Around here, the mountain people said, there were "Chessboard snakes": their bodies, when coiled up, happened to look just like a chessboard. There was the "Bellows-wind" too, also known as the Spectacles snake, which moved faster than the wind; when its hiss rang out, even the mountain pigs were frozen in their tracks.
The mountain people also believed that snakes were lecherous. For this reason, snake-catchers always drew the image of a woman on a piece of wood and smeared on rouge-if a woman could be made to spit on it, better still-then stuck it at the side of the road or on the mountainside for a night; when they went back to look, a snake would very likely be found coiled up, stock-still on the wood, as if dead drunk. The snakecatcher could then at his own leisure entrap his prey in a snake basket. By the same logic, they said, people walking at night who were nervous around snakes were best off carrying a stick or a piece of bamboo. It was said that bamboo was lover to the snake, and snakes, generally speaking, wouldn't dare do anything rash to someone with bamboo in hand.
If they met a venomous snake on the road, poised to attack, the mountain people still had one escape route: shouting "scarlet woman." Shouting this, apparently, confused snakes and gave you enough time to make your getaway. What history lay behind these words, that they had to be spoken and no others? No one had a convincing explanation.
Once, while spreading pesticide on the northern slope, Yanzao was bitten by a snake and ran back, howling. His number was up, he thought, but after running a while he discovered that his feet were neither swollen nor painful, that he was suffering neither cramps nor shivers. He sat down for a while, and managed to stay alive quite successfully, could still drink water, still see the sky, still pick his nose. Puzzled and perplexed, he turned back to look for the sprayer, but gaped, dumbstruck, when he reached the place where he'd left it: a clay-skin snake, a good three feet long, the very one that had just bitten him, lay stiff and dead on the cotton-flower field.
He'd become more poisonous than a snake.
Curious, he ran to the tea plantation to rummage around by the roots of the tea trees, where a good number of clay-skin snakes always lurked. He held out his hand for the snakes to bite, then watched them one by one lie writhing and twitching at his feet, until finally, as if miraculously, they stopped moving.
When dusk came, he tied a great armful of them together with a dead snake and carried them back home; people who spotted him from a distance thought he was strolling back home with a bundle of cut grass.
*This Him (Qu)
: Up until this point, whenever I've spoken of Yanzao or other people, in the Chinese version I've always used the word to, meaning "he" or "him." In Maqiao, a close synonym of to, is qu. The only difference is that to refers to someone faraway, meaning "that him over there"; qu is people you can see, nearby people, meaning "this him over here.", Maqiao people, I imagine, must think it ludicrous the way Mandarin-speakers from outside their area don't differentiate between "that him" and "this him." They use these words in jokes: for example, "Master there (to), Servant here {qu)" to ridicule someone who's humble to a person's face, arrogant behind a person's back-in this context, although the to and qu refer to the same person, they mean two very different things and couldn't be mixed up.
The ancients also used qu as a demonstrative pronoun. The Record of the Three Kingdoms contains the phrase: "My son-in-law came yesterday, he (qu) must be the thief." The ancients often used this word, which can also mean a small channel or stream, in poetry too: "For a spring (qu) to be as pure as this, there must be running water at its source"; "when the mosquito tries to bite an iron ox, there's nowhere he (qu) can sink his teeth…" (meaning not being able to get a word in edgeways). But these lines of poetry don't illustrate the distance-related meaning of qu. Privately, I've always felt that this stubborn fixation on differentiating spatial relationships linguistically perhaps stems purely from the meddlesome nature of Maqiao people-there's no particular need for it.
Until now, neither Mandarin Chinese (felt by those who use it to be quite adequate), nor English, French, Russian, and so on have made this distinction.
Returning to Maqiao all those years later, I felt my ears filling up once more with this qu, saw face after face of qu, both familiar and unknown to me. I didn't see Yanzao as qu. I started to remember how he'd often helped us carry firewood all those years back then, how we were forever fooling around with him, for example how we'd often steal his pesticide when he wasn't looking and mix it with grain to poison rats, ducks, and chickens, or just take it to the supply and marketing cooperative to exchange for flour, making him suffer endless injustices and abuse from the village cadres.
