Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  "Are you talking about Mr Agreed?"

  Still not a word.

  "What's he done to you?"

  "Go to sleep!" Master Black rolled around on the bed plank, producing a series of loud creaks that woke everyone else up-he was the first to start snoring, though.

  On the afternoon of the following day, Zhongqi's shoes were heard approaching the door, a Mao button as big as an egg flashing and glinting on his chest. "Chairman Mao says debts should be repaid. Where does it say that debts can be left unpaid in socialism?" He coughed loudly, "I won't bother the national government with unimportant matters like this: if Mou Jisheng can't pay me back in cash, grain will do as well."

  Mou Jisheng rushed out: "What money do I owe you? You old fool!"

  "You know what I mean."

  "It was always you who invited me. I didn't beg, I didn't ask for anything, everything I ate I've shat out, so go and look in the toilet hut!"

  "Comrade, you must be truthful, you must keep studying. You intellectuals shouldn't try to run before you can walk, you're still being educated by us poor and lower-middle peasants, understand? Tell you the truth, I know everything about you, Master Black, it's just I don't tell anyone. I've been kind to you so far!" Zhongqi's words contained a veiled menace.

  "Talk, then! Talk!"

  "Me, talk? You really want me to talk?"

  "I'd give my dragon to hear you talk!"

  "Okay, then. When we were planting peanuts last year, there was a shortfall in the team's planting peanuts every day-d'you think I didn't see the peanuts in your shit? A few days ago, you said you were having a wash, but what were you actually doing?…"

  His face flushed scarlet, Master Black dashed forward, dragged Zhongqi outside and clanged his head against the doorframe. "He's killing me! He's killing me!" Zhongqi whimpered.

  Afraid things would turn murderous, we rushed over to stay Master Black's hand, trying desperately to pry the two of them apart. Availing himself of this opportunity, Zhongqi wormed his way out from under my armpit and headed for the drying terrace, his shoes clacking away as he went.

  When the sound of his cursing had faded off into the distance, we asked Mou Jisheng what had really happened.

  "What happened? He wanted me to do low stuff."

  "What kind of low stuff?"

  "Sleep with his wife!"

  There was a moment of unutterably astonished silence, before we all started cackling with laughter. One female Educated Youth ran off screaming in fright and didn't dare show her face again.

  It was only later that we badgered any sense of the matter out of him, that Zhongqi was sterile, and had earmarked Master Black to do the job for him. "It must be you're special, brother Mou." "You've got to stick for your supper" (see the entry Stick[y]). "You shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth." We were enjoying ourselves enormously, determined not to let Master Black stand up for himself, determined not to let him escape the Zhongqi family bed.

  "These turtle people!" He pretended not to hear.

  "Who're you swearing at now? Tell us the truth: did you sleep with her?"

  "Would you sleep with her? Have you seen what his wife looks like? One look at her takes your appetite away! I'd rather sleep with a pig!"

  "If you don't sleep with her, will you keep eating their chickens?"

  "What chickens are you talking about? They take a month to eat a chicken, one ladle of soup at a time-the bowl's empty before you've tasted anything. Just drop the subject, just talking about it makes me mad."

  That afternoon in the fields, the Master Black affair became the principal topic of conversation. What surprised me was that apart from Fucha, no one else in the village thought Zhongqi had done anything wrong. Poor old Zhongqi, so set on making friends with Master Black, d'ycm think it'd been easy to keep him fed and watered? He was a sick man, he'd just wanted to borrow a seed to produce a descendant-nothing unreasonable about that. He hadn't forced Master Black to get married or anything, he'd just wanted to borrow a tiny little thing he wasn't bothered about, what was so bad about that? It was the choice of someone who had no other choice. Zhaoqing also said that in any case, whether Master Black agreed or not, he'd eaten so much it would be mean not to repay him.

  Needless to say, the Educated Youth didn't agree with this strange logic and spent the whole afternoon arguing till we were blue in the face, going on and on about how we were going to go and report to the commune, how there was no way we were going to let our revolutionary Educated Youth be seduced by that old codger Zhongqi.

