by Han Shaogong
Fortunately, the guestroom had a black-and-white television which was just then showing an old kung-fu film. I put on a show of enthusiasm, repeatedly shifting my gaze onto the boxing high kicks of the kungfu warriors, young ladies, and old monks, as an excuse for my silence.
Luckily, some snot-nosed kid I didn't know pushed on the door a few times, giving me something to do: I asked his name, moved a stool over for him, chatted with a woman standing behind him about his age and rural family planning.
Something like half an hour passed. In other words, the minimum required duration for reunions and reminiscences had been achieved, and we could part. Half an hour isn't ten minutes, or five. Half an hour isn't too hasty, or gushy, too empty or indifferent; it enabled us to remember each other as friends. In the final analysis, I'd tolerated, endured the nameless, strong, grassy smell Yanzao's body gave off-the kind of smell that a certain kind of bamboo gives off after it's been cut- for this effortfully, unendingly long stretch of time; my mission would soon be accomplished.
He got up to say goodbye, and at my emphatic request once more picked up onto his back that heavy piece of wood, and reiterated his "uh-uh" noise at me, the noise that sounded as if he was about to vomit. There were a lot of things he wanted to say, I'm sure, but everything he said reminded you of vomiting.
As he went out the door, a tear suddenly glimmered in the corner of his eye.
The footsteps in the black night gradually grew distant.
I'd seen that teardrop. Despite the dimness of the light at that moment, that teardrop sank deep into my memory, so deep that I had no way of wiping it away with a blink of the eyelids. It had gleamed gold. When I quietly released my breath, when I relaxed my face from its frozen smile, I was unable to forget it. I had no sense of release. As I watched the kung-fu movie on the television, I couldn't forget it. As I ran a bowl of hot water for washing my feet, I couldn't forget it. As I squeezed onto the long-distance bus and yelled at a big fat man in front of me, I couldn't forget it. When buying the newspaper, I couldn't forget it. While going to the food market, umbrella in hand, and breathing in fishy smells, I couldn't forget it. While under gentle but unremitting pressure from two members of the intellectual elite to edit with them teaching materials on traffic regulation and go to the Public Security Bureau to buy the head of traffic's obligatory distribution rights, I couldn't forget it. When getting out of bed, I couldn't forget it.
The footsteps had disappeared into the night.
I knew this teardrop came from somewhere very distant. Distant people, separated by time and space, are often filtered in our memories into something cherished, touching, beautiful, become multicolored hallucinations in the imaginings of our souls. Once they come near, once they turn into a qu, a this him, standing before you, then everything changes completely. They may well morph into a hazy, uninteresting strangeness, swathed in layer upon layer of totally different experiences, interests, and types of discourse, swathed so tightly, so immovably that no breath of air can break in, a strangeness with nothing to say to me-just as I, perhaps, am totally different in their eyes, am totally unrelated to their memories.
I was looking for ta, that him, but could only find qu, this him.
I had to get away from this him, but I couldn't forget that him.
The clear distinction in Maqiao language between ta and qu highlights the great difference that exists between near and far, between fact and description, between fact at a distance and actual fact itself. That evening I saw very clearly that between these two words, as that strangely conjoined mass of acute angles, as that wood-bearing qu strode off to become ta, a silent teardrop gleamed.
*Confucian
: I gave Yanzao's wife twenty yuan. She was overjoyed to receive it, and, of course, immediately began spewing out politenesses:
"Yanzao often talks about you all."
"How come you're so Confucian?"
And so on.
Confucian, in Maqiao dialect, referred to a sense of etiquette, of morals, to lofty intellect, to a slightly wordy seriousness. Generally speaking, this word carried no pejorative connotations.
But when you start thinking about how much hypocrisy has been dressed up over the years in the cloak of Confucian orthodoxy, it wasn't a word that made you feel too comfortable. What seemed to be philanthropy-that twenty yuan I just mentioned, for example-stemmed not from a deep sincerity, nor from natural instinct, but merely from cultural indoctrination. This is inevitably a rather depressing thought.
