The child pouted, kicking sourly at a piece of wood ash.
"Kicking, are you, you pig-sticker!" (see the entry "Stick[y]"). The Phys. Ed. teacher whacked him on the top of his head.
The child raised his arms to ward off the blow; maybe he used a little more force than was necessary, for his father had to take a couple of steps back, almost slipped over. "So hit back at me, would you? You'd hit back, you good-for-nothing?" He snatched the bottle of soda from the child's hand, "I'll bury you alive, I will!"
Panting with fury, the boy ran outside screaming like a mad thing: "You old bastard! You old bandit! You old counterrevolutionary! What kind of teacher are you, hitting people like that?" A torrent of abuse ensued: "Reckon this is still the old society? Reckon you can bully everyone else, make everyone's life miserable, humiliate the nation and forfeit its sovereignty, hmmm?" These two phrases he'd used sounded very scholarly. "Serves you right! Serves you right, picking over ox dung! My life'd be better if you went to prison. If I get to be premier when I grow up, I'll launch political movements! And tell you what, I won't be rehabilitating your type!…"
"I-I-I-"
Guangfu's angry response caught in his throat; even though he was a Phys. Ed. teacher, he still couldn't catch up with his son, but his whole body shook with anger; luckily, I was there to help him get back home and calm down. The boy's attitude toward him left me surprised and bewildered. Of course, the boy had spoken in anger, so his words shouldn't be taken too seriously. But the way he'd jabbed at his father's sore points proved at the very least that he had no acute sense of pain toward past events, and that no misjudgement of any case could compare in importance with his bottle of soda. It was at this moment that I was again made conscious of the ambiguities of time. Like a lot of people, Guangfu thought that most people would sympathize with his ordeals, that everything set in stone by Time should be forever preserved in its original form, universally recognized and admired like a precious cultural relic in a museum. Rooted in this belief as he was, he was like my parents or lots of people from earlier generations, always lecturing the younger generation by revisiting past events, talking about his time in prison, the famine, ox dung, or 1948.
What he hadn't realized was that time isn't a cultural relic, that there is no unified sense of time, existing for and appreciated by him and his son simultaneously. When the government returned to him a 1948 in which his father was pure as the driven snow, they failed to allocate one to his son as well. The boy's sullen kick at the pile of wood ash showed he was not only uninterested in, but resented all that came from the past, including 1948.
This, it would seem, was illogical. Despite having no personal experience of the past, he could at least be curious about strange events that took place in the past, just as children normally respond enthusiastically to classical legends, rather than kicking them angrily away. There was one plausible explanation for this: he didn't have any real hatred of the past, it was just that he hated the present past, which was to say the past of this overcast evening, the past that resonated with his father's scolding lectures and pomposity, the past that had snatched away his halfbottle of soda.
Guangfu's anger drove him to tears. This got me thinking about the policy that had made their whole family suffer injustice, a policy that had ruled that all personnel still serving in the old regime after 1947 at department and lieutenant-commander level and above were historically counterrevolutionary. This was applied across the board, to anybody, anywhere, in any temporal schema, the implication being: everyone lived within one, single time scheme, with no exceptions permitted. Years later, people finally realized that this policy was an oversimplification, and thanks to the revoking of this policy Guangfu's bitterness was replaced by sweetness. On the other hand, however, Guangfu was still trying to force his son to live in a single time scheme, again with no exceptions permitted. He was insisting on nothing less than a new timetable: the past that he detested so much, his son also had to detest; the present that he cherished, his son also had to cherish. The vast and momentous 1948 of his mind had to take on the same form and supremacy in his son's mind, it couldn't shrink, couldn't scatter, least of all disappear into nothingness. What he hadn't realized was that his son lived entirely outside his father's time-that in his son, a tiny little tin bottle cap could lead to a totally different conclusion:
"Served you right going to prison like that!"
"I'd be better off if you were in prison!"
