Of course, dialect isn't the only linguistic obstacle, neither is region the only linguistic tie. Apart from regionalization, language at the very least also has epochal gradations. A few days ago, I was chatting with friends, sighing over how the development of transportation and communications was strengthening horizontal links across humanity, ever accelerating the process of cultural renewal; in the not-too-distant future, maybe regional differences in culture would be rooted out, would melt away, leading to a possible increase and intensification of epochal differences. People of the same era in the global village would eat the same kind of food, wear the same kind of clothes, live in the same kind of houses, propagate the same kind of ideas, even speak the same kind of language, but by then, for people of the 1950s to understand people of the 1930s, for people born in 2020 to understand people born in 2010, could be as difficult as it is now for Hunanese people to understand Hainanese culture, for Chinese people to understand British culture.
This process has in fact already begun. Within any one dialect, the "generation gap" shows up not only in ideas about music, literature, clothing, employment, politics, and so on, it also shows up in language-we're already used to seeing an old person having to work up a real sweat to understand his children's vocabulary. "Three-in-one," "bean coupons," "team worker," "(class) status," a whole batch of Chinese terms have rapidly become archaisms, although they haven't yet been banished to ancient manuscripts, they haven't yet been withdrawn from daily life, they remain current in a few, fixed circles of exchange, just as dialect is still current in old village circles. It's not region but era, not space but time which are producing all these new kinds of linguistic communities.
We could explore this question a bit further. Even if people can overcome the obstacles of region and era, can they still find any kind of common language? A linguistics professor once carried out a classroom experiment: he pronounced a word, such as "revolution," then got students to say the first image that flashed into their brains on hearing it. The responses were enormously varied: there was red flag, leader, storm, father, banquet, prison, politics teacher, newspapers, market, accordion… The students produced totally different subconscious interpretations of the word "revolution" according to their totally different individual life experiences. Of course, having entered into the realm of public exchange, they have to submit to standards of authority such as large dictionaries. This is the compromise the individual makes to society, the compromise of lived and living feelings to cultural tradition. But who can say for sure that the ephemeral images secretly omitted in these compromises won't be stored up in some dark layer of consciousness, evolving into language that could erupt at any given moment and change the course of events? Who can say for sure, while people search for and use a broadly standard form of language, while they are overcoming all kinds of linguistic obstacles in their quest for communication with other minds, that new divergences in sound, form, meaning, regulations aren't emerging at all stages? Aren't psychological processes of nonstandardization or antistandardization constantly, simultaneously in progress?
Strictly speaking, what we might term a "common language" will forever remain a distant human objective. Providing we don't intend exchange to become a process of mutual neutralization, of mutual attrition, then we must maintain vigilance and resistance toward exchange, preserving in this compromise our own, indomitable forms of expression-this is an essential precondition for any kind of benign exchange. This implies, then, that when people speak, everyone really needs their own, unique dictionary.
Words have lives of their own. They proliferate densely, endlessly transform, gather and scatter for short bursts, drift along without mooring, shift and intermingle, sicken and live on, have personalities and emotionSj flourish, decline, even die out. Depending on specific, actual circumstances, they have long or short life spans. For some time now, a number of such words have been caught and imprisoned in my notebook. Over and over, I've elaborated and guessed, probed and investigated, struggled like a detective to discover the stories hidden behind these words; this book is the result.
This, of course, is only my own individual dictionary, it possesses no standardizing significance for other people. This is just one of the many responses from the linguistics professor's class experiment; once class is over, people can forget it.
Glossary
Ba: an ancient name for Sichuan, a large province in midwestern China.
Catty: five hundred grams.
CCP: the Chinese Communist Party
Double Ninth Festival: Ninth day of the ninth lunar month.
Educated Youth: high-school and university students sent down to labor in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.
Great Leap Forward: with the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), Mao Zedong hoped to achieve an economic breakthrough that would allow China to overtake the West. It in fact led to the worst manmade famine in human history, leaving approximately thirty million Chinese dead, most of them peasants.
Guomindang (GMD): the Nationalist Party in power in Mainland China from 1911 to 1949.
