by Han Shaogong
There was another cave in the lower village, which had also been dug at about the same time by other people. The cave mouth was now blocked up by two scruffy wooden planks, with a mess of rice stalks, a few multicolored, now-discarded cigarette packets, and a pair of tattered shoes dropped behind them-as if someone was still living there.
*Separated-Pot Brothers
: "Ah-ha, an honored guest, come sit for a while in the cave."
His face was familiar, but I couldn't quite remember who he was.
"Comrade Han, how's your health?"
"Good."
"How's work?"
"Good."
"How's study?"
"Good, quite good."
"How are your venerable elders?"
"Not bad."
"Are your honorable sons and daughters obedient?"
"I only have one daughter, but thank you for your concern."
"Eh," he inclined his head, "is industrial production in the cities good?"
"Of course…"
"Is the flow of commerce in the cities also…"
Fearing my conversation partner was about to inquire into every urban profession and trade, I hurriedly cut into this parallel sentence exchange: "I'm sorry, you are…?"
"Parted so recently, and you don't recognize me?" He smiled at me. All this happened while I was visiting the air-raid shelter and a middleaged man popped up by my side.
"I can't quite…"
"You are forgetful, good sir."
"It's not that surprising, I left here almost twenty years ago."
"Really? Twenty years? Now that's surprising! Can it really be that one day in the cave is a thousand years in the outside world? Tsk tsk." As he spoke, he shook his head in deepest, unfathomable puzzlement.
A distant voice, accompanied by a laugh, shouted: "That's Ma Ming!"
"Yes, my unworthy surname is Ma, informal name Ming."
"You're Ma Ming? The one from the House of Immortals…"
"Ashamed, bitterly ashamed."
Only now did I begin to remember, to remember how I'd gone to his house to paint quotations by Chairman Mao; I also noticed that a drip was hanging off the tip of his nose, as if on the point of falling, but-not falling. Each wrinkle on his face contained a rich seam of grime, but he didn't in fact look aged in the slightest. His face ruddy, his voice booming, he still looked exactly as he had before, dressed in a dirty, greasy, cotton jacket, with both hands resting inside his sleeves. The only change was that he seemed to have an extra badge from some county teachers' training college pinned to his chest, picked up from who knew where.
"You're still living in… the House of Immortals?"
"It has been my good fortune, my good fortune, to move to a new abode." He smiled, a segment of lotus root caked with mud in his hand, and gestured toward the interior of the air-raid shelter.
"You live in a place as damp as this?" I was astonished.
"You just don't understand. Men evolved from monkeys, monkeys evolved from fish, fish swim fearlessly in the sea all year long, so why on earth should they fear damp after they've turned into men?"
"You don't get ill?"
"I'm ashamed to say, in this lifetime of mine, I've eaten all sorts of delicious things but never known the taste of medicine." Just as he was saying this, a woman rushed over, saying a big pumpkin had disappeared from her family's garden and wanting to know whether Ma Ming had picked it. Ma Ming immediately began to glower: "Why don't you ask me whether I'm a murderer, too, while you're at it?" Seeing the woman's blank stare, he pressed his advantage with another growl: "Why don't you ask me whether I murdered Chairman Mao?" As a segue, he spat on the ground, forgetting all about me, his guest, and stalked off.
A few kids giggling somewhere off in the distance fled in terror after one sideways glance from him.
Off he went, spitting with anger. The last time I saw him was as I was leaving Maqiao. I spotted him standing on the mountain, as usual, leaning on a walking stick, a lone, independent figure on the hillside behind the upper village, looking far off into the vast, hazy, open fields that stretched out before him as the pink light of dawn floated over the mountain valleys. He looked to be in a complete trance. I also heard him hum a strange sort of intonation, like a moan pressed out of his gut, which turned out to be a well-known tune from television:
Where did you come from? My friend, It's as if a butterfly has flown to my window. I don't know how many days it'll stay, We've been apart too long, too long…
I didn't dare call out to him, as it didn't feel right disrupting the aesthetic mood evoked by his butterfly.
