Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  In standard Mandarin Chinese, the term lihai (severe), widely used to refer to people possessing a high level of ability in some area, provides another example of the sting in the tail of praise, of the anxiety concealed within the pleasure. Li means fierce, severe, while hai, meaning evil or harm, provides a warning of even greater clarity and bluntness. In Hunanese, calling someone lihai refers to someone with ability who's always taking ill-intentioned advantage.

  So it seems that in a lot of Chinese dialects, knowledge and skill, and evil (or brutality, fierceness, wickedness, harm, etc.) are two sides of the same coin. Two thousand years ago, Zhuangzi expressed anxiety and hatred toward all forms of knowledge and skill. "There are few good people in the world, but many bad, there are few sages that benefit the world, many that harm it" (Zhuangzi, The Outer Chapters, chapter 10). He believed that only by exterminating knowledge would the thieves of the nation be routed; only following the destruction of jewels would the numbers of property thieves decline; only by smashing tokens and documentation would people grow honest and contented with their lot; only by breaking the scales would people be unable to haggle and argue; only by destroying laws and religion would people be able to comprehend nature and the Way of the ultimate in human life… Zhuangzi's resentment of knowledge has long since been submerged beneath the modern advance of technological progress, become a faint glimmer lying over the horizon, ignored by the majority. But in linguistic heritage, at least in the many southern dialects I mentioned above, it continues to eke out a stealthy existence.

  *Strange Talent

  : Maqiao dialect has another term for people who demonstrate great ability: "strange talent." The Origins of Words (Commercial Book Center, 1988) gives three definitions for guai, the word for "strange" in Mandarin: the first is bizarre or unique; the second is particularly, extremely, very-presumably the gradual evolution of the first meaning into a function word; the third is censure, blame. From the looks of it, in Chinese bizarre things are forever linked with censure and blame, are perilously out of the ordinary. Maqiao's "strangest talent" was Yanwu. When the original batch of Educated Youth had all been transferred or retired due to illness, only two remained, of whom I was one. Those who could sing revolutionary operas had all gone, and when the arts propaganda team were ordered to go out and perform, we couldn't even get the gongs going, so someone suggested Yanwu to us. He was still studying at middle school, but he responded to the call and sang very well, as it turned out; though he didn't have time to come and rehearse, and was so short he couldn't get on the stage, he concealed himself in a dark spot behind the stage, where he sang through operas from start to finish, good guys, bad guys, male roles, female roles; he just learned the words and out they came, so all the people on stage had to do was mouth. The difficult high notes he hit without batting an eye, producing an astonishing stream of rich, full sound that reverberated in the night sky over the countryside. That head of his poked in and out at everyone else's waist height: it was impossible to see his face clearly without bending at the middle. So as not to miss class, he'd run off after having finished singing, disappearing into the darkness before I'd got a proper look at him.

  His singing of Peking operas and model operas was hugely renowned, and whenever there was a joint performance being given in Pingjiang County, he'd be asked to help out.

  I only got a proper look at him after he graduated and returned to the village. He had a round babyface, as if he hadn't yet lost his milk teeth, that bore no particular resemblance to his elder brother Yanzao's sharp mouth and monkeylike features. After watching me play a few games of chess, he coolly took to the board himself. I dropped my guard, thinking only to give him a lesson: within a few moves he'd decimated my pieces, ravaged my defences. In another game, he plundered and pillaged to left and to right with the ruthlessness of a grand master, an implacable opponent he was, cutting me no slack, relentless in pursuit and fearsome in attack, destroying at root and branch, prepared to massacre mistakenly rather than let a single piece escape.

  I suffered, in secret amazement, a devastating defeat.

  "I'm so sorry, I'm no good, no good at all," he said humbly. But his forehead bore a wrinkle of undisguisable satisfaction.

  Afterwards, in secret, I furiously researched through chess manuals, but when I asked him for a rematch, he was full of excuses, having to fetch a prescription or work outside the village; he hid himself far, far away, denying me an opportunity to avenge my humiliation. I could imagine, when he saw for himself my anxious impatience, my desperation, the delight on his face once he turned his back.

