Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  In my opinion, a vow is like a curse, or a linguistic tyranny. One of the three girls mentioned above, Qiuxian from Zhangjia District, due to this coercive tyranny, later married a veterinarian. It can't be said this coercion had particularly dire results. She learned tailoring and the family ended up quite well-off-it was just that she wasn't a brilliant match with her husband. That was all.

  One day, when it was about to rain, she was cycling back home, having finished her door-to-door business, harboring an unspecifiable feeling of discontent, and decided she didn't want to go back home, that she'd spend the night at the house of a same-pot uncle. On the way, she passed a man with a deeply wrinkled face hitting a child, and her heart suddenly thumped in her chest: the person inside this pair of shabby pants with one leg shorter than the other was none other than old Fucha! If this old man hadn't timidly ducked his head at her in something approximating a nod, she would certainly have thought she'd got the wrong person.

  "Brother Fucha…" The words sounded unfamiliar to her.

  "Humph…" The man's face bore the trace of a bitter smile, "This boy's driving me mad! It's about to rain, but he just won't move."

  "Keke, want a ride on my bike?" Qiuxian's gaze was directed at the child.

  The child's eyes lit up on seeing the woman and her bicycle.

  "No, tell little uncle you don't, don't hold her up."

  "It doesn't matter, I've got to pass through Maqiao anyway."

  The child sneaked a look at his father, then a look at Qiuxian, and climbed on like a flash, scrambling with great expertise onto the front bar of the bicycle.

  Fucha was at a total loss: since he couldn't very easily step forward to grab the child, he could only stamp his foot from where he was: "Are you getting off then? Are you getting off then? Asking for a spanking?"

  "Keke, tell your dad it's no problem."

  "Dad, it's no problem!"

  "Ask your dad if he wants a ride too."

  "Dad, d'you want a ride too?"

  "No… I don't know how…"

  "You want him to get on."

  "Dad, little uncle wants you to get on!"

  "No, no, off you go…"

  Qiuxian hesitated a little, then, hearing the pattering sound of rain on the mountain over the way, pressed her own umbrella on Fucha, bestrode the bicycle, and rode off. The child was very excited to have the wind rushing right up against him and made horse-galloping noises for a bit, then made car noises for a bit-when they passed children who stared along the way, these noises got even louder.

  "Keke, is your dad… nice… to your mom?"

  "Very nice. Vrooooosh!"

  "Do they argue?"

  "Nope."

  "They really don't?"

  "My mom says my dad has a good temper, so he's no good at arguing."

  "They haven't argued once?"

  "Nope."

  "I don't believe you."

  "They really haven't…"

  "Your mom's really… lucky."

  Qiuxian's tone dripped with disappointment.

  After falling silent for a while, she then asked:

  "D'you… like your mom?"

  "Yup."

  "What d'you like about her?"

  "She makes baba cakes for me."

  "What else?"

  "And… when I don't do my homework and Fucha's about to hit me, she shouts at him." Whenever he felt resentful, he used his father's proper name.

  "Has your mom bought you games?"

  "Nope."

  "Or taken you to the city to look at the trains?"

  "Nope."

  "Can your mom ride a bike?"

  "She… can't."

  "That's a real pity, isn't it?" Qiuxian was clearly jubilant.

  "No, it's not. I don't want her to ride a bike."

  "Why not?"

  "She might fall off. Her mom, Guixiang, was almost squashed to death by a tractor when she was riding a bike."

  "What a bad boy you are-aren't you afraid your little uncle will fall off her bike?"

  "If you fall off, that's nothing."

  "That's nothing" meant that's nothing to worry about.

  Qiuxian asked anxiously: "Why's it nothing?"

  "You… you're not my mom. Peow-peow-peow." The child had spotted another slope and was happily making the signal to accelerate.

  Dazed, Qiuxian suddenly felt a moistness well up and threaten to drop from her eyes. She set her teeth and pedaled forward. Luckily, a shower of autumn rain had already started to fall.

