A Dictionary of Maqiao

by Han Shaogong

  He didn't feel he'd lost out in the slightest.

  He knew even less about those things they called electric lamps. Some young men had cut down light bulbs in the city, intending to take them back to hang on the roof beams of their own houses; this handy little thing lit up at night, they said, didn't go dark even when the wind blew. Totally mad, Ma Ziyuan thought they were; there was no way such a treasure could possibly exist the world over.

  Going "on the take" was later listed as one of Ma Wenjie's "crimes." He hadn't foreseen that so many would follow him into the city, and in order to bring the chaos under control he ordered his followers to suppress the looters. Among those wounded was Benyi's dad: because the tiles on his shoulder were too heavy, he was right at the back of those leaving the city and the soldiers caught up with him.

  Before he'd had time to turn round, he felt a cold wind whistle past him and half his head, including one eye and one ear, flew into the air, dispatched in the wake of a silver-white sword blade. Propped up by his shoulders, the remaining half bounced along for another ten steps or so. His body and limbs flailed and his carrying pole bobbed up and down until, only quite some while later, his body finally lay dejectedly prostrate. His assassin, standing beside him, was shocked speechless for some time.

  When the corpse was being cleaned, Maqiao's elders said, someone luckily noticed that Benyi's dad's foot was still stirring, and after giving it a rub discovered his hand was still warm and there was still a puff of life coming from his mouth. When Ma Wenjie came over and recognized an acquaintance from his own village, he hurriedly found a doctor to save him, who mixed up a bowl of paste, applied it to the wound, and stopped the bleeding, as if tightly sealing the mouth of an earthen jar. The doctor also poured a little rice broth into his mouth, and seeing that, after a short wait, the rice soup had actually been swallowed down, pronounced, "he won't die."

  After Benyi's dad was sent back to Maqiao, he lived another five or so years; although he only had half a head left and couldn't work in the fields or say anything, he could still sit under the eaves making grass shoes and chopping up pig fodder.

  The man with half a head never went where there were a lot of people, so as to avoid frightening everybody, in particular to avoid frightening children. Hiding away in his house all day, he got a bit restless, so he had to find things to do. And so, in this way, he managed to get done more than most normal people.

  I find all this very hard to believe, and the idea of a man with half a head bustling around everywhere is even more fantastic, but this was how all the old people told it, insisting they'd all worn straw sandals sewn by Benyi's half-headed old dad. I just let them talk on.

  *Bandit Ma (continued)

  : One rainy evening, a staff member from the Liberation Army sent out as an advance guard met with County Leader Ma Wenjie under an oil lamp, explained to him the national situation and Communist Party policy, and urged him to give up his rebellion. Ma Wenjie demonstrated his consent, accepted the post of deputy director of the "Advisory Committee," and agreed to begin persuading the armies of the enemy, the puppet regime, and every gang member to submit.

  Ma Wenjie had been County Leader for a few months but had never sat in office; he didn't even know where his office was. He'd never received any salary, didn't even know where he should go to receive his salary. He still liked wearing straw sandals; he could write a little but didn't have any great fondness for writing letters: whenever he dispatched messengers to the gangs, he'd make them carry an arrow-shaped bamboo token with three of his blood-red fingerprints on the top as guarantee. The gang members usually recognized his fingerprints and complied with his orders. Generally speaking, wherever the fingerprints went, guns would be handed over. The Baima Group from Baini Bow handed over thirty-odd great swords, which were carried clatteringly all the way to the county seat.

  Little did Ma Wenjie know that Baima Group's Big Brother "Dragon's Head," whom he himself had persuaded to surrender, would find himself in prison two months later, and in chains.

  Astounded, he went looking for the County Military Team-leader, whom he subjected to a spluttering interrogation, only to be rendered speechless when the man brought out a great heap of irrefutable evidence drawn from case investigations. He discovered that the Baima Group had in fact only feigned surrender, while secretly storing up guns and gunpowder, and preparing to flee. Then there was a Xu Someone, whom he'd also persuaded to surrender, who had gallons of blood on his hands, who'd tyrannized the local area, raped countless local girls. Finally, his own chief of staff was interrogated by the new regime and discovered to be a military spy sent in by the GMD on a secret mission to control Ma Wenjie, or even to carry out assassinations. Should someone like this just be set free to operate free and undisturbed outside the law?

