by Han Shaogong
It appears from the above that speech rights were decided by a combination of factors, such as sex, age, and wealth. Even more important, of course, were political factors-Benyi, as the local Party Secretary, was Maqiao's highest power holder, and whenever he spoke his voice would boom out with gravitas, with solemn pledges, as if he meant what he said, as if no protest would be brooked. As time went on, bellowing became something of a habit with him; his throat would often be worn out, producing more wheeze than voice, but still he'd be blathering all over the place. Even when walking alone, hands behind his back, he couldn't keep his mouth shut and sometimes ended up talking to himself, posing questions he answered himself. "Could beans grow here?" "Go fuck a dragon, the ground's so wet the roots'd go rotten." "If we mixed in some silt that might do the trick." "What're you doing hauling stuff all over the place? If you've got time to haul mud, you'd be better off growing a bit more grain on the hill." "Awakened son of a…"
All this, in fact, was a solo performance by him, and him alone. If you ever walked behind him for any length of time, you'd discover that he never shut up, that he argued indefatigably with himself, that he was capable of conducting entire debates single-mouthedly.
People called him "Big Gong Yi" and knew that things would be noisy wherever he went. The commune cadres were all rather deferential toward "Big Gong Yi." At one commune meeting, Benyi rolled up as if he were running the whole show, as usual going off first to poke his nose into the kitchen to check up on the smells being produced. Looking for a cigarette light from the stove, his face immediately fell when he spotted the foot basin, full of nothing but cut-up radish, without a single meat bone in sight: "What's this, then? Where's your feeling for poor and lower-middle peasants! Hmm?" Boiling with rage, he pushed up his sleeves and strode off, ignoring the meeting, straight to the butcher's in the supply and marketing cooperative to ask whether they had any meat. The butcher said the meat had just all been sold out. He lifted up a broadsword: grab me a pig, grab a pig over here, he said, chop chop! Commune regulations only permitted one pig to be killed every day, said the butcher. So, when the commune said we could eat for free from now on, did you believe that too? said Benyi, referring back to one of the unreliable promises made by the Communist state during the Great Leap Forward.
Wanyu, who just happened to be sitting nearby, sniggered: "Goody, goody, count me in for a bowl of pork soup today too."
Benyi glared: "What're you doing, sitting here?"
Wanyu blinked: "Good question, what am I doing sitting here?"
Short-tempered at the best of times, Benyi banged the broadsword: "Look at you, you useless loafer, what're you doing around here, when it's not New Year's or a holiday? You'd better come back with me, and look sharp about it! If you haven't hoed those acres of rape plants on the north hill by the end of today, I'll get the masses to struggle you to death!"
Wanyu wet his pants in terror at the sound of the broadsword and slipped out the door as quickly as he could; but a while later, his shiny scalp timidly poked back in: "You-you… what was it you just wanted me to do?"
"You deaf or something? I want you to hoe the rape plants!"
"Got it, got it. Keep your shirt on."
His shiny scalp retreated once more. Benyi finally calmed down and had rolled up a twist of tobacco when he heard a movement behind him; there, as he turned to look, was Wanyu's face again, smiling into contortions, "Sorry, I was in too much of a flap just then to hear right, you wanted me to hoe… hoe…"
I reckon he must've been so frightened he couldn't hear a single thing properly.
Only when Benyi roared the words RAPE-PLANTS into his ear was he finally rid of him.
After a series of oinks were heard from behind the shop, Benyi's color finally improved somewhat. He loved slaughtering pigs more than anything else and was very expert at it. After another round of oinks, he returned to the stove for a smoke, his face covered in splotches of mud and hands stained with blood. That same broadsword had just cleanly, neatly dispatched the pig. He kept careful watch at the butcher's shop, until it was time to invite a few of the lads from the supply and marketing cooperative to gather around the sizzling-hot cooking range; he ate some pork and drank some pig's blood soup before contentedly wiping his greasy mouth and belching with repleteness.
