Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  *Speech Rights

  : Benyi said that people in the provincial capital didn't drink pounded tea, didn't know how to weave cloth shoes, that many families-imagine how pitiful!-hadn't enough cloth for pants and wore shorts no bigger than a palm, like the girdle that women wore on horseback, pulled in agonizingly tight at the crotch. Because of this, Maqiao people brimmed over with sympathy for city people and whenever they saw us Educated Youth about to return to the city, they'd always be urging us to buy more local cloth to take back and make up a few pairs of pants for our parents. Thinking this very funny, we told them there was no shortage of cloth in the cities, and if shorts were made on the small side, it was to fit better, to look good, or for convenience when playing sports.

  Maqiao people just blinked and looked doubtful.

  As time went by, we discovered that it didn't matter what we said, that we couldn't dismiss Benyi's rumors as false-because we had no speech rights.

  There isn't really a close synonym for "speech rights" in standard Mandarin, but it was a word of particular importance in the Maqiao vocabulary, signifying linguistic power, or in other words the right to claim a very definite portion of the sum total of linguistic clout. Possessors of speech rights bore no particular external marker or status, but everyone was aware of their existence as linguistic leaders, was aware of the force that sprang from their shadowy authority. They had only to open their mouths, or cough, or direct a look, and those standing around would immediately shut their mouths and listen respectfully, not daring to interrupt randomly the flow of words, even if they disagreed. This kind of hush was the most usual manifestation of speech rights, the most tacit, coordinated, voluntary submission to linguistic dictatorship. The words of someone without speech rights, by contrast, were as dust and nothingness: anything they said was wasted breath, no one cared what they said, didn't even care whether they had the chance to speak. Their words were inevitably scattered and lost in a wasteland of indifference, never to gain any response. When such occurrences became frequent, it wasn't easy for someone to keep up their vocal confidence, or even to preserve an ordinary kind of competence in speech production. The way that Yanzao ended up practically a mute represented an extreme example of loss of speech rights.

  The topics of conversation covered by the possessors of speech rights were taken up by the general multitude; their expressions, sentence structures, tones of speech, and so on fell into common usage; power was constituted in this linguistic diffusion, was realized and affirmed by these processes of linguistic expansion and outward radiation. The term "speech rights" exposes the linguistic basis of power. A mature governing regime or a powerful faction will always have its own powerful linguistic system, is always accompanied by a series of official documents, meetings, ceremonies, lecturers, key texts, memorials, theories, propaganda slogans, works of art, even new place-names or new reign titles, thus acquiring and establishing its own speech rights throughout all society. Power sources that fail to acquire their own speech rights are the rabble who follow those with wealth or might, bandits who manage to cut down the government troops a few times on their progress toward the capital city: even if they briefly gain the upper hand, their success is inevitably short-lived.

  This point is neatly illustrated by the great stock the holders of power set by documents and meetings. Documents and meetings are both the key to safeguarding power and the best way of reinforcing speech rights. Mountains of paperwork and oceans of meetings are a fundamental or integral part of, and genuine source of excitement within, the bureaucratic way of life. Even if meetings are river upon river of empty talk, even if they haven't the slightest real use, most bureaucrats still derive a basic level of enjoyment from them. The reason is very simple: it's only at these moments that the chairman's podium and the mats of the listening masses will be placed in position, that hierarchies will be clearly demarcated, giving people a clear consciousness of the existence (or lack thereof) and degree (large or small) of their own speech rights. Only here do the speech rights of those with power and influence, on passing through the ears of the masses, through notebooks, megaphones, and so on, enjoy support from coercive forms of dissemination and broadcasting. Only in this kind of an environment do those with power and influence, immersed in the language with which they themselves are familiar, become aware that their power is receiving the warm, moist, nurturing, nourishing, safeguarding protection of language.

  All this is often far more important than the actual aims of the meeting.