  Ma Wenjie was in a cold sweat, incapable of doing anything except nod continuously.

  The streets were plastered with slogans demanding the suppression of counterrevolutionaries. The peasants on the outskirts of the city, it was said, were sending grass ropes into the county seat, in preparation for tying people up. Every day, it was said, people were being dragged out of the county prison to be shot; large cells, containing several dozen men, could be emptied in a night, without anyone knowing whether they'd been sent elsewhere or killed. Rumors both true and false finally converged on Ma Wenjie himself: that his "Advisory Committee" was a hotbed of phoney surrenderers and that he was the ringleader of the "Advisory Gang." He waited for his superiors to send people to seize him, waited several days without anything happening; quite the opposite, his superiors behaved entirely as usual, inviting him to come to meetings here and there, sending someone over with his khaki Liberation Army uniform. He wore this uniform when he went out into the streets; when people who knew him saw how anxious he looked, they kept to the other side of the road, gave him a wide berth.

  It's hard to give a clear account of how things worked out, partly because there were so few parties involved and because they weren't willing to talk, but also because what little the parties involved did manage to say was so dubious, in so many places, and differed so enormously from one version to the next. Some said that Bandit Ma's old enemy Donkey Peng had also surrendered and gotten himself an official position higher than Bandit Ma's. Keen to make a show of loyalty to the new regime, Peng found the easiest method was to denounce lots of people for having falsely surrendered. There were also those who said that Section B and Section H in the GMD had never gotten along; when the Japanese devils had been there, each had played the Japanese against their opponent; now that the CCP had come, they were making use of the CCP to elbow out their adversaries. Seeing as Section B had used Bandit Ma to contain the H section, Section H could, of course, make use of the CCP to deal with Bandit Ma. How could Bandit Ma, a local yokel, possibly keep up with all these underhanded dealings and secret summonses?

  Of course, there were also those who said this wasn't how things were. They believed that a lot of bandits only surrendered half-heartedly, that Bandit Ma was an incorrigible brigand and had secretly planned several defections and rebellions, that he was guilty of the most heinous crimes. It was only because he was already dead that the government later forgave him his past.

  I have no way of distinguishing the true from the false amongst these accounts, so I'll have to sidestep them all and just tell briefly how the story ended. I can't necessarily even give a proper account of how it ended, all I can do is try my best to piece together the fragmented sources available. It would probably have been one day a couple of months later, when Ma Wenjie was on his way back home from a meeting at the prefectural commissioner's office, and he heard a terrible commotion of weeping coming from inside his house. When he pushed open the door, he was confronted by a gang of women who threw themselves upon him at this very same instant, their eyes glittering with tears, their mouths open wide. The sound of crying came to an abrupt halt. But it stopped only for a moment, before violently re-erupting. The f
ew children present followed suit, their faces twisting with sobs.

  He couldn't believe his eyes.

  Director Ma! County Leader Ma! General! Third Master! Third Uncle… The women cried out every imaginable name, as they jostled frenziedly to reach the front to make their kowtows, thumping out a terrible din with their heads.

  "Our lives are over!"

  "Our lives are in your hands!"

  "Give me back my precious love!"

  "We only surrendered because of what you said! You're responsible!"

  "His dad said he had to go, but what about the family, there's seven, eight of them, they all need feeding, what am I going to do…"

  One woman rushed forward, grabbed hold of his lapels, smacked him right in the face, and yelled out, as if crazed: "It's all your fault! Give us back our men, give them back-"

  By the time Ma Wenjie's wife had come forward to coax the madwoman away, Ma Wenjie's jacket lapels were torn and his assailant had clawed two bleeding scratches across his hand.

