Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  He couldn't believe his eyes.

  Director Ma! County Leader Ma! General! Third Master! Third Uncle… The women cried out every imaginable name, as they jostled frenziedly to reach the front to make their kowtows, thumping out a terrible din with their heads.

  "Our lives are over!"

  "Our lives are in your hands!"

  "Give me back my precious love!"

  "We only surrendered because of what you said! You're responsible!"

  "His dad said he had to go, but what about the family, there's seven, eight of them, they all need feeding, what am I going to do…"

  One woman rushed forward, grabbed hold of his lapels, smacked him right in the face, and yelled out, as if crazed: "It's all your fault! Give us back our men, give them back-"

  By the time Ma Wenjie's wife had come forward to coax the madwoman away, Ma Wenjie's jacket lapels were torn and his assailant had clawed two bleeding scratches across his hand.

  Ma Wenjie slowly worked out what had happened. While he'd been having a meeting with his superiors, the "Advisory Gang" had risen up in rebellion, killing first of all three members of the work team in Baoluo Township; they'd planned a rebellion of even greater dimensions, but failed to anticipate the government intercepting and seizing a secret missive; all the government then had to do was strike first, and hardest, executing the ringleaders of the rebellion as soon as possible-the husbands of these women numbering among them. They'd not seen their husbands return from a meeting called several days ago. In the end, the government informed them they should go to a place called Bramble Street to pick up their effects; that's how simply things were managed.

  As he listened, Ma Wenjie once more went into a cold sweat, pacing up and down the room with his hands behind his back, staring up at the heavens, his tears pouring out. He clasped the hands of every single woman gathered in the room: "Your brother's let you down," he said, "he's let you down."

  Crying all the while, he pulled open some cases, took out all the shiny silver dollars they contained-only fifty-odd coins altogether-and stuffed them into the hands of his petitioners. His wife, wiping her eyes, also produced her private savings, made up of the scattered coins that Ma Wenjie normally left at his pillowside, on tables, in drawers, in the stable or toilet. He was usually careless with his money, but luckily his wife followed behind him, scooping it all up.

  The two of them finally managed to send their weeping and wailing guests home.

  Ma Wenjie didn't close his eyes once all night; when he rose the next day and saw that the cockerel at the gate stretching its neck but producing no noise, he sensed something a little odd had happened. When, tapping the table absent-mindedly, he realized that still there was no noise, something, he felt, was even odder. Finding himself at an old Daoist temple, at the front of whose hall was an old bell, he walked up to the bell, tried to sound it and discovered there was still no sound; now unable to control his mounting anxiety, he swung the hammer and rang the bell with all his might; hearing its deafening chimes, everyone from roundabout ran over, staring at him with huge, terrified eyes. It was only then that he realized it wasn't the bell that was failing to make a noise- he had gone deaf. He put the bell hammer down without a word.

  Having drunk a bowl of gruel that his wife had prepared for him, he heaved a sigh and got ready to go and see the doctor, but just as he reached the mouth of the lane, he collided with a flood of people on the streets, taking part in another demonstration march for the suppression of counterrevolutionary elements, a memorial meeting for the three revolutionary martyrs of Baoluo Township. Headed in the direction of the county prison, the people's militia and primary school students were shouting out slogans. What they were shouting with their mouths so wide open, he didn't know.

  He stopped and, using the wall for support, slowly turned and went back home.

  From his house to the mouth of the lane, it was fifty-one steps, from the mouth of the lane to his house it was also fifty-one steps, no more, no less; this happened to be his age exactly.

  "How come it's exactly fifty-one steps?" It surprised him.

  His wife handed him an umbrella, urging him to go and see the doctor.

  "Tell me, how come it's exactly fifty-one steps?"

  He couldn't hear whatever his wife had to say.

  "What did you say?"

  His wife's mouth once more opened and closed noiselessly.

  He remembered again that he was deaf and didn't repeat his question, just shook his head. "Strange. Very strange."

  That afternoon, a doctor friend came to have a look at his hearing problem. He asked his guest for a little coarse opium. You practice Daoist rituals and breathing every day, his friend gestured at him, aren't you supposed not to smoke? He tapped his forehead, meaning that he'd caught a slight chill, that he was feeling the cold badly, and that he needed something to smoke to drive out the cold, bring on a sweat. His friend gave him a pouchful.

  It rained that night. After he'd performed his last ritual, he committed suicide by swallowing opium. He'd changed into a clean, neat set of clothes, shaved off his beard, even carefully cut his fingernails.

  Going by what most people said, he hadn't needed to die. He was in no particular danger. Even though he was implicated in a few felonies- such as deciding to surrender to the GMD and allowing his followers to kill a few ordinary people on the take-he was, in the end, a big cheese and the arrow-tokens of his Advisory Committee had, in the end, achieved a great deal for the new regime. When he'd studied carpentry, moreover, he'd been apprenticed alongside some important senior officer in the Communist Party, whose family he'd protected, sending over rice to help them through. The day after he killed himself, a section chief arrived posthaste on a special trip across the province to deliver a letter written by the senior officer himself. At the end of the letter, the senior officer invited him, at his convenience, to come as his guest to the provincial capital to talk about old times.

