Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  Fucha blinked silently; no one else knew what to do either, at that moment. A second ago, we'd been roaring with laughter, just winding Zhongqi up-none of us'd thought he'd be held to what he'd written, that he'd be forced into producing a silver bracelet.

  But Zhongqi wasn't so easily put down, and he subsequently started to stamp his approval around even more recklessly. If Benyi or a commune cadre happened to take out a page of anything, he'd rush over and scribble "agreed," straight off. Agreeing had become a habit with him and no sheet of paper could escape his fountain pen, could escape his unfettered powers of ratification and approval. Fucha, who liked things to be neat and tidy, who preached orderliness, could only try desperately to avoid him: as soon as he heard the clacking of his shoes, as soon as he saw his face, he'd gather up all material of a papery nature, so as to avoid giving him the slightest opportunity to interfere. He had to pretend not to have seen, and would angrily turn and wander off somewhere else, looking for something else he could agree to, grabbing letters to us Educated Youth from out of the postman's hands, for example. As a result, every letter of mine carried his stamp of agreement to the recipient's name and address, sometimes they even carried his bright red fingerprint.

  I found him as intensely irritating as Fucha did and resolved to find an opportunity to deal with him. One day at noon, as he napped, we stole his fountain pen and threw it into the pond.

  Two days later, a ballpoint pen appeared in his pocket, its metal clip glittering away-it looked like there was nothing anyone could do.

  *The Ghost Relative

  : Many years later, it was rumored someone in Maqiao had recognized a relative from a past life. When I was in Maqiao, I'd heard stories like this and after returning to the city I heard that incidents of a similarly bizarre nature had taken place in other parts of Hunan. I didn't place much credence in them. A friend of mine, a scholar of folklore who's done specialized research on the subject, has even taken me off to places he's investigated and pointed out to me example after example of living proof, making each and every one of them relate their past lives. I still felt such occurrences lay beyond my comprehension. So, of course, you can imagine my amazement when something like this happened to people I knew.

  By then it was the 1980s: a young man from Maqiao, working at a bean curd shop in Changle, found himself destitute, had lost everything- even down to his underpants-at cards. He tried calling on some acquaintance of his, but as soon as they saw him they bolted the door fast, gesticulating vigorously at him to leave.

  He was so hungry that black stars were appearing before his eyes. Fortunately, one person still had a heart-a girl from the Golden Happiness Tavern, only thirteen years old, called Hei Danzi. While her boss was out, she secretly pressed a few buns on the young man, and two yuan besides. "And what d'you call this?" the young man boasted to his gang of confreres. "This is the magic of Brother Sheng!"

  Shengqiu was his name, and he was the son of Benyi, Maqiao's former Party Branch Secretary.

  In time, the boss of the Golden Happiness Tavern found out what was going on, that Hei Danzi was often helping Shengqiu out, and suspected that she was abusing her position, giving away things from the tavern. After carrying out a very careful stock check, the boss failed to discover any deficit or goods missing from the shop; but it still struck him as strange: why should a mangy, unemployed vagrant be worth such care and attention from Hei Danzi? As a distant uncle of Hei Danzi's, he felt he should cross-examine her about it and called her to him for questioning.

  Hei Danzi lowered her head and wept.

  "What are you crying about, what are you crying about?"

  "He…"

  "What about him?"

  "He's my…"

  "Spit it out, is he your boyfriend?"

  "He's my…"

  "Spit it out!"

  "He's my son."

  The boss's jaw-and almost a cup of boiling tea-dropped.

  And that was how this surprising piece of news got out. People said Hei Danzi-Hei Danzi from the Golden Happiness Tavern-had recognized her own son from a past life. That was to say, she was the reincarnation of Maqiao's celebrated Tiexiang. If her boss hadn't pressed her, she would never have dared say it out loud. For days on end, people thronged the tavern, pointing and peeking. To cadres from the municipal committee and police substation, this was no trifling matter: this was the revival of feudal superstition-what was the world coming to? Betting was back, prostitutes were back, highwaymen were back, and now, to top it all, there were ghosts too. There was certainly never a dull moment around here.

