Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  Maogong was someone who enjoyed the limelight, and once the gong passed into his hands, he immediately dressed up in a long, white silk gown and took to wielding a staff, coughing and spluttering at great volume whenever he turned up on someone's terrace. Overly rapacious in collecting his straw sandal money, he demanded at least twice as much as his recent predecessors and took second helpings wherever he went. There was no end to the strange tricks he used. Once, while having a meal at Wanyu's house, he picked up, unobserved, a piece of string pecked at by chickens that Wanyu's dad had dropped under the stove, and hid it in his sleeve; when they sat at table and his host wasn't looking, he put it in the bowl of chicken. When he lifted his chopsticks and "discovered" the tape, he accused his host of tricking him and demanded five silver dollars off him. After his host had begged and pleaded with him, the matter was finally settled at two dollars. Another time, on a visit to a household in Zhangjia District, he first of all defecated outside on his own straw hat, so that a dog would come and chew it. After having sat inside the house for a while, reckoning that the dog would've chewed the hat to bits, he went back outside and made a huge fuss, accusing his host of deliberately antagonizing him, the Head of the Committee, and the imperial army, saying he couldn't even leave his straw hat alone, that he'd fed it to the dog behind his back. Nothing his host said was of any use, so he finally swallowed his anger and gave him an iron pot in compensation.

  Everyone knew, in fact, that the straw hat had been tattered and broken from way back.

  Seeing as he'd planted so many seeds of bitterness, it's not hard to imagine how the villagers responded to Benyi's cry to "liberate Taiwan" by the hundreds, charging onto the battlefield, particularly Wanyu's dad, who not only ran onto Maogong's fields to trample the crops, but also shredded the melon creepers planted at the side of Maogong's field. Afraid Maogong wouldn't hear them, some of the young men yelled and hooted in deliberate, ear-splitting unison, making a racket that terrified all the chickens and dogs in the village.

  Not surprisingly, Maogong did hear and hurried over, wheezing away. Pounding the ground with a stick, he cursed: "You good-for-nothing Benyi, stealing my grain in broad daylight, I hope you die horribly…"

  Benyi raised his arm and shouted: "Liberate Taiwan!"

  Law-abiding members of the commune shouted with him: "Liberate Taiwan!"

  "What happens to opponents of the cooperative?" he shouted.

  Again came the deafening roar in response, "Reap their grain, eat their crops! Take what you can! Reap their grain, eat their crops! Take what you can!"

  Maogong's eyes went bloodshot with fury: "Fine, fine, take what you want, take all you want, but when I starve to death and become a hungry ghost, I'll come and stab you to death!"

  He turned to shout at his sons Yanzao and Yanwu to go back and fetch knives. The two brothers were just little kids, already paralyzed with fear by this scene, and just stood there on the hillside, not daring to move. Maogong cursed his sons a while, spittle flying everywhere, then went back himself, leaning on a bent stick; not long after, he returned carrying a bunch of firewood and set fire to the edge of the field. His fields had long been deprived of water and the crops were very withered; with just one gust of wind the fire crackled into a huge blaze. He cackled raucously as he watched the fire, cursing and stamping his foot: "I can't eat this, you bastards, so help yourselves, help yourselves, hahaha-"

  In the blink of an eye, his own grain had turned to ashes.

  A few days later, Maogong failed to catch his next breath, and died.

  People said that Maogong's ghost didn't scatter. One full moon, after Benyi's family had been cutting millstones, the journey back home from the quarry took them past Maogong's gate. Benyi had put down his carrying pole and taken a few steps up the mountain in search of some wild chicken nests, when he was frightened out of his skin by a sudden great rumbling noise behind him. Practically everyone in the lower village heard the strange noise too, and first children then men hurried over to see what was happening. When they arrived on the scene, everyone was so astounded they just stood, stunned, like petrified chickens, completely unable to believe their eyes: Benyi's two new millstones were locked in battle with a stone mortar in the doorway of Maogong's house-

  At this point in the story, Fucha asked me if I knew what a stone mortar was. I said that I'd seen one, it was a tool for threshing ordinary or glutinous rice, shaped a bit like a bowl. I also knew there were two sorts of threshing: hand threshing and foot threshing. Hand threshing was when someone held the threshing pestle and pounded it up and down. Foot threshing was slightly more labor-saving, a bit like a see-saw: someone stood on one end of the seesaw and stamped down so that the pestle on the other end rose very high; once the foot was released, the threshing end pounded down heavily on the stone mortar.