Maybe, from this evening onwards, in this tiny little beancurd stall, an irrevocable chasm opened up between their pasts, a chasm that included 1948, and that was practically unbridgeable.
*Army Mosquito
: A very small variety of mosquito, this was, and very dark in color; if you examined it carefully, though, you'd see there was a small white dot on its black head. Its sting produced a red bite, not that big but unbelievably itchy, that lasted about three days. Maqiao people called it the "army mosquito." People said Maqiao didn't used to have this sort of mosquito, only the vegetable mosquito, a large, greyish creature. Although the bites it produced were big and extremely itchy, they disappeared pretty quickly. Maqiao people also said that the army mosquito had been brought by the provincial army, the year that Donkey Peng's provincial army had fought their way up to Changle. They'd been stationed there for ten days, leaving behind piles of pig bristles, chicken feathers, and this vicious breed of mosquito. That's how the army mosquito got its name.
It was during my time in the countryside that these mosquitoes taught me just how fierce they were. Particularly in the summer, when work finished very late, mosquitoes would swarm around your face and legs, making a deafening buzz, forming clouds so dense they could almost lift you off the ground. We were too hungry when we got home for our hands to take care of anything besides eating and drinking. And so, wolfing and gulping as we held our bowls, we had to keep our legs jigging about in a mealtime dance that we had to get used to: if you stopped for only a moment, a swarm of mosquitoes would mercilessly descend. If your hand happened to shoot out to rub your leg, you'd rub a few mosquito corpses off. People were quite used to rubbing rather than swatting mosquitoes, because in the end hands and feet were your own flesh and wouldn't put up with getting slapped all the time.
When it got late, the mosquitoes, too, seemed to get tired and rest, and the buzzing noise would grow fainter.
*Public Family
: Maqiao's paddy fields were unusually shaped, interlocking like fangs, and lay on a strip of valley between two mountains, slowly descending, one step at a time, to the drifting chimney smoke or evening moonlight of Zhangjia District. This stretch of land was called the "Great Gully," a name which should tell outsiders there were a lot of gully fields in the area. These "gully fields" were a type of paddy field to be found in mountainous areas where residual water exceeded flowing water, thereby producing a cold, swampy mud that concealed a great many deep gully holes; once you'd stepped in one, you could be in up to your forehead. The gully holes weren't easy to spot from the surface, and only people often in the fields would get to know the position of each and every one. Maqiao's oxen also knew where the gully holes were, and if they suddenly stopped short somewhere, the plougher would know to tread very carefully indeed.
Each of these fields had its own name, derived either from its shape- turtle patch, snake patch, melon strip patch, silver carp patch, wooden bench patch, straw hat patch, and so on-or from the quantity of grain it ought to produce-three-peck patch, eight-peck patch, and so on; some were named after political slogans-unity patch, leap forward patch, four purifications red flag patch, and so on. Even so, naming them thus still wasn't enough to identity all those scattered fields, and people's names had to be used, or placed in front of the field names, in order to tell them apart: "Benyi's family's three-peck patch" and "Zhihuang's family's three-peck patch," for example, differentiated these two pieces of land.
It should thus be apparent that these fields used to be pr
ivately owned, or had been allocated to private owners during Land Reform; it was thus very natural that they should be linked with the names of the landowners.
Considering that collectivisation had happened a good ten years before I arrived, I was surprised they all still remembered so determinedly what had once belonged to their own families. Even the children, once they'd reached a certain age, all knew where the fields that had originally belonged to their own families were and whether rice would {ken) grow there. When putting down fertilizer, they'd put a bit extra down there. If they needed to pee, they'd relieve themselves there. Once, a child stepped on a piece of china, almost carving his foot open, and hurled it angrily onto another field. A woman standing nearby immediately glared at him:
"Where d'you think you're throwing stuff, eh? Want a smack, do you? Or a poke with my chopsticks!"
That patch had originally been her family's-a long, long time ago.