Beyond the framework of "Confucianism," can the sympathy and affection of genuine feeling exist between humans? Did Maqiao people replace "good," "decent," "warm-hearted," and other close synonyms with "Confucian" because they couldn't rid themselves of grave doubts over human nature? What feelings of fear or shame might these doubts produce in alms-givers?
*Yellowskin
: "Yellowskin" was a dog, an incredibly ordinary dog who lacked any other characteristics from which we could devise a name for it. No one knew where it came from and it seemed to have no owner. Because the Educated Youth had rather more grain to eat than other households, thanks to parental supplements, the Educated Youth's cooking pot gave off more appetizing smells. They hadn't managed totally to shake off wasteful habits, and dirty rice or spoiled vegetables would be flicked carelessly onto the ground or into the ditch. As day after day Yellowskin fed royally, it seemed to set down roots here, its ever-hopeful gaze fixed permanently on our bowls.
It also got to know the voices of the Educated Youth. If you wanted to call it from far off, or set it onto some target, you had to talk in the Changsha city dialect. If you used Maqiao dialect, it'd gaze to left, to right, in front and behind, before it made any kind of a move. Maqiao people were furious when they discovered this.
It'd even gotten to know the sound of our breathing and footsteps. Sometimes we'd go out in the evening, to pay visits in nearby villages or to the commune to make a phone call; by the time we returned to the village the night would already be well advanced. We'd climb up over Tianzi Peak, with Maqiao down below, sunk into the gently flickering, hazy blue moonlight, still at least another five or six li away from us. And then, without us needing to say anything, still less to whistle, there'd be a movement in faraway Maqiao, a sound of breakneck pattering would rise up from somewhere deep within the moonlight, skirting along the twisted path, closer and closer, faster and faster until it finally loomed into a silent black shadow that threw itself at our sleeves or collars in an expression of welcome.
It was like this every time. Yellowskin could catch and distinguish any sound from more than five or six li away, sparing no effort in its mad dash to meet us, always providing a source of warmth for us nocturnal travelers, offering the embrace of an advance party from home.
I don't know how it managed to survive after we left Maqiao. I only remember that after Uncle Luo was bitten by a mad dog, the commune launched a huge dog-catching campaign. Benyi said Yellowskin was the most vicious dog of all, the one most needing to be destroyed, and took action with a rifle himself, but failed to hit his target even with three shots. Left with a bleeding back leg, Yellowskin scurried off yowling into the mountains.
At nighttime, we'd hear a familiar cry, a dog barking on the hillside near the house, calling for nights on end. Probably it found it all very puzzling: it could hear our footsteps from far off on the horizon, so why couldn't we hear its nearby cries for help?
At that time, we were busy looking for jobs to take us away from Maqiao and paid no attention. We didn't even notice when its cries stopped.
When I revisited Maqiao, however many years later it was, I did actually recognize it, recognized its three-legged limp. It threw a completely expressionless look at me, closed its eyes once more and went back to sleep at the foot of a wall. It was old and scrawny, able to do nothing but sleep for more than half the time; neither could it understand Changsha dialect. When I extended a hand to stroke its head, it twitched with a violent sta
rt, then unceremoniously turned its head to take a great bite; it didn't really bite, of course, just clamped its teeth heavily around my hand, to express menace and hatred.
This taciturn dog took another look at me, then went off, its head hanging.
*Streetsickness
: Although standard Mandarin has words like "sea-sick," "carsick," and "airsick," it doesn't have Maqiao's "streetsick." Streetsickness was an illness with symptoms similar to seasickness, but which struck sufferers instead on city streets, causing greenness of face, blurred eyesight and hearing, loss of appetite, insomnia, absent-mindedness, apathy, weakness, shortness of breath, fever, irregular pulse, sickness and diarrhoea, and so on; female sufferers would tend to get irregular periods and run out of breast milk after giving birth. A whole swathe of quacks in Maqiao had special decoction prescriptions for curing street-sickness, including wolfberry, tuber of gastridia, walnuts, all manner of things.