It was only later that I found out those few words I'd got out of Ma Ming were quite the most courteous reception I could have hoped for. For a good few years lately, he'd severed all relations with the villagers and hadn't had a friendly look, let alone word, for anyone. Every day, footloose and fancy-free, he wandered through the mountains and surveyed the rivers, viewing the human world with a coldly indifferent eye. Once, a child fell into the pond unnoticed by anyone else in the village but him, as he stood on the hillside. He saved the child but refused even to contemplate the thanks of the child's mother, threw all the cured pork she sent to his door into the dung pit: "Don't pollute my mouth," he'd! said. He'd rather eat ants and earthworms than eat the coarse food of coarse people, than accept favors from the villagers.
By then, he'd moved out of the House of Immortals. Maqiao's oldest residence had collapsed and Zhihuang got a few people together to rip out the foundations. A few fired bricks were still usable, so the villagers built a wayside pavilion and a small house for him. Hands in his sleeves, he went to have a look, but instead of moving into the new house uttered an uncompromising declaration of war. He chose instead to crawl into the air-raid shelter.
He didn't do that much sleeping in the cave; far more often he'd sleep in the wild, on the mountains, using the wind for a pillow, the dew for a bed. Someone once asked him if he was afraid of being eaten by something wild while asleep on the mountain. Being eaten-what was there to be afraid of in that? he asked. In his lifetime he'd eaten a good many wild things, so it was only fair that he should be eaten back by something wild in return.
In the years gone by, there were two people he hated most of all: first of all he hated Benyi, then after Benyi he hated Yanwu. "Devil's spawn," he'd always be backbiting, though no one knew the provenance of the enmity. In fact, the faces of all three shared certain points of resemblance: all had thin, pared-down faces, hooded eyes, chins slightly flattened then turned up, so that their lower lips were forced outwards. After this chance thought came to me, I was suddenly struck by a wild hypothesis. I imagined that after the deaths of Benyi and Yanwu, Ma Ming would, to the astonishment of all, weep and prostrate himself, eyes and nose running, before both their graves. I imagined that some other lazybones would in future perhaps spread a rumor to the effect that Ma Ming had said Benyi, Yanwu, and he were in fact blood relations, were all of the seed sown many years ago by Long Stick Xi (see the entry "Rough")-that they were what Maqiao people called separated-pot brothers.
Separated-pot brothers were sometimes also called borrowed-pot brothers, meaning that the brothers shared a father but, since infancy, hadn't eaten from the same pot, hadn't grown up in one family. Whether this separation was a result of legitimate adoption, or of illegitimate birth, or was forced by population drift and dispersal following bouts of pillaging, was of little import: none of this was specified. Just two factors-one, they'd been separated at the pot, and two, they were brothers-sufficed for the people of Maqiao, who seemed to stress these two crucial facts above all else. I imagine that this lazybones spreading the rumor will have asked Ma Ming, was there any proof for this allegation of his? Ma Ming would answer: when Long Stick Xi left Maqiao, he'd told him in person-at the time, he'd been just a boy and refused to believe him, he'd even spat at Long Stick Xi. Then later, as he grew up, he discovered that, in fact, in the village only Benyi, Yanwu, and h
e exactly reproduced Long Stick Xi's birdlike countenance; only then did he believe his real father truly had played all those dirty tricks.
I imagine that when Maqiao people hear about this, they'll all stare and gape in shock, paralyzed like a mass of poisoned cockroaches. They'll watch Ma Ming's shadow float over the drying terrace, see him cast the occasional, icy glance out of the corners of his eyes, no one having the courage to step forward and call out at him to pause and verify the facts any further.
*Beginning (End)
: In Maqiao dialect, the word for "end" (pronounced wan in Mandarin) is pronounced the same as the word for "beginning" {yuan). Two temporal extremes are thus phonetically linked. In that case, when Maqiao people say "yuan," do they mean end? Or do they mean beginning?
