Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  After Benyi gave up his post as Secretary, he made a living for several years as a reincarnater. Right up until his health began to fail, as long as he could still get out of bed, all it took was for him to hear the sound of a pig squealing and, quite uninvited, he'd go and stick his nose in, having a go at this person's ancestors, this person's mother-no one at the slaughterhouse would escape a tongue-lashing. He was addicted to wielding that knife of his, was pretty nifty at it too: he was the most famous butcher around here during those years, never needed anyone to catch the pig, or tie it up for him, didn't matter how big it was, or how truculent, after just one look he knew exactly what to do. Catching it unawares, he'd suddenly raise his knife, and then, as if with borrowed strength, overcome the beast with great economy of effort. One hand would grasp the pig's ear, the other would bury itself in the skin on the underside of the pig's head-meanwhile, the knife had long since plunged into its chest, turning once, deep inside, before being briskly drawn out. The pig was flat on the ground before it'd had time to squeal. Then, chuckling away to himself, he'd wipe a few bloody, smudgy marks on the quivering pile of flesh, slowly, calmly, wiping the knife clean.

  This was called slaughtering on the run, or mute slaughtering- something he was a real pro at.

  Sometimes, when he'd had a bit too much to drink, his hand would slip, one knife-stroke wouldn't get the job done and the floored pig would jump up and run crazily about. He'd glare furiously, all the veins in his neck throbbing with pent-up rage, chasing about the place, waving the bloody knife. At times such as these, he'd always be cursing, "Look at you run around the place, you show-off, you, think it's your lucky day, don't you, think you've got the upper hand…"

  People didn't generally have a clue who he was cursing.

  *Jasmine-Not-Jasmine

  : • It's going to rain, it doesn't look as if it will (concerning the weather).

  • I'm full, I'm full, one more bowl and then I'll be full (concerning eating).

  • I reckon the bus isn't going to come, you'd best keep waiting (concerning waiting for the bus).

  • This newspaper article is well written, I can't understand a single word (concerning the newspaper).

  • He's an honest man, he just doesn't talk honestly (concerning Zhongqi).

  Anyone who came to Maqiao had to get used to this kind of double-talk: ambiguous, vague, slippery, vacillating, first this, then that. This rather unsettling way of talking was what Maqiao people called "jasmine-not-jasmine." I found out that Maqiao people weren't generally unsettled by this, didn't even find anything strange about it. It appeared they would quite happily produce statements that weren't really statements, that had no basis in logic. They weren't used to the principle of noncontradiction, it seemed. If sometimes they couldn't avoid speaking a little more clearly than usual, they regarded it as a hard and thankless task, a concession to the outside world which they would make while knowing it was beyond them. I could only suspect that they basically felt double-talk came more naturally to them.

  It was because of this that I never really figured out how it was that Ma Zhongqi died. Here is a summary of what people said: Zhongqi was a bit greedy, but he wasn't that greedy; he was always very above-board, it was just that he was a bit underhanded; he'd never had things that rough, it was just that he had bad luck; his wife's illness was obviously curable, it was a pity they couldn't find the right medicine; he always acted like a cadre wherever he went, it was just that he never looked like one; he built a new house, sure, but it wasn't his after he'd built it; fifth old Huang treated him best, it was just that he never helped him out; he was respected, but he didn't have speech rights; it would be unfair to say he stole things, but he walked out of the butcher's with a piece of meat he hadn't paid for; he took the yellow-vine brew himself, suicide doesn't fit the facts. After all this, was anything clear to me? Or was nothing at all clear?