  Most of the villagers jabbered away without taking much notice. As Party Branch Secretary, Benyi didn't have anything sensible to say either. He summoned the Educated Youth to a meeting, where he first of all asked one of us to read a few pages of newspaper editorials. When the reading, and his nap, were both over, he yawned and asked Mou Jisheng: "Did you steal the team's peanuts last year?"

  "I-I took a few handfuls."

  "One planted peanut seed will grow into a lot of peanuts, d'you know that?"

  "Uncle Benyi, we're meant to be discussing Zhongqi today, the peanuts are a completely separate matter,"

  "What d'you mean, separate? It's in the small things that you show your attitude to the collective, show whether you have feeling for poor and lower-middle peasants. Wasn't it him (he used the distant, qu him, I remember) that hit Zhaoqing's kid and made him cry, last month when we were digging the pond?" Benyi glared at everyone.

  No one said anything.

  "When you look at a problem, you have to look at the whole thing, you have to look at it historically! Chairman Mao says that whatever happens, it's wrong to hit people."

  "I just lost my temper…" Mou Jisheng defended himself weakly.

  "You still can't hit people. What kind of behavior is that? Are you Educated Youth or street hooligans?"

  "I… won't hit… anyone… again…"

  "That's a bit more like it: when you're in the wrong you're in the wrong. You've got to be honest about things-why make a fuss when you're clearly in the wrong? We'll leave it at that: no self-criticism necessary, you'll just be docked thirty catties of grain."

  Benyi had already moved off, hands tucked behind his back, looking wholly satisfied with his resolution of the problem. He wrinkled his nose as he went out the door, as if he'd caught a whiff of toad-and-green-pepper stir-fry from our kitchen. As for that business with Zhongqi, he'd sort it out, he said, he'd sort it out.

  The matter was never raised again and was thus left unresolved.

  When I call this incident to mind, I realize that logic is both useful and useless, can both clear and muddy the waters. Confronted with the unique logic of the Maqiao Party Branch and the general masses, our puzzlement and indignation were totally useless. Mou Jisheng continued to endure public censure: his refusal to repay Zhongqi (either in cash or in kind) and to pay the grain fine became ironclad proof of his lack of good faith. From this point on, he began to show signs of depression and deliberately performed bizarre and terrifying acts, such as swallowing shards of enamel or lifting a whole dirt cart on his shoulders, or working the oil press alone and telling all his companions to sleep; but by that point it was very difficult to provoke general astonishment and acclaim, or attract acolytes. His Miss Xia also left him-this female Educated Youth with her refined features can't have wanted to have her name linked with Zhongqi's wife; even if these links were entirely groundless, she couldn't escape the imaginings of other people. In the end, Master Black suddenly appeared before us one day with his chest covered in Mao buttons.

  "What're you wearing those for, Brother Mou?"

  "I'm going to liberate Taiwan." He smiled at us.

  I stared, with surprise, hard into his eyes and discovered his gaze had become that of a stranger.

  Master Black was diagnosed as hysterical and his residence registration was moved back to the city. He was still physically strong, apparently, and could still play basketball. He could also watch films, smoke cig
arettes, ride a bike on the street-he had a full life in the city. It was just that he wasn't very good at recognizing people, would babble and have random mood swings-probably the early stages of hysteria. When an old classmate met him on the street and slapped him on the shoulder, he blinked, briefly hesitated, then turned around and walked off.