If things always have an end, then time always advances forward in a straight line, never repeating itself, with forward and back, this and that, right and wrong permanently in diametric opposition to each other, implying a certain standpoint for making comparisons and judgments. If, conversely, things always go back to the beginning, then time moves in a circle, always going around and starting again, with forward and back, this and that, right and wrong always confusingly overlapped and overturned.
As I see it, history's optimists insist on the division between beginning and end, viewing history as an ever-advancing straight line, in which all honor and disgrace, success and failure, praise and blame, gains and losses are always precisely recorded, ready to receive true and just final judgment. Perseverance will receive its final reward. History's pessimists, however, insist on the unity between beginning and end, viewing history as an ever-repeating loop in which their retreats endlessly advance, their losses are endlessly gained, everything is futile.
Which yuan would Maqiao people choose? Beginning or end?
Consider Maqiao: a little village, impossible to find, almost dropped off the map, with a few dozen households in the upper and lower village combined, a strip of land, set against a stretch of mountain. Maqiao has a great many stones and a great deal of soil, stones and earth which have endured through thousands of years. However hard you look, you won't see it changing. Every particle is a testament to eternity. The never-ending flow of its waters gurgles with the sounds of thousands of years; the pearls of dew of thousands of years still hang on the blades of grass at the roadside; the sunlight of thousands of years now shines so brightly we cannot open our eyes-a blazing white heat that buzzes on the face.
On the other hand, Maqiao is not, of course, the Maqiao of former days, or even the Maqiao of a moment ago. A wrinkle has appeared, a white hair has floated to the ground, a withered hand has turned cold, everything moves silently on. Faces appear one by one, then one by one fade away, never to return. Only on these faces can we look nervously for traces of the march of time. No power can stop this process, no power can prevent this succession of faces from sinking into Maqiao soil-just as one note plucked after another sounds and softly dies away.
*Vernacular/Empty Talk (Baihua)
: In Chinese, the word baihua has three meanings:
1. (Modern Chinese) vernacular (as opposed to the classical, literary language).
2. Unimportant, nonserious, unverifiable chatter, spoken only for idle amusement.
3. In Maqiao language, "bai" is also read "pa," which is a homophone of the word meaning "scary," so "empty talk" is also "scary talk," often meaning stories of ghosts or crimes told for the titillation and enjoyment of listeners.
For Maqiao people, "empty talk" was what people in other parts might call gossip. It was an activity designed for passing the time, one that took place mostly on evenings or on rainy days. This led me to suspect that the beginnings of Chinese vernacular sprang from beneath gloomy thatched eaves such as were found here, that its roots lie in sources of vulgar diversion, in the records of the fantastic and bizarre, even in tales of horror. Zhuangzi viewed fiction as trivial, superficial blather; Ban Gu proclaimed it to be "that which is spoken on the streets, in the alleys, on the roads, on the byways," both of which views generally approximate such an understanding. From the "Tales of the Supernatural" of the Wei-Jin period to the early Qing "Tales of Liaozhai"-the source from which Chinese vernacular springs-the absurd and the abnormal, in the form of demons and bizarre happenings, abound everywhere, launch repeated assaults on the nerves of listeners. Here there was no possible recourse to Confucian statesmanship, no saintly purification of mind and desire. The difference between baihua and the classical language was that the former has never been seen as a high, noble language, has never had the capacity to induce or depict states of spiritual extremity.
Baihua is just a daily consumer product, a language of the market-place. Its transformation by western languages, its maturation and development in the modern era have made no difference to the prejudiced value judgments made against it by the majority view-in the dictionary used by Maqiao people, until the 1990s at the very least, baihua was still "empty talk," still utterly detached from any subject of serious import, still a pseudonym for "that which is spoken on the streets, in the alleys, on the roads, on the byways." Maqiao people had never sensed any urgent need to use a new name, to differentiate clearly between the three implications of bai mentioned above, to escape from the confusion inherent within the concept itself. Maybe they considered themselves as belonging to an inferior category of person, that of ignorant peasants. They felt they could only penetrate this base, worthless form of "emptiness," this form of linguistic degeneracy-a feeling that amounted to no less than a self-imposed confession of linguistic guilt, to exile. As they saw it, true knowledge seemed to require another kind of expressive language, one that was mysterious, unfathomable, that lay beyond their powers of expression.