  The cadres did their utmost to deflate this talk of ghosts and to educate the masses, summoning her down to the police substation for cross-examination-drawing a crowd of idly curious onlookers in the process. On and on they went, till the policemen's heads throbbed and ran with sweat, but still the case couldn't be settled; finally they had to agree to take her to Maqiao for further investigation. Even if she could recognize her son from a past life, surely she couldn't recognize other people from a past life? If she couldn't recognize them, then that would put an end to her corrupting claptrap, and about time, too.

  Six people went: in addition to Hei Danzi, two policemen, a vice-director from the municipal committee, and two meddlesome cadres who tagged along. When they were still a good distance away from Maqiao, they got out of the car and made Hei Danzi go in front, leading the way, to see whether she truly remembered the scenery of her past life. The girl said that she only vaguely, approximately remembered this past life, and she might go the wrong way. But looking around her after each stretch she walked, she made straight for Maqiao, with a directness that made the people trailing behind break out in goose-pimples.

  When her path took her across a stone quarry in the mountains, she suddenly stopped and cried a while. The stone quarry was by now abandoned: a few lumps of dried-up ox dung lay on the fragments of rubble all over the ground; puffy clumps of wild grass poked out that would perhaps, before too long, inundate the rubble. When the cadres asked her why she was crying, she said her husband in her previous life had been a stonemason, had cut stone here. The cadres, who'd made some inquiries in advance, secretly rejoiced, knowing this to be completely untrue.

  After entering Maqiao she hesitated a little, saying that there hadn't been this many houses before, she couldn't recognize much of it.

  The vice-director was delighted. "Had enough, eh? Don't want to play any more, eh?"

  One of the policemen didn't agree with the vice-director and was unwilling to start back to the office: seeing as they'd got there, why not let her keep trying-they weren't going to get anything else done today in any case.

  The vice-director thought for a moment, looked up at the sky, and didn't put up any opposition.

  It was at this point that the person telling me the story started to get carried away-this, he said, was when things really took a turn for the weird. He said that as soon as she stepped into Benyi's house, Hei Danzi seemed possessed by some spirit: not only did she know the way there and the door, but also where the kettle was kept, the piss bucket, the rice cupboard, everything; she also knew at one glance that the semiprostrate old man on the bed was Benyi. Her tears immediately welled up, and she fell to the ground in obeisance, crying out brother Benyi's name, sobbing away. Even deafer than before, Benyi widened his eyes with a great effort and was utterly bemused to see the room full of strange faces. His bemusement only lessened slightly when his second wife came back from the vegetable garden and roared a few sentences at him. It was just too much for him to take, this little girl, still wet behind the ears, standing before him, and his eyes bulged up as big as copper coins: "If you want money, ask for money, you want food, ask for food, just what kind of ghost are you? She's not even grown-up, how can she be a ghost?"

  Terrified into tears, Hei Danzi was hustled outside.

  A lot of villagers came to inspect this bizarre novelty, to pick over Hei Danzi's appearance, thinking ba
ck to what Tiexiang had been like, subjecting every part of her to comparison. The majority conclusion was: how could this possibly be Tiexiang? Tiexiang had been bewitching, dazzling-what kind of a pickled cabbage dumpling was this? On and on they went, until Hei Danzi, squatting on the stepped eaves, weeping and warbling, suddenly raised her head and asked an unexpected question:

  "What about Xiuqin?"

  The Maqiao people squinted at each other-this was an unfamiliar-sounding name.

  "What about Xiuqin?"

  One after another they shook their heads, mystification shining from their eyes.

  "Is Xiuqin dead?"

  The little girl was once more on the verge of tears.

  An old man suddenly remembered something: yes, yes, yes, he said, I think there's a Xiu-something-Qin, she's from Benyi's same-pot brother, Benren's, family. Benren had fled to Jiangxi many years ago and had never come back, Xiuqin had married into Duoshun's family, she was the third wife now, yes, she was still alive.

  Hei Danzi's eyes shone.

  With effort, people figured things out for themselves: if this girl before them was Tiexiang, then she'd have been the sister-in-law for a time of Third Wife-no wonder she was asking about her. Swept along by enthusiasm, a few people took her off to find her. "Third Wife lives on the bamboo hill, you come with us," they said to Hei Danzi. Hei Danzi nodded her head, then hurried to follow them over a hill and through a bamboo grove, before far off in the distance she saw a house flash out from among the bamboo.

  Her rather meddlesome guides had already run off ahead into the yellow mud house, yelling and calling, had passed through the few empty rooms but discovered no one home. Someone then went to the lotus pond, and shortly after shouts came over from that direction: "She's here, she's here!"

  An old woman was at the side of the pond, washing clothes.

  Hei Danzi flew over and threw herself before the old woman: "Brother Xiuqin, Brother Xiuqin, it's me, Tiexiang…"

  The old woman carefully looked her up and down, to left and to right.

  "Don't you recognize me?"

  "Tiexiang who?"

  "When I was in the hospital, it was you who sent me food and water. The evening I ran off, it was you I came and kowtowed to!"

  "Why you're-you're-you're-you're…" Whatever thought had just come into the old woman's head, she never verbalized: her words choked in her throat, her eyes glinting with tears.

  They said nothing else, just wept so bitterly in each other's arms that the bystanders didn't know what to do, didn't even dare come closer, just watched from far off. A clothes-washing pole fell into the water and slowly spun in circles. A twisted bundle of clothing also rolled into the water, scattered, then slowly sank.

  *Flame

  : It's very hard to define this word precisely, as it's both abstract and ambiguous in sense. If you said you didn't believe in ghosts, you'd never seen ghosts, Maqiao people would flatly declare it was because your "flame" was too high. So what is flame, then? If this question is a slightly tricky one to answer, then I could try rephrasing it as: what sort of people have a high flame? Maqiao people would say: city people, educated people, rich people, men, people in the prime of life, who've never been ill, state employees, people in daylight, people unplagued by disasters and difficulties, who live by highways, people on sunny days, in open country, people with lots of friends and relatives, people who've just eaten their fill…… And, of course, people who don't believe in ghosts.

  This covers practically the full gamut of life's problems.

  I'd surmise, then, that what they mean by flame is a general life view: in situations where humans find themselves in a weakened position, a person's flame goes low, is snuffed out, and ghosts and demons start to appear. The popular saying, "poor people see more ghosts" probably refers to the same sort of thing. Writing this reminds me of my own mother, who'd received a modern education, had been a teacher, and had never believed in ghosts. In the summer of 1981, because of a big septic boil on her back, an affliction that frequently reduced her to a state of semi-stupor, she started to see ghosts. Time and time again, she would cry out in terror in the middle of the night, shrinking, trembling back into the corner of the bed, claiming there was someone behind the door, a woman called Wang, come to assassinate her own ghost, and asking me to kill her with a vegetable knife. It was then that I was reminded of this word "flame." At that moment, I thought, her flame was definitely too low, she'd seen things I had no way of seeing, had entered a world I had no way of entering.

  Afterwards, she hadn't the slightest recollection of what had happened.

  The power of the intellect is without doubt the most important ingredient in flame: it's the mark of the strong, advancing revolution, science, and economic development; wherever it touches, ghostly shadows will disappear like smoke, ghostly talk will scatter like clouds, and dazzling sunlight will reign triumphant. The problem is, if you understand flame as Maqiao people do, then it's only relative: since the strong become weak before the even stronger, fear of ghosts may never be utterly, triumphantly dispelled. There are also times when the power of the intellect is thwarted, when it is insufficient, and disintegrates. My mother doesn't believe in ghosts. But when her sense of reason was sufficiently weakened so as to be rendered incapable of resisting a septic boil, on came the ghosts. Modern people don't place that much credence in ghosts, but when their sense of reason becomes incapable of overcoming difficulties such as war, poverty, pollution, indifference, becomes incapable of shaking off the weight of inner anxiety, then specters and superstitions of every shade and description will rear their heads once more in even the most scientific and developed cities of the twentieth century. Even those who categorically deny the existence of ghosts, even highly educated, modern people will still, perhaps, use ghostly imagery (think of modern painting), ghostly sounds (think of modern music), ghostly logic (think of modern surrealist poetry or fiction)… In a sense, modernist culture is the covert breeding ground for the biggest ghost town of this century, a scholarly cacophony of ghosts and spirits that derives from those members of modern society with the lowest flame: peasants, the uneducated, the poor, women, children and old people, sick people, people plagued by disasters and difficulties, refugees, people who live far from highways, with few friends and relatives, people at nighttime, on rainy days, who don't live in open country, people suffering from hunger… and people who believe in ghosts.

