Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  Strange to say, the brusquer her words, the more authoritative they became, and the harder it was for anyone else to put up any resistance. As Maqiao people would put it, this was called having sha, or "clout." Sha implied authority or extreme competence, a homonym for the word meaning "kill"; it also meant completion. People with "clout" could be understood as those who had the last word, the ones who had the deciding vote in conversation. Brother Wan's was the only female face with clout that I came across down in the countryside.

  In the presence of such clout, any interaction was pretty much no interaction at all; however well you knew her, you still seemed to be separated by 108,000 li. If she bumped into us, she acted as if she'd bumped into thin air; the gleam in her black eyes instantly skimmed over the tops of our heads, landing on some unknown spot in the distance. To begin with, we found this hard to get used to: offering an awkward greeting didn't feel right, but neither did offering no greeting at all; as time went on, however, we saw she acted the same toward everyone, so we accepted it as normal and didn't take it to heart. When I mentioned her name to people from Zhangjia Mill I came across, they'd smile: it's not just Maqiao Bow, there's no one even in the same village, the same stockade who's made friends with her, no one can make her out. She lives near us, but it's like she doesn't exist.

  So: it seemed she couldn't get close to anyone.

  She just represented official business, a concept, a symbol called Brother Wan that lacked any flicker of a smile, of emotion, warmth, or understanding, and so to many people she had an unreal quality; if you shut your eyes and thought about her, she was no more than an illusion, as if there, but not there. Some said she had a complicated past, that she was the illegitimate child of an important official, the seed of a work team leader planted during land reform; ten or so years later, her mother had brought her to the city, wanting to have a blood test and to voice her grievances. This had left her distinguished father with no choice but to keep her in the county seat and send her to high school, secretly providing for her living and education costs. I don't know how much truth there is in this. Some also said that when she'd been making noisy "Cultural Revolution" a few years ago in the county seat, she'd been a famous student leader who'd got to Beijing and Shanghai, who'd carried a rifle and gone to prison, who'd even been taken to a meeting in a car sent by the provincial military organization, who'd had her picture taken with some big cheese from the Central Committee. I don't know how much truth there is in this, either. Others said although there'd been no talk of marriage for Sister Wan even by the time she was twenty-five or twenty-six, in fact she had a long-term boyfriend, a former classmate of hers who'd joined the army. Every year she'd go to Guangdong for a time to see her boyfriend, people said. Unfortunately, the young lad had been misguided enough to join Lin Biao's clique in the 1971 coup d'etat; after it failed, he was thrown into prison and for several years no word of him was heard; his family and Brother Wan (who'd never been carried over the threshold) only received news after he'd died from illness in prison. Again, I don't know how much truth there is in this.

  To me, she'd forever be the stuff of stories and rumors. Her youth washed away amidst such stories and rumors, gradually acquiring the darkened complexion of middle age.

  Once, seeing her walking along the road, some uncouth young men decided to pick on her, to provoke her by singing low songs. Seeing that she was turning a deaf ear, they took revenge with filthy catcalls:

  "Hey, why so stuck-up? Reckon you're so chummy with the higher-ups, don't you?"

  "What kind of a flower d'you think you are, anyway? You must've been knocked up by that army guy ages ago, broken by that dead devil, or else how'd your tits get that big?"

  "Forget her missy-prissy act, I don't believe she doesn't want it. Look at how she walks, bum sticking out up to the sky, isn't she just asking for it?"

  A wave of laughter.

  She acted as if she hadn't heard.

  When Maqiao's Zhaoqing heard about this, he laughed at the lads, said they must've been really woman-crazy to pick on Brother Wan. They didn't even think who she was. D'you think you'd be able to stick (see the entry "Stick(y)") a woman with as much form as that?

  His underlying message being that form is a male thing; once a woman's got it, she no longer counts as a woman, or at least no longer counts as a pure woman, and lowness from young men becomes inappropriate. Taking this one step further, form is a kind of scourge that eliminates gender; excessively high form can wound a person, even jeopardize the birth of later generations.