  * Asking Books

  : The next time I saw Fucha, his head full of white hairs, one trouser leg shorter than the other, he rubbed his hands and insisted I come over to his house for a bit. I didn't really have time, but seeing as he just stood there, waiting to one side, not about to give up, I had no choice but to comply. I found out afterwards that he'd wanted to grab this opportunity to show me a book he'd written, drafted in tiny letters on a pile of sheets from an account book, bound in a plastic fertilizer bag, with a few strands of grass mixed in. The ink quality, faded and unclear in many places, wasn't great. But this, I discovered to my surprise, was the most daring piece of research I'd ever seen. He wanted to correct, to overturn the universally acknowledged theorem of pi.

  As I didn't understand math, I had no way of volunteering any opinions on his research-I was, in any case, pretty doubtful about his ground-breaking theorem.

  He smiled faintly, rolled out some tobacco, and filled a bamboo pipe. Different professions were as far apart as different mountains, he said, so I wouldn't understand. Did I know of someone more senior?

  "Who?"

  "Someone who does math."

  "No," I said quickly.

  A glint of disappointment shone from his eyes but his smile didn't falter: "No problem, I'll keep looking."

  After I went back to the city, he wrote me a letter: he'd put aside pi and started on some linguistic questions. For example, he considered the characters for "shoot" and "short" to be the inverse of each other. The character for "shoot" [ff] was made up of the characters for body [J^] and inch [~*f]: an inch-long body. The character for "short" [g?] contained the sign for "arrow" [^], thus implying "shoot." He'd written this up in a letter to the State Council and the State Committee for Character Reform, and was asking me to find an acquaintance to pass it on to, "someone who does language stuff."

  In another letter, he wrote that Maqiao people used to say that people who "read books" (a phrase which in Chinese also means, more generally, "study" or "learn") "asked books"-this was what his dad used to say. Read, ask, read, ask: if you don't ask, how can you read (and learn)? "Reading books," by comparison, was now a fairly meaningless term for learning, as it manifested a tendency to overemphasize mechanical memorizing and rote learning. He recommended that schools all over the country revive the phrase "ask books" as a phrase more beneficial to national modernization.

  *Master Black

  : One night, wails and screams suddenly rose and fell throughout the village, joined a moment later by a chorus of dogs-something serious must have happened. I climbed out of bed and opened the door to peer into the hazy moonlight out of which Wanyu's piercing voice was screeching terrifyingly. A big mountain pig, it turned out, had snuck into the village, been hacked at and walloped by the men, leaving a trail of blood and a few pig bristles in its wake, before running off into the darkness. The men all said it was a great pity and released another round of combative yells at the dim black mountain. Every door had been flung open, all the men had ransacked their houses for weapons and run out; even Wanyu, with his watersnake waist and girl's voice, had wrapped his fingers around a wood axe and was looking everywhere along with everyone else. This was nothing unusual, Fucha said, somewhat out of breath. Whenever any Master Black, any wild thing came into the village, it took one shout and everyone's doors were flung open. No one could keep their door shut at a time like this, and keep face.

  They called all mountain pigs "Master Black."r />
  After a round of yells, followed by round upon round of billowing echoes, everyone concluded there was no hope that night and finally dispersed disconsolately back to their homes. When, half asleep, I'd reached the eaves of our house, I was frightened almost out of my wits by a big black thing I glimpsed lurking under my window. After I'd yelled out to a few of the other Educated Youth, I realized it hadn't moved in ages; when I plucked up courage to go in a bit closer, still it didn't move. A nudge with my foot revealed it to be not a mountain pig, but a creaking bundle of firewood.

  I was covered in cold sweat.

  *Master Black (continued)

  : When Maqiao people said "chase the meat," they meant go hunting; "make shoes" meant bring down the sword; "invite guests" meant poison; "ride in a sedan" meant dig a traphole; "whistle to heaven" meant scattered gunfire, and so on. They suspected animals of being fluent in humanspeak and said that when hunting, even if you were inside a building, you had to use code language to guard against indiscretions on which your quarry could eavesdrop. It was particularly imperative that direction words be rearranged: "north" actually meant "south," "east" meant "west" (and vice versa). That's why people banged gongs and shouted when they hunted Master Black, creating a man-made cacophony to conceal the direction of traps or guns, and used a prearranged code language, shouting out east while attacking west, mixing true with false, all to confuse the animal.