  Fucha said he didn't believe a stone mortar could fight either, but the old-timers insisted they'd seen it with their own eyes, swearing on their eyes and noses. A stone mortar had pitted itself against the two millstones, jumping here and there, breaking out to the right, to the left, causing such thunderous collisions that the very stars seemed to tremble in the heavens, pounding a series of holes in the ground, as if tamping the earth down as densely as it could. At that moment, it seemed that all the birds from all around had flown over to spectate, forming a dense, cawing mass that filled every single tree.

  Two or three of the strongest men came forward to intervene, trying to separate the bitterly embattled parties with a rod, but failed to separate them, their faces sweating profusely from the effort. The rod pressed against the stone mortar actually snapped with a crack and the stone mortar jumped up again in fury, lunging crazily at the millstone, while onlookers darted to either side to dodge its grinding. They were entwined in a blinding struggle: if one retreated, one advanced, if one dodged, one blocked; in the end they moved off the terrace, fighting on to the edge of the ditch, to the bridge, before twisting their way up the mountain, the din resounding across the grassland. Stranger still, a kind of yellowish blood actually flowed from these stones onto the ground and onto the blades of grass. When their corpses lay in pieces on the peak, with only the odd fragment stirring, struggling listlessly, blood flowed and burbled from the broken sides of all the pieces, winding its gurgling way down the mountain for half a It, before staining yellow a whole embankment of bamboo.

  After gathering up the shattered corpses, which had scattered far and wide, people used them to block up a gully in a paddy field. The mill-stones filled the Three-Peck Field of Benyi's family, the mortar stone filled Maogong's field; thus the dispute was finally settled.

  Because the owners' families had been enemies, the old-timers said later, the grievance extended to their stones, who also became enemies. In future, enemies had better be a bit more careful not to lay down their things any old how, any old place.

  From this time on, although Benyi would badmouth and curse Mao-gong from time to time, he never again walked in front of Maogong's door or came to Maogong's field. Maogong's wife and two sons finally joined the cooperative, but Benyi said he didn't want the cooperative to have anything to do with their family ox, and took it away to be sold in town. There was also a plough and a rake that Benyi didn't dare keep either, and he got people to carry them off to the ironworks furnace.

  I burst out laughing when I'd heard all this; I didn't believe such a thing had really happened.

  "I don't believe it either, they're just spirit-talking (see the entry for "Spirit"). They've got no culture." Fucha chuckled, then turned over, "but you just relax and go to sleep."

  He turned his spine to me, and fell still; I didn't know whether he was asleep or not-he may have been asleep but his ears were still pricked up in all directions. I also kept my ears open, listening to my own breathing, listening to the sound of little water pockets springing out of the muddy porridge in Maogong's field.

  *Gruel

  : This was a kind of thin porridge, pronounc
ed gang in Maqiao dialect (jiang in mandarin). As Maqiao was a poor mountain village short of grain, "gruel" was a pretty commonly used word. One of the "Odes of the small states" in the Book of Odes says: "It is better to serve guests wine than gruel," and the word gruel is generally used to refer to a drink one rung below wine, such as corn soaked in water. The biography of Bao Xuan in Chapter Seventy-two of the Han History contains the phrase "wine into gruel, meat into bean leaves," referring to those who live in extravagance and luxury, treating wine like gruel, meat like the leaves on beans. From this it becomes clear how the term "gruel" has since come to refer more generally to the food and drink of the poor.