This woman's continuing recollection of her family's private field proved that public ownership of land in Maqiao, right up to the early 1970s, was no more than a system, that it hadn't yet permeated to the depth of a feeling, or at least not to the depth of a whole-hearted feeling. Systems and feelings are, of course, two very different sorts of things, and all that seethes below the surface of a system is different again. Within the matrimonial system, a husband and wife could share a bed while dreaming different dreams, while having changes of heart. (Can this still be termed "marriage"?) In an absolutist system, factions can operate behind the scenes after great power has waned. (Can this still be called "absolutist"?) By a similar logic, for as long as many Maqiao people would hold in their urine in order to release it over what had previously been their own private fields, their grasp of the concepts of public ownership, of the "public family" had to be a little shaky.
Of course, neither was it the case that they were dead-set on private ownership. In fact, Maqiao had never had a proper system of private ownership. Villagers told me that even before the Republic (founded in 1912), their private rights extended only to three inches of swamp below the surface of the fields. Anything below three inches had always belonged to the emperor, to the state. Everything, the world over, belonged to the ruler, and officialdom did as they pleased, the landowner remaining powerless to prevent them. This explained, outsiders can perhaps understand that when collectivisation was later introduced in Maqiao, although some private complaints were inevitable, once the government order was given, the masses meekly entered the public family without giving the matter much further thought.
On the other hand, though, when they talked about "public" and "private," they always attached the word "family" afterwards; this was quite different from usage in Western languages. "Private" in the West means private to the individual. Any talk of property between husband and wife or father and son brings with it clear demarcations of private rights. For Maqiao people, the term "private family" signifies something public within the private. There was never a division between this and that, you and me, within a family. In the West, "public" means public society; in English, "public" means a horizontal stratum of equal, private bodies, often with political and economic significance, distinct from private issues such as personal secrets. For Maqiao people, the "public family" signified things that were private within the public sphere: marital disputes, young loves, burying the old, children's study, women's clothes, men's bragging, hens laying, rats burrowing-all private matters came under the scrutiny of the public family, they all counted as the responsibility of the public family. The public family became one big Private.
Precisely because of this collective clan sentiment (public-family), people usually called cadres "parent officials." When Maqiao's Ma Benyi was only thirty, or thereabouts, and had just married, he was respectfully addressed by many as "Daddy Benyi" or "Public Benyi" (Benyi Gong), because of his status as Party Secretary.
This phrase, in fact, returned to the original sense of the word "public" in Chinese. The earliest usage of the word for "public," gong, in Chinese did not mean public at all; it referred to a tribal leader or to the king of a state, was synonymous with the word "lord." Strictly speaking, translating the Western word "public" as gong is not right at all. In transporting Western terms such as "private ownership system" and "public ownership system" wholesale to Maqiao, you run the risk, it would seem, of creating a chasm between name and reality.
Benyi was Maqiao's gong (in its sense in classical Chinese), at the same time as he represented Maqiao's gong (in its sense in English and other Western languages).
*Taiwan
: In amongst the gully fields, there was one field called Taiwan, which to begin with I'd never taken much notice of. When we were fighting the drought by running the waterwheel, Fucha and I used to work deep into the night on a shift together, yawning as we climbed up onto the waterwheel, pedaling creakily away. Innumerable bare feet had already tramped the slow-turning wooden tread-weight into a radiant surface that gleamed with amazing brightness; one slip in concentration and my footing would be lost, my hands locked onto the handrail, and I'd be strung up yowling like a dog. At times like this, the waterwheel Fucha was turning under his feet could wreck your courage, the tread-weight spiraling unstoppably up over and over, pulverizing your feet black-and-blue or into a bloody mass. Fucha advised me not to watch my feet, as it was easy to miss your footing that way, but I couldn't allow myself to trust him, couldn't follow his advice. Time after time, he tried to get me talking, chatting, just to help me relax. He loved more than anything else to hear me talk about things from the city, or things to do with science, stuff about Mars or Uranus, for example. He'd graduated from junior middle school and had a head for matters scientific; he understood how sticky (magnetic) rocks worked, for example, and said that if enemy planes should ever drop bombs again maybe we could make a huge sticky stone that enemy planes would stick to from out of the sky-wouldn't that be more useful than artillery guns or guided missiles?