  He didn't work much in the village or spend much time at home; he didn't even come back when his old mother was seriously ill. When the team leader allocated irrigation repair duties to everyone, his were always done for him by Yanzao. Only Yanzao ever appeared on his family's plot of land. First, he studied to be a painter, and we once met on the road, him carrying a bag of tools and covered in paint from head to foot. When I next saw him, a while on, he'd changed to studying Chinese medicine: quite the expert he looked, treating people with acupuncture and taking their pulse. Afterwards, he studied portrait painting and carving as well-it was said he sold paintings and calligraphy in Changle and in the county, as well as carved Chairman Mao's poems in plain and cursive calligraphy on customers' fountain pens, while-you-wait and at a fair price. In short, there was nothing much he couldn't turn his hand to, nothing that could prevent him from showing off the superlative strangeness of his talent. The fame of his strange talent spread far and wide until everyone, both old and young, knew of him. Even though he was a "traitor to the Chinese" (see the entry "Traitor to the Chinese"), Maqiao people never bore any ill feeling toward him and were always very tolerant of his frequent mysterious journeying outside the village.

  Quite the contrary: he was the pride of Maqiao, the communal pride of all the villages and stockades massed around the environs of Maqiao Bow. If rumor spread that such-and-such a place had produced a university student: what of it? Maqiao people would snort. What a pity Yanwu was a traitor to the Chinese, otherwise he could have studied at three or four universities. If rumor spread that someone from such-and-such a place had been recruited as a country irrigation technician and was working for the state: What-someone like that gets to be a technician? Maqiao people would snort. What a pity Yanwu's class status was too high, otherwise this nobody wouldn't have had a chance.

  Once, when Benyi's child had been ill for ages and showed no sign of recovery, Benyi made plans to send him to the county seat. Maqiao people concluded that he was sure to die: if Yanwu's prescription couldn't cure him, what use would it be to send him to the county seat? Sending good money after bad, that was. Just two weeks later, Benyi's kid was cured, in the county seat. Still, Maqiao people weren't surprised, weren't lost for words. It wasn't that Yanwu's prescription was no good, they said, nothing of the sort: the only problem was that the prescription hadn't been made up properly in the countryside. Otherwise there'd have been no need at all for Benyi's child to go to the county seat, using all that money up and suffering like he did: he even went under the knife, had his heart, liver, and lungs dug out to be washed like pickled vegetables, must've taken a good ten years off his life expectancy.

  Benyi himself fully concurred with this.

  Benyi, the Party Branch Secretary and an enemy of Yanwu's father, endlessly repeated how Yanwu was even more strangely talented than his old man, how he definitely had the makings of a future counterrevolutionary, of a convict. But this didn't have the slightest effect on his worship of Yanwu's strange talent, on his special regard for Yanwu: he'd ask Yanwu to come and check the pulses of his own family whenever they were ill. He wouldn't be able to rest easy before he'd done this.

  Yanwu never charged for treating Maqiao's sick; and toward cadres, his manner was doubly reverent. Once, after bumming a cigarette off me, he turned and ran, disappeared in the blink of an eye. When I went to the lower village on an errand I dis
covered Commune Head He sitting on the grain-drying terrace, smoking away there and then on that Qiulu Mountain cigarette of mine, Yanwu standing to one side rubbing his hands, his face wreathed in simple, honest, slightly timid smiles, listening respectfully to the Commune Head's admonitions. I found out later that he didn't smoke, not because he didn't want to, but because he begrudged it. Working as a painter outside the village, as a doctor, as an artist and engraver, he carefully saved and hoarded up all the cigarettes he received as gifts, then eventually presented them with the greatest respect to cadres, and particularly to Benyi. Benyi's cigarettes were always a hodgepodge of brands for this very reason.