Journey to the West: one of the best-known novels of premodern China, written c. 1570, recounting the adventures of the monk Xuan Zang (Tripitaka) and the monkey Sun Wukung on a pilgrimage to India.
Li: a traditional unit of length equivalent to 0.5 km or 0.31 mile.
Lin Biao (1907-71): Communist leader and Mao Zedong's designated successor until his death in a plane crash following an unsuccessful coup d'etat. Lin Daiyu: the tragic, sickly, poetry-writing, garden-dwelling heroine of The Dream of Red Mansions, probably the most famous of all Chinese novels, written by Cao Xueqin c. 1760.
LuXun (1881-1936): one of the most acclaimed figures in modern Chinese literature, renowned for his critical and satirical short stories and essays on modern China.
Miao: an ethnic minority of southwestern China.
Ming Dynasty: the Ming Dynasty ruled China from 1368 to 1644.
Model Operas: Eight "politically correct" revolutionary operas from the Cultural Revolution.
Mu: A Chinese unit of area equivalent to 0.067 hectares or 0.167 acres.
Poor and lower-middle peasants: The two poorest, and therefore most politically correct, classes of peasants in Maoist China. Qing: the Qing Dynasty ruled China from 1644 to 1911.
Qingming: the Chinese grave-sweeping festival, when ancestors are commemorated.
Rice sprout dance: a traditional Chinese folk dance that Communist propaganda teams popularized from the 1940s, adding new political content. Dancers take a step forward, then a step back, in effect not moving from their original spot.
Romance of the Western Chamber: a romantic work of drama written by Wang Shifu (c. 1300).
Simplified characters: in the 1950s, the Communist government simplified the majority of Chinese written characters, reducing the number of strokes and often radically changing the appearance of the character. The original characters are now called "full-form" or "complex" characters.
Struggle: to submit (a class enemy) to class struggle was a technique of mass intimidation used particularly in Maoist China, involving mass denunciation meetings and self-criticisms.
Tujia: The Tujia nationality is found in Hunan and Hubei provinces.
Zhang Xianzhong: one of the rebels who contributed to the fall of the Ming Dynasty.
Zhan Tianyu (1861-1919): a railway engineer who invented a type of railcar coupler still in use today.
Zhuangzi (c. 370-300 b.c): a great Daoist philosopher of ancient China.
Guide to Principal Characters
Bandit Ma: see Ma Wenjie.
Benren: Benyi's same-pot brother; fled to Jiangxi during the Great Leap Forward.
Benyi (also Ma Benyi): Party Branch Secretary in Maqiao.
Commune Head He: leader of the local commune.
Fucha: Maqiao's accountant.
Kuiyan: "lazy" son of Zhaoqing.
Long Stick Xi: a mysterious outsider who introduced "t
incture of iodine" to Maqiao.
Ma Ming: leader of Maqiao's "Daoist Immortals," inhabitant of the "House of Immortals."
Ma Wenjie: Maqiao's most famous modern historical figure and former County Leader.
Master Black (also Mou Jisheng): muscular but dim Educated Youth.
Master Nine Pockets: renowned beggar king of Changle.
Shuishui: wife of Zhihuang the stonemason, later a "dream-woman."
Three Ears: unfilial son of Zhaoqing, one of the "Daoist Immortals," later lover of Tiexiang.
Tiexiang: daughter of Master Nine Pockets, later wife of Benyi and lover of Three Ears.
Uncle Luo: former village leader; Maqiao's oldest cadre.
Wanyu: Maqiao's singing star.
Xiongshi: son of Zhihuang and Shui Shui, killed in delayed blast of Japanese bomb.
Yanwu: talented younger brother of Yanzao.
Yanzao: "Traitor to the Chinese," persecuted and bullied for being a landlord's son.
Zhaoqing: notoriously stingy inhabitant of Maqiao, father of Three Ears.
Zhihuang: Maqiao's stonemason, famed for his stupidity, married toShuishui.
Zhongqi: Maqiao's resident gossip and busybody.
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Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html Page 46