  Mou lisheng knew all this perfectly well but he didn't take it in properly and sometimes things didn't quite click into place in his head when it came to the crunch. He was in the middle-school class of 1982, one year above me, and we were sent down to the countryside together. Once, when we were coming back from the banks of the Luo River carrying rice seedlings we'd bought, he said he wanted to get back extra early to wash his shoes and rushed on ahead alone, disappearing in the blink of an eye. We grumbled at how annoying he was: what did he want to wash his shoes for? When'd he ever washed his shoes before? The thing was, we were worried in case someone couldn't keep going on the way back; as he was the strongest, he'd have felt obliged to lend a hand. In any case, whether he helped out or not, he didn't have to scurry off so fast, like a thief-it tired a person out.

  Mou had, indeed, never washed his shoes: whenever he discovered his foot slipping on something inside his shoe, he'd tie his shoes together by the laces, dangle them in the stream that flowed between fields, then pull them out a few days later, dry them in the sun and start wearing them again. He said this was the automatic shoe-washing method. Needless to say, shoes washed in this way still stank horribly and whenever a host gestured he should remove his shoes, anyone standing by would exit at top speed after just one sniff.

  Our conjectures weren't proved wrong: as we suspected, he didn't go and wash his shoes. Not only that, when we got home his seedling basket was nowhere to be seen-in other words, he hadn't gotten back yet. As the afternoon wore on, even the stragglers returned and we managed to plant out several paddies of seedlings, without sight nor sound of him. When it'd got dark, we heard heavy footsteps on the road, sounds of breathing like the wheezing of a bellows, before finally, thank goodness, he collapsed to the ground as if there were a stone in his stomach. Covered in mud, barely half the rice seedlings in his load left hanging precariously off the pole, he tripped and stumbled over himself, unable to put one foot in front of another. He was not amused: "This damned turtle place with these damned turtle people! They talk crap! Sent me on a wild-goose chase over the mountains! I almost stepped in a trap! I'll stick all your grannies!" (see the entry "Stick[y]")

  I didn't know who he was swearing at.

  We asked him what'd happened, what he'd been playing around at all day. His face clouded with anger, he ignored everyone and walked to his room to hurl things around. It took us ages to discover that what he'd done was forget the locals' habit of reversing directions. He hadn't really got used to the local accent, either: he'd be all right as long as he didn't need to ask the way, but as soon as he asked he'd be bound to go wrong. So he'd hauled a heavy load of seedlings to Shuanglong Bow to the north of Maqiao, then carried them to Longjia Sands to the south of Maqiao, finally tramped all over the mountains till it was almost dark. A local he passed finally suspected he hadn't caught on, and reminded him about the direction rule. He'd almost keeled over with rage.

  We all laughed-a lot.

  After the peasants found out, they laughed even more. "As he's just a big lump of flesh that can't understand human speech," said Uncle Luo, "we should call him Master Black."

  Since there were fewer and fewer wild pigs on the mountains, the term Master Black had long fallen into disuse, but Mou Jisheng enabled it to stage an unexpected comeback by changing its meaning. Normally, when Mou Jisheng went out to work he didn't wear a bamboo hat and bared his upper body to the sun's violent rays, burning his muscular back deep black; when he ran, his upper body rippled in dark waves, so the nickname Master Black seemed to suit his appearance.

  He had a strong physique and liked wrestling with anyone on hand: he particularly enjoyed giving the local "turtle people" a good thrashing. While the turtle people carried two baskets of grain, he'd carry four, divided between two or three carrying poles; once this had produced open-mouthed shock from bystanders, he'd set them down and preen himself, panting with the effort. While the turtle people wore cotton jackets, he'd wear shorts in snowy weather so cold it turned your lips purple; once bystanders had expressed shocked admiration, he'd finally yield (with a teeth-gritted show of reluctance) to general persuasion and go inside. He liked playing basketball and on hot summer days he wouldn't rest at noon but instead would brave the violent sun on the drying terrace to knock a ball around, working up a full sweat even without a basket. The weather was so hot even the crickets, toads, and chickens were silent and only the thump of his ball reverberated throughout the village. The peasants clicked their tongues in awe.