Despite his nonattendance at the meeting, the commune cadres didn't dare criticize him. When he returned to the hall, all red in the face, the cadres still felt obliged to invite him onto the stage to speak-a sufficient demonstration of the prodigious extent of his speech rights.
"I'm not going to talk for long today, just a couple of points I've got," he said.
This was the routine public announcement with which he prefaced every speech. Whether he in fact spoke on two, or three, four, five, or even more points, whether he produced two or three words or a lengthy disquisition, he would always declare in advance that he only wanted to speak on two points.
He talked and talked, blasting out smells of meat soup, then talked about his past experiences in the Korean War, made reference to his military prowess in fighting American soldiers as evidence that tasks such as irrigation repairs, crop planting, pig raising, and family planning would, could, must be achieved! He was always calling American tanks "tractors." On the 38th Parallel, he said, the earth shook when the American tractors arrived, scared the crap out of you, it did. But the volunteer troops were all heroes, real men: at 300 meters, no one fired, 150 meters, still no one fired, 100 meters, still no one fired, then finally, when the American tractor was right in our faces, one round of fire blew the fucker up!
He looked all around, very pleased with himself.
Once, Commune Head He corrected him: "It's not a tractor, it's called a tank."
He blinked: "Isn't it called tractor? I didn't get much education, I'm illegitimate."
What he meant was he was illiterate, that it wasn't surprising he couldn't distinguish clearly between tanks and tractors. He studied the word tank with some application but by the next meeting, once he'd got through the stressful 300-150-100 meters bit, he slipped as usual into saying tractor.
His confusion about such terms had no effect whatsoever on the respect listeners paid to his comments: "People only die of illness, not of work"; "Great natural disasters, bumper harvest; small natural disasters, small harvests"; "Everyone should work on their thinking, on making progress, on the world"^ none of this made much sense, but because they were said by Benyi, they gradually entered into common usage, were passed on. His hearing, too, was rather poor. Once, listening to the commune cadres, he heard "We must grasp the key to the road ahead" as "We must grasp the tree on the road ahead," which was obviously wrong, but since "tree" came straight out of Benyi's mouth, Maqiao people trusted it implicitly and instead laughed at us Educated Youth, saying we had to grasp the "key" to the road ahead-what was that supposed to mean?
*Light the Sky Red
: The 1960s and the 1970s were the decades of "Light the Sky Red." "Light the Sky Red" was a kind of big kettle lamp, with two long kettle spouts sticking out, from which protruded candlewicks as thick as a little finger and that burned cotton or diesel oil, spewing forth rolls of black smoke as they did so. During these decades, one of these lamps would often be hauled on a long bamboo pole to alleviate the heavy darkness when we were breaking in virgin mountain land, sowing grain in the fields, assembling the masses for a meeting, rallying a team for a march. These were decades during which there weren't enough hours of daylight and frenzied activity spilled over into nighttime. The blacksmiths produced batch after best-selling batch of "Light the Sky Red" lamps. Whenever cadres discussed a commune's or a team's revolutionary performance, they'd talk in these terms: "Just look at them, they use up at least ten Light the Sky Reds when they get going!"
When I was sent down to Maqiao, I was just in time for the "demonstrate loyalty" craze. In showing loyalty to the leader, one indispensable daily activity consisted of going to Fucha's living room every evening.
Only his room was that bit bigger, big enough to contain the entire production team workforce. One dim Light the Sky Red was hung up too high, leaving the people beneath as no more than hazy black shadows, impossible to make out. If you bumped into someone, you couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman.
After everyone had stood before the portrait of the leader, the cadres issued a chorused order, at which the workforce suddenly emitted an earshaking, deafening roar, reciting from memory and in one breath five or six quotations from Chairman Mao. This gave us sent-down youth a real shock. None of us had thought that Maqiao people could memorize so much, and their revolutionary theory left our heads reeling.
After a while, when we discovered that they recited the same ones, just those few, every time, we relaxed.
