Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  One day while digging in the ground, Zhaoqing suddenly let out a long, tragic sigh.

  "It'll never happen, never happen. What's the point in going on?" He shook his head: "This rotten mouth of mine's never going to grow a lettuce jade."

  Knowing what he meant, his listeners also turned mournful. They thought about the strips of sweet potato, the aged brown rice, and the blackened dried vegetables they swallowed every day: if even their bottoms couldn't produce any kind of a smell, what hope was there of growing a lettuce jade?

  "Uncle Luo could grow one," Wanyu was very confident of this, "he's got a godson in barbarian parts who sends him money."

  "Benyi's got a hope too, he's pretty sturdy, there's a lot of fat on him," Zhaoqing said. "The bastard, at those meetings he goes to every other day, they kill a pig every time, there's so much meat it bends their chopsticks."

  "Cadre meetings are revolutionary work. You jealous, then?" Zhongqi said.

  "What d'you mean, work? Aren't they just growing their lettuce jades?"

  "You can't say that. If everyone grew a lettuce jade, lettuce jade would become too cheap, too common-d'you think it would've got into The Extended Virtuous Words like that?"

  "I could've become a cadre during Land Reform." Shortie Zhao set full sail for a delicious, dreamy journey of remembrance.

  "You-a cadre? You can't even write Shortie Zhao properly! If you ever got to be a cadre, I'd walk everywhere on my hands." Zhongqi thought this very funny and chuckled away for a while.

  Zhaoqing said: "What about you, then, Zhong, you dragon you, carrying your quotation book around every day, wearing your Chairman Mao button, who're you trying to impress? D'ycm honestly think you can grow a lettuce jade?"

  "I don't want one."

  "You couldn't grow one."

  "I'm not going to grow one, that way no one'll come and dig my grave."

  "Reckon you're going to have a grave that people can come and dig?"

  Zhaoqing's remark was rather below the belt. Since Zhongqi had no descendants, it was generally held that he ran the risk of having no one to bury him after he'd died; Zhaoqing, however, had produced five or six kids, so a remark like this from him was a blatant assertion of his superiority, and touched a raw nerve in his opponent.

  "You stinking, farting scumbag, Zhao."

  "You pig-sticker."

  "Parents never washed your mouth out, did they?"

  "No use if you did wash your mouth-your belly's so full of shit."

  Their exchanges swiftly got wilder and filthier, before bystanders finally managed-with great difficulty-to intervene. In an effort to thaw the atmosphere a little, Fucha mentioned Secretary Zhou in the commune: what was Benyi compared to him? Benyi only got his mouth around some lard at his five meetings per month-that wasn't going to make much of a dent on a stomachful of sweet potato and brown rice. Only the commune cadres had it really good, touring here today, there tomorrow, always with a reception party at the ready, like it was New Year's every day. Just think about Secretary Zhou's juicy pink-and-white flesh, fattened on great vats of frying oil. His golden throat still sounded out clear as a gong even after a night of making reports, better even than Tiexiang's voice. He must be building up to an enormous lettuce jade.

  Uncle Luo took over: "That's quite right: it's just as important to spot the big ones as to spot them at all. If Benyi's mouth grew a lettuce jade, it would be as big as a sweet potato at best, and even ten of them would be nothing to just one of Secretary Zhou's. You'd be far better off digging up Secretary Zhou's grave."

  From Secretary Zhou, they moved onto Commune Head He, onto the bigwigs in the county, in the province, and finally to Chairman Mao. They all believed unanimously that Chairman Mao was the luckiest of all, his allotment of fortune the highest. His lettuce jade a hundred years from now would be something incredible, not just a panacea for all ills but a magical elixir of life. A national treasure like this, they reckoned, would need high-level chemical preservatives and a massive military guard day and night.

  Having reflected on the matter, everyone concurred that was how it would be. By this time, the sun was already slanting to the west, so they hauled their rakes pensively onto their shoulders and headed for home.