The picture that particularly stuck in my mind was what he looked like when anxious: his face would flood scarlet, the blue veins on his forehead would bulge out extravagantly, he'd flare up at whomsoever he saw, howling even more savagely at us to show his suspicions about our involvement in the conspiracy. But none of this fury prevented him from continuing to carry firewood or other stuff for us later on. All it took was for us to spot his shoulders were looking bereft, smile, gesture, and he'd head, muttering away to himself, toward the heavy object.
I didn't manage to find him. The villagers said someone in Longjia Sands had called him over to help out with some work. There was no need, in fact there was no way I could visit his home. His wife was completely awakened, couldn't even cook; when she was pulling up crops in the fields she'd just pull and pull until she fell over onto her great big behind into the mud-that's the sort of person she was!
But off I still went, off toward that pitch-dark door, while other people snickered away. Hanging on the walls I saw a few gourds holding seeds, along with several terrifying dried snakeskins, like multicolored wall-carpets. As anticipated, the lady of the house looked a complete mess, her cranium bizarrely outsized, as if everything she ate went straight to her head; an eye-catching scar, the cause of which I never discovered, shone on her forehead. She failed to laugh when she was meant to, then would suddenly let out a great guffaw when she shouldn't; I was a little confounded by the air of intimacy she struck up toward me, as if we were great friends of old. She brought me a bowl of tea, but I couldn't touch it; one glance at the greasy ring of black dirt round the edge of the bowl left me nauseated for some time afterwards. The floor inside the house of such a mistress would never be flat, would be more potted and bumpy than anything outside, and any slip in concentration when walking over it might leave you with a twisted ankle. Clothes of all different colors had merged into just one color, a kind of confused, murky grey, piled chaotically on the bed. When the mistress of the house suddenly pulled something out from under there, I almost jumped out of my skin. The thing turned out to have a nose and eyes: it was a child. It never actually made a sound, wasn't frightened by guffaws, remained oblivious to the flies climbing over its face, its eyes kept screwed shut.
I almost wondered if it were dead-had the mistress of the house brought it out just for show?
I hurriedly gave her twenty yuan.
This was rather stingy, of course, and rather hypocritical. I could have produced thirty yuan, forty yuan, fifty yuan, but I didn't. According to my unspoken calculations and assessment, twenty yuan was enough. What could this twenty yuan achieve? It wasn't quite sympathy for Yanzao; rather, it was payment for my own sense of yearning, a financial exchange for some kind of apology from me, buying back mental peace and contentment, buying back my own high self-esteem. If I imagined that twenty yuan could do all this, then that would be cheap indeed. If I imagined that twenty yuan could in an instant have me humming a ditty, fiddling with my camera, could immediately release me from this sickening, run-down slum, into the sunlight and birdsong, then that would be very cheap indeed. If I thought that twenty yuan could fill my subsequent memories with glorious rose-tinted poetry, then that really would be very cheap indeed.
I put down the bowl of tea, its cover unlifted, and left.
That evening, I stayed
in a room in the county government guest house. There was a knock on my door; when I opened it, I could see no trace of anyone in the pitch-darkness outside, but a single, solitary log charged headlong into my room. I finally made out that Yanzao had accompanied it in: he was even thinner than before, the angle of every joint in his body very acute, his whole body the strange juncture of a mass of acute angles. His Adam's apple protruded with particular sharpness, as if it were about to decapitate him. When he smiled, his fleshy gums bulged everywhere, revealing more red than white inside his mouth.
His shoulders, as ever, hadn't been empty: they'd carried this log for about ten li.
He'd clearly come in pursuit of me. From his gestures, it looked like he wanted to give me this log as a gift, in repayment for my sympathy for and remembrance of him. I expect his home contained nothing of greater value.