So although Maqiao people would visit nearby Changle, they very seldom spent the night there, even less lived there for any length of time. The year Guangfu from the upper village went to study in the county seat, he was seriously streetsick after a month or so, lost an enormous amount of weight, and returned to the mountains on the brink of death. Terrible, terrible, he said, the city's no place for humans! That he later read for a diploma and managed to feed himself by his teaching job in the city constituted a feat that, in Maqiao eyes, was no less than miraculous. His experience of dealing with streetsickness had taught him one pickles and often going barefoot did he manage to stick it out in the city for ten or so years.
Streetsickness was a frequent cause of disagreement between me and Maqiao people. This wasn't a real illness, I suspected, or it was at least a deeply misunderstood illness. The city didn't rock like cars, boats, and planes; there was, at worst, more smell of coal smoke, of gasoline, more chlorine in the tap water and more noise than in the countryside-hardly enough to make anyone ill. In fact, there were millions of city people who'd managed to escape this illness. After I left Maqiao, I read a few journals which increased my suspicion that streetsickness amounted to nothing more than a particular form of psychological suggestibility, rather like hypnosis. Providing you're psychologically suggestible, when you hear someone say sleep, then quite possibly you will really go to sleep; when you hear someone say ghosts and goblins, then you'll probably see them. By the same logic, someone who's received years of education in the principles of class struggle and identification of enemies will probably see enemies everywhere in life-then once his forecast of enmity has incurred hostility, affront, and even retaliation in kind from others, this state of actual enmity will continue to affirm his expectations in fact, giving him even more grounds for his feelings of enmity.
This range of examples has revealed a further range of facts; or rather, not facts in a strict sense, but second-degree facts, facts that are linguistically manufactured or regenerated.
Dogs have no language, and so dogs are never streetsick. Once humans become linguistic beings, they attain possibilities that other animals lack completely-they can harness the magical powers of language; language becomes prophecy, a mass hysteria that confuses true and false, and that establishes fictions, manufacturing one factual miracle after another. After I'd thought of this, I conducted an experiment using my daughter. I took her on a car journey, having pronounced beforehand that she wouldn't get carsick; and, as predicted, she was perfectly happy for the whole journey, didn't feel a trace of discomfort. The next time we traveled by car, I predicted she would get carsick; as a result, she became incredibly anxious, unable to sit still, until in the end her face went ashen, her brow creased over, and she leaned onto me, half-sick before the car had even started moving. I can't claim my experiment has been exhaustively tested, but it serves as proof that language isn't something to be sneezed at, it's a dangerous thing we need to defend ourselves against and handle with respect. Language is a kind of incantation, a dictionary is a kind of Pandora's Box capable of releasing a hundred thousand spirits and demons-just as the inventor of the word "streetsickness," someone I don't know, manufactured the physiology peculiar to generation after generation of Maqiao people and their long-held aversion to the city.
And what about "revolution," "knowledge," "hometown," "director," "labor reform criminal," "god," "generation gap"? What have these words already manufactured? What else will they manufacture?
Maqiao people wouldn't accept any of this.
I later learned that Benyi missed out on a job with the state because of his streetsickness. When he returned from the Korean War, he looked after the horses in the prefectural commission and could very likely have become a cadre later on; a glorious future stretched out before him. But, just like other Maqiao people, he felt that life in the city was no life at all. You hardly ever saw ginger salted bean tea, heard no sound of flowing water under the starry sky on summer nights, there was no roasting of knees and crotch by the fireplace… He had difficulty making his Maqiao dialect understood. Neither could he get up as early as city people. His colleagues were constantly snickering at his forgetting to button up his fly. He couldn't get used to calling the toilet hut "lavatory," or whatever it was, nor to differentiating between men's and women's toilets.
He did learn some of his colleagues' habits, using a toothbrush, using a fountain pen, for example, even messing about at basketball. The first time he played, he ran around so much his face streamed with sweat, and he didn't even manage one touch of the ball. The second time, when someone on the opposite team had grabbed the ball and was about to score a basket, he suddenly cried out: "Stop-." All eyes turned to him, no one knowing what had happened. Slowly, unhurriedly, he left the court, picked a booger, then returned to the court, waving at the players as if nothing had happened: "Slow down, slow down, easy there."