  Ma Wenjie slowly worked out what had happened. While he'd been having a meeting with his superiors, the "Advisory Gang" had risen up in rebellion, killing first of all three members of the work team in Baoluo Township; they'd planned a rebellion of even greater dimensions, but failed to anticipate the government intercepting and seizing a secret missive; all the government then had to do was strike first, and hardest, executing the ringleaders of the rebellion as soon as possible-the husbands of these women numbering among them. They'd not seen their husbands return from a meeting called several days ago. In the end, the government informed them they should go to a place called Bramble Street to pick up their effects; that's how simply things were managed.

  As he listened, Ma Wenjie once more went into a cold sweat, pacing up and down the room with his hands behind his back, staring up at the heavens, his tears pouring out. He clasped the hands of every single woman gathered in the room: "Your brother's let you down," he said, "he's let you down."

  Crying all the while, he pulled open some cases, took out all the shiny silver dollars they contained-only fifty-odd coins altogether-and stuffed them into the hands of his petitioners. His wife, wiping her eyes, also produced her private savings, made up of the scattered coins that Ma Wenjie normally left at his pillowside, on tables, in drawers, in the stable or toilet. He was usually careless with his money, but luckily his wife followed behind him, scooping it all up.

  The two of them finally managed to send their weeping and wailing guests home.

  Ma Wenjie didn't close his eyes once all night; when he rose the next day and saw that the cockerel at the gate stretching its neck but producing no noise, he sensed something a little odd had happened. When, tapping the table absent-mindedly, he realized that still there was no noise, something, he felt, was even odder. Finding himself at an old Daoist temple, at the front of whose hall was an old bell, he walked up to the bell, tried to sound it and discovered there was still no sound; now unable to control his mounting anxiety, he swung the hammer and rang the bell with all his might; hearing its deafening chimes, everyone from roundabout ran over, staring at him with huge, terrified eyes. It was only then that he realized it wasn't the bell that was failing to make a noise- he had gone deaf. He put the bell hammer down without a word.

  Having drunk a bowl of gruel that his wife had prepared for him, he heaved a sigh and got ready to go and see the doctor, but just as he reached the mouth of the lane, he collided with a flood of people on the streets, taking part in another demonstration march for the suppression of counterrevolutionary elements, a memorial meeting for the three revolutionary martyrs of Baoluo Township. Headed in the direction of the county prison, the people's militia and primary school students were shouting out slogans. What they were shouting with their mouths so wide open, he didn't know.

  He stopped and, using the wall for support, slowly turned and went back home.

  From his house to the mouth of the lane, it was fifty-one steps, from the mouth of the lane to his house it was also fifty-one steps, no more, no less; this happened to be his age exactly.

  "How come it's exactly fifty-one steps?" It surprised him.

  His wife handed him an umbrella, urging him to go and see the doctor.

  "Tell me, how come it's exactly fifty-one steps?"

  He couldn't hear whatever his wife had to say.

  "What did you say?"

  His wife's mouth once more opened and closed noiselessly.

  He remembered again that he was deaf and didn't repeat his question, just shook his head. "Strange. Very strange."

  That afternoon, a doctor friend came to have a look at his hearing problem. He asked his guest for a little coarse opium. You practice Daoist rituals and breathing every day, his friend gestured at him, aren't you supposed not to smoke? He tapped his forehead, meaning that he'd caught a slight chill, that he was feeling the cold badly, and that he needed something to smoke to drive out the cold, bring on a sweat. His friend gave him a pouchful.

  It rained that night. After he'd performed his last ritual, he committed suicide by swallowing opium. He'd changed into a clean, neat set of clothes, shaved off his beard, even carefully cut his fingernails.

  Going by what most people said, he hadn't needed to die. He was in no particular danger. Even though he was implicated in a few felonies- such as deciding to surrender to the GMD and allowing his followers to kill a few ordinary people on the take-he was, in the end, a big cheese and the arrow-tokens of his Advisory Committee had, in the end, achieved a great deal for the new regime. When he'd studied carpentry, moreover, he'd been apprenticed alongside some important senior officer in the Communist Party, whose family he'd protected, sending over rice to help them through. The day after he killed himself, a section chief arrived posthaste on a special trip across the province to deliver a letter written by the senior officer himself. At the end of the letter, the senior officer invited him, at his convenience, to come as his guest to the provincial capital to talk about old times.