  When the Educated Youth first came to Maqiao, they often misheard "eating gang (gruel)" as "eating gan (dry grain)," thus confusing it with its exact opposite. In fact, the people around here always replaced the j sound with a hard g sound: the word for river (jiang), for example, was also pronounced gang. So "eating gruel" sometimes sounded like "eating river." When the harvest was late and the pot in every household held nothing but water thickened with only a sprinkling of grain, this phrase fit perfectly well.

  *Traitor to the Chinese

  : Maogong's eldest son, Yanzao, was always the one who did the heavy work in the work team, hauling rotted ox manure, breaking up stones, burning charcoal, and so on. When houses were being built, he cast the earthen bricks, when there were funerals, he carried the coffins; his mouth used to hang open with exhaustion, unable to stay shut, and the blue veins on his calves bulged into great, terrifying nodules. Because of this, he'd always wear long pants, however hot the weather was, patched in layer after layer, to hide his ugly legs. When I first met him, his old granny was still alive. His old granny was what was known in local legend as a poison woman, someone who hid deadly poisonous powder made from snakes and scorpions in cracks in her nails and tried to kill enemies or strangers by secreting it into their drinks. Such people normally used poison to avenge a grievance or, some said, to shorten other people's lives in order to lengthen their own life spans. People said that Yanzao's granny only became a poison woman after the cooperatives were set up, because of her class hatred for poor and lower-middle peasants, because she wouldn't let things lie with the Communist Party. Benyi's mother had died many years ago, and Benyi had always suspected she'd been poisoned by this devil-woman.

  The wind had blown down Yanzao's thatched hut that day, and he entreated the villagers to come and help him mend it. I went along too, to help mix the putty. I caught a glimpse of this famous old woman's benign countenance as she stood over the stove tending the fire; to my amazement, it bore absolutely no resemblance to the picture of villainy painted by popular legend.

  The thatch was fixed in a morning. As people were carrying their own tools back home, Yanzao ran up behind them: "Why aren't you staying to eat?" he shouted, "Why are you going without eating? What's the sense in that?"

  Having smelled the fragrance of meat float out of the kitchen some time ago, I too felt there was no good reason for everyone to be going. Then I heard Fucha say that people not only wouldn't eat at his home, they wouldn't even dare touch the food bowls there. Everyone knew there was a poison woman in the family.

  I moistened my lips, and slipped off home with quickened steps.

  A short while later, Yanzao came pounding on the doors of houses to beg everyone once more to come and eat; he even pushed open the door of our house. Instantly thumping to his knees, he pounded out three crisp, resonant kowtows. "D'you want me to throw myself into the river? D'you want me to hang myself? Doing things for free, without getting fed, that's never been the way, not since the time of the three great emperors and five lords. You've walked over everyone in the Yanzao household today, I can't go on living, I'll just die here."

  Frightened out of our wits, we quickly pulled him to his feet, saying that we'd cooked at home and hadn't planned to eat out. In any case, we hadn't done anything much, it was embarrassing to eat his food, and so on and so forth.

  His face was sweating profusely with agitation; despite all this effort, he hadn't changed the mind of one single person, and was now on the verge of tears. "I know, I know, you're all afraid, afraid that old…"

  "Not at all, not at all, rubbish, total rubbish!"

  "Even if you don't trust that old woman, why shouldn't you trust me? D'you want me to cut out my heart, liver, and lungs, chop them into tiny pieces for you to see? Fine, if you're afraid, then don't eat. But right now, my little big brother's rinsing out the pots to cook all over again! If any of you are still worried, just go and watch her cook. This time I won't let that old woman anywhere near…"

  "Yanzao, why are you so upset?"

  "Generous, honorable people, please allow me to live." Saying this, he fell to his knees once more, his head pounding the floor as if he were crushing garlic with a pestle.

