After everyone had stood before the portrait of the leader, the cadres issued a chorused order, at which the workforce suddenly emitted an earshaking, deafening roar, reciting from memory and in one breath five or six quotations from Chairman Mao. This gave us sent-down youth a real shock. None of us had thought that Maqiao people could memorize so much, and their revolutionary theory left our heads reeling.
After a while, when we discovered that they recited the same ones, just those few, every time, we relaxed.
As the sent-down youth had had some education, they very quickly and easily memorized far more of the leader's quotations and could roar them straight out in one go, keen to outdo the villagers' ferocious zeal. After the battle had been lost, the villagers became rather more subdued; whenever they reached for their cigarettes they'd first ask the sent-down youth if they wanted any; their voices when they recited, too, were rather tired, weak, and lackluster.
After the bellowing was done, it fell to one of the cadres, usually Benyi or Uncle Luo, to give the Chairman Mao on the wall a brief, concise report on that day's agricultural events, after which they'd timidly add: "Sleep well, hey, old man."
Or they'd say: "It snowed today, have you burned more wood, hey, old man?"
Chairman Mao, it seemed, had tacitly given his blessing. Only then would everyone disperse, their hands in their sleeves, bundling one after another out the door into the whistling winter wind.
Once, Zhaoqing lurked at the back taking a nap, and after everyone else had gone, he was left squatting in a corner. Not having noticed either, Fucha's family shut the door and went to sleep. Only when it got to midnight did they hear someone shouting and yelling: you villains, you! D'you want to freeze me to death?
Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, all Fucha could say was, blame the Light the Sky Red for being so low on oil you couldn't see in the dark.
From this it should be clear that after daily study of this kind, everyone was pretty well versed in revolutionary theory. What was rather more particular to Maqiao people, however, was the way they produced some more unusual quotations from Chairman Mao: "Chairman Mao says this year's rape plants are really coming along," for example; "Chairman Mao says we should economize on grain but we can't eat porridge every day"; "Chairman Mao says if landlord elements are dishonest, then we should string 'em up"; "Chairman Mao says Shortie Zhao isn't sticking to family planning, he only talks about quantity not quality of children"; "Chairman Mao says whoever pours water into the pig dung should be investigated and fined a mouthful of grain!" and other such phrases. Even after I made very wide inquiries, no one knew the source of these higher instructions, neither did anyone know who first broadcast such remarks. But people treated them with a deep seriousness and used them endlessly in conversation.
There was nothing strange about this, of course. When I later read up on Chinese literary history, I discovered that Maqiao people had done nothing that several Confucian masters hadn't done earlier. These individuals would insist on "consulting the sages," but in fact would as often as not just fabricate sagelike words as coming from the mouths of Confucius, Laozi, Xunzi, or Mencius to frighten people. Yang Xiong of the Han Dynasty used a great many quotations from Confucius, but when people later came to check them, hardly any were found to be genuine.
*Form
: "Form" was a word in common use, close in meaning to words such as "character" and "quality," without being limited to these alone. Whether or not a person had form, or had lost form, was the basic yardstick by which Maqiao people judged others. A person's qualifications, study record, background, position, reputation, authority, courage, insight, ability, wealth, good or bad conduct, even reproductive capability and so on, could all cause his "form" to change. Form and speech rights were linked together in external-internal, cause-effect relations: people with form naturally had speech rights; people with speech rights definitely had form. Fucha's same-pot uncle Mingqi, widely known as Uncle Mingqi, had studied professional rice, bread, and cake catering in Changle. When the commune had a big meeting, they'd often ask him to make the steamed bread; this gave him great form. Whenever such an opportunity came up, Uncle Mingqi would change to Father Mingqi, and it was not only Mingqi himself who felt he had face, all the villagers in Maqiao felt they had face; if they bumped into people from other villages passing by their village, whether these people knew him or not, Maqiao people would always, consciously and unconsciously, reverentially invoke his name. If the listener's face drew a complete blank, or didn't show any particular interest, Maqiao people's faces would instantly fall and their eyes drip contempt: you don't even know about Father Mingqi? they'd say. If they'd been about to treat you to a cup of hot tea, their hospitality might well turn into a bowl of stone-cold colored tea, simply due to your ignorance or indifference. After Mingqi had finished making the steamed bread and returned home, he liked to take a turn around the village, his hands behind his back, and point out things that didn't please his eye. Even naughty children would be rather awe-struck at the steamed-bread smell that enveloped his body, and meekly hang their heads in silence. Once, a few quiet words from Mingqi intimidated a lad named "Three Ears" out of catching mud loaches: we Educated Youth were amazed to see him simply pick up his bucket and slosh them back in. Three Ears wasn't normally afraid of anything at all. "How come you're so wellbehaved today?" I leaned over and whispered in his ear. A look of forebearance on his face, he muttered, as if his nerve had deserted him by the time it reached his mouth: "He's got form, you know, I'm not going to go asking for trouble today."