  He was already asleep in his grass mat shroud before he got to see this letter. After taking instructions from the prefectural commissioner's office and the province, the county government bought him a coffin, a pair of white candles, and a string of firecrackers.

  *Bramble Gourd

  : Most Maqiao people wouldn't know what Bramble Street, the place I just mentioned, was; most people from near Maqiao wouldn't know either-especially not the younger generation.

  Bramble Street disappeared many years ago. If you left the county seat from the East Gate on Sanhuali Road, then crossed the Luo River, you'd see a flat stretch of bank, where cotton or sweet potatoes grew; on top of the northern face, which was slightly elevated, were a few scattered stones, some straggling grass, and a couple of thatched sheds built for night watchmen. If you came in a bit closer to look, you'd probably glimpse some ox droppings or the nests of wild birds in amongst the deep grasses, or a broken straw sandal. This was Bramble Street, now called Brambleland, or Brambleland Embankment. It would have been near impossible for younger generations to gain a sense of how this had in fact once been a "street," that it had actually been host to a hundred bustling, clamoring people and a huge, grand Confucian temple, famous for miles around.

  Bramble Street had become a name without any links to reality, that had gone to waste.

  Bramble Street only continued to figure, only carried any importance as a place-name, in stories relating to Ma Wenjie. Even so, its inevitable disappearance into oblivion was merely postponed for a few decades in the minds of one group of people-nothing more. The massacre of the "Advisory Gang" which took place that year started right here. In the last stage of their study meeting, the fifty-odd leaders of the surrendering bandits had been ordered to dig a pond. They dug and dug, hauled and hauled, dripped with sweat for three days; as soon as some kind of a pond had been dug, the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun hidden on a roof somewhere suddenly went off-a sudden noise, it was, that would have s
ounded very foreign, very distant to its hearers. The rain of bullets whistled over, rolled up into a whirlwind. None felt the bullets passing through his flesh, but as clouds of dust leapt up from the mud slope behind them and sand splattered in all directions, it became very obvious that somethinghad exploded through one side of their bodies before blossoming out into a whole chain of dust-cloud blooms on the other side. Maybe they were just beginning to understand what kind of a thing metal is, what kind of a thing speed is, how freely and easily metal bullets passed through flesh and how hard this instant was to grasp. And finally, they fell, one after another, into the hole in the ground they themselves had just dug.

  It was only after 1982, when the government pronounced the "Revolt of the Advisory Committee" to be a case misjudged for all sorts of complex reasons, that talk of this episode once more began to flash into conversation, that the strange name of Bramble Street began to be used once more. Some old people said that after that volley of gunfire, Bramble Street became the haunt of ghosts, that house after house had caught fire for no apparent reason, and that before two years had passed, seven houses had burned down. A lot of the children born there-three within two years-were born feebleminded. The fengshui man said there were ghosts at work there and that the fish in the pool couldn't keep them off, so of course houses were going to get burned down. Mr Fengshui also babbled something about these being guan ("government") ghosts, ghosts connected to catastrophes in government, guan being homophonic with the word coffin, which referred to souls which hadn't scattered after death, something like this-no one listening quite got what he said. People immediately started to dig inside and outside their houses, tunneled several feet down, and cleared out any suspicious broken bits of material which might have been rotten coffins. They also dug a new pond and planted a few thousand fishtail seedlings in a determined effort to increase the flow of water, to overcome fire with water. The strange thing was that the fish in this pond just wouldn't survive: all of them went belly-up within a month. Finally, an umbrella-maker's shop on the eastern side of the street caught fire and people slowly lost confidence in fire-fighting; one after another, they were forced to move elsewhere, a great many to the area around Huang Bay.