  One by one, he begged everyone who'd helped; he ended up pounding his forehead so much it bled, and still he hadn't managed to persuade anyone. It was just as he said: he really had thrown out three whole tables of already prepared food, thrown them into a ditch, and made his sister wash rice and borrow meat again to make another three tables-by this point, it was already time to start the afternoon's work. Some time ago, he'd tied up his granny with rope, a long, long way from the cooking area, under a big maple tree in the village, making a public example out of her. Out of curiosity, I went to have a look. The old woman was wearing only one shoe and seemed to be somewhere between sleep and consciousness, her eyes slanted downwards, focused on some spot on the upper face of a stone, her toothless mouth opening and closing, listlessly producing a few indistinct sounds. She'd wet her pants and stank of sourness. A few children watched her from far-off, not without fear.

  The tables of food were once more laid on the terrace in front of his house, but still there was no one to be seen. I saw Yanzao's elder sister sitting by the tables, wiping her eyes.

  Finally, we Educated Youth were unable to contain our greed-and didn't much believe in evil spirits, in any case. With one of us taking the lead, a few of the lads went and enjoyed a few pieces of beef each. One of them muttered, as his mouth ran with grease, that he hardly knew what the meat tasted like: he didn't care whether he was poisoned or not, he'd quite happily die of overeating.

  Probably because of this act of face-giving, Yanzao henceforth felt exceptionally indebted to us. We practically never chopped our own firewood-he'd always carry it over before it was needed. He had a unique capacity for carrying heavy loads. As I recall, his back was almost never empty: if there wasn't a carrying pole of rotted manure then there'd be a carrying pole of firewood, or the whole, sprawling mass of a threshing machine. In winter, in summer, his shoulders could never be empty, neither on fine, nor rainy days. It looked strange and awkward if he wasn't carrying something on his shoulders: like a snail without its shell, it just didn't look right. It was like a deformity that made him uneasy, that made his heels slip up when he walked-when he wasn't carrying things he really did stumble along, stubbing his toe so much that the blood throbbed inside it.

  If he carried cotton, he carried so much that it covered his entire frame, so much that from a distance it looked like two mounded snowy mountains were moving of their own accord along the road, bobbing up and down as they advanced-very strange.

  Once, he and I went to deliver grain, and on the way back home he actually put a big rock in his two empty baskets. He said that if he didn't have a bit of pressure like that, he couldn't walk properly. As soon as the carrying pole was twisted by downwards pressure over his shoulders, it became intimately fused with his body, the swishing movement of every muscle took on a dance rhythm, his step became elastic, and he bounded along the road out of sight, transformed from only a moment before, when ashen-faced he'd been carrying empty baskets, his steps unrhythmic and erratic.

  He too was a traitor to the Chinese. It was only later that I found out that, in Maqiao terms, as his father was a traitor to the Chine
se, he couldn't escape the label either. This was how he saw matters himself. When we Educated Youth were newly arrived in Maqiao, when we saw how much rotted ox manure he carried, how energetically he worked, we naturally nominated him as a model worker; momentarily aghast, he waved his hands in agitation, "That's awakened, impossible: I'm a traitor to the Chinese!"

  The Educated Youth all jumped in fright.

  Maqiao people felt that policies from above stipulating that lines should be drawn between enemies and their children were really rather de trop. By a similar logic, I expect, after Benyi became Party Branch Secretary and when his wife went to the supply and marketing cooperative to buy meat, the other women would remark with envy, "She's Secretary-who'd dare short-change her?" When Benyi's kids misbehaved at school, the teacher would actually scold them, "Secretary! Stop talking in class! And peeing!"

  Yanzao later became a "Dumb-ox"-a mute, in other words. He hadn't been a mute to start with, it was just that he'd never had that much to say for himself. Being a traitor and having a poison woman in the family meant he couldn't find a wife, even by the time his forehead was starting to get wrinkles. His elder sister had once tried to trick him, people said, by finding him a blind girl; when the wedding day came, he scowled and refused to enter the house, spending the whole evening hauling pond silt outside the village. The next day, and the day after that…still the same. The poor blind girl wept for three nights in the empty bridal chamber. In the end, his elder sister had no choice but to take the blind girl back home and give her a hundred catties of grain as compensation for the retraction of marriage. When his elder sister yelled at him for being so hard-hearted, he just said he was a traitor to the Chinese and he shouldn't bring anyone else down with him.