As the sent-down youth had had some education, they very quickly and easily memorized far more of the leader's quotations and could roar them straight out in one go, keen to outdo the villagers' ferocious zeal. After the battle had been lost, the villagers became rather more subdued; whenever they reached for their cigarettes they'd first ask the sent-down youth if they wanted any; their voices when they recited, too, were rather tired, weak, and lackluster.
After the bellowing was done, it fell to one of the cadres, usually Benyi or Uncle Luo, to give the Chairman Mao on the wall a brief, concise report on that day's agricultural events, after which they'd timidly add: "Sleep well, hey, old man."
Or they'd say: "It snowed today, have you burned more wood, hey, old man?"
Chairman Mao, it seemed, had tacitly given his blessing. Only then would everyone disperse, their hands in their sleeves, bundling one after another out the door into the whistling winter wind.
Once, Zhaoqing lurked at the back taking a nap, and after everyone else had gone, he was left squatting in a corner. Not having noticed either, Fucha's family shut the door and went to sleep. Only when it got to midnight did they hear someone shouting and yelling: you villains, you! D'you want to freeze me to death?
Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, all Fucha could say was, blame the Light the Sky Red for being so low on oil you couldn't see in the dark.
From this it should be clear that after daily study of this kind, everyone was pretty well versed in revolutionary theory. What was rather more particular to Maqiao people, however, was the way they produced some more unusual quotations from Chairman Mao: "Chairman Mao says this year's rape plants are really coming along," for example; "Chairman Mao says we should economize on grain but we can't eat porridge every day"; "Chairman Mao says if landlord elements are dishonest, then we should string 'em up"; "Chairman Mao says Shortie Zhao isn't sticking to family planning, he only talks about quantity not quality of children"; "Chairman Mao says whoever pours water into the pig dung should be investigated and fined a mouthful of grain!" and other such phrases. Even after I made very wide inquiries, no one knew the source of these higher instructions, neither did anyone know who first broadcast such remarks. But people treated them with a deep seriousness and used them endlessly in conversation.
There was nothing strange about this, of course. When I later read up on Chinese literary history, I discovered that Maqiao people had done nothing that several Confucian masters hadn't done earlier. These individuals would insist on "consulting the sages," but in fact would as often as not just fabricate sagelike words as coming from the mouths of Confucius, Laozi, Xunzi, or Mencius to frighten people. Yang Xiong of the Han Dynasty used a great many quotations from Confucius, but when people later came to check them, hardly any were found to be genuine.
*Form
: "Form" was a word in common use, close in meaning to words such as "character" and "quality," without being limited to these alone. Whether or not a person had form, or had lost form, was the basic yardstick by which Maqiao people judged others. A person's qualifications, study record, background, position, reputation, authority, courage, insight, ability, wealth, good or bad conduct, even reproductive capability and so on, could all cause his "form" to change. Form and speech rights were linked together in external-internal, cause-effect relations: people with form naturally had speech rights; people with speech rights definitely had form.
Fucha's same-pot uncle Mingqi, widely known as Uncle Mingqi, had studied professional rice, bread, and cake catering in Changle. When the commune had a big meeting, they'd often ask him to make the steamed bread; this gave him great form. Whenever such an opportunity came up, Uncle Mingqi would change to Father Mingqi, and it was not only Mingqi himself who felt he had face, all the villagers in Maqiao felt they had face; if they bumped into people from other villages passing by their village, whether these people knew him or not, Maqiao people would always, consciously and unconsciously, reverentially invoke his name. If the listener's face drew a complete blank, or didn't show any particular interest, Maqiao people's faces would instantly fall and their eyes drip contempt: you don't even know about Father Mingqi? they'd say. If they'd been about to treat you to a cup of hot tea, their hospitality might well turn into a bowl of stone-cold colored tea, simply due to your ignorance or indifference. After Mingqi had finished making the steamed bread and returned home, he liked to take a turn around the village, his hands behind his back, and point out things that didn't please his eye. Even naughty children would be rather awe-struck at the steamed-bread smell that enveloped his body, and meekly hang their heads in silence. Once, a few quiet words from Mingqi intimidated a lad named "Three Ears" out of catching mud loaches: we Educated Youth were amazed to see him simply pick up his bucket and slosh them back in. Three Ears wasn't normally afraid of anything at all. "How come you're so wellbehaved today?" I leaned over and whispered in his ear. A look of forebearance on his face, he muttered, as if his nerve had deserted him by the time it reached his mouth: "He's got form, you know, I'm not going to go asking for trouble today."
