine but it was still so painful he ended up knocked out for two whole days at an inn. By the time he hurried on to Liuyang, his brother-in-law had just left for Jiangxi.
"Two days, two rotten, measly days! If Wang Laoxuan hadn't got a boil, if he'd carried out his orders on time, wouldn't my dad have joined the Communist Party?"
Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html Page 14
