by Han Shaogong
In just the same way, I've never been able to understand the Crusades. I've read the Catholic Bible, I've read the Islamic Koran, and apart from certain differences in wording, such as that between "God" and "Allah," I found the two religions amazingly similar in terms of ethical strictures, in admonishing people not to kill, steal, be lewd, tell lies, and so on- they're almost two editions of the same book. So why should war after far-reaching holy war erupt between the cross and the crescent? What mystical force mobilized so many people from the east to kill westwards, then from the west to kill eastwards, leaving behind a land of bare bones, and tens of thousands of weeping orphans and widows? In the great, gloomy amnesiac void that renders all memories impermanent, is history nothing but a war of words? Do the meanings of words light sparks? Do words drag themselves down into the mire? Does grammar chop off arms and heads? Does blood flow out of sentence structures, nourishing the brambles on the plains and congealing under the setting sun into smear upon gleaming smear?
Ever since language has existed in the world, it's led to endless human conflict, arguments, wars, manufactured endless death by language. But I don't for a moment believe this is owing to the magical power of language itself. No, quite the opposite: the instant that certain words take on an aura of incontrovertible sanctity, then immediately, invariably, they lose their original links to reality, and at moments of the greatest, irreconcilable tension between embattled parties, transform themselves into perfectly chiselled symbols, into the abstract simulacra of power, glory, property, and sovereign territory. If, shall we say, language has been instrumental in the advancement and accumulation of culture, then it is precisely this halo of sanctity that strips language of its sense of gravity, turning it into a force harmful to humans.
As I write this, the twentieth century will soon be at an end. As well as witnessing great strides in science and economics, this century has left behind unprecedented environmental crises, skepticism, sexual liberation, the records of two world wars and several hundred other wars, from which the numbers of war dead are in excess of numbers from the past nineteen centuries put together. Countless forms of media and language have sprung out of this century: television, newspapers, the Internet, tens of thousands of books published every day, new philosophies and slang created, renovated every week, fueling linguistic growth spurts and explosions, and forming a thick, sedimented stratum that covers the surface of the entire globe. What guarantee is there that some part of these languages won't trigger new wars?
The fetishizing of language is a civilizational disorder, the most common danger faced by language. This observation of mine won't for a minute stop me from inhaling and absorbing language every day, from ending my days rolling around in the ocean of language, from being drawn to reflection and emotion by a single word. All that my continuing recollections of that trip to Liaoning have done is increase my wariness toward language: the moment language becomes petrified, the moment language no longer serves as a tool searching for truth but comes to represent the truth itself, the moment a light of self-veneration, of self-adoration appears on the faces of language users, betraying a fetishization of language mercilessly repressive of their enemies, all I can do is think back to a story.
This story happened in Maqiao, on one July 15th, the day of an ancestral sacrifice. By this time, Yanwu's uncle Ma Wenjie had been rehabilitated and no one any longer made much mention of his father having been a traitor to the Chinese. As neither of them had been given a proper funeral before, now of course people wanted to make amends. As the richest person in Maqiao, Yanwu had hired a Western band and a national band to make sure it'd be a lively occasion. He also put together an eight-table banquet, and sent out red invitation cards to friends and relations from inside and outside the village.
Kuiyuan, who'd returned to the village for the ancestral sacrifice, also received a red invitation card, but when he opened it to have a look, his face immediately changed color. His full name was Hu Kuiyuan, the kui spelled with the character meaning "chief," or "great," but on the invitation it was written with the character meaning "lack" or "loss."
This "loss" kui was deeply inauspicious and dripped with animosity-even though it was probably only a result of momentary carelessness and laziness on the part of the invitation writer.
"I'll give his mother a good sticking!" (See the entry "Stick(y).")
He ripped up the red invitation in a fury.
His intolerance of this word "loss" echoed the intolerance of 1950s law courts for "Song Ziwen," the intolerance of the fighters of the Red Company faction for the two words "Revolutionary Company," the intolerance of the crusading army for the word "Allah." And so began a holy war of language.