  *Curse-Grinding

  : Maqiao people had a whole set of procedures for taking revenge on bad elements from barbarian parts: "curse-grinding." Take, for example, someone who shat indiscriminately on Maqiao's ancestral graves, or was rude to Maqiao women. Without changing their voices or facial expressions, Maqiao people would covertly circle three times around this foreign visitor. After this had been done, they'd quietly bide their time until the visitor had gone into the mountains or the forests. When this moment came, they'd mutter incantations under their breath, complex, tongue-twisting rhymes that broke all the mountain place-names up, then mixed them all together: this was called their mountain incantation. Usually, the words of the incantation were highly effective. Their evil-doing victims would turn this way and that, unable to tell east from west, walking and walking till they returned to where they'd started, aware of the ever-darkening sky over their heads and with no one to call to for help. In the mountains, they might be hungry and cold, might step on an iron trap, might stir up hornets or ants and get stung till their faces and bodies swelled up with blood. People even said that there'd once been an ox-rustler from barbarian parts who'd died on the mountain, who'd never re-emerged from the sparse fir grove on the north face of Tianzi Peak. Then there was the soul-taking incantation. All you needed to do was take a strand of the offender's hair, "grind" the words of the incantation again and again, and the offender's mind would cloud over until he or she ended up a walking zombie.

  After Master Black returned to the city on grounds of ill health, rumors started up. Some suspected Zhongqi's wife of "grinding" a curse at Master Black. Needless to say, I had no truck with such rumors. I'd seen that woman: she hated Master Black, but she didn't have an evil word in her. Sometimes she'd sigh idiotically in front of the women in her neighbors' houses, about how all her born days she'd never begged for wealth or sought long life, all she'd wanted was to give birth to two sons, big as horses, strong as oxen, dead ringers for Master Black. That way, at least, those two breasts of hers wouldn't have hung there all her life for no good reason.

  *Three Seconds

  : When Mou fisheng was still in Maqiao, his energy levels were quite excessive, and after finishing work he'd still want to play basketball. When the Educated Youth were too tired to play, he'd get together some local lads, or sometimes even run a few li to the middle school in the commune and play on until midnight, the bouncing ball shimmering in the moonlight. His demands on his students were very strict: sometimes he'd whistle, point to someone on court, and yell: "Tie your pants higher!"

  Both referee and coach, he even monitored his players' pants.

  He made his students master the strictest rules of the basketball court, including the "three seconds" rule. Before he arrived, Maqiao's boys had already played ball, just not with many rules: you could bounce the ball twice, when things got really hairy you could run with the ball, the only thing you couldn't do was hit anyone. Mou Jisheng trained his students by the standards of the county's top team and introduced them to the "three seconds" rule. When I revisited Maqiao many years later, the village had a privately run culture institute and half a basketball court, where a few young men-all faces that were utterly unfamiliar to me-were kicking up quite a ruckus as they played. Only one thing sounded familiar: my heartbeat quickened at the way they were always shouting out "three seconds."

  None of these young men knew who the Educated Youth had been. They had no idea who these people were, these people who, a long time ago, had stayed in the village for a few brief years, these people from barbarian parts who'd been guests in the village and had no deep understanding of Maqiao; neither was there any need to express interest. I strolled through the village. There wasn't a trace left of our years in Maqiao, even the old, familiar scratches on the mud wall had gone. Out of the few friends I vaguely remembered, none were to be found, all had departed this world one after another, either last year, or the year before, or three years before, or three years before that. With their passing, the Maqiao of my memories sank stone by stone, soon to disappear without a trace.

  I'd lived here for six years. One gust of wind had scattered the days of those six years, leaving behind one lone relic: "three seconds"-although its meaning had changed. From what I could glean from watching the lads on the basketball court in front of me, "three seconds" not only outlawed hanging onto the ball for more than three seconds under the basket, it extended also to the flouting of all rules: hitting, shoving, running with the ball. Anything "three seconds" equaled "against the rules." In his time here, Mou Jisheng could never, ever have imagined this would come to pass.