  A few days later, Secretary Zhou visited Maqiao to examine the brick recovery situation, and while he was about it asked me to help him write up some official materials on carbon paper, telling me again and again how elegant my imitation Song-style calligraphy was. Watching his beaming fat face, my thoughts kept on straying, as I imagined in his mouth a lettuce jade big as a parcel of vegetables that accompanied him everywhere he went. His voice was indeed resonant, always imitating the music in broadcasts, singing the newest song of praise for Beijing. He'd often ask me what I thought of his singing, listening to endless replays of my fawning compliments. He also asked me what sort of a Cultural Director I thought he'd make. Of course, I said, of course, you've got art in your bones, you're clearly the stuff Cultural Directors are made of. This made him even happier, kept him merrily humming away, and anyone he saw he'd greet warmly, ask them how their kids and their pigs were. The lettuce jade in his mouth began swelling to ever greater proportions, as if self-confidence dripped out of his very pores.

  He got Benyi to take him to see the brick firing. I watched the lesser lettuce jade leading the greater lettuce jade-maybe soon we'd have baby lettuce jades carrying fired bricks I couldn't clear my befuddled head of these fantasies. I must've been digging too many graves lately, I thought, my head was full of bad stuff, full of the smell of corpses.

  "Tell me, apart from imitation Song-style, what other calligraphy styles look good?"

  "Lettuce jade."

  "What did you say?"

  "Er, what was it you…"

  "I asked what other calligraphy styles look good."

  I suddenly came to and hurriedly answered his question about calligraphy.

  *Presenting the Vine

  : Yellow vine was a highly poisonous species of plant: women who wanted to commit suicide usually went up the hillside and dug up some yellow vine, as did men planning to poison fish and shrimps in shallow, stagnant, slow-flowing bends in the river. A length of yellow vine knotted three times, with a piece of chicken feather inserted, or drenched in a bowl of chicken blood, presented to the enemy, was the final diplomatic communication before two sides met in war. Once this step had been taken, it meant things had already gotten pretty bad, and the conflict was irresolvable without some loss of life. It was said that in the early years of the Republic, Maqiao people presented the vine to Longjia Sands. Returning home one day with an ox he'd bought, a certain Father Xingjia of Longjia Sands passed by a relative's house and popped in for a bite to eat and drink, leaving the ox tied up outside the main door. When he was, say, seventy or eighty percent drunk, he heard the sound of an ox lowing outside the door and asked a child to go outside and have a look. After taking a look, the child came back and said an unknown black ox had climbed onto the back of their ox. Father Xingjia was furious: he'd just brought his ox back from the market, what kind of a brute was this other animal? Raping it before he'd got his breath back?

  Everyone jostled their way out the door, but found the owner of the black ox was nowhere to be seen. Rather the worse for wear and in a fit of drunken bravado, Father Xingjia's nephew grabbed a flaming branch and lashed out with it, jabbing it straight into the black ox's shoulder joint. With a great bray, the animal cantered off, taking with it the flaming branch, swinging and lurching as it went. Plunged deep in, the branch had, it would seem, wounded it to the very heart; after running home, the ox died that same day.

  The ox was from Maqiao. The following day, Maqiao sent someone over with a yellow vine soaked in chicken blood.

  The battle raged for ten days and Maqiao had by far the worst of it. The Peng family from Longjia Sands had a huge ancestral temple and, aiming to defeat Maqiao straight off, called up namesakes from a surrounding radius of thirty-six b
ows to come and help the village. Hopelessly outnumbered, the Maqiao forces had no choice but to ask an intermediary to make peace. Following the mediation, not only did the people of Maqiao not recover the money for the ox, they had to pull down houses and sell grain to compensate Longjia Sands to the tune of a copper gong, four pigs, and a six-table banquet, before the matter was settled. The Maqiao representatives dispatched to present compensation to Longjia Sands went banging drums: four old and four young there were, eight altogether, all with pants tied around their heads, all carrying bundles of rice straw on their backs to express the shame of defeat. Although they received ajar of wine from their adversaries as a gesture of friendship, they returned to the village with tears streaming down their faces, and kneeled, one after another, rooted to the ground before the ancestral tablet, intoning over and over how they'd betrayed their ancestors, how they no longer had the face to live. All night they drank, till their eyes were bloodshot, before finally swallowing yellow vine. On the morning of the following day, eight stiff corpses were carried out of the ancestral temple as the villagers all joined together in unanimous lament. Some of the abandoned graves I dug a few decades later, it was said, belonged to these people. Zhaoqing sighed, saying their descendants either died, or fled. Zhaoqing also said that the year the vine was presented happened to be a year of famine as well: none of the dead had had much to eat, none of them had had their fill of gruel, so of course their graves couldn't grow any lettuce jades.