It was only then that I began to realize, although they were all Maqiao people, they lived very differently, according to whether or not they had form.
Old Uncle Luo had an adopted son who sent him money from barbarian parts-which amounted to sending him form. Otherwise, if he'd only had his age going for him, he'd have had barely enough form for Benyi to give him the time of day.
Zhaoqing couldn't make steamed bread, nor did he have an adopted son who sent him money, but he produced six sons almost without blinking, which gave his form a bit of a boost. When dividing sweet potatoes or beans in the village, the scales controlled by the cadres would always be tipped a bit when it got to his share, as a marker of respect to him.
Of course, some temporary varieties of form could produce comic results. For example, when the Educated Youth nicknamed Master Black returned from the city, he swapped a mountain chicken with Zhongqi for the bottle of Dragon soy sauce he'd brought back. This kind of soy sauce was a brand-name, tribute soy sauce, people said, that was sent every year to Beijing to make Chairman Mao's red braised pork; in the provinces, you had to be at least a county-level magistrate before you'd get a taste of it. When the news broke, Zhongqi enjoyed half a month's form, for half a month his coughs and throat-clearings enjoyed a new depth and authority. But even though he used the soy sauce drop by halfdrop, in the end he couldn't withstand the almost daily requests from his neighbors on all sides, the endless visits from the commune cadres and Benyi; as the bottle emptied by the day, his form fell like a boat on subsiding waters, until it sank back to its original level. He begged Master Black to swap him another bottle of Dragon brand soy sauce, this time prepared to pay two mountain chickens. Master Black was full of promises, but he never produced the goods; there was probably something of a premium on tribute soy sauce in the city too.
Zhongqi also thought of asking Father Mingqi, to open up an alternative path to finding Dragon brand soy sauce, to finding form. But Father Mingqi's form was so vast and Zhongqi so overcome by stammering that he failed repeatedly to find an opportunity to sidle up and talk to him. It was round about this time that Mingqi was busy in the commune making steamed buns, and directing all sorts of things in the village. If the team cadres were holding a meeting and saw him come in, they'd make room for him without even thinking about it. Listening to Benyi allocate work, he didn't feel in the least bit superfluous, nodding or shaking his head, expressing approval or disa
greement; sometimes he'd interrupt before someone had finished talking, most of what he said totally unrelated to public affairs in Maqiao, related only to how the weather at the moment was too cold and the dough wasn't rising, to the shoddy workmanship at the yeast factory, to how the yeast wasn't working and so on-all steamed-bun-related matters. The team cadres would listen meekly, making an occasional contribution to his discussion of professional catering techniques. If one day he got carried away and held up the cadres for one or two hours, it didn't matter and no one ever asked him to leave-because he had form.