  I know generally that for Zhongqi, who'd long nursed a sickly wife, life was very difficult and he never had enough money to buy meat. On the Double Ninth Festival, unable to help himself, he stole a piece of meat from the butcher's, was publicly arrested, and his self-criticism was stuck on a wall. He probably thought he couldn't take the shame and on the next day drank yellow-vine brew. It was that simple. But Maqiao people can't explain simple things clearly and precisely. They have to slip into an ever more ambiguous "jasmine-not-jasmine" way of talking. This can only prove that Maqiao people are unable, or unwilling, to accept a fact this simple. Perhaps they feel that outside every factual link lie yet more facts beyond explanation and clarification; thrown into confusion, crushed and scattered by all these blurred facts, their own remarks can only lapse into irrelevant nonsequitur.

  Throughout his life, Zhongqi wrote innumerable "agreeds." The final one was written, through force of habit, on his own self-criticism for the theft of the meat and stuck on the wall for all to see. In the self-criticism, he cursed himself for being a thief, a shameless rogue, a reactionary element, ashamed to stand before Party and government and ancestors. Some of what he wrote was rather exaggerated in tone, indicative of the depths of his terror at the time. He'd spent his life knowing too much of other people's secrets, knowing of too much widespread deception and villainy, while he himself remained law-abiding all his life, not daring to take even a stalk of rice straw that hadn't been allocated to him. And what good did his honesty ever do him? None at all. He was cast aside by a group of people of whom he utterly disapproved, watched wide-eyed as they got rich while he fell on increasingly hard times. He couldn't even buy pork dripping, let alone afford two spare ribs to rub together. Ought he to have changed? As I imagine the scene, he walked into the butcher's, felt around in his own empty, empty pockets, breathed in the oppressive merriment of the festival atmosphere, and finally decided to make a new start with a piece of meat. Unfortunately, he didn't get any meat, only endless public humiliation and censure.

  What should he have done then?

  Should he have gone on being honest, or gone on being dishonest?

  If he was standing before me right now and asked me such a question, I would probably hesitate a while. I would find it very difficult to give a straightforward reply. At this point, I expect I would secretly feel a haze of "jasmine-not-jasmine" creep irresistibly over me.

  *Kuiyuan

  : In 1968,1 helped out in the making of a survey. A mass association called "Forever Eastwards" in the CCP Hunan Provincial Party Committee organ, wanted to expel two cadres from the Provincial Party Committee. Firstly, though, they had to carry out a thorough political investigation of all these cadres' relatives. So as to avoid being attacked by the opposing faction, they agreed to accept public scrutiny and invited the Red Guards to send someone along to help out with the survey. And so it was that I managed to get onto a cadre inspection team while I was still barely out of diapers, that I wangled my way onto this cushy number, onto a publicly funded pleasure trip around the whole country. First of all we went to a number of prisons in Beijing, Jinzhou, and Shenyang to find out about a male cousin of one of the cadres. The cousin used to be a broadcaster at an important broadcasting station, but after mispronouncing the name of the important Communist Party member "An Ziwen" as that of the important GMD member "Song Ziwen" during a live broadcast in the 1950s, he was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years, and had been serving out his sentence in the above-mentioned prisons. I discovered, to my surprise, that however many appeals he wrote, all his hearers felt it was entirely right and proper that he should pay for one single written character with fifteen years of his life. By the time we spoke to him, he'd thought things through for himself, was full of apologies to the Party and to Chairman Mao, and no longer felt his own sentencing was overly harsh. "Government," he addressed me-me! all of fifteen-year-old me-"I won't appeal again, I'll concentrate on reforming my thinking."

  As I walked out from under the electric wire fencing and high walls, back to the hotel where we were staying, a sudden te
rror rose up in me: a nameless terror toward "An," "Song," and all other such words.