  And by the same basic principle, those with power and influence are filled with a natural sense of vigilance and animosity toward language they are not themselves used to or familiar with. During the Cultural Revolution, Marx and Lu Xun enjoyed the highest respect in China, became the only two out of a few last, great figures who could still be found in the empty, deserted bookshops. And even so, reading Marx and Lu Xun then was still extremely dangerous. A book of Marx's that I had in the countryside nearly became proof of my "reactionary" crimes- "That Educated Youth's reading a book by Marx," the commune cadre said, "not a book by Chairman Mao! What on earth is he thinking? What on earth is he feeling?"

  I realized that the commune cadres neither meant nor dared to oppose Marx; neither did they know what that book by Marx (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) said, whether it subverted their controls over forestation or family planning or evening out resources. No, they had no idea about all this, and neither did they much care. They glared and raged at any language they didn't understand very well, feeling their speech rights implicitly challenged and threatened.

  Throughout the twentieth century, as modernism broadened its influence, abstract painting, absurdist theater, stream-of-consciousness novels, and surrealist poetry disrupted the status quo, bringing antiorthodox cultural phenomena such as hippies, feminism, rock music, and the like in their wake. Interestingly, as these new phenomena emerged, almost every single one was viewed as a sinister political conspiracy. Bourgeois newspapers attacked Picasso's abstract paintings as "evil Soviet trickery aimed at the downfall of Western democratic society," as "propaganda for Bolshevik ideology," while Elvis Presley and John Lennon, the representative member of the Beatles, were suspected by churches and governments alike of being "underground spies for the Communist Party," of aiming to "corrupt the younger generation, to destroy them before the battle with communism had begun"-their music was continually prohibited on US army bases in Europe. All Red regimes, meanwhile, do pretty much the same thing, and over the last few decades all modern art, whether high or low, has been officially denounced, defined in official documents and university textbooks as the "avant-garde of peaceful evolution," as "the declining and degenerate ideology of the Western bourgeoisie," as "spiritual toxins aimed at poisoning youth," and so on.

  These reactions represent, of course, a defensive excess. This fact was later gradually recognized by both sides, which, to greater or lesser degrees, relaxed their levels of surveillance, even became willing to make use of the expressive power of these various new cultural forms for their own purposes, using rock music to praise Yanan (Mao's revolutionary center in Northwest China) or Nanniwan (a barren area of Northwest China where the Communist army struggled for self-sufficiency), for example; or using abstract paintings to promote the export of clothes.

  Of course, it would be overly ingenuous to regard these reactions merely as forms of defensive excess. Any unfamiliar form of language, in fact, is an uncontrollable form of language, and hence an uncontrollable form of power. Regardless of its external political markers, it will exercize a real centrifugal force, creating obstructions and interruptions within information channels, resulting, to varying degrees, in the weakening, in the dissolution of the speech rights of power-holders.

  Maqiao people, it seemed, had achieved a penetrating understanding of power-holding, had seen through it all a long time ago, in summarizing power thus as speech rights, as talking.

  Let's see who in Maqi
ao had speech rights:

  1. Women didn't generally have speech rights. They were used to not interrupting when men were speaking and just stayed on the sidelines, breast-feeding a child or stitching shoe soles. The cadres never asked them to join in the big Village Meetings of the People.

  2. Young people didn't have speech rights. From a very young age, they got used to hearing age-old admonitions such as "children listen as grown-ups talk," and would always let older people have their say first. Even if they disagreed or, more often than not, muttered behind their backs, it would have been an unthinkable heresy to talk back to their faces.

  3. Poor families didn't have speech rights. The wealthy could huff and puff, while the poor could only wheeze: feeling they lacked dignity, poor people were usually unwilling to show their faces where there were a lot of people about, and so inevitably missed out on a great many opportunities for talking to others. And there was another custom in Maqiao: those in debt, even if they only owed half a pint of unhusked grain, weren't allowed to take important roles at village weddings and funerals, such as master of ceremonies, master of sacrifices, matron of honor, so as not to bring the host family bad luck. The place nearest the tea cabinet, by the brazier in each household, was the most prominent place to sit and was called the head place; no guest except the creditor could casually sit down there, unless an insult to the host was intended. All these regulations ensured that speaking power was amassed in the wealthy fists of those with lending power.