He still wasn't a great talker, stammering out a few brief, random, and rather indistinct syllables. Most of the time, he responded to my questions with nods or shakes of the head; this kept the conversation moving along. I later realized that this, still, wasn't the principal obstacle to our conversing; even if he hadn't been a mute, we still wouldn't have found anything to talk about. Apart from elaborating for a time on the weather or on today's harvest, apart from politely refusing this log that I had no way of carrying off with me, I didn't know what to talk about, what would light up his eyes, what would move him to expression beyond a nod or a shake of the head. He fell silent, making me sense yet more acutely the superfluity of words. Lacking for words, I still groped for words: you went to Longjia Sands today, I've been to your home today, I saw Fucha and Zhongqi today too, and so on, like that. I talked this meaningless babble, struggling to piece stretch after stretch of silence into something resembling conversation.
Fortunately, the guestroom had a black-and-white television which was just then showing an old kung-fu film. I put on a show of enthusiasm, repeatedly shifting my gaze onto the boxing high kicks of the kungfu warriors, young ladies, and old monks, as an excuse for my silence.
Luckily, some snot-nosed kid I didn't know pushed on the door a few times, giving me something to do: I asked his name, moved a stool over for him, chatted with a woman standing behind him about his age and rural family planning.
Something like half an hour passed. In other words, the minimum required duration for reunions and reminiscences had been achieved, and we could part. Half an hour isn't ten minutes, or five. Half an hour isn't too hasty, or gushy, too empty or indifferent; it enabled us to remember each other as friends. In the final analysis, I'd tolerated, endured the nameless, strong, grassy smell Yanzao's body gave off-the kind of smell that a certain kind of bamboo gives off after it's been cut- for this effortfully, unendingly long stretch of time; my mission would soon be accomplished.
He got up to say goodbye, and at my emphatic request once more picked up onto his back that heavy piece of wood, and reiterated his "uh-uh" noise at me, the noise that sounded as if he was about to vomit. There were a lot of things he wanted to say, I'm sure, but everything he said reminded you of vomiting.
As he went out the door, a tear suddenly glimmered in the corner of his eye.
The footsteps in the black night gradually grew distant.
I'd seen that teardrop. Despite the dimness of the light at that moment, that teardrop sank deep into my memory, so deep that I had no way of wiping it away with a blink of the eyelids. It had gleamed gold. When I quietly released my breath, when I relaxed my face from its frozen smile, I was unable to forget it. I had no sense of release. As I watched the kung-fu movie on the television, I couldn't forget it. As I ran a bowl of hot water for washing my feet, I couldn't forget it. As I squeezed onto the long-distance bus and yelled at a big fat man in front of me, I couldn't forget it. When buying the newspaper, I couldn't forget it. While going to the food market, umbrella in hand, and breathing in fishy smells, I couldn't forget it. While under gentle but unremitting pressure from two members of the intellectual elite to edit with them teaching materials on traffic regulation and go to the Public Security Bureau to buy the head of traffic's obligatory distribution rights, I couldn't forget it. When getting out of bed, I couldn't forget it.
The footsteps had disappeared into the night.
I knew this teardrop came from somewhere very distant. Distant people, separated by time and space, are often filtered in our memories into something cherished, touching, beautiful, become multicolored hallucinations in the imaginings of our souls. Once they come near, once they turn into a qu, a this him, standing before you, then everything changes completely. They may well morph into a hazy, uninteresting strangeness, swathed in layer upon layer of totally different experiences, interests, and types of discourse, swathed so tightly, so immovably that no breath of air can break in, a strangeness with nothing to say to me-just as I, perhaps, am totally different in their eyes, am totally unrelated to their memories.
I was looking for ta, that him, but could only find qu, this him.
I had to get away from this him, but I couldn't forget that him.
The clear distinction in Maqiao language between ta and qu highlights the great difference that exists between near and far, between fact and description, between fact at a distance and actual fact itself. That evening I saw very clearly that between these two words, as that strangely conjoined mass of acute angles, as that wood-bearing qu strode off to become ta, a silent teardrop gleamed.
*Confucian
: I gave Yanzao's wife twenty yuan. She was overjoyed to receive it, and, of course, immediately began spewing out politenesses: "Yanzao often talks about you all."
"How come you're so Confucian?"
And so on.
Confucian, in Maqiao dialect, referred to a sense of etiquette, of morals, to lofty intellect, to a slightly wordy seriousness. Generally speaking, this word carried no pejorative connotations.
But when you start thinking about how much hypocrisy has been dressed up over the years in the cloak of Confucian orthodoxy, it wasn't a word that made you feel too comfortable. What seemed to be philanthropy-that twenty yuan I just mentioned, for example-stemmed not from a deep sincerity, nor from natural instinct, but merely from cultural indoctrination. This is inevitably a rather depressing thought.
Beyond the framework of "Confucianism," can the sympathy and affection of genuine feeling exist between humans? Did Maqiao people replace "good," "decent," "warm-hearted," and other close synonyms with "Confucian" because they couldn't rid themselves of grave doubts over human nature? What feelings of fear or shame might these doubts produce in alms-givers?
*Yellowskin
: "Yellowskin" was a dog, an incredibly ordinary dog who lacked any other characteristics from which we could devise a name for it. No one knew where it came from and it seemed to have no owner. Because the Educated Youth had rather more grain to eat than other households, thanks to parental supplements, the Educated Youth's cooking pot gave off more appetizing smells. They hadn't managed totally to shake off wasteful habits, and dirty rice or spoiled vegetables would be flicked carelessly onto the ground or into the ditch. As day after day Yellowskin fed royally, it seemed to set down roots here, its ever-hopeful gaze fixed permanently on our bowls. It also got to know the voices of the Educated Youth. If you wanted to call it from far off, or set it onto some target, you had to talk in the Changsha city dialect. If you used Maqiao dialect, it'd gaze to left, to right, in front and behind, before it made any kind of a move. Maqiao people were furious when they discovered this.
It'd even gotten to know the sound of our breathing and footsteps. Sometimes we'd go out in the evening, to pay visits in nearby villages or to the commune to make a phone call; by the time we returned to the village the night would already be well advanced. We'd climb up over Tianzi Peak, with Maqiao down below, sunk into the gently flickering, hazy blue moonlight, still at least another five or six li away from us. And then, without us needing to say anything, still less to whistle,
there'd be a movement in faraway Maqiao, a sound of breakneck pattering would rise up from somewhere deep within the moonlight, skirting along the twisted path, closer and closer, faster and faster until it finally loomed into a silent black shadow that threw itself at our sleeves or collars in an expression of welcome.
It was like this every time. Yellowskin could catch and distinguish any sound from more than five or six li away, sparing no effort in its mad dash to meet us, always providing a source of warmth for us nocturnal travelers, offering the embrace of an advance party from home.
I don't know how it managed to survive after we left Maqiao. I only remember that after Uncle Luo was bitten by a mad dog, the commune launched a huge dog-catching campaign. Benyi said Yellowskin was the most vicious dog of all, the one most needing to be destroyed, and took action with a rifle himself, but failed to hit his target even with three shots. Left with a bleeding back leg, Yellowskin scurried off yowling into the mountains.
At nighttime, we'd hear a familiar cry, a dog barking on the hillside near the house, calling for nights on end. Probably it found it all very puzzling: it could hear our footsteps from far off on the horizon, so why couldn't we hear its nearby cries for help?
At that time, we were busy looking for jobs to take us away from Maqiao and paid no attention. We didn't even notice when its cries stopped.
When I revisited Maqiao, however many years later it was, I did actually recognize it, recognized its three-legged limp. It threw a completely expressionless look at me, closed its eyes once more and went back to sleep at the foot of a wall. It was old and scrawny, able to do nothing but sleep for more than half the time; neither could it understand Changsha dialect. When I extended a hand to stroke its head, it twitched with a violent start, then unceremoniously turned its head to take a great bite; it didn't really bite, of course, just clamped its teeth heavily around my hand, to express menace and hatred.
Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html Page 20