  "I was still drinking breast milk at thirteen! My mom was always away at work but the wet nurse would still make me drink!" He'd always be making announcements like this to explain the reasons for his incomparable physical strength and drop hints about how he came from a family of revolutionary cadres.

  Human milk was a good thing, to be sure, and the peasants were entirely convinced by this explanation.

  Zhongqi very early on expressed a particular interest toward him. When winter arrived, Zhongqi would produce a steaming-basket that he carried around with him everywhere when he got off work. The basket was so small it could only hold two or three burning pieces of charcoal at a time and could only be hugged by one person between the legs or against the chest, but still it was an ember that brought heat. Zhongqi had never let anyone else enjoy the use of his basket: even when women came to warm their hands, he might chortle generously but would still impose time limits and give them frequent warnings about their charcoal consumption and their massive expenditure of heat. Master Black was the lone exception to whom, with a clackety-clack of his shoes, he'd voluntarily pass the basket. Unfortunately, Master Black wasn't interested in this object, since his health was good and he'd never felt the cold; he took one look, then walked outside with a snort.

  Zhongqi had weaseled out a lot of the village's secrets, none of which he'd make public just like that. At times, one sentence would be the furthest he'd go and as soon as anyone inquired any further, the smug taunts would immediately begin: "Take a guess, go on, take a guess." So no one ever got much sense out of him. Only with Master Black was he willing to share his secrets: a scrap today ("There was a pile of chicken feathers in Fucha's house yesterday"), another scrap tomorrow ("Uncle Luo tripped over on the mountain two days ago"), the day after that, in even more hushed tones, "Someone visited Shuishui's mom and brought two piglets."

  Mou Jisheng had no interest in these secrets and only wanted to hear the low stuff. Zhongqi looked embarrassed, hemmed and hawed, reddened, then decided to make an offering. He mentioned the time when Fucha's mother, however
many years ago it'd been, had woken up in a daze from a midday nap and discovered there was a man pressing down on her who turned out not to be Fucha's dad. But she'd been too tired and weak to resist, had lacked the will to figure out who this person was, so she shouted into the other room: "Quick, come here, third son, your granny's boiling hot! Come and tell me what this idiot's playing around at!" Her son was asleep in the other room and didn't wake. But her shout managed to frighten this hazy human form away. She turned over comfortably and continued her deep, heavy-breathing sleep.

  "Is that it?" Deeply disappointed, Mou Jisheng didn't feel this secret was worth knowing either.

  As I later discovered, relations between Zhongqi and Mou Jisheng gradually grew in intimacy. In the past, as soon as evening came on, Mou Jisheng would make a big fuss about turning off the lamp and going to sleep, but now, unexpectedly, he often went out alone and sometimes only returned to bed very late. When asked where he'd been, he'd go all mysterious and hedge our questions, a wrinkle of self-satisfaction between his eyebrows, then carelessly let out a burp smelling of dates or egg that would drive us wild with incredulous jealousy. He wasn't about to let us share his gourmet's luck: we'd have to beat him to death before he'd spit the truth out, this we knew full well. Our later investigations revealed that his burps were linked to Zhongqi: we discovered that Zhongqi had made glutinous rice cakes for him and that Zhongqi's wife had washed his quilt and shoes for him. We couldn't make any sense of it: Zhongqi was normally such a stingy so-and-so, he wouldn't help out just any old Wang, Li, or Zhang, so why was he sucking up to that halfwit Master Black?

  One night, some time after we'd all fallen asleep, we were startled awake by a violently angry shove at the door. Lighting the oil lamp, we discovered Master Black huffing and puffing on his bed, spitting with rage.

  "What's up with you?"

  "I'll do him in!"

  "Who?"

  Not a word.