  It appears from the above that speech rights were decided by a combination of factors, such as sex, age, and wealth. Even more important, of course, were political factors-Benyi, as the local Party Secretary, was Maqiao's highest power holder, and whenever he spoke his voice would boom out with gravitas, with solemn pledges, as if he meant what he said, as if no protest would be brooked. As time went on, bellowing became something of a habit with him; his throat would often be worn out, producing more wheeze than voice, but still he'd be blathering all over the place. Even when walking alone, hands behind his back, he couldn't keep his mouth shut and sometimes ended up talking to himself, posing questions he answered himself. "Could beans grow here?" "Go fuck a dragon, the ground's so wet the roots'd go rotten." "If we mixed in some silt that might do the trick." "What're you doing hauling stuff all over the place? If you've got time to haul mud, you'd be better off growing a bit more grain on the hill." "Awakened son of a…"

  All this, in fact, was a solo performance by him, and him alone. If you ever walked behind him for any length of time, you'd discover that he never shut up, that he argued indefatigably with himself, that he was capable of conducting entire debates single-mouthedly.

  People called him "Big Gong Yi" and knew that things would be noisy wherever he went. The commune cadres were all rather deferential toward "Big Gong Yi." At one commune meeting, Benyi rolled up as if he were running the whole show, as usual going off first to poke his nose into the kitchen to check up on the smells being produced. Looking for a cigarette light from the stove, his face immediately fell when he spotted the foot basin, full of nothing but cut-up radish, without a single meat bone in sight: "What's this, then? Where's your feeling for poor and lower-middle peasants! Hmm?" Boiling with rage, he pushed up his sleeves and strode off, ignoring the meeting, straight to the butcher's in the supply and marketing cooperative to ask whether they had any meat. The butcher said the meat had just all been sold out. He lifted up a broadsword: grab me a pig, grab a pig over here, he said, chop chop! Commune regulations only permitted one pig to be killed every day, said the butcher. So, when the commune said we could eat for free from now on, did you believe that too? said Benyi, referring back to one of the unreliable promises made by the Communist state during the Great Leap Forward.

  Wanyu, who just happened to be sitting nearby, sniggered: "Goody, goody, count me in for a bowl of pork soup today too."

  Benyi glared: "What're you doing, sitting here?"

  Wanyu blinked: "Good question, what am I doing sitting here?"

  Short-tempered at the best of times, Benyi banged the broadsword: "Look at you, you useless loafer, what're you doing around here, when it's not New Year's or a holiday? You'd better come back with me, and look sharp about it! If you haven't hoed those acres of rape plants on the north hill by the end of today, I'll get the masses to struggle you to death!"

  Wanyu wet his pants in terror at the sound of the broadsword and slipped out the door as quickly as he could; but a while later, his shiny scalp timidly poked back in: "You-you… what was it you just wanted me to do?"

  "You deaf or something? I want you to hoe the rape plants!"

  "Got it, got it. Keep your shirt on."

  His shiny scalp retreated once more. Benyi finally calmed down and had rolled up a twist of tobacco when he heard a movement behind him; there, as he turned to look, was Wanyu's face again, smiling into contortions, "Sorry, I was in too much of a flap just then to hear right, you wanted me to hoe… hoe…"

  I reckon he must've been so frightened he couldn't hear a single thing properly.

  Only when Benyi roared the words RAPE-PLANTS into his ear was he finally rid of him.