  I don't know how much truth lay behind Zhaoqing's comments. But Brother Wan-no, Sister Wan actually-really did preserve her chastity and never married; when I left Maqiao she was still a powerful, lofty, single unit. But she didn't stay on in Maqiao for long: a year or so later her natural father's wife died and he was reinstated in his post, back from the May 7 Cadre School, so he had her recalled to the city.

  People said she was sent to a big state-owned factory in Gansu Province.

  *Jackal-Fiend

  : In the layered folds of Tianzi Peak was hidden a small stockade, called Chazi Bow, to reach which you had to cross a small stream. The water wasn't deep and a few stepping-stones poked out of the surface; with three steps and a couple of jumps, you were across. The stones crouched among the clumps of waterweed, often draped with moss; there was nothing special about them. I crossed over here several times on my way to Chazi Bow to paint Chairman Mao's quotations or to carry seedlings. Once, my traveling companion asked me if I'd noticed anything different last time I crossed the stream. I paused to think, then said I hadn't. Think again, he said. I thought again, and still said I hadn't. D'you remember a big, long rock in the water? he asked. I couldn't remember, and only his repeated promptings brought back a vague recollection. The last time I'd crossed the stream, there seemed to have been a long rock, probably near a clump of water willow in the middle of the current, that I'd stepped on, even squatted down on to drink a couple of mouthfuls of water. Maybe.

  My companion smiled. That wasn't a rock, he said. Oh no. The last time the river was up, a few young oxherders on the mountain had spotted that long rock suddenly stand erect, stir up a murky whirlpool in the stream, then travel downstream with the floodwater-turned out it'd been alive: a jackal-fiend.

  A jackal-fiend was a jackal fish, another name for which was jackal mute. Maqiao people said this fish didn't eat plants but other fish; it was the fiercest of all fish, but could also at times be the most stoic: people could tread over it for months on end without it moving.

  After this, whenever I saw big rocks or big lumps of wood, I'd always feel a tremor of anxiety or apprehension. I was worried they'd suddenly start writhing, come alive, scurry away. Anything covered in moss might suddenly crack open a cavernous black eye and wink nonchalantly at me.

  *Precious

  : Benyi had a nickname: "Dribbler." It was Zhihuang who picked out this nickname. While working on the construction site, during one mealtime he noticed Benyi's eyeballs bulging, his chopsticks scraping noisily against the side of his bowl, locked in life-and-death chopstick-to-chopstick combat with everyone else's in the plate of meat. In a tone of surprise, Zhihuang suddenly asked: "How come you're dribbling so much?" Discovering that everyone's gaze was fixed on him, Benyi wiped his mouth a couple of times, "what dribble?" He wiped off a string of saliva, but failed to wipe off the rice grains and drops of oil on his stubble.

  Zhihuang pointed at him and laughed, "You dribbled again!"

  Everyone else laughed too.

  Benyi tugged at his cuff to have another wipe but still didn't manage to wipe himself clean; he muttered something and looked a bit hangdog. By the time he'd picked up his bowl and chopsticks again, he discovered that in the blink of an eye the dish of meat had emptied. He couldn't stop himself peering around at the mouths surrounding him, as if with his own eyes he wanted to track down the whereabouts of those lumps of fat meat, as they sank into those rotten gut
s.

  He cast a somewhat baleful look at Zhihuang afterwards. "Eating is eating, what were you fussing about?"

  In general, Benyi wasn't unused to ridicule, he wasn't that good at protecting his own prestige outside public affairs. When confronted with less than respectful comments, sometimes he could only pretend to be deaf-he was actually rather deaf. But his sense of hearing was unusually sharp that day and he was very anxious about face because there were people from outside the village on the construction site: Commune Head He and Sister Wan from Zhangjia Mill. Zhihuang was just being precious, making a big thing of his dribble on an occasion like this.