  When taking a rest on the burial ground, Maqiao men would eye the tangled mass of skeletons, keeping as far away as possible, an odd blankness in their eyes. They'd all beg Wanyu to sing something-most likely as a way of bolstering their courage. Wanyu would curl himself up under an earthen step out of the wind, wipe a handful of snot from his frozen red nose and slowly sing this verse:

  Four brothers each with four ox horns

  Each goes their own way, carrying a horn

  Five hundred years on, the leaves return to their roots

  A palm can't leave the back of its hand.

  The eldest takes the southeast peak,

  The second over the northwest hills,

  The third goes down to the Bright Pearl Sea

  The fourth fords the River that Crosses Heaven.

  Five hundred years, five hundred years more,

  Waiting every day till the sun's gone down,

  The road to the west is wide and vast,

  When will the brothers' horns lock once more?

  *Old Forder

  : During the great road-works campaign, Zhaoqing was the least popular person in the workers' shed. People said when he turned up at the construction site, he brought nothing with him save his one naked dragon. He treated everyone else's belongings as common property. If, when mealtime was approaching, you discovered your chopsticks were gone, nine times out of ten he'd got there first and walked off with them, and was shoveling his food in with them right there and then. If you discovered your towel had gone, it would be him who'd got his paws on it and was wiping clean his bony chest or flat nose with it. The Educated Youth objected both to his flame-yellow teeth and to his long nasal hairs, but took particular exception to his stealing their towels. When you'd grabbed the towel back, even when you'd scrubbed at it violently with soap several times over, you'd still worry his nostril filth was left on the towel. He was as thick-skinned as they came, and would just laugh it off, or even have a go at the other person for being mean. Sometimes he'd even be shamelessly vulgar: "I didn't wash my wife's crotch with it-what're you so upset about?"

  Everything came back to crotches with Shortie Zhao. If someone's nose was bleeding: Has your period come? he'd say. If someone went for a pee: Bringing baldy out to see the sun? he'd ask. He could tell these two jokes a hundred times without getting tired of them, or sensing anything at all boring or repetitive about them.

  He'd also bring up the subject of his son Three Ears, about how this unfilial son of his had seduced and eloped with Tiexiang, "Before I'd had a chance, he got right in there and screwed that city woman-furious, I was!"

  It was the female Educated Youth who took the greatest exception to him. Whenever they came out to work, they never wanted to be put with him.

  At home, he'd never used soap. But he wouldn't let other people keep anything special for themselves, wouldn't let there be anything in the world he couldn't try himself. His interest in soap didn't take too long to develop and when he stole a towel he'd always nab the soap while he was about it. He'd get well into his washing, foaming up a huge basin of bubbles for one mandarin jacket-infuriating for the soap's owner.

  When Mou Jisheng got back from work and discovered the piece of soap he'd just bought had shrunk almost beyond recognition to a tiny lump, he couldn't stop himself getting angry. "You scumbag, Shortie Zhao, don't you have any sense of right and wrong? Stealing other people's property is against the law, don't you know that?"

  Zhao pulled a long face: "What're you shouting about? I'm a grandfather, my grandsons tend cows and gather wood, is using a bit of your soda (see the entry "Rough") against the law?"

  "But why're you using it? I want compensation! Compensation from you!"

  "I'llgive you compensation, if that's what you want! D'you think I can't afford a bit of soda? I'll give you ten bits. What a fuss!"

  "Your dragon, you'll give him compensation," some bystander snickered.

  Zhao's face went burning red: "Reckon I can't pay him back? My sow's just had piglets, they're eating a pot of slops every day-any day now, they'll be out of the pen."

  His antagonist still wanted to seek truth from facts: "You wouldn't want to pay me back even if your sow shat gold."

  "I'll pay, I'll pay! I'll pay him back with my pants."

  Mou Jisheng sprang to his feet: "I don't want your pants, d'you think I can wear those pants of yours?"

  "What're you talking about? I got them made less than a month ago."

  "They're like women's pants, there's no opening to piss or shit."

  Mou Jisheng had the utmost contempt for the pants the peasants wore: tied together with a piece of grass string, they had no leather belt or belt hoops, and absolutely no shape at all, just two baggy tubes they were, the back identical to the front. People were always swapping them from front to back, so the bottom often ended up at the front, ballooning out and making people feel as if their lower bodies were heading in the opposite direction from their torsos.

  "Well, what d'you want to do about it then?"

  Unable to think of anything even remotely appealing in the possession of Shortie Zhao, an exasperated Mou Jisheng had to postpone settlement over the soap till later.

  It was then that we realized why Maqiao people called Zhaoqing "Old Forder." Old Forder meant old miser, or stingy devil. In Maqiao vocabulary, a "ford" is the opposite of a "rock." "Rock" implies stupid, or straight-as-an-arrow honest, something mountainlike, while "ford" implies cunning, shrewd, watery: both meanings echo the ancient saying "the benevolent love mountains, the wise love water." Bearing in mind that in ancient times communications, commerce, calculations, and plans only came with the presence of flowing water, the word "ford" quite logically came to describe those who are calculating.

  During the few days I shared a bed with Zhaoqing, it was the grinding of his teeth, more than anything else, that drove me mad. No one knew what grudge he was bearing, or against whom, but all night, every night, he'd grind away, as if masticating on some stubborn, unyielding, unchewable mass of glass or nails, and the whole of the workers' shed shook with him. Even insomniacs several sheds away must've been ground down and chewed up by his teeth. I noticed that a lot of people got up in the mornings with red eyes, swollen eyelids, hair sticking up and limbs shaky, utterly weary, painfully exhausted, as if they'd been through a massive trauma.

  But Zhaoqing acted as if nothing had happened, bouncing along with a quick, light step, sometimes even flashing a grinning mouthful of yellow teeth, no trace left of the gr
ievance he'd been venting all night.

  I raised the issue with him. He seemed rather pleased with himself: "You didn't sleep well? I wonder why I didn't hear anything? I didn't even turn over once, that's how well I slept."

  "You must've had a stroke, either that or your stomach's full of bugs!"

  "I should go see the doctor. Lend me a bit of money, three yuan, five yuan, whatever you have'll do."

  Borrowing money again. After bitter past experience of lending money and not getting it back, I exploded at him: "Still got the cheek to ask? What d'you think I am, a bank?"

  "Just lend it me for two or three days, two or three days, once the pigs are out of the pen I'll pay you back."

  I couldn't believe him. It wasn't just me, I knew; almost all the Educated Youth had made this mistake with him: once the money was out of your hands it was very difficult to get it back. For him, borrowing money was almost a hobby, an interest of his, a form of entertainment with little link to any concrete purposes-he often borrowed when he didn't need money at all. Once he let himself in for a savaging by Master Black, having borrowed one yuan off him in the morning, but, persuaded by his fist, returned the original article to him in the afternoon, without having done anything with it. Of course, borrowing the money was something in itself: with a note warming his pocket for a few hours, his heart could rest happy and easy. "Is all money the same?" he once remarked in all earnestness. "There's nothing special about using money, anyone can use money. What kind of money you use though, and using it in a way that brings happiness-now that takes effort."