  For a time, his relations with Commune Head He were particularly intimate: whenever Commune Head He wanted anything, he'd come as soon as he was summoned and smile as soon as he came, forever obedient, supremely gifted at demonstrating his learning whenever necessary, then returning the credit for his learning to the patronage and enlightenment of his leaders. One time, having hardly slept a wink for two days because of a painting job outside the village, he returned to Maqiao late at night, limping and staggering giddily from exhaustion. He heard from his neighbors that Commune Head He had sent a letter over, saying an alarm clock was broken and could he come and see about fixing it. Not daring to rest, he ran through the night to borrow tools from a clock-smith in Changle before hurrying on to the commune. When crossing Tianzi Peak, all it took was one lapse of concentration and you'd fall into the deep crevice. On the morning of the next day, he was eventually discovered by some passers-by, his face, hands, and exposed feet in particular plastered with stinging mountain leeches, as if his body had been overgrown with bright red fibrous roots. The passers-by all fell upon him, trying to beat the leeches off with such violence their hands were covered in blood. After they'd slapped him awake, he burst into terrified tears after one look at his blood-stained form.

  If those people hadn't passed by quite so fortuitously, in another few hours Yanwu's blood would probably have been sucked completely dry by mountain leeches.

  In the end, none of his displays helped him that much or got his strange talent redirected toward some higher end. Twice when universities were recruiting students from the workers, peasants, and soldiers, Commune Head He usurped Benyi's authority, pushing Yanwu forward as "Re-educable Youth," but as soon as the motion reached the higher-ups he was sent back again. What's more, on the eve of every important holiday, the peasant militia routinely ransacked his house and lectured his brothers: even if it was just a cosmetic exercise, the militia still had to do what the militia had to do.

  After I'd been transferred to work in the county, I heard the county public security bureau had hauled him into jail on suspicion of writing reactionary slogans. The reactionary slogans had been discovered at the joint arts performance on National Day, apparently written along the stage just before the performance. I never found out what they actually said. All I knew was the reason the public security bureau grabbed him: at the time he'd been backstage playing the huqin and voice-dubbing very close to the scene of the incident, he had a reactionary family background, he had culture, he had class, he had the strangest talent, so surely he was the person most likely to get up to reactionary shenani-gans under cover of darkness.

  What I found surprising was that not only were all Yanwu's worshippers, the men and women, young and old of Maqiao totally unconcerned that their idol had been arrested, they even viewed his being reactionary as something that gave them face. Their response was perfectly calm, as if such an outcome was entirely natural. They'd snort with obdurate contempt whenever someone mentioned a suspect from a neighboring village: him, reactionary? Yanwu could produce handwriting as good as his with his feet, he'd never manage anything more reactionary than stealing a cow or some rice.

  To them, being reactionary wasn't just petty thievery and pickpocketing, it wasn't the stuff of which ordinary men were capable. Yanwu was the most qualified to be reactionary, was the classiest reactionary: his riding off, ashen-faced, in the police car was every bit as glorious as a cavalcaded state procession to enroll at the university in the city.

  There was no one else who could touch him.

  People even came to blows over this business. Someone who'd come to drive pigs from Longjia Sands happened to mention in idle conversa-ion that someone in Longjia Sands had a relative who was also a great reactionary in Xinjiang, who'd been regiment commander a few years previously, who'd had his photo taken with bigwigs like Lin Biao. Maqiao's lads weren't going to stand by and listen to this: What d'you mean regiment commander, they said, we heard he was only a warehouse watchman, that he had no military rank at all. If Yanwu'd been born twenty years earlier, he'd have ranked head and shoulders above corps commander, never mind regiment commander. He'd probably have been a high-ranking official under Chiang Kaishek and right now he'd have been in Taiwan riding in cars everyday.

  The man from Longjia Sands said: "Yanwu might be a strange talent, but he's not that much of a strange talent; when he paints Chairman Mao's portrait, the head's too big and the body's too thin, he looks like Oldie Wang from the supply and marketing cooperative."

  "You reckon Yanwu can't paint a likeness?" the Maqiao people said. "He's reactionary, so 'course he paints like one."

  "How'd his painting make him a reactionary?"

  "You haven't seen him painting dragons, he can paint one in the blink of an eye."

  "There's nothing special about painting dragons, any odd-job painter can knock one out."

  "He can teach, too."

  "Can't Li Xiaotang teach, too?"