  "Precious" meant stupid; "preciousness" meant stupidity. Zhihuang's preciousness was renowned throughout all Maqiao. For example, he didn't understand you had to give up your seat to cadres, he didn't understand how to fake when tamping down earth, it took him a very long time to figure out that women have periods every month. That he used to beat his wife so violently showed how precious he was. His wife later divorced him and went back to her family home in Pingjiang, but from time to time he'd send the dream-woman food and clothing-this showed he was even more precious. The three quarries on Tianzi Peak were gouged out by him, one by one, hammer blow by hammer blow. You could've built a mountain out of all the rocks he'd hammered out, and people bought them, hauled them away, used them who knows where. Even so, as soon as his thoughts began to wander, he'd start viewing all these rocks as his own property. A lot of people just couldn't make him come to his senses, couldn't do anything about how precious he was on this point. All they could do was rain curses down on him, and that was how he got the name "Precious Huang."

  Once he went to someone's home to clean the millstone, to recondition the old stone. While the two of them were idly chatting, the conversation got around to operas; the householder's opinion differed from his and they ended up arguing till they were red in the face. Just go, go, said the peasant, I don't want my millstone washing. Zhihuang gathered up his tools, got up, and had gone out the door when something occurred to him, and he turned back to add: "Whether you have it washed or not, this millstone still isn't yours. Just as long as you understand that."

  The peasant pondered this for some time, but still didn't understand anything at all.

  After Zhihuang had walked another few steps away, he turned around again in a fury: "Got that? It's not yours!"

  "Well, it's not going to be yours, is it?"

  "It's not mine either, it's my dad's."

  What he meant was, the millstone had been hammered out by his dad, so it was his dad's.

  There was another time when someone from Shuanglong Bow came to the quarry weeping and wailing, saying his uncle had died and he had no money for the funeral; his great fear was that his uncle wouldn't have a decent burial, and he begged Zhihuang to sell him a tombstone on credit. Zhihuang saw how pitifully he was sobbing and said, don't worry about credit. Just take it, give your uncle a decent burial. Having said this, he hauled out a piece of top-quality blue-and-white stone and chiseled out a stele, even tied it up with some rope and helped him carry it down the mountain, taking him back part of the way. By this time, the quarry had been reclaimed into the collective. When the accountant Fucha discovered that he'd given a memorial stone to someone for nothing at all, he insisted that he chase after him to get the money back, saying he just didn't have the right to take pity on people like that. The two of them had a big row. Zhihuang's face darkened: "I dynamited the rock, I broke it, I carried it, I chiseled it, so how come it belongs to the team leader now? What's the sense in that!"

  Fucha just docked him some work points and left it at that.

  Zhihuang didn't actually care about work points, even if he was being docked by a team cadre. He didn't care about anything apart from rocks, nothing that hadn't been produced by his own two hands had any great importance for him; he just couldn't find any reason to care. The year he and Shuishui got divorced, Shuishui's people came and almost cleaned his house out of stuff, but he didn't care a bit; he just watched them move things out, and even made them tea. He lived in the upper village, and on the mountainside not far away there was a grove of good bamboo. When spring came, the bamboo roots spread like wildfire underneath the ground, the shoots running everywhere: sometimes, as if by magic, a thick bamboo tip would sprout up in someone's vegetable garden, or under their bed, or in their pigsty. According to the general rule, the bamboo shoot belonged to whichever household it had run to. Zhihuang understood this, it was just that he had difficulty remembering to put it into practice. Once, when he went to his vegetable patch to build a melon hut, he saw a stranger there, a passer-by most likely, who fled in panic as soon as he saw him. He obviously didn't know the way, and jumped into the ditch instead of taking the main road; Zhihuang shouted out but couldn't get him to stop and watched, wide-eyed, as he stepped onto nothingness and then fell into the deep ditch, sinking up to his waist in sludge. He yowled at great volume, a big fat bamboo shoot rolling out of his shirt.

  It was obvious that this bamboo shoot had been dug up from Zhihuang's garden. But making as if he'd seen nothing, Zhihuang hurried over, deftly cut down a sapling with a wood knife he produced from behind his back, and lowered one end down into the ditch for the person in the ditch to grab hold of and slowly climb out.

  Seeing the knife in Zhihuang's hands, the passer-by blanched and started trembling all over. Seeing as Zhihuang didn't seem to be making any move, the man took a few tentative pigeon steps toward the main road.