  Round upon round of gunfire from armed struggles resounded outside the hotel; everywhere there were street barricades, bullet holes, and gunpowder smoke; convoys of vehicles bearing yelling, screaming combatants with guns loaded and at the ready would often whistle past on the street, waking the people in the hotel up to violent starts. In Liaoning in 1968, the "Red Company" was locked in battle with the "Revolutionary Company," while the "Mao Zedong Thought" faction was encircling the "Mao Zedongism" faction. A brutal battle being fought near the station brought all the trains to a stop, trapping me and three colleagues in the hotel for a full two weeks. All this is perhaps very hard for later generations, like my daughter, for example, to understand. In the eyes of those who were born later, in terms of thinking, theory, conduct, interests, expressions, dress, or language there was nothing much to choose between those fighting on opposite sides, beyond the slight linguistic differences between, for example, "Red Company" and "Revolutionary Company"; in other circumstances, they would have done business or worked together, studied for diplomas or played the stock-market, would have done all sorts of things together. So how did these endless bouts of furious hand-to-hand fighting come about?

  In just the same way, I've never been able to understand the Crusades. I've read the Catholic Bible, I've read the Islamic Koran, and apart from certain differences in wording, such as that between "God" and "Allah," I found the two religions amazingly similar in terms of ethical strictures, in admonishing people not to kill, steal, be lewd, tell lies, and so on- they're almost two editions of the same book. So why should war after far-reaching holy war erupt between the cross and the crescent? What mystical force mobilized so many people from the east to kill westwards, then from the west to kill eastwards, leaving behind a land of bare bones, and tens of thousands of weeping orphans and widows? In the great, gloomy amnesiac void that renders all memories impermanent, is history nothing but a war of words? Do the meanings of words light sparks? Do words drag themselves down into the mire? Does grammar chop off arms and heads? Does blood flow out of sentence structures, nourishing the brambles on the plains and congealing under the setting sun into smear upon gleaming smear?

  Ever since language has existed in the world, it's led to endless human conflict, arguments, wars, manufactured endless death by language. But I don't for a moment believe this is owing to the magical power of language itself. No, quite the opposite: the instant that certain words take on an aura of incontrovertible sanctity, then immediately, invariably, they lose their original links to reality, and at moments of the greatest, irreconcilable tension between embattled parties, transform themselves into perfectly chiselled symbols, into the abstract simulacra of power, glory, property, and sovereign territory. If, shall we say, language has been instrumental in the advancement and accumulation of culture, then it is precisely this halo of sanctity that strips language of its sense of gravity, turning it into a force harmful to humans.

  As I write this, the twentieth century will soon be at an end. As well as witnessing great strides in science and economics, this century has left behind unprecedented environmental crises, skepticism, sexual liberation, the records of two world wars and several hundred other wars, from which the numbers of war dead are in excess of numbers from the past nineteen centuries put together. Countless forms of media and language have sprung out of this century: television, newspapers, the Internet, tens of thousands of books published every day, new philosophies and slang created, renovated every week, fueling linguistic growth spurts and explosions, and forming a thick, sedimented stratum that covers the surface of the entire globe. What guarantee is there that some part of these languages won't trigger new wars?

  The fetishizing of language is a civilizational disorder, the most common danger faced by language. This observation of mine won't for a minute stop me from inhaling and absorbing language every day, from ending my days rolling around in the ocean of language, from being drawn to reflection and emotion by a single word. All that my continuing recollections of that trip to Liaoning have done is increase my wariness toward language: the moment language becomes petrified, the moment language no longer serves as a tool searching for truth but comes to represent the truth itself, the moment a light of self-veneration, of self-adoration appears on the faces of language users, betraying a fetishization of language mercilessly repressive of their enemies, all I can do is think back to a story.

  This story happened in Maqiao, on one July 15th, the day of an ancestral sacrifice. By this time, Yanwu's uncle Ma Wenjie had been rehabilitated and no one any longer made much mention of his father having been a traitor to the Chinese. As neither of them had been given a proper funeral before, now of course people wanted to make amends. As the richest person in Maqiao, Yanwu had hired a Western band and a national band to make sure it'd be a lively occasion. He also put together an eight-table banquet, and sent out red invitation cards to friends and relations from inside and outside the village.