  After a series of oinks were heard from behind the shop, Benyi's color finally improved somewhat. He loved slaughtering pigs more than anything else and was very expert at it. After another round of oinks, he returned to the stove for a smoke, his face covered in splotches of mud and hands stained with blood. That same broadsword had just cleanly, neatly dispatched the pig. He kept careful watch at the butcher's shop, until it was time to invite a few of the lads from the supply and marketing cooperative to gather around the sizzling-hot cooking range; he ate some pork and drank some pig's blood soup before contentedly wiping his greasy mouth and belching with repleteness.

  Despite his nonattendance at the meeting, the commune cadres didn't dare criticize him. When he returned to the hall, all red in the face, the cadres still felt obliged to invite him onto the stage to speak-a sufficient demonstration of the prodigious extent of his speech rights.

  "I'm not going to talk for long today, just a couple of points I've got," he said.

  This was the routine public announcement with which he prefaced every speech. Whether he in fact spoke on two, or three, four, five, or even more points, whether he produced two or three words or a lengthy disquisition, he would always declare in advance that he only wanted to speak on two points.

  He talked and talked, blasting out smells of meat soup, then talked about his past experiences in the Korean War, made reference to his military prowess in fighting American soldiers as evidence that tasks such as irrigation repairs, crop planting, pig raising, and family planning would, could, must be achieved! He was always calling American tanks "tractors." On the 38th Parallel, he said, the earth shook when the American tractors arrived, scared the crap out of you, it did. But the volunteer troops were all heroes, real men: at 300 meters, no one fired, 150 meters, still no one fired, 100 meters, still no one fired, then finally, when the American tractor was right in our faces, one round of fire blew the fucker up!

  He looked all around, very pleased with himself.

  Once, Commune Head He corrected him: "It's not a tractor, it's called a tank."

  He blinked: "Isn't it called tractor? I didn't get much education, I'm illegitimate."

  What he meant was he was illiterate, that it wasn't surprising he couldn't distinguish clearly between tanks and tractors. He studied the word tank with some application but by the next meeting, once he'd got through the stressful 300-150-100 meters bit, he slipped as usual into saying tractor.

  His confusion about such terms had no effect whatsoever on the respect listeners paid to his comments: "People only die of illness, not of work"; "Great natural disasters, bumper harvest; small natural disasters, small harvests"; "Everyone should work on their thinking, on making progress, on the world"^ none of this made much sense, but because they were said by Benyi, they gradually entered into common usag
e, were passed on. His hearing, too, was rather poor. Once, listening to the commune cadres, he heard "We must grasp the key to the road ahead" as "We must grasp the tree on the road ahead," which was obviously wrong, but since "tree" came straight out of Benyi's mouth, Maqiao people trusted it implicitly and instead laughed at us Educated Youth, saying we had to grasp the "key" to the road ahead-what was that supposed to mean?

  *Light the Sky Red

  : The 1960s and the 1970s were the decades of "Light the Sky Red." "Light the Sky Red" was a kind of big kettle lamp, with two long kettle spouts sticking out, from which protruded candlewicks as thick as a little finger and that burned cotton or diesel oil, spewing forth rolls of black smoke as they did so. During these decades, one of these lamps would often be hauled on a long bamboo pole to alleviate the heavy darkness when we were breaking in virgin mountain land, sowing grain in the fields, assembling the masses for a meeting, rallying a team for a march. These were decades during which there weren't enough hours of daylight and frenzied activity spilled over into nighttime. The blacksmiths produced batch after best-selling batch of "Light the Sky Red" lamps. Whenever cadres discussed a commune's or a team's revolutionary performance, they'd talk in these terms: "Just look at them, they use up at least ten Light the Sky Reds when they get going!" When I was sent down to Maqiao, I was just in time for the "demonstrate loyalty" craze. In showing loyalty to the leader, one indispensable daily activity consisted of going to Fucha's living room every evening. Only his room was that bit bigger, big enough to contain the entire production team workforce. One dim Light the Sky Red was hung up too high, leaving the people beneath as no more than hazy black shadows, impossible to make out. If you bumped into someone, you couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman.