by Han Shaogong
Perhaps I wasn't in any great danger and he didn't need to wail or done anything to help me out. But out of all my friends and acquaintances present at that moment, not one was as terrified and panicked as he, not one shed tears involuntarily for me. I was grateful for his tears-though only for a very brief moment, though they quickly shrank back into a pair of small eyes to which I'd never be able to feel close. Later on, wherever I went, however many cities and villages I forgot, I couldn't wipe from my memory that brief glance downwards at a face below, just a face that, enlarged by perspective, had obliterated from view the scrawny body beneath, and that was showering down a noisy waterfall of yellow tears for me.
I wanted to say something to thank him, to pay him back somehow, a few yuan, a piece of soda, say, but he wouldn't have it.
I carried a bedful of cotton blankets over to his house and asked his wife to use them to cushion Zhaoqing's coffin. All his life he'd slept on carrying poles; from now on he should be allowed to sleep well. He'd been busy all his life; from now on he should be allowed to be lax.
To be "lax," in Maqiao dialect, means to "relax."
*Yellow-Grass Miasma
: When I was in Maqiao, Zhaoqing told me more than once that I shouldn't go up into the mountains early in the morning, that I should wait at least until the sun had come out. He also pointed out to me something densely blue in among the scattered trees on the mountain, that floated in and out of view, hanging like threads, like bands on the branches and leaves, slowly drifting away in smoky rings: miasma, this was called. There were several different sorts of miasma: in spring there was spring-grass miasma, in summer there was yellow-plum miasma, in autumn there was yellow-grass miasma- all were highly poisonous. If people blundered into it, their skin would inevitably come out in ulcers, their faces go blue-yellow, their fingers black. It could even kill them.
He also said that you couldn't be too careful even when you went up into the mountains in daytime. The night before you went up, you couldn't eat tiny scraps of things and you definitely couldn't sleep with a woman, definitely had to give up temptations and lusts. Before going up into the mountains, you'd best drink a mouthful of rice wine to warm the body too, to strengthen the yang.
This was what Zhaoqing said.
It was he who told me. I remember.
*Pressing Names
: I didn't recognize Kuiyuan when I bumped into him again all those years later. Both he and his Adam's apple had grown, along with a little beard; he wore a suit with rolled edges, walked around in eye-catching leather shoes, wafted fragrant breezes from his washed hair and carried a black leather bag that wouldn't zip up. He was Kuiyuan, Ma Zhaoqing's youngest, he said: Don't you recognize me, Uncle Shaogong? What a memory you have, ha-ha-ha!
I had to puzzle away for ages before I finally dredged up a child's face from long, long ago, and drew one or two points of corroborating resemblance between it and the unfamiliar face before me. I also recognized a letter he produced, written by me, true enough, to Fucha a few years ago, discussing some language-related question.
He said he'd been missing me and that he'd come to the city especially to see me. I asked him, wonderingly, how he'd managed to find me. Don't ask, he said, he'd had a devil of a time finding the way. When he'd been set down on the quay, he'd asked everywhere where I lived, but no one he'd asked had known. In the end, he'd asked where the municipal government was-still no one knew. Losing his temper, he asked where the county government was, and someone finally pointed him in some sort of a direction. I thought you were looking for me, I laughed, what did you want with the municipal and county governments? He said he had a couple of outings every year, he'd been to Wuhan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, all sorts of places. He knew how to get about. This seemed to serve as his answer to my question.
He didn't say whether he'd actually found the government offices. But he complained about how my phone must be broken and how he hadn't been able to get through, however hard he tried. I later discovered that he hadn't in fact had my telephone number at all, so heaven only knew what number he'd been calling.
In the end, he got in a taxi and spent fifty yuan-almost all the money he'd had left on him-before finding out what university I was at. Not knowing what taxis cost here, he'd been ripped off by a crooked driver, no doubt about it.
This, of course, was no cause for worry-he'd always felt pretty detached about money matters. To sum up, he contacted the government, made a phone call, took a taxi, did everything an important visitor should, before he finally chanced across an acquaintance of mine who took him to where I lived. He'd never believed he wouldn't find me, he said, and everything had, as expected, come out in the wash: without any undue exertion, he'd miraculously pulled off a long-distance raid on my home, bringing along for good measure another young man I didn't know. Now he was home and dry, everything was fine and dandy; he took off his coat and watch, his shoes and socks, and rubbed the sweat and mud from his feet. Casting his eyes about the place, he was amazed to see I didn't have a real leather sofa, or a big, right-angled wide-screen color TV, or color-sprayed vinyl walls and mood lighting and laser-sound stereo karaoke-he knew a lot more about city life than I did. I said laser-sound stereo karaoke cost too much, forty, maybe fifty yuan for one disc. He corrected my mistake: what are you talking about, he said, a good disc would cost one, two hundred at least. Has the price gone up? I asked. It's never been less, he said. Unwilling to concede the point, I said that a friend of mine a couple of days ago had bought one at this price, a genuine, nonpirated disc. He said that wouldn't have been DDD, it wouldn't have been digital; no one serious about singing would've wanted anything to do with it.
Not understanding DDDs, I didn't dare take the matter any further and merely absorbed his instruction in silence.
After he'd washed, he put on some of my clothes and said with a smile he'd known all along he wouldn't need to bring a change of clothing: What sort of a person d'you think Uncle Shaogong is? he'd said to the folks back home. When I get to his place, there'll be clothes to wear, food to eat, work to do, no fear! When at home, rely on parents, away from home, you rely on friends… He slapped me affectionately on the back as he told me this.
I removed his hand.
Things weren't that simple, I said, but let's get you settled, and then we'll see.
I took them to a hotel. When they were registering, I discovered he was no longer surnamed Ma: the surname on his ID. card had been changed to Hu. That was how I found out that after his dad died, his mother hadn't been able to bring up all the kids and had given him away to someone else, along with an elder brother and elder sister given away elsewhere. I also found out that where they came from, adopted children had no inheritance rights before they'd "pressed names."
Pressing names was a ritual carried out to formalize entry to a clan, conducted after the funeral of the adoptive father, in which the clan elders sang the name of the adoptive father, the name of the adoptive grandfather, the name of the father of the adoptive grandfather, the name of the grandfather of the adoptive grandfather, the name of the father of the grandfather of the adoptive grandfather… of the person entering the clan. They sang the names of all the fathers they could possibly trace back to ensure that the person being adopted would inherit the ancestors' property and trade, and to prevent him from taking the property or land back to his original family later on. As they saw it, names were sacred and the names of the dead wielded an additionally mysterious kind of power, capable of defeating demons and punishing the unfilial. Kuiyuan said that the Hu family weren't short of property- the house was their own-but unfortunately the old man was long-lived, could still go out to work in the fields even at the age of eighty-seven. Last year he'd spend three months ill in bed, coughing up phlegm and blood, and it'd looked as if his number was pretty much up. No one had expected that, after all this time spent dying, he'd come back to life again… What on earth was he meant to do? Kuiyuan's eyes widened in astonished bemusement. What h
e meant was that he hadn't yet been rewarded for his pains, he hadn't yet pressed names and so didn't yet have rights of ownership over the house.
And so he couldn't wait forever: he had to try and make his way in the city.
*Lazy (as Used by Men)
: I had a friend, a big boss in the city, who employed an engineering team. 1 introduced him to Kuiyuan and the young man who'd come with him and they got taken on as unskilled workers-I reckoned that would just about earn them a bowl of rice.
A few days later, they were banging on my door, both faces a picture of woe: it was impossible, they said. No, it really was impossible.
"What happened?"
"Nothing, really."
"Are you streetsick?"
"I've never gotten streetsick, it was just we got… burned."
"D'you mean sunburned?"
"Right, mmm."
"Didn't you wear a hat?"
"Hat didn't do any good."
"Don't you get sunburned in the village?"
"I've… never worked in the fields."
"Well what did you do all day, then?"
"Nothing much, sometimes I'd help brother Yanwu harvest a bit of grain, collect a few debts, most of the time I'd just mess about, play cards, sit around other people's houses." Kuiyuan flashed a smile, exchanging glances with the young man who'd come with him, who just then was taking a sidelong glance at the television as he cracked sunflower seeds, but who also smiled at that moment.
"So young, the two of you, and so… lazy?" I pronounced a word of infinite gravity.
"Lazy, that's exactly what we are." Kuiyuan very happily joined in, "I'm lazy around the house too, I've never cut firewood, never carried water, I still don't know how rice is washed and boiled, never done it."
The young man cracking sunflower seeds said: "Same with me: ask me where the sickle or the drill rod are in my house, ask how much our pigs eat at one meal, I won't have a clue."
"When I go out to play cards, I can be gone a couple weeks."
"I don't play cards, I go and mess around at my uncle's house in the county, ride on his motorbike, watch the TV."
I was rather nonplussed by this. I could tell from their complacent tone, from their rather exaggerated accounts of themselves, that the meaning of this word had transmogrified, that a process of linguistic renovation had begun of which I was entirely unaware. The word lazy- which was abhorrent to me-represented to them a medal for which they strove, competed, and struggled to have decorating their own chests. The indolence I had just been criticizing had to them become a synonym for ease, comfort, face, skill, to be pursued and coveted, which made their eyes shine. What else could I say to them?
Of course, the original meaning of lazy hadn't been entirely expunged: when discussing other people's wives, for example, they'd discuss whose wife was lazy and whose wasn't, and lazy women came in for repeated condemnation. What this sounded like to me was nothing less than a new, men's dictionary, compiled by them and inapplicable to women, and one in which the word "lazy" came trailing clouds of glory. If what had happened to lazy was anything to go by, then we could infer that deceiving, exploitative, violent, fiendish, treacherous, rascally, corrupt, thieving, opportunist, vulgar, rotten, low-down, obsequious, etc., could, or had already become words that connoted praise and respect in this most recent men's dictionary-at least for a sizable proportion of men. If, as they saw it, there were still men who didn't acknowledge this dictionary, this was not proof the dictionary didn't exist, it was proof only that these men were linguistic aliens, pathetic nobodies, all washed up by the tide of innovation, lagging behind the shadow of History.
Human dialogue often takes place within two, or even multiple, dictionaries. The difficulties of translating what words mean, and in particular the endless pitfalls of translating what words mean on a deep emotional level aren't easily overcome. In 1986 I visited an "artists' colony" in Virginia, U.S.A.-in other words, a creative center for artists. I couldn't rid myself of the awkward feeling the word "colony" gave me. It was only afterwards that I found out for a lot of westerners living in western sovereign states that have owned many colonies, the word colony doesn't bring with it the images of murder, burning, raping, pillaging, opium-smuggling, and the like that it does in the memories of colonial peoples; quite the contrary, it means something perfectly innocuous, it's just another name for a settlement abroad, a dwelling place; it even exudes a faintly romantic, poetic resonance of development that is tied up with all the pronouncements and professions of benevolent expansion, of maritime exploration, of the spread of civilization which are part of imperial memory. A colony is a staging house for the noble, an encampment of heroes. Westerners would never sense there was anything inappropriate in using this word to refer to the location of artistic labors.
Also in America, I met someone called Hansen, a man who understood Chinese, who'd married a Chinese woman, and who was a journalist on the Asia desk of a big news bureau. When he heard me talk about the sufferings of Chinese people, he expressed deep sympathy and anger toward the instigators of this suffering. But I suddenly noted a strange reaction behind the sympathy, behind the anger: his smiling eyes sparkled in the lenses of his glasses, his index finger drew endless lines back and forth somewhere across the dinner table, as if he was writing some word in the air, or conducting some stirring tune in his mind. Unable to control the excitement inside him, he ended up phoning some friends, inviting them to come and meet me, telling them in English how I had some stunning, amazing stories! These were, he swore, the most fantastic stories he'd ever heard! This word "fantastic" jarred on me. When my father committed suicide, when he sank to the bottom of that river, did he feel "fantastic"? When the younger brother of a friend of mine was shot following a miscarriage of justice, when, close to execution, he howled and wept, unable to find the faces of his parents in the crowd come to see him off, did he feel "fantastic"? When, after the son of a friend of mine was mistakenly killed by a gang of hooligans and the father brought his son's effects back from his university, not ever having dreamed that he would write the inscription for his son's gravestone, did he feel this was "fantastic" in any way?… I don't wish to cast doubts on Hansen's compassion: no, he'd always exposed injustices in his newspaper, always helped Chinese people as much as he could, which included helping me obtain the perks and financial assistance due to a visiting scholar. But his "fantastic" came from a dictionary incomprehensible to me. It was obvious that in this dictionary, suffering wasn't just suffering, it also provided material for writing or performance, it was the precondition necessary to incite revolt and revolution, and so the greater the suffering, the better, the more fantastic its radiant glow. This dictionary concealed a principle within it: in order to obliterate the instigators of suffering, more and more suffering was required as proof to convince more and more people of the urgent, lofty necessity of this struggle. In other words, in order to obliterate suffering, first there had to be suffering. The suffering of others gives rise not only to the pity, but also to the pleasure and happiness of saviors; it's an endless source of bonuses for the score-cards of their heroism.
I didn't feel like talking any more, and suddenly changed my plans: to his bemusement, I refused to let my dinner companion pay for my pizza.
I've often realized, not without a sense of disquiet, that talking isn't easy, that my words often propagate all kinds of misunderstandings once they've flown out of my mouth. I've also discovered that even a powerful propaganda machine lacks absolute controlling power over understanding and, similarly, sinks repeatedly into the mire of ambiguity. Here, I must make mention of the young man who came to my house with Kuiyuan. I later found out his surname was Zhang, that he'd been an employee of the County Film Company but had been relieved of his duties due to his exceeding the birth quota. It wasn't that he'd failed to comprehend the consequences of exceeding the birth quota: the vast truckloads of tedious state propaganda about the punishments and rewards that came with famil
y planning regulations had bored a hole in his eardrum. Neither did he have any great love of children: the two sons he already had hardly ever caught a glimpse of him, extracted a smile from him with the greatest of difficulty, and represented to him the permanent, burdensome obstacles to divorce. He had no reason whatsoever to produce another child. After I'd spoken with him, after I'd turned it over endlessly and uncomprehendingly in my mind, there was only one conclusion I could draw: he operated on another vocabulary system, one in which a great many words transgressed ordinary people's imaginings. For example, "violating law and order" wasn't necessarily a bad or an ugly thing to do-quite the contrary, violating law and order was a proof of strength, a privilege of the strong, a crucial source of happiness and glory. If, under the category of "violating law and order," you included corruption, smuggling, official profiteering, prostitution, rushing through red lights, random spitting, eating out on public funds, and so on, then this young man would have embraced every single one of these acts with open arms. The only reason why he hadn't done these things was because at present he lacked the capability to do so.