He didn't go to the banquet. He gnawed savagely on his own raw sweet potato, as he watched people return from Yanwu's place, wiping grease from their mouths. He was going to call Yanwu's family to account, he told his family. In fact, after he went out he first of all went and sat in Zhihuang's house for a while, than went to the vegetable garden at Fucha's house to nibble on a cucumber, then ended up going to the front of Tiananmen, where he watched some young men play ping-pong, then watched some more young men play a table of mahjong-he didn't dare go looking for Yanwu. He was even afraid of Yanwu learning he'd come to make trouble. How was he ever going to dare make a fuss, if the exterior of the Tiananmen residence alone was enough to make him wet himself? Luckily, as he vacillated away, he discovered that the members of the Yanwu household, who were in the middle of decorating a shopfront, had left an electric drill on the ground; probably when the electricity had been cut off, the workers had gone off to drink tea and had forgotten to pick it up. Yanzao, who just a moment ago had been slapping some underling around, had also disappeared, presumably busy with something else. His sharp eyes darting from left to right, with nimble fingers Kuiyuan stuffed the electric drill up his shirt, scooped up two socket boards while he was at it and slipped out of the main gate; he ran to the sweet-potato patch of his third brother's house, dug a hole, and buried them before he contemplated his next move. He knew that stuff like this could later be sold anywhere.
Slowly, leisurely, he returned home, wiping his sweat and fanning himself, kicking the dog-who yelped in terror-that had followed him along, as if he'd just earned himself the right to kick it like this.
"Anyone'll need his wits about him to get the better of Kuiyuan!" he told his mother excitedly.
"What'll that Yanwu say about it?"
"What'll he say? Everything that happens now's his responsibility!"
But he didn't actually say what would happen, or how he would take responsibility. Seeing him busy removing and polishing his leather shoes, his mother forgot to press him any further on this and went off to make him something to eat. Two married women with children in their arms stood by the door for a while, half-credulous, half-doubting about what would come of the matter, forcing Kuiyuan into repeating a few blusters: "So what if Yanwu has money? When I come looking for him, he'll know about it."
After he'd finished eating, Kuiyuan was unable to sit still at home and went out in search of a television. When he reached the mouth of the road, he discovered the road was blocked by three men, of whom one, Kuiyuan discovered when he peered at them by the light of the moon, was a sidekick of Yanwu's, his manager Wang. Pretending not to have seen them, Kuiyuan tried to squeeze past.
"Where d'you think you're going?" Quick as a flash, Wang grabbed him by the chest: "You've kept us waiting long enough. You going to talk, or are we going to have to beat it out of you?"
"What're you talking about?"
"Still playing dumb?"
"You joking with me, Brother Wang?"
Smiling, Kuiyuan was about to pat the man on the shoulder when, before his hand had gone up, the other stuck his leg out, felling him with a quick rustle over the ground to half his full height, to a kneeling position. Covering his head with both arms, he yelled and screamed out: "Why'd you hit me? What d'you want to
do that for?"
He took a punch from a black shadow: "Who hit you?"
"I'm telling you, I've got brothers, I have…"
He took another kick in the back.
"So, who hit you this time?"
"No one, no-"
"No one, eh? That's a bit more like it. Just tell us where the drill's hidden. Before we get really angry."
"I never wanted to make anyone angry in the first place. But that invitation card you sent today just went too far, I haven't told Brother Yanwu yet…"
"What're you talking about?"
"Ah-ah, I said I haven't told Manager Ma yet…" Before the words were out of his mouth, Kuiyuan felt his hair being grabbed by a hand, his head jerked roughly upwards and twisted round to face Wang's big beard. The beard within his field of vision was sharply inclined.
"Still messing around with us?"
"Talk, I'll talk, all the talk you want…"
"Move!"
Kuiyuan felt another sharp pain in his behind.
He led the three men to the sweet potato patch, scratched away at the topsoil with his hands, took out the electric drill and the socket board, and-quite unnecessarily-tapped the dust off the socket board and cast aspersions on its quality: "Poor quality, this is, I could tell just from looking."
"Give us some straw sandal money." The black shadows took the electric drill, snapping off Kuiyuan's watch while they were at it. "We'll let it go for now, but any more trouble from you and we'll have your ears off before we've got another word out of you."
"Righto."
Kuiyuan was completely baffled as to how they'd found him out, but he didn't dare ask. He didn't dare make any kind of a sound until the black shadows had moved off and the sound of their footsteps completely died away; only then did he get up, and weep and curse, with no thought of dignity: "Bastards, bastards, I'll get you all if it's the last thing I do-"
He rubbed his wrist, discovered it to be indeed bare, then groped around in the hole in the ground, but found that too devoid of his watch. He resolved to go and find the village head.
The village head had no time for his stories about Chief Yuan or Unlucky Yuan, about his watch (or the lack of it), for his bawls and wails, did no more than throw him a sideways glance. A fanatical opera addict, the village head went off to Tiananmen that evening to watch a show. Unfortunately there was no good opera that day. A troupe from near Shuanglong Bow took to the stage, singing some cobbled-together drum dances, their operatics, movements, costumes and make-up so scrappy they looked just like a few people who'd gotten together to thresh and dry grain on a stage. They sang utter nonsense, in fact if they ran out of words they'd produce obscenities or bits of nonsense, quite happy just to get a laugh from the audience. A lot of the audience had hurled their shoes at the stage.
Unable to lay his hands on a tattered old pair of shoes, the village head walked out of the theater and headed back home to bed. Suddenly, while on the road home, a banshee cry erupted behind him and two hands grasped his neck, toppling him over forwards. His forehead smashed on some unknown object; stars flashed before his eyes. While he was still trying to get a proper look at who was behind him, to work out what was going on, he felt a sudden chill by his right ear; when he groped at it with his hand, he discovered that side of his head was already quite seriously bereft of his…"Ear-" he yelled out in terror. He heard behind him the sound of clothing being ripped, heard the black shadow behind him bite speedily and squeakily on something, spit it on the ground, jump violently up and down, pick the thing on the ground up again, and hurl it violently, far away in the direction of where people were most densely assembled. All this took place in an instant.
"Hey, Wang, go fetch your fucking ear-"
This piercing, booze-soaked scream was Kuiyuan's.
"You bastard Wang, that's what happens if you don't listen to your betters, your ear ends up going to the dogs-"
It was obvious that Kuiyuan's knife had cut up the wrong person.
"Kui you bastard, you're going to get it now, you got the wrong person!" someone shouted out nearby.
More and more people gathered around. Some rushed forward, grabbing back the apparently crazed Kuiyuan by the waist. After a bout of brawling, Kuiyuan felled the new arrivals, broke past all obstacles, and headed for the dark night of the hills.
Still trembling all over, the terrified village head covered over the bleeding wound on the right side of his head and launched into an unending wail of sorrow: "Ear… my eyayayar…" He'd collapsed onto the ground on all fours, like a dog, searching. Somebody suddenly had a thought and said Kuiyuan had just thrown something toward the foodstall-could it have been the ear? At this, everyone's eyes instantly switched over in that direction, while those standing there hurriedly moved their feet out of the way to allow room for the bleeding village head, for some beams from a flashlight to sweep over the ground. Bending over, they soon found a cigarette box, a few pieces of watermelon skin, and a few piles of pig dung, but not a scrap of flesh. In the end, a sharp-eyed child found the fleshy fragment in a tattered straw sandal, but unfortunately the blood and flesh had gotten completely mangled, were embedded with grains of sand, smeared with black dirt, and were absolutely stone cold, as if they had never been part of a person. People said the only mercy in the whole unfortunate affair was that it hadn't been snapped up by a dog.