Language of this kind had all but disappeared, they supposed, except in odd fragments of vocabulary handed down through their ancestors. Language of this kind lay far beyond their comprehension, was transmitted by spirits, was concealed perhaps in the spells of shamans, in the hysterics of dream-women, in rain and thunder, the sounds of nature.
These people were very thin, their skin very dark, their joints stiff, their eyes and hair yellowed. Having sold off ultimate jurisdiction over their language, sold it off to people they didn't know, they then blindly followed life's path along to its end. The unfortunate fact of the matter is, though, that my attempts at fiction and the most important linguistic memories of my youth were succored first of all by their baihua-Slled evenings and rainy days, as we curled up in groups of threes and fours in preparation for the contented exchange of nonsense and tall stories. Bearing this immovable backdrop in mind, I'm sure they'd laugh at my fiction, sure they'd view it, in terms of moral or emotional value, as page upon page of wasted breath. In some respects, this contempt of theirs is a source of awakening for which I'm grateful. Despite my love for fiction as a genre, fiction is, in the end, fiction-nothing more. Even though humanity has produced countless beautiful novels, the wars in Bosnia and the Middle East were still fought. A Nazi who's read Dostoyevsky will continue to kill people, a cheat who's read Cao Xueqin and Lu Xun will continue to swindle. We shouldn't overstate the influence of fiction.
One could go even further and say that not only fiction, but also all language is just language, and nothing else; no more than a few symbols describing facts, just as a clock is no more than a symbol describing time. Regardless of how clocks shape our sense of time, shape our understanding of time, they can never be time itself. Even if every clock were smashed, even if all instruments for measuring time were smashed, time would still go on as before. And so we really should say that all language, strictly speaking, is "empty talk," and its importance shouldn't be exaggerated.
I've written a fair amount of fiction, as I've idled away my time as a writer over the last ten years. But essentially I've achieved no more than what anybody from Maqiao would have, my volumes of fiction amount exactly to what Fucha was doing just at that moment when he measured how deep we'd d
ug today, then heaved a sigh of relief. "Let's get the bad air out of us, let's have a bit of empty talk (baihua)!' He dropped his carrying pole, stretched his arms, and grinned broadly.
It was very warm in the cave. There was no need to put any more clothes on, and we lay on our sides on the soft piles of earth, knees propped together, gazing at the lamp's hazy flickering on the cave wall.
"Go on, then."
"You go first."
"You go first. You've read all those books, you must've read a lot of empty talk."
There was something not quite right about this remark, I felt, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.
"All right, I'll tell you something funny about Benyi, okay? This happened when we were doing People's Militia training last month, when you'd gone off for a meeting. Up he popped on the grain-drying terrace, telling me my commands weren't loud enough, so he got me to stand by and watch how he shouted. "Left turn," he shouted, "right turn," he shouted, then "back turn," finally "forward-turn." All over the place, the six guys were, didn't know what direction to turn in, but Benyi just glared, drew circles on the ground, and said this is how you turn, around and around and around and around!"
Fucha roared with laughter, his head crashing against the wall of the cave.
"Okay, my turn." By now quite excited, he moistened his throat and started to tell a ghost story. He said there once was a man from around Shuanglong who'd built a house near the mountains, very high up, projeering over the river. He lived on the top floor, and waking up one night he saw a head outside his window looking east, then west. At first he thought it was a burglar, but then realized this made no sense: if he slept on the upper floor and the window was a good twenty feet from the ground, how could a burglar have such long legs? Groping for a flashlight, he quickly turned it on, and what d'you think he saw?"