  He was already asleep in his grass mat shroud before he got to see this letter. After taking instructions from the prefectural commissioner's office and the province, the county government bought him a coffin, a pair of white candles, and a string of firecrackers.

  *Bramble Gourd

  : Most Maqiao people wouldn't know what Bramble Street, the place I just mentioned, was; most people from near Maqiao wouldn't know either-especially not the younger generation. Bramble Street disappeared many years ago. If you left the county seat from the East Gate on Sanhuali Road, then crossed the Luo River, you'd see a flat stretch of bank, where cotton or sweet potatoes grew; on top of the northern face, which was slightly elevated, were a few scattered stones, some straggling grass, and a couple of thatched sheds built for night watchmen. If you came in a bit closer to look, you'd probably glimpse some ox droppings or the nests of wild birds in amongst the deep grasses, or a broken straw sandal. This was Bramble Street, now called Brambleland, or Brambleland Embankment. It would have been near impossible for younger generations to gain a sense of how this had in fact once been a "street," that it had actually been host to a hundred bustling, clamoring people and a huge, grand Confucian temple, famous for miles around.

  Bramble Street had become a name without any links to reality, that had gone to waste.

  Bramble Street only continued to figure, only carried any importance as a place-name, in stories relating to Ma Wenjie. Even so, its inevitable disappearance into oblivion was merely postponed for a few decades in the minds of one group of people-nothing more. The massacre of the "Advisory Gang" which took place that year started right here. In the last stage of their study meeting, the fifty-odd leaders of the surrendering bandits had been ordered to dig a pond. They dug and dug, hauled and hauled, dripped with sweat for three days; as soon as some kind of a pond had been dug, the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun hidden on a roof somewhere suddenly went off-a sudden noise, it was, that would have sounded very foreign, very distant to its hearers. The rain of bullets whistled over,
rolled up into a whirlwind. None felt the bullets passing through his flesh, but as clouds of dust leapt up from the mud slope behind them and sand splattered in all directions, it became very obvious that somethinghad exploded through one side of their bodies before blossoming out into a whole chain of dust-cloud blooms on the other side. Maybe they were just beginning to understand what kind of a thing metal is, what kind of a thing speed is, how freely and easily metal bullets passed through flesh and how hard this instant was to grasp. And finally, they fell, one after another, into the hole in the ground they themselves had just dug.

  It was only after 1982, when the government pronounced the "Revolt of the Advisory Committee" to be a case misjudged for all sorts of complex reasons, that talk of this episode once more began to flash into conversation, that the strange name of Bramble Street began to be used once more. Some old people said that after that volley of gunfire, Bramble Street became the haunt of ghosts, that house after house had caught fire for no apparent reason, and that before two years had passed, seven houses had burned down. A lot of the children born there-three within two years-were born feebleminded. The fengshui man said there were ghosts at work there and that the fish in the pool couldn't keep them off, so of course houses were going to get burned down. Mr Fengshui also babbled something about these being guan ("government") ghosts, ghosts connected to catastrophes in government, guan being homophonic with the word coffin, which referred to souls which hadn't scattered after death, something like this-no one listening quite got what he said. People immediately started to dig inside and outside their houses, tunneled several feet down, and cleared out any suspicious broken bits of material which might have been rotten coffins. They also dug a new pond and planted a few thousand fishtail seedlings in a determined effort to increase the flow of water, to overcome fire with water. The strange thing was that the fish in this pond just wouldn't survive: all of them went belly-up within a month. Finally, an umbrella-maker's shop on the eastern side of the street caught fire and people slowly lost confidence in fire-fighting; one after another, they were forced to move elsewhere, a great many to the area around Huang Bay.

  By the end of the 1950s, Bramble Street had become totally deserted, a stretch of wasteland; even the well had caved in, and mosquitoes and wigglers flourished in vast numbers.

  In fact, it became a patch of good land, very fertile, so it was said, where cotton flowers and sweet potatoes would grow particularly well; it also produced a wonderfully sweet variety of melon that very quickly became famous. Sometimes, in an effort to drum up customers, the peddlers in the county capital would yell with particular vigor, "Get your Brambleland Embankment Brambleland Melons!"

  Some people wrote this as "Baubleland Melons" on the signs for their melon stalls.