  Kuiyuan, who'd returned to the village for the ancestral sacrifice, also received a red invitation card, but when he opened it to have a look, his face immediately changed color. His full name was Hu Kuiyuan, the kui spelled with the character meaning "chief," or "great," but on the invitation it was written with the character meaning "lack" or "loss."

  This "loss" kui was deeply inauspicious and dripped with animosity-even though it was probably only a result of momentary carelessness and laziness on the part of the invitation writer.

  "I'll give his mother a good sticking!" (See the entry "Stick(y).")

  He ripped up the red invitation in a fury.

  His intolerance of this word "loss" echoed the intolerance of 1950s law courts for "Song Ziwen," the intolerance of the fighters of the Red Company faction for the two words "Revolutionary Company," the intolerance of the crusading army for the word "Allah." And so began a holy war of language.

  He didn't go to the banquet. He gnawed savagely on his own raw sweet potato, as he watched people return from Yanwu's place, wiping grease from their mouths. He was going to call Yanwu's family to account, he told his family. In fact, after he went out he first of all went and sat in Zhihuang's house for a while, than went to the vegetable garden at Fucha's house to nibble on a cucumber, then ended up going to the front of Tiananmen, where he watched some young men play ping-pong, then watched some more young men play a table of mahjong-he didn't dare go looking for Yanwu. He was even afraid of Yanwu learning he'd come to make trouble. How was he ever going to dare make a fuss, if the exterior of the Tiananmen residence alone was enough to make him wet himself? Luckily, as he vacillated away, he discovered that the members of the Yanwu household, who were in the middle of decorating a shopfront, had left an electric drill on the ground; probably when the electricity had been cut off, the workers had gone off to drink tea and had forgotten to pick it up. Yanzao, who just a moment ago had been slapping some underling around, had also disappeared, presumably busy with something else. His sharp eyes darting from left to right, with nimble fingers Kuiyuan stuffed the electric drill up his shirt, scooped up two socket boards while he was at it and slipped out of the main gate; he ran to the sweet-potato patch of his third brother's house, dug a hole, and buried them before he contemplated his next move. He knew that stuff like this could later be sold anywhere.

  Slowly, leisurely, he returned home, wiping his sweat and fanning himself, kicking the dog-who yelped in terror-that had followed him along, as if he'd just earned himself the right to kick it like this.

  "Anyone'll need his wits about him to get the better of Kuiyuan!" he told his mother excitedly.

  "What'll that Yanwu say about it?"

  "What'll he say? Everything that happens now's his responsibility!"

  But he didn't actually say what would happen, or how he would take responsibility. Seeing him busy removing and polishing his leather shoes, his mother forgot to press him any further
on this and went off to make him something to eat. Two married women with children in their arms stood by the door for a while, half-credulous, half-doubting about what would come of the matter, forcing Kuiyuan into repeating a few blusters: "So what if Yanwu has money? When I come looking for him, he'll know about it."

  After he'd finished eating, Kuiyuan was unable to sit still at home and went out in search of a television. When he reached the mouth of the road, he discovered the road was blocked by three men, of whom one, Kuiyuan discovered when he peered at them by the light of the moon, was a sidekick of Yanwu's, his manager Wang. Pretending not to have seen them, Kuiyuan tried to squeeze past.

  "Where d'you think you're going?" Quick as a flash, Wang grabbed him by the chest: "You've kept us waiting long enough. You going to talk, or are we going to have to beat it out of you?"

  "What're you talking about?"

  "Still playing dumb?"

  "You joking with me, Brother Wang?"

  Smiling, Kuiyuan was about to pat the man on the shoulder when, before his hand had gone up, the other stuck his leg out, felling him with a quick rustle over the ground to half his full height, to a kneeling position. Covering his head with both arms, he yelled and screamed out: "Why'd you hit me? What d'you want to do that for?"

  He took a punch from a black shadow: "Who hit you?"

  "I'm telling you, I've got brothers, I have…"

  He took another kick in the back.

  "So, who hit you this time?"

  "No one, no-"