I hadn't brought enough cash, so that afternoon I took another sum of money along, handed over enough for the fine, living costs, educational materials, and so on, and took him away. One tiny twist in the story remained before I took him away: probably because there were too many convicts, the prison warden didn't know which cell he was locked up in.
Rushed off their feet, they made me sit and wait for two or three hours before they finally took pity and made an exception to the rules, allowing me to enter the cells area and look through the cells, one by one, myself. I glimpsed two long rows of grey metal doors stretching off into the distance, each door with a tiny window inset, crammed with faces; or rather, each was a square of eyes compressed in at every angle, packed denser than a block of meat fresh out of the freezer. Every eye seized hold of me, waited for me. I started with Number One: my effortful request to each square meat brick to move aside for a moment opened out a slight crack of space into which I could shout Hu Kuiyuan's name, then press my ear up close, silently listening for a movement within. I heard a miscellaneous buzz of voices, smelled a sour, rotten odor of sweat and urine, but time and time again was disappointed-no one answered.
Twenty-odd windows had gone past and my throat was beginning to crack, when a thin, weak answer floated over as if from a distant, very distant horizon, a whisper transmitted to my ear by the iron bars, drifting in and out of hearing. I was astonished: every cell was at the most twenty or thirty meters square, how could a voice sound so distant? How come it seemed to come out of a universe of infinite depth and distance, that stretched out behind the iron bars?
"Ah-ah-ah-" It sounded like someone was pinching his windpipe.
He received back from the police the black leather bag with the unzippable zipper, said many words of sincere repentance to them, then uttered nothing further, just sat on the backseat of the motorbike, getting a surreptitious measure of the expression on my face. It was only after we'd gone a few kilometers that I sensed the person behind me was wiggling his feet, dispersing their bad smell a little on the wind.
Back home, the first thing I did was tell him to stand in the doorway and not move, not sit down, not touch a single thing in my house, to take off his clothes straightaway and go into the bathroom; every single item of his clothing was collected up into a bundle by my wife and stuffed into the washing machine.
As expected, my wife, yelping with alarm from over by the washing machine, soon discovered lice, bedbugs, and traces of blood on his clothes. Slinking out of the bathroom, Kuiyuan smirked with embarrassment, asking as he combed his hair, "Where's the mirror?"
I pointed.
"I was unlucky, this time I got into a democracy cell…"
I didn't understand.
"I only survived by the skin of my teeth."
"What d'you mean, democracy cell?"
"Don't you know what a democracy cell is?"
"I've never committed a crime."
"It's just… it's just… everyone's democratic, right."
"What's that mean?"
"Democracy means lice, bedbugs, fights, blood, lots of them."
I still didn't understand.
He started to eat. He said in a prison cell the prison king had the best time of it, when he ate, there'd be people fanning him, singing songs, offering a towel to wipe his face. When the food came, the prison king would have first pick, nabbing all the good things, like the meat, of course. Afterwards, the "Four Daoist Immortals" and "Eight Daoist Immortals," the prison king's direct subordinates, would eat, picking out another layer of good stuff. The scraps of soup and leftover rice remaining were all the little people ate. When the prison king wanted to sleep, he took the best place. When the prison king wanted to see the female convicts, only he stood in the window opening, lifted onto the shoulders of those below, who'd sometimes support him for up to two hours at a stretch, their legs trembling with exhaustion.
A newcomer had no choice but to fall into line. If you weren't prepared to follow the fiat of the prison king, the Daoist Immortals or those convicts in waiting for promotion as Daoist Immortals would soon beat you half to death. This was called "softening you up." Or they'd stick you in the frame, show the guards in charge of discipline a nail or razor blade to prove you'd broken prison rules, and you'd end up in chains or with a yoke round your feet. He said although a prison king was pretty vicious, in a prison king's cell, people were usually quite law-abiding, generally there was a leader in everything, there were no group fights, things were kept fairly clean and hygienic, the towels hung up neatly, the quilts folded one on top of another, which kept the disciplinary cadres happy. To convicts, the democracy cell was the most terrifying thing of all, when a prison king hadn't yet emerged, or when victory and defeat between two or three prison kings remained undecided-that was no life at all. One stray comment and there'd be shouting and fighting; you'd be doing pretty well to keep your eyes, nose, hands and feet on after a few months in a democracy
Rubbing the head he'd somehow managed to keep on his shoulders, Kuiyuan said with lingering fear in his voice that the cell he'd been put in this time was neither one thing nor the other: it was a democracy, plain and simple. Three great rumbles had already been fought between the Sichuan gang, the Guangdong gang, and the Northeastern gang, without any decisive outcome. Even clapping the battle leaders in irons hadn't solved the problem for the disciplinary cadres. Terrified as he'd been every day, he hadn't had one good sleep.
I gave an icy laugh: "Got a lot of prison experience, have you?"