Soberly pondering my objections, he very seldom expressed surprise at the various bits of scientific knowledge I boasted about, just as he was never usually miserable amidst great misery, or joyful amidst great joy, his baby-face retaining at all times its look of knowing sagacity. All his various emotions were filtered into a single expression of placidity, of shyness, his permanently limpid gaze radiating out at an unglimpsed angle. Once you'd met this gaze, you immediately felt it was omnipresent, that any move of yours would be apprehended and penetrated. There were eyes behind his eyes, a gaze behind his gaze, you felt you couldn't keep anything concealed from him.
He disappeared, then popped out again from somewhere, cradling a snake-melon, probably stolen from the garden of some house nearby. When we'd finished eating, he dug a hole in the ground and started carefully burying the melon skin and seeds: "It's midnight already; let's go to sleep."
There were a lot of mosquitoes around and I was slapping away at my legs.
He searched out some leaves from somewhere and rubbed them over my legs, hands, and forehead-to great effect, it turned out, as the buzzing of the mosquitoes lessened significantly.
As I gazed at the moonlight just burst out from among the mountains, listened to the croaking of the frogs, one rebbit after another rising up from the gullies, I felt a slight anxiety: "So we're going to… sleep?"
"When we work, we work, when we rest, we rest."
"Benyi Gong said he wanted the wheel to fill the field by tonight."
"That's his problem."
"Will he come and check?"
"Nope."
"How d'you know?"
"I don't need to know-he just won't!"
This I found rather strange.
He knew that I'd carry on asking him why. "It's superstition, peasant superstition, just forget it." He then collapsed at my side, turned his back to me, hugged his legs in tightly, and prepared to sleep.
I wasn't like him, couldn't sleep when I felt like it, couldn't not sleep when I didn't fe
el like it, all neat and simple. I really did want to sleep, but my eyes couldn't rest, so I asked him to tell me some more empty talk (see the entry "Empty Talk"), even superstitions would do. Eventually he capitulated, but insisted he'd heard it from elsewhere-whenever relating matters of great import, he'd first communicate the provenance of the story in order to absolve himself. He'd heard so-and-so say, he said, that the owner of this field had been called Maogong, a bitter enemy of Benyi. The year the lower-level agricultural producers' cooperative was established, Maogong stubbornly refused to join the cooperative until his was the only field still individually farmed out of all the surrounding fields. As head of the cooperative, Benyi wouldn't allow Maogong to take water from the fields above his. Maogong still refused to yield, preferring to haul his thick hide to the river to fetch water than beg for it. Finally, seizing the opportunity provided by Maogong's suffering an asthma attack, Benyi charged hollering onto the field at the head of a group of men, a bucket raised aloft, to claim his grain; this, he said, was "liberating Taiwan."
In the past, Maogong had been the head of the Protection Committee and owned a lot of land: he was a landlord traitor to the Chinese. That, of course, made his land "Taiwan." Come to mention it, though, that label of traitor was a little unfair. Before, this area had been the fourteenth district under the puppet regime set up by the Japanese, and it had a Protection Committee with jurisdiction over Maqiao and the surrounding eighteen bows; those with wealth or status took turns as Head of Committee for three months each; a gong was sent to the home of whoever's turn it was. As leader, you drew no particular salary, but the gong gave you the right to sound off about public affairs and you could pick up "straw sandal money" wherever you went; in other words, cream off a little profit for yourself under the cover of public duty. Maogong's turn came right at the last of the eighteen bows, and by the time it came around to him, the Japanese Army had already surrendered, so he didn't have to take the job; but because the locals didn't know what was going on outside, the gong was still passed to him.
Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html Page 17