  "Oldie Li can't hold a candle to him."

  A Maqiao lad gave an example: when Yanwu explained the word "neck," the explanation took a good ten minutes. What was a "neck"? It was the cylinder of body tissue in between head and shoulders containing hundreds of blood vessels that could shrink down and turn this way and that. Pretty good, hey? How much learning could Li Xiaotang show off? A neck is a neck, Oldie Li would just give his own neck a couple of pats and leave it at that. What kind of teaching was that?

  "Way I see it," said the man from Longjia Sands, "I'd rather have a couple of pats."

  Long and hard they argued: over the question of whether or not Yanwu was in fact a strange talent, over the question of whether he couldn't paint a likeness of Chairman Mao or whether he deliberately didn't paint a likeness, over the question of whether or not he was actually reactionary. Then the Longjia Sands man trod accidentally on someone's foot, the victim flared up into a temper and threw tea in his face quick as a flash. If there hadn't been people nearby to restrain them, there could've been a major incident.

  As I said before, the word in Mandarin for "strange" is also "censure(d)." The phrase "strange talent" always made me secretly uneasy, made me feel that no good would ever come of it. And the public security bureau and Maqiao people ended up proving this point. When presented with reactionary slogans, they suspected neither Yanwu's same-pot brother Yanzao nor other bad elements from neighboring villages, principally because neither Yanzao nor anyone else in the area could match Yanwu's strange talent. With a feeling this was perfectly justified, perfectly natural, not even worth thinking about or seeking agreement on, they defined cleverness as the enemy, brilliance as treachery-even though they secretly worshipped cleverness and brilliance. They weren't trying to eradicate reactionary slogans, as such; it was more the case that they'd long sensed that the abnormality represented by the phrase "strange talent" would sooner or later need locking up. Despite his life-long displays of cleverness, Yanwu had unfortunately never scrutinized the implications of this word, its critical undertones in Maqiao dialect; he'd been so pleased for so many years with his own strange talent, with how he'd kept in with cadres and his fellow villagers, with how he'd managed his own fate like the strange talent he was, that he'd got a little bit over-optimistic.

  Whether he woke up to this in jail, I couldn't say. All I know is that he remained pretty distin
ctive whilst in jail, he didn't let pass any opportunities to exercise his strange talent. There, where even belts were confiscated, he actually succeeded in attempting suicide. For several nights, he rolled around wildly on the floor clutching his stomach, yelling and groaning, until he got the doctor to come and gave him an injection. He secretly hoarded the injection bottle until finally he smashed it and swallowed the pieces.

  Tears streaming down his face, his mouth filled with blood and he fell into a dead faint. The guards sent him to the hospital for emergency treatment, but when the doctor heard he'd swallowed fragments of glass, he said even a fluoroscopy wouldn't be able to make out where they were and an operation was of even less use, so there was no hope of saving him. As soon as the two little convicts who'd been ordered to carry him on their backs to the hospital heard this, they burst into piercing wails. The sound of their crying brought an old man from the hospital kitchens over: luckily, he'd had a bit of experience in such matters and suggested they pour leeks down into him. Unchopped leeks, he said, lightly boiled then poured into the stomach would wrap round and tie up glass fragments before they were finally shat out. Somewhat skeptical, the doctors did as he said, but were then amazed to see the balls of leeks in his faeces unroll one after another to reveal the glass fragments inside.

  *Reincarnation

  : The bloody business of butchering pigs, cows, and the like is called "reincarnation" in Maqiao, a turn of phrase that makes it sound like a loftily noble undertaking. The old-timers said that domestic animals had fates, too, that they'd sinned in previous lives and were paying for it in this life, that they suffered more than any other creature, that by killing them you were letting them be reincarnated earlier, releasing them from their sea of bitterness, that it was a deed of great charity. By this reckoning, butchers could slaughter away, as if right were on their side, and diners could merrily chew and munch, their mouths running with grease, their hearts fully at ease. Language can change the way people feel: altering a word can mitigate, even erase, the pity that scenes at a slaughterhouse evoke, until blood-letting stimulates nothing but blank, unmoved stares.