  "Hey! Your bamboo shoot-" Zhihuang yelled out.

  The person almost tripped and fell.

  "Your bamboo shoot, don't you want it?"

  He threw the bamboo shoot over.

  The person picked the bamboo shoot up from the ground, stared at Zhihuang in stupefaction, but as he couldn't actually spot any trick, any danger, off he pelted like a madman and soon afterwards disappeared. Zhihuang watched his back view with some amusement, and it was only a good while later that the expression on his face turned to puzzlement.

  All the villagers laughed at Zhihuang afterwards, laughed that he hadn't just failed to catch the thief, he'd even cut down a tree and rescued the thief from out of the ditch. And the funniest thing of all was that he'd worried the thief would've had a wasted trip and made a gift of what was his own property. Zhihuang blinked at these comments, and just smoked his tobacco.

  *Precious (continued)

  : I've got a couple more things to say about "precious." I once saw Zhihuang bring a few people to the supply and marketing cooperative to put up two buildings. When the last piece of tile had been lowered into place, Benyi sprang up from somewhere or other to check on the quality of work, giving it a kick here, a prod there. His face suddenly clouded over: the stone wall hadn't been built level, he declared, and too little mortar had been used-everyone would have their work points cut.

  Zhihuang went to reason with him, to ask what on earth he was talking about. "I'm a stonemason, d'you think I don't know how much mortar to use?

  Benyi sniggered icily: "Are you Party Secretary or am I Party Secretary? What's more important: what Awakened Huang says, or what the Party Secretary says?"

  It looked like he had it in for Zhihuang.

  Bystanders tried to smooth things over, pulling Zhihuang to one side, placating Benyi. Zhaoqing tailed the Party Secretary everywhere: if he saw him going to the toilet hut, he'd wait outside the toilet hut; if he saw him going to the butcher's, he'd wait outside the butcher's. When he finally saw him leave the butcher's smoking a cigarette, he accompanied him on an inspection tour of the cucumbers and peppers along the side of the road, but still couldn't get so much as a backward glance out of him.

  The mealtime bell sounded in the cooperative. Benyi rubbed his hands in glee, "Good, good, off to Director Huang's to eat a nice bit of turtle!"

  The delight was written all over his face.

  Just as he was about to set off, a rat-a-tat noise suddenly erupted from so
mewhere around the just-completed granary, a rather irregular noise. People hurried over to report: unbelievable, unbelievable, Precious Huang's out there pulling down the building. Momentarily stunned, Benyi quickly propelled himself over to have a look and discovered that old Zhihuang had indeed worked himself into a lather; this solitary figure, swearing and cursing away, was savagely thwacking the wall with his double-ball hammer.

  The new wall was like beancurd. One piece of stone had already warped on one side, another piece had started to bend, and powdered debris cascaded in fine trickles. Old Huang of the cooperative was at his side, unable to get him to stop. Old Huang spotted Benyi: "What's going on here? What's going on here? What's the point in pulling down a good building? Even if you don't care about your labor, eh, I care about my bricks. Four cents a brick, doncha know?"

  Benyi cleared his throat, to announce his arrival on the scene.

  Precious Huang didn't grasp the significance of the cough.

  "Huang, you fartbrain!"

  Huang threw him a glance, but took no notice.

  "Why're you acting so precious!" Benyi had reddened to the base of his neck, "Whether we pull it down or not, you've got to wait till the cadres have looked into it… and then we'll see. You've got no speech rights. Go back home! All of you, you're going back with me!"

  Zhihuang spat into the palm of his hand, then picked up the stone hammer again. "I broke these stones off the mountain, I brought them here in my cart, I built the wall. If I pull 'em down, what's it to you?"

  Once he'd gotten onto the subject of stones, no one could reason with Zhihuang, no one could do anything about his baleful glares. Zhongqi stepped forward to give the Party Secretary some verbal support. "Huang, m'boy, that's no way to talk, the stone isn't the cooperative's, it isn't yours either. You belong to the team leader, so the stones you break belong to the team leader."