The great pity of the matter was that form easily went to a person's head; in the case of someone like Mingqi, who got form not through his own strengths but through a lucky chance, it was particularly easy to go mad with the success. The fame of his steamed buns spread far and wide, and when there was a big meeting in the county he'd sometimes be called upon to go and do the catering. On whichever occasion it was he went to the city, he met Widow Li, a floor-cleaner at the county government guesthouse, and the two of them became entangled in the course of various encounters. To cut a long story short, the widow had grown up in the city and knew how many beans made five, knew a few tricks in bed; in the meantime, the white steamed buns that Mingqi brought from the kitchens kept hunger at bay for the widow and her son; and so, as time went by, a pact of true love was forged. In the end, Mingqi finished what he'd started, sneaking out to the Li family a whole bag of special batch "Wealth and Power" flour (reserved exclusively for the head of the County Committee) and taking a pig's head with him while he was at it.
When the news got out, Widow Li was stripped of her post as floorsweeper, and afterwards lived by scavenging rubbish. Mingqi (minus the title "Father") returned dejectedly to Maqiao, never again to enjoy the opportunity of making steamed buns in the county seat or in the commune. His status in the village, moreover, went into dramatic decline: his appearance gradually became more and more wretched, his neck always shrunk down into his hunched shoulders whether it was hot or cold, as if he wanted to bury his face. He was, of course, stripped almost entirely of his speech rights. Whether it was a meeting for cadres or for every member of the commune, it was never his turn to speak. If there was some matter on which everyone had to express an opinion, he would stick his head out in panic, his voice about as loud as the buzz of a fly or mosquito, provoking Benyi to holler: "Speak up! Speak up! It's not like you haven't been fed!"
He was often assigned the hardest, most exhausting work, and his work points were lower than other people's.
Maqiao people hated iron that failed to become steel, they hated Mingqi for his greed and lust, for cutting the whole village off, just like that, from its gleaming portion of glory; it was as if everyone in the village had stolen a bag of flour and a pig's head. So they dealt with him by unwritten rule: they'd hiss "lost form" at him, just the once, driving him into chronic dejection and depression; before we left Maqiao to return to the city, his accumulation of melancholy had turned to illness and his soul had returned to the underworld. This rather brutal process taught me that "form" could also be collectivized. Mingqi's form took on the importance it did precisely because he was such a rare treasure for Maqiao, precisely because it'd become a source of capital shared by all the villagers in Maqiao. His casual throwing away of his form constituted a crime committed against everyone in the village.
Returning to Maqiao many years later, as I walked along the ridges between the fields I heard a child singing a folksong under a tree:
Mingqi bagged a wild bird,
Caught in the act he was,
They took him to Crotch County
Pulled off his pants, ripped his clothes
The police beat his bottom,
If you blow your own trumpet,
Once the trumpet's blown,
You'll be left with a bright red bum…
My heart skipped a beat. I'd never imagined that even all those years later Mingqi would still live on in Maqiao, in the folksongs of Maqiao's next generation, that such an immortal oral monument would have been erected to his bag of flour, to his loss of form, to his decline and fall. I expect this monument will be passed on from mouth to mouth, generation to generation in Maqiao, until Benyi, Fucha, or others, and I, and even the child singing under the tree, are no longer in this world.
As long as language still exists, perhaps he will always live on, deep into the future.
*Clout
: Maqiao women's form usually came from men. For women who were already married, if their husband's family had form then they themselves had form, if their husband's family lost form then they themselves lost form; for women who weren't yet married, form was determined mainly by their fathers, after they no longer had a father, their form depended on their elder brothers. There were, of course, exceptions. One I encountered once at the road-works construction site. A real free-for-all it was there, with laborers from every village come to help out, all fighting for tools, for earth, for rice and vegetables. The whistling winter wind billowed up wave upon wave of scree, muddying the sky and the heavens into a great yellowed expanse. Those hauling earth, tamping the ground, and pulling wheelbarrows were all blown around by the wind like dancers, like a shadow play without sufficient light, the old and young indistinguishable from each other.