People relaxed, feeling able to tread on the ground at their ease, without worrying they might be treading on something precious. They could be confident of the ground beneath their feet once more.
By the time the village head returned from the country clinic, his head tied up with white silk, it was nearly morning. Apparently the ear had been sewn back on after a fashion, but Kuiyuan had done his dastardly work rather too well, chewing the ear till it was almost beyond recognition. The doctor said that for the time being he couldn't say for certain whether the ear would still work: they'd have to wait and see.
Lots of people thronged the door to his house, craning their necks to get a look inside.
Three months later, Kuiyuan's case was finally judged in the regional court. He'd fled to Yueyang, but was caught and brought back by the public security joint defence team dispatched by Yanwu. His crimes were grievous bodily harm and theft: one sentence of eight years covered both crimes. Having failed to get himself a lawyer, he seemed entirely insouciant about the whole process, standing in the court grinning and laughing every so often at a few mates of his behind him, giving his hair the odd carefree toss. Without the bailiff's intervention, the young men behind him would've passed a lit cigarette over to him.
"Can't I even smoke?" A look of great surprise came over his face.
When the presiding judge finally asked him if he had anything to say, another look of great surprise came over him:
"Did I do something wrong? You're kidding me-what did I do wrong? All I did was get the wrong person, my only fault was drinking too much that day. You know I don't normally drink, unless it's Remy Martin, Hennessey Cognac, dry white Great Wall Wine, Confucius wine, and a small cup at the most. My problem is I have too many friends, whenever anyone sees me they want me to drink, so what can I do? It'd be letting friends down not to drink! A gentleman should never drink alone, and all that. And anyway, it was the middle of July that day, the gateway to the spirit world was wide open, so it would've been letting the ancestors down not to drink…"
After he'd been cut short once by the judge, he nodded his head repeatedly, "Okay okay okay, I'll cut to the chase, get to the point. Of course, I did something a bit uncivilized, but this wasn't a crime, no crime at all; the worst you could say about it was I let my judgement cloud over just that one time, like I just lost my grip, smashed a bowl. Wouldn't you say? After today's hearing, I think this point should already be perfectly clear. The facts speak for themselves. I've already explained this to the higher-ups. Director Li from the prefectural commissioner's office will be here in a minute, that's the director of the Grain Bu
reau, I had a meal at his place not so long ago…"After the judge had once more impatiently requested him to omit his wide and varied descriptions of the weather, the surroundings, the menu of the day that meal took place, he was once more obliged to obey. "Okay, I won't say anything more about Director Li. The higher-ups have views on this matter. Chief Provincial Editor Han Shaogang also believes I've done nothing wrong.
You all know Chief Editor Han, yes?… What? You don't even know Chief Editor Han? He was my dad's best friend! He used to belong to our County Cultural Institute! My advice to you all is make a phone call and ask him what the provincial government actually thinks about this…"
His stream of consciousness lasted a good twenty minutes.
Staring at his flame-yellow teeth, the judge decided his arguments made no sense at all, refused his appeal, and told the police to take him out. The final image he left with people as he was led away was that of his overlong suit pants, their cuffs overhanging his heels, brushing back and forth over the ground in a wet, muddy mess.
*Open Eyes
: After Kuiyuan had served one year in prison, he fell ill and died. When the news reached Maqiao, his mother choked with sorrow and died. When matters had reached this pass, the enmity between the Kuiyuan and Yanwu households became even more deeply entrenched. To make a long story short, Kuiyuan's three older brothers smashed some glass in Tiananmen and injured Yanzao. Yanwu then sent his people to break in on the Kuiyuan household's funerals and hurl dogshit missiles at the soul tablet, at the offerings table, even at the two coffins. Only when the two households were threatening each other with torches and knives did the villagers ask the Ox-head to mediate between them.