He anxiously leapt to his own defense: "No, no, no, nothing of the sort, I'm the most law-abiding person ever, if someone dropped their money in front of me, I wouldn't pick it up."
"How many times you been inside?"
"First time, absolutely the first time. Strike me down if I tell a lie, I swear. I've heard some things about prison from Brother Yanwu."
I couldn't remember who this was.
He couldn't believe it: "Can't you even remember Brother Yanwu? The board director, Yanzao's little brother! You know-didn't you used to play ball with him?"
When he mentioned Yanzao, it occurred to me that Yanzao, it seemed, had had a brother by this name. When I arrived in Maqiao, he was still in school, and I later heard he'd written some reactionary slogan on a stage and gone to prison-by that time, I'd already been transferred elsewhere. My memory, I realized, was getting worse and worse.
*Tiananmen
: Before I revisited Maqiao, a lot of people told me that Maqiao now had a Tiananmen, that it'd become a famous scenic spot (or almost), that even senior officials out on business came, that after visiting the shrine of Qu Yuan and the County Revolution Memorial, they'd always drive out to have a look. Strictly speaking, Tiananmen wasn't actually in Maqiao, it was on the boundary with Zhangjia District, right next to what was later National Highway 107, but its link to Maqiao lay in its belonging to Maqiao's Yanwu. It was in fact a large residence, occupying a few dozen mu of land, with pavilions, terraces and turrets, a lotus pond, flower gardens, bamboo woods, a winding corridor set on the water, artificial mountains and rocks. The garden was divided up within itself, each part with its own name, one called "Garden of Eden," one called "The Xiang River Lodge," an indeterminate mix of East and West. Its construction was a bit crude: few of the tiles had been laid flat or clearly aligned, they were all skewed and encrusted with dried cement that hadn't been leveled off. Not many of the windows could be opened, being permanently stuck up with something or other. This caused inevitable anxieties: if Lin Daiyu- a famously sickly Chinese literary heroine-had spent all day in the gardens pushing and pulling at windows, she'd have had her work cut out for her-how'd she still have had time to bury flowers and burn poems? The days would've gone by without her managing to croak out much more than a few lines of karaoke.
People were at work on the skeleton of a small, two-storey Westernstyle hotel, and it was said that after it'd been finished they'd hire ten girls from around Jiangzhe
as waitresses, especially to receive journalists, writers, and other guests.
I didn't get to see the owner: people said Yanwu lived mainly up in the county, coming back only now and then to take a look around the place and check up on a couple of factories around here. I glimpsed his house from far off, a small two-storey building in the center of the lotus pond. Three or four window air conditioners were visible around its perimeters, sticking out from each wall, far more than made logical sense; when I thought about it, even the toilets must have been terrifyingly, bone-chillingly cold. The whole house looked like a cement monster overgrown with iron tumors.
Some years earlier, I'd heard that the peasants around here had gotten rich and taken to buying seven or eight electric fans at a time. When they ran out of places to put them, they set them up in the pigpens. Then the next thing you knew, it was air conditioners that were all the rage. The guide was endlessly nagging at me to count the number of air conditioners and would start counting them for me in fives and tens whenever my concentration seemed to be slipping. Every excessively enunciated figure expressed a deep envy that was tinged also with a kind of pride, and that resonated inside my eardrum, as if these iron tumors were in some way part of him, as if he felt some inner compulsion to make me admire the dazzling results of the rich peasant policy.
The guide felt this was still not enough, and at some point went looking for a manager, a young man who knew me, apparently. I'd taught a few classes in days gone by and he'd been one of my students. He produced a key, wanting to take me on a visit to the house. I could hardly refuse the offer, and not having much choice in the matter, followed him across the twists of the winding corridor, through three iron sluice gates and, with a slam and a clatter of doors, into the mansion set in the lake. Its interior, a resplendent expanse of hanging lamps and wallpaper, was really quite nicely done. Unfortunately, as the electricity wasn't powerful enough, none of the air conditioners would start, so the manager had to give everyone a rush fan to stop them from sweating. The television wouldn't play any programs either-apparently the television tower in the neighborhood hadn't yet been put up. There were two telephones, one black, one red, and from the looks of the receivers, they weren't program-controlled, so you probably wouldn't get through to that many people here-people said the switchboard operator in the local government was never on the job and spent most of her time looking after her kid.
"Have some tea, have some tea," I was being given the full courtesy treatment.
"Okay." In fact, I'd rather have found some water to wash the sweat off me.
"Watch the TV, go on."
"Okay."
After the manager had spent ages tuning it with his bottom stuck in the air, the TV finally started flickering a little less and a brightly colored picture floated up out of nowhere, some tape of a foreign music video. It played and played, then started flickering again. Maybe the tape was broken, I said, and tried to change it for one that worked. After a lengthy search, I discovered there weren't any other tapes to watch, the only other one being a Hong Kong martial-arts movie in even worse condition.