There were no women on the construction site and the laborers took a piss or a crap whenever they wanted. I'd just finished shaking off the last couple of drops when I spotted some people who looked like cadres come to measure the earth and draw up lines of lime, among them someone wearing an old army uniform, a cotton cap over the head, a scarf over half the face, at that moment using a bamboo pole to direct two other people to run back and forth pulling the rope. Against interference from wind-noise and the high-pitched loudspeaker, this person was yelling something at someone, but seeing they hadn't heard, threw down the bamboo pole and ran over, hurling down the hillside a big stone that had been lying across the lime. I was pretty impressed by this cadre's show of strength: if it'd been me, I'd have had to call at least one other person over to give me a hand.
As soon as Fucha saw this person, he started to look worried: "What we've done, will it… do?" he asked, twisting his hands.
The person stuck the bamboo pole a few times into the land by the landfill area, then took out the pole, measuring how deep it'd gone into the ground. "Still needs tamping down a layer."
Fucha's tongue hung out.
"What about the people Commune Head He asked you to send?" the person asked.
Fucha pointed at me, then at another Educated Youth.
The person walked over and stuck a hand out at us. This was clearly a gesture that came from outside Maqiao; I stood there, stupefied, until I realized this was called shaking hands and we should also stick out our hands.
I was slightly surprised. This person's hand was not as bony and sinewy as I had anticipated, it was even rather soft. I took another look at that face the size of a palm, at its eyes with their extraordinarily big black pupils, which possessed an air of delicate prettiness as they fluttered open and shut, and which struck me as somewhat out of the ordinary.
We followed this person to the command office to help edit a quick report. On the way, we heard people address this person as "Teacher Wan," "Brother Wan," but on the whole this person wouldn't reply, would at most nod in the direction of the speaker, or give a faint smile. "This guy's got top form," my companion Educated Youth muttered to me, not expecting Teacher Wan/Brother Wan, a few meters away, to catch what he said. Wan turned, came to a halt, fixed shiny black eyes on my companion as a silent warning, scoured me with a sharp, knifelike stare, as a punishment to warn me off future transgressions, then steadily walked away.
We hadn't imagined this person's ears would be so sharp, nor that the return fire would be so swift or fierce. This struck us as a bad omen: you had to be extra careful around someone like this.
It wasn't until that afternoon that we discovered this W
an person was actually a woman. When he went off to relieve himself, my companion saw that as Wan took off the cotton cap, a head of long black hair rolled out. My companion was so surprised he didn't even visit the toilet hut but ran straight back to report, holding in his urine. Amazed by this, I also went to have a look and saw that Wan Whoever-it-was, squeezed in among a table of men, really had started out life a baby girl. According to local rules, women didn't eat at the table. As time went on, we got used to this rule, to the way things should look, and we actually found the discovery of a woman's face in front of a dining table surprising, even discomforting, as if someone had rubbed sand in our eyes.
It was only later that I discovered Wan was from Zhangjia Mill. Her full name was Wan Shanhong, and she'd taught in a locally run school for two years but hadn't wanted to stay there, so she returned to the village to study agriculture for two years-she could even plough just like a man. She was a proper high school graduate and a member of the commune youth group propaganda committee; whenever there was anything important to be done in the commune, they'd generally ask her to come and help write or add things up, people said they even wanted to train her to be a successor to someone or other. Because of this, people still respectfully called her "Teacher Wan" or "Propaganda Committee Wan." She didn't like the young men calling her "Brother Wan" but her objection was only one voice against many and popular feeling couldn't be resisted, so as time went by she had to put up with this name. I must admit that Brother Wan without her cap was not half bad looking: she had a good figure and there was a strong line to her jaw, from ear to chin. She walked back and forth through crowds of men like a sharp scythe cutting back and forth through the grass. But she didn't seem to be much of a talker: during a winter spent with us repairing the highway, she did little more than fling instructions at us in her slightly raspy intonation, a few "okays," "no goods," "let's eats"; and when she spoke, her face was as expressive as a papaya.
Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html Page 23