  If you look into the biography of any important modernist writer or artist, you'll soon discover the shadowy forms and flashing eyes of people with low flame, people like those I have just listed.

  I'm not arguing for the existence of ghosts. As I often remark, the ghosts Maqiao people discovered, including those ghosts which came from outside Maqiao, could only ever speak Maqiao dialect, they couldn't speak Mandarin, much less English or French; they obviously hadn't transgressed the intellectual bounds of their discoverers. This leads me to believe that ghosts are manmade things. Maybe they're just a kind of hallucination, a kind of imagining that springs forth at times when the body is weak (as in my mother's case) or the spirit is weak (like the despairing modernists)-the same as what happens, more or less, when people dream, get drunk, take drugs.

  Facing up to ghosts amounts to facing up to our own weaknesses.

  This is one way of understanding the term "flame."

  And so I suspect that what's known as the Hei Danzi story never happened in Maqiao (see the entry "The Ghost Relative"), that Tiexiang wasn't really reincarnated. When I returned to Maqiao, Fucha categorically denied there was any truth to this story, rejected it as devil talk that misled the masses, as groundless gossip. I believed Fucha. Of course, I don't in the slightest suspect those who claimed to have seen Hei Danzi with their own eyes of deliberately deceiving me, no, they probably felt no compulsion to do that. It is simply the case that I see, in their scattered and contradictory narrative fragments, the dubiousness of this story. I once tried pursuing the story
to its end: where was Hei Danzi now? Will she ever come back to Maqiao? They hemmed and hawed. Some said that Hei Danzi had eaten red carp-people who'd eaten this variety of fish no longer remember things from their past life, so she wouldn't come back. Some said Hei Danzi had followed her uncle down south to a city on the coast to make money and couldn't be found. Others said Hei Danzi was afraid of Benyi-which meant: she had neither the face nor the courage to come back. And so on, and so forth.

  There was no neat ending. Of course, it didn't need a neat ending, I could weigh each version for myself. I had absolutely no doubt the whole story resulted from general confusion at a time of low flame, that it was a shared illusion of theirs, just like everything my mother saw while ill.

  When people hope to see something, that something will always pop up one day or another. People have two possible means of making this something appear: at times of high flame, they use the techniques of revolutionary, scientific, or economic development; at times of low flame, they use illusion.

  People can't be made identical to each other. If I can't raise the flame of most Maqiao people, I don't think I have any reason to rob them of their right to illusions, to prevent them from imagining that their Tiexiang returned once more to Maqiao, that she overcame the boundary between the living and the dead and wept in the arms of her sister-in-law by the side of the lotus pond.

  *Red Flower Daddy

  : Uncle Luo wasn't originally from Maqiao: he'd been a long-term hired hand all the way up to land reform, after which he became village head for a few years, making him a veteran cadre in Maqiao. Various people had proposed marriage to him at various times, but each time he'd refused. He was a confirmed bachelor: when he'd eaten his fill, there was no one else in his household to go hungry. When just he worked, everyone in his household toiled. Sometimes people called him "Red Flower Daddy"-"red flower" meant virgin. People later discovered that the reason he wouldn't get married wasn't because he lacked money, it was because all his life he'd kept his distance from women, had been afraid of women; whenever he saw a woman approach he'd do his utmost to take a detour off elsewhere; you'd never, ever find him anyplace where there were a lot of women around. His nose was very sensitive, peculiarly so: he could always sniff out a fishy smell on women's bodies. He thought the only reason women used face powder was to cover up their fishy bodily smell. In spring in particular, the air was always full of this fishy female smell (which was particularly strong on women of about thirty), mingled with a smell of rotting melons; it could travel one hundred paces on the wind and his head would swim as soon as it hit his nostrils. If he remained in contact with this smell for any length of time, it would do terrible things to him: his face would go yellow, his forehead would break into a cold sweat, he'd retch over and over again.