  *1948 (continued)

  : I used to think that time was measured equally everywhere, that it was something that traveled at uniform speed, a transparent fluid equally, evenly, and precisely distributed, drop by drop. But no: this, in fact, is just the time felt by our bodies: being born, growing up, getting old, dying, for example, all according to the prescribed order. But people aren't trees, or stones. Perhaps, apart from material time, it is felt time that is most meaningful to people. A person's period of childhood is always very long, just as periods of upheaval, danger, and distress are very long. There can be no doubt that a sense of longue duree springs from a person's special sensitivity of feeling, clarity of memory, and depth of new knowledge. For those who pass comfortable, dull days, in whose lives one day is replicated by one hundred, and one year is replicated by ten, we see the opposite occurring: time isn't drawn out, it isn't expanded or enlarged, but becomes increasingly hurried, increasingly shrunken, until it finally turns into a zero, a blink, then it's gone without a trace. One day, they suddenly discover to their wide-eyed horror that the old person in the mirror is themselves. By a similar logic, time we know very little about, the time of the ancients, the time of distant nations, for example, is always hazy and so close to being invisible that it can be practically ignored, just as anything far away, anything at the very extreme of our worldview shrinks into specks of dust, into something barely distinct from air. When I used to read American fiction, I found that I often got the 1920s and the 1940s in America mixed up, and the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, even more so. I was frightened at myself: how could the entirely distinct, undeniable living and dying, and dying and living-several decades, even several centuries long-of all the generations that lay behind a novel, quietly escape me, why were they so frantically brief that they stimulated me only to skim quickly through a book, or even yawn?

  The reason was very simple: I was too far away, I couldn't see everything clearly.

  Time is a hostage to the powers of perception.

  Human time only exists through perception, and people whose powers of perception are weakened, or even totally lost, human vegetables confined to their sickbeds, for example, lack a truly meaningful sense of time. This transparent fluid, time, has never trickled down in equal quantities, at uniform speeds, it quietly changes form according to different powers of perception, undetectably extending or shortening, concentrating or scattering, protruding or collapsing.

  The problem is, everyone's perceptions are different, and one person's perceptions will constantly alter as a situation changes. Standing amongst a huge pile of crushed sensory fragments, do we still have a reliable, permanently fixed, abiding image of time? A unified time? When we discuss the year 1948, which perception of 1948 are we discussing? On that rainy, overcast evening, in that small beancurd stall, after Guangfu had had a cry about his dad, he got onto the subject of lotus root. He said the lotus root that year was incredibly sweet, unusually powdery after you'd boiled it-you couldn't get stuff like that to eat now. Lotus root nowadays, he said, grew from chemical fertilizer, was a hundred times inferior to lotus root back then.

  What he said left me a little perplexed. I knew that nowadays some places did in fact use too many chemical fertilizers, that this did in fact affect crop quality. But most lotus root was still organic and not all that different from old Guangfu's lotus root of yore. I suspected it wasn't the flavor of the lotus root that had changed, but rather Guangfu's perception of its taste that had changed, as he grew older and older, as periods of famine or liver trouble receded further and further back in the past. This is a very common phenomenon. We often gloss over things from the past, lotus root or a book, some neighbor of ours, for example, because we've forgotten the specific circumstances which produced our original warmth of feeling. We may even feel that a distressing experience from the past was incredibly beautiful, because we've already become distant spectators, utterly removed from the danger of sinking back down into its mire. We're no longer in distress, we're simply enjoying the memory of that distress.

  And so time, that hostage to perception, in fact corrodes our perceptions.

  To what extent was the 1948 of which Guangfu spoke to me truthful, reliable, still uncorroded? To what extent were his unreliable recollections of the flavor of lotus root distinct from his own unreliable beliefs?

  On the subject of the government's recent decision to rehabilitate the "Advisory Committee," Guangfu said that what the CCP did was far from easy for them: rectifying your own mistakes, swallowing down your own phlegm, none of this is easy. As he said this, he discovered that the box of tobacco was empty and told his son to go and buy some tobacco, and get two bottles of soda for the guest while he was at it. His son was twelve or thirteen years old, and at the mention of soda his eyes lit up and he ran barefoot out the door. When he returned with tobacco and soda, he didn't leave things at that: he frenziedly pryed off the cap of the soda bottle with the tip of a chopstick. Pop-he stood there, briefly dazed, before he began turning in every direction, climbing under the dark bed to grope around, his pointy buttocks sticking right up in the air. The tin bottle cap must have flown off somewhere.

  He re-emerged with a spider's web o
n his head: I couldn't see it, he said, I couldn't see it, then brushed off his hands and took the other bottle of soda off outside to drink, humming a tuneless popular song.

  "So that's that, hmmm?" Guangfu asked him angrily.

  "I looked everywhere, I couldn't see it."

  "Did it grow wings? Fly off into the sky?"

  I didn't know why Guangfu was attaching so much importance to a tin bottle cap. Maybe the little tin cap could be returned for money? Or was he furious about his kid's devil-may-care attitude?

  He made the child have another look, interrupting his conversation with me, helping move a pile of charcoal away from a corner of the wall, along with a wooden bucket and hoe and other tools, huffing and puffing as he did so, subjecting every single suspicious hiding place to a thorough investigation. "Where the hell are you hiding?" he threatened the bottle cap, "I know you're hiding somewhere! Where've you gone to?"

  Of course, he didn't forget to scold the child: "Get looking, you good-for-nothing! Look! Getting a bit big for your boots, are you? Let me tell you, if it wasn't for the Communist Party rehabilitating your grandfather, d'you think you'd be drinking soda? Or wearing shiny leather shoes? Or going to high school with a fountain pen in your pocket? I nearly died doing labor reform, I was so hungry I even picked out the grass from ox dung to eat…"