  *Lettuce Jade

  : In the winter, when the commune would be wanting to build a grain store here, a middle school there, they were forever sending instructions down from above that each person was to contribute five fired bricks. Maqiao didn't have money for buying bricks and the villagers had to go to the mountains to dig up graves-overgrown, untended graves, of course. The mountain-dwellers lived mainly in thatched barns or wooden houses, but their graves were anything but slapdash affairs, using great heaps of fired bricks to build immortal structures that would withstand centuries and millennia. These graves had been through too much history: most of the mounds had collapsed and been covered over with dense brambles and grass, with nothing to mark them out from regular fiat ground covered with vegetation-one cursory glance couldn't distinguish where the grave was. After we'd hacked away at the vegetation around the grave with sickles, and removed the topsoil with rakes, the blue bricks supporting the grave would slowly come into view, stone by stone. At this moment, the faint-hearted girls among the Educated Youth would scurry a long way off into terrified hiding. The men, each attempting to be braver than the next, would jostle to lodge the teeth of their rakes into the joins in the bricks, slowly heaving them to and fro until the bricks loosened and the first brick was pried off with a violent wrench.

  If the grave had been fairly well preserved, it was like a pot well sealed against moisture: as the grave was broken open, a white mist would rise up, billowing in waves out of the pit and spreading in gusts a bitter stench of skeleton that turned the stomach. After the white vapor had slowly thinned into nothingness, we timidly crowded closer, peering at the black world within the grave through the gap opened up in the bricks. By the light of a quivering thread of penetrating sunlight, we could glimpse the once-human skeleton, its big empty eye sockets, or its broad pelvis. We could also glimpse random piles of earth and rotting wood. We grave-diggers wouldn't normally expect to find any treasures of gold and silver in the grave: we'd be doing well to come across one or two bronze or ceramic vessels. Many of the skeletons we saw had been positioned facing downwards: this meant our luck was definitely out. According to local custom, people like this had had bad ends, been struck by lightning, hanged, or shot, for example. Those who'd survived them hadn't wanted them to revisit the world of light and pass their bad luck on, had wanted at all costs to prevent them being reborn. Facing them downwards was a crucial step in ensuring they never revisited the light of day.

  In death, as in life, different people receive different treatment.

  There was one time when, digging out a female corpse, we discovered that although her bones were white, her hair was as glossily jet-black as if there was still breath in her and reached down almost to her waist. Her two incisors hadn't rotted either, and they gleamed and protruded out of her mouth in splendid isolation, a good three inches long, so it seemed. We fled in terror. In the end, after some inquiries, the team committee paid Master Black-who had no fear of ill omens-two catties of meat and one catty of wine to paraffin and burn the skeleton, to s
top this female spirit making any further trouble. Years later, I learned from an academic that this is actually perfectly normal. Human death is a long, slow process, and given a congenial environment the hair and teeth will continue to grow. Foreign physicians had done plenty of research on the subject.

  We started to carry down more and more bricks from the mountain. The skeletons, of course, were left, abandoned on the mountain. People said that wherever there was a concentration of eagles hovering and swooping back and forth in the sky over the mountains was probably where the strong, rank smell had stimulated their appetites. Others said that in the evenings you could hear the sounds of men howling and women crying on the mountain: surely it was the ghosts, cursing their grave-diggers as they froze with cold.

  Nevertheless, we still went into the mountains every day to carry out our dastardly mission.

  Normally, Zhaoqing was as cowardly as they came, but he never hung back when we were digging ancestral graves. I later discovered that the reason why he always pushed himself forward was because he hoped to find a rare treasure in the grave pit: shaped like an uneven parcel of vegetables and of a dazzling crimson color, growing on the tongue of the dead person, like human breath that had coagulated over a long period of time in the tomb and then bloomed forth with incredible beauty. The peasants called this thing resembling a parcel of vegetables "lettuce jade": it was the best tonic in the world, they said, an intense concentration of physical strength that could focus the spirit and enrich the blood, could add to the yin and strengthen the yang, could dispel wind, protect embryos, prolong life. There's a reference to it in The Extended Virtuous Words: "Just as there is no false gold, there is no true lettuce jade." The villagers also said not just anybody could posthumously exhale lettuce jade; only the mouths of the wealthy, of those who had tasted top-drawer delicacies, slept on cotton pillows, whose bodies had been nurtured in gold and jade while they lived, would bear fruit in one hundred years' time.