He didn't know why the people on the court burst out laughing and perceived some malice in the laughter. What was wrong with him picking his nose?
On hot summer days, it was much hotter and drier on the streets than in the countryside-mercilessly hot. Roaming the streets at night, he spotted some girl students run past in front of him, wearing really low clothes, shorts that revealed their thighs and legs. He also saw row upon row of bamboo beds in the shade of trees, on which unknown women lay fanning themselves and sleeping. A smell reminiscent of cooked meat floated from their chins, bare feet, the tufts of hair in their armpits or the rounds of snow-white skin accidentally exposed by their collars.
His whole body burned, his breathing quickened, his head was swaddled in insupportable agonies-it had to be streetsickness. He tried rubbing in half a jar of balm, to no effect; he had someone pare a few bright red pimples off his back, but his brain was still fried, bubbles still foaming out of his mouth. Hands in sleeves, he took a few deeply discontented turns through the streets and back, then kicked a rush basket about ten feet:
"I'm off!"
A few days later, he came back from the countryside, his fire somewhat cooled, his face covered in smiles. He took out a baba cake from the mountains and divided it amongst his colleagues to give them a taste of something new.
What had happened was a ligelang of his in Zhangjia District, a widow twelve years older than him, as big as a bucket, had quelled his fires- and then some.
The prefectural commission was a good two days' journey from Maqiao and he couldn't often go back to cool his humors. He reported to his senior officer that he had streetsickness, that everyone from Maqiao got this illness, that it stopped them enjoying the good life. He hoped he could return to the mountains to work on his two mw of paddy fields. The senior officer just thought he wasn't happy looking after horses and changed his job for him, making him custodian at the Public Security Station. In the eyes of his colleagues, he was a little unappreciative of this favor from his superior, as on the second day he reported for duty he was actually rude to the department chief's wife. At the time in question, the wife had been examining a sweater o
n the bed, her buttocks sticking up very high as her hands gripped the sides of the bed. Rather pleased by this, Benyi gave those arresting buttocks a pat: "What're you looking at?"
The astounded woman went bright red and started to yell at him: "Where did you crawl out from, you filthy turtle's egg? What d'you think you're doing?"
"Why're you laying into me like that?" He asked a secretary standing by: "Why doesn't someone wash her mouth out? All I did was have a little pat…"
"Still full of it! Shameless!"
"What did I say?"
As soon as he got upset, Benyi started to talk in Maqiao dialect; he could talk till he was blue in the face and still no one would be able to understand him. But he saw that filthy woman move off to cower in a corner and heard her clearly, distinctly enunciate one word:
"Bumpkin!"
Afterwards, the leader came looking for Benyi to have a word. Benyi had no idea what the leader could possibly have to talk to him about. How absurd-did this count as a mistake? Was this taking liberties? All he'd done was pat with his hand, he could pat where he wanted, in his village whose buttocks couldn't he pat? But he controlled himself, didn't wrangle with the leader.
The leader declared he wanted him to examine the roots of his own criminally erroneous thinking.
"There are no roots, I'm just streetsick. Once I get onto those streets, my fires rise, my scalp hurts, when I wake up every morning it's like I've been beaten upside the head."
"What're you talking about?"
"I said, I'm streetsick."
"What d'you mean, streetsick?"
The leader wasn't from Maqiao and didn't understand what street-sickness was, neither did he believe Benyi's explanations and snapped back that Benyi was stalling him with gibberish. But this cloud's silver lining brought Benyi great joy: that one pat absolved him from further punishment, lost him his commission and meant he could go back home! From now on, every day he could drink ginger salted bean tea, every day he could sleep in! When he received the order to return to the countryside, he had a very satisfactory yell at his wife, then went alone to the tavern to wolf down a bowl of shredded pork noodles and three ounces of wine.