By now, my face was streaming with sweat. Steam was billowing off the lotus pond and the scarlet carpet baking underfoot was roasting everyone till they smelled of cooked meat. Panting with the heat, I had to retreat outside the door until the others had finished watching the fragmentary singing and dancing.
I only later discovered that the name "Tiananmen" referred to the main building of the compound, which was a small-scale imitation of the architecture of Tiananmen Square. To give an idea of its size: a chicken chased to extremes of panic and desperation could probably have flapped its way up onto the top of the building. The building had arches, doorways, moats, and footbridges, and was painted deep red in imitation of palace walls. In front of the main entrance stood two grimacing stone lions. Unfortunately there was no water in the moat, only scattered clumps of grass out of which a couple of toads leapt sporadically. When you stood at the head of the building, no square or memorial lay ahead, only a row of commercial alleys, a gathering of desolate noodle stalls, odds-and-ends shops and the like, an empty pool table covered with yellow dust and a crowd of young men squatting under the eaves of buildings, some crouched on stools like roosting chickens, idling away their time.
There was a house with a large shop sign hung over it, "Tianzi International Culture Club," apparently provided by the owner of Tiananmen to serve his fellow villagers for free.
As part of the club, there was also a big theater stage to the left of the building. The guide said that in the first month of this year, the county theater troupe had come to sing opera here for three whole days, again paid for solely by Yanwu for the free entertainment of his fellow villagers.
The visiting party was discussing something to do with one of the actresses in the troupe. Their argument caught the attention of the roosters perched under the eaves, finally giving their sallow gazes a focus.
I was, of course, surprised that Yanwu could build such a big mansion, and also that he'd built it in such a contentious style-if he'd built it ten or so years earlier, wouldn't it have been condemned as a counterrevolutionary conspiracy punishable by death? Only later, when I bumped into an old acquaintance, Zhihuang, did I learn the whole story that lay behind this. Zhihuang said that when Yanwu was in high school, when his family class status was very poor and he hardly counted as human, he'd once stuck a picture of Tiananmen on his bed, which had been confiscated by the class representatives. If poor and lower middle-peasants didn't own photographs like this, said the class cadre, what right did landlord scum like him have to pine for Chairman Mao? To see Tiananmen everyday? He was plotting to blow up the great leader with dynamite, now, wasn't he?
Presumably this incident had hurt him very badly, very deeply. Now that he had money, he built his very own Tiananmen before he did anything else.
In the past, he'd had no right to look at Tiananmen; now, he wanted to let everyone know that not only could he look at it, he could even build one, and build one right under all their noses. He could let his wife and two kids play with the crickets and dogs, eat sesame cakes, and sneeze in Tiananmen.
He took out large loans, was kidnapped several times by debt-collectors threatening to snap his tendons, was even taken away once in a police inspection-unit car-all for this project.
*Brutal
: In Maqiao, "brutal" means capable, skillful, a high level of technical know-how. The problem is, "brutal" at the same time implies ruthless, vicious, malicious. Uniting these two meanings in one word never made me all that comfortable. As I've said before, my handwriting was quite good, and during my time in Maqiao I'd often be ordered to paint displays of Chairman Mao's quotations everywhere in red and yellow oil paint. When the peasants saw me writing on the walls, neither using templates nor tracing out the characters, just climbing up the ladder and writing, there'd be astonished murmurs: "This transfer kid's really brutal!"
I could never work out how much of this was admiration, how much was criticism.
Being able to write nicely was brutal, knowing a lot of characters was brutal, helping the team leader fix the grain threshing machine was brutal, being able to dive down and fill in the leaks in the pond was brutal, even factories from barbarian parts that manufactured appliances, diesel oil, chemical fertilizers, and sheet plastic (and therefore, of course, the workers) were clever, were brutal. When Maqiao people talked like this, maybe they were unaware that they were implicitly relegating knowledge and skill to the category of moral corruption, of savagery.
I suspect that, according to their past experience, people with a grasp of some particular knowledge or skill possessed a natural tendency toward violence and terror. The first time they saw a piece of rumbling machinery, it dropped Japanese bombs on them from the sky; the first time they saw a radio amplifier, it cut off their "capitalist tails" by confiscating their own private land. What was there to reassure them that clever people they later encou
ntered wouldn't do them similar sorts of harm?
Under these circumstances, was there anything wrong in them using the word "brutal" in this way?
Maqiao language isn't unique on this point.
In a lot of places in Sichuan, people with a high level of skill are described as "fierce," a word close in meaning to "brutal." "Really fierce," that's what they say about someone with a great deal of skill.
In a lot of places in the north, people with a high level of skill are described as "wicked," again close in meaning to "brutal." "Wicked so-and-so," is what they call someone with a lot of skill.
Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html Page 40