It was only then that I began to realize, although they were all Maqiao people, they lived very differently, according to whether or not they had form.
Old Uncle Luo had an adopted son who sent him money from barbarian parts-which amounted to sending him form. Otherwise, if he'd only had his age going for him, he'd have had barely enough form for Benyi to give him the time of day.
Zhaoqing couldn't make steamed bread, nor did he have an adopted son who sent him money, but he produced six sons almost without blinking, which gave his form a bit of a boost. When dividing sweet potatoes or beans in the village, the scales controlled by the cadres would always be tipped a bit when it got to his share, as a marker of respect to him.
Of course, some temporary varieties of form could produce comic results. For example, when the Educated Youth nicknamed Master Black returned from the city, he swapped a mountain chicken with Zhongqi for the bottle of Dragon soy sauce he'd brought back. This kind of soy sauce was a brand-name, tribute soy sauce, people said, that was sent every year to Beijing to make Chairman Mao's red braised pork; in the provinces, you had to be at least a county-level magistrate before you'd get a taste of it. When the news broke, Zhongqi enjoyed half a month's form, for half a month his coughs and throat-clearings enjoyed a new depth and authority. But even though he used the soy sauce drop by halfdrop, in the end he couldn't withstand the almost daily requests from his neighbors on all sides, the endless visits from the commune cadres and Benyi; as the bottle emptied by the day, his form fell like a boat on subsiding waters, until it sank back to its original level. He begged Master Black to swap him another bottle of Dragon brand soy sauce, this time prepared to pay two mountain chickens. Master Black was full of promises, but he never produced the goods; there was probably something of a premium on tribute soy sauce in the city too.
Zhongqi also thought of asking Father Mingqi, to open up an alternative path to finding Dragon brand soy sauce, to finding form. But Father Mingqi's form was so vast and Zhongqi so overcome by stammering that he failed repeatedly to find an opportunity to sidle up and talk to him. It was round about this time that Mingqi was busy
in the commune making steamed buns, and directing all sorts of things in the village. If the team cadres were holding a meeting and saw him come in, they'd make room for him without even thinking about it. Listening to Benyi allocate work, he didn't feel in the least bit superfluous, nodding or shaking his head, expressing approval or disagreement; sometimes he'd interrupt before someone had finished talking, most of what he said totally unrelated to public affairs in Maqiao, related only to how the weather at the moment was too cold and the dough wasn't rising, to the shoddy workmanship at the yeast factory, to how the yeast wasn't working and so on-all steamed-bun-related matters. The team cadres would listen meekly, making an occasional contribution to his discussion of professional catering techniques. If one day he got carried away and held up the cadres for one or two hours, it didn't matter and no one ever asked him to leave-because he had form.
The great pity of the matter was that form easily went to a person's head; in the case of someone like Mingqi, who got form not through his own strengths but through a lucky chance, it was particularly easy to go mad with the success. The fame of his steamed buns spread far and wide, and when there was a big meeting in the county he'd sometimes be called upon to go and do the catering. On whichever occasion it was he went to the city, he met Widow Li, a floor-cleaner at the county government guesthouse, and the two of them became entangled in the course of various encounters. To cut a long story short, the widow had grown up in the city and knew how many beans made five, knew a few tricks in bed; in the meantime, the white steamed buns that Mingqi brought from the kitchens kept hunger at bay for the widow and her son; and so, as time went by, a pact of true love was forged. In the end, Mingqi finished what he'd started, sneaking out to the Li family a whole bag of special batch "Wealth and Power" flour (reserved exclusively for the head of the County Committee) and taking a pig's head with him while he was at it.