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  Han Shaogong

  A Dictionary of Maqiao

  Translated by Julia Lovell

  Translator's Preface

  In 1968 the Chinese Communist regime under Mao Zedong instigated one of the twentieth century's most sweeping movements of human upheaval. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76) resulted in a cataclysmic disruption of Chinese society and the relocation of millions of intellectuals, predominantly high-school and university students (zhiqing, "Educated Youth"), from the cities and towns to the countryside, where they were expected to settle for the rest of their lives, laboring alongside the peasants. Often dispatched thousands of miles to remote, impoverished areas on the borders or in the rural hinterland of China, they were confronted with languages and ways of life that were entirely alien. Han Shaogong, age sixteen in 1970, was sent to villages in northern Hunan (south China), to spend his life planting rice and tea.

  That life plan came to an end in 1976, along with the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong himself. Han returned to the Hunan provincial capital Changsha, where he attended college and began a career as a writer in the post-Mao political and cultural thaw. By the mid-1980s, he was at the forefront of one of the key liberating developments in post-Mao literature: the Root-Searching Movement (xungen pai). The Root-Searchers set about reopening fiction to influences from Chinese traditional culture, aesthetics, and language, rebelling against decades of stifling Communist controls. From Mao's proscriptive 1942 Talks at Yanan on Art and Literature up until his death, the Chinese Communist Party had defined the function of literature as serving China's hundreds of millions of workers, peasants, and soldiers (whose own thoughts and desires were also defined by the Party). In the interest of increasing its control over literary production, the Maoist regime made ever more strenuous efforts to regulate language through manuals dictating correct forms of grammar, rhetoric, and characterization. After Mao's death, Han and his peers emerged, blinking, from a world in which the limits of literary expression had been so closely prescribed that fictional output had dwindled alarmingly: an average of eight novels had been published every year between 1949 and 1966; this figure fell even lower during the Cultural Revolution. [1] Not surprisingly, the question of how to break out of the strangulating "Mao Style" in language and form dominated literary discussion of the 1980s and beyond.

  A Dictionary of Maqiao (completed in 1995) is, among many other things, Han Shaogong's answer to this question. It is a rebuttal both to the insanity of Maoist thought control and to the linguistic dogmatism that persists within contemporary Communist China in the form of continuing censorship of public expression. As its title suggests, the novel is structured as a dictionary. Its headings are words from the dialect of Maqiao, a tiny village in southern China, noted down by Han during his time in the countryside and confined for years in exercise books, until they became hisfocus for this philosophical meditation on the impossibilities of creating a universal, normalized language, and on the absurdities and tragedies that ensue when such an attempt is made.

  The book is also a fictional account narrated by Han Shaogong as an Educated Youth, recording the history, language, and customs of the area to which he was sent down-from before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. A Contents page appears at the start of the novel, in theory permitting the reader to treat it as a reference book or lexicon, to dip into entries at will. As the novel progresses, however, entries start to assume knowledge of dialect words and of characters already introduced-the Party Branch Secretary Benyi, the old village leader Uncle Luo, the local opera aficionado Wanyu, the special Maqiao understanding of words such as "awakened" and "precious"-thus requiring a linear reading. Han Shaogong's compilation of dictionary entries, it soon becomes apparent, is neither alphabetical nor random, and the book is very far from a dry catalog of anthropological and linguistic detail. A Dictionary is the biography of a community, told through its history, people, plants, and animals.

  Through entry headings that range from people and places to dogs and mosquitoes, from brief vignettes to lengthy sequences, Han combines the variety of a short-story collection with the satisfactions of a sustained narrative. (By breaking up the narrative into shorter episodes and observations, he is also harking back to well-established genres in the Chinese literary heritage, in particular the "jottings" (biji) essay form much beloved of premodern literati.) Chinese history, in particular the traumatic recent past, has a large part to play, as Han presents his and the village's own unique interpretation and experience of events: the pre-1949 struggles between the Communist and Nationalist parties, Land Reform and the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao economic reforms. But Han's story telling always has a larger, philosophical point to make. Even against the Orwellian backdrop of Maoist China, Han shows us, language and history do not become fixed, controllable entities; words and meanings are mutated, misrepresented, and invented by everyone, including Benyi, the local Party mouthpiece.

  One of the most intriguing aspects of the novel is Han's own position as an Educated Youth-as an educated outsider living within the village. Many of the Educated Youth enthusiastically embraced the idea of banishment to the countryside as a way of assuaging the long-standing Chinese intellectual guilt complex toward the People. The legitimacy of the Chinese literary elite is traditionally rooted in the Mencian theory of government – namely, that the mandate to rule was deserved only if the People's welfare were properly attended to-and modern literati have continually agonized over how to portray the lives of the Masses, rather than the preoccupations of the group they belonged to and most understood, the urban bourgeoisie. This sense of guilt opened the way to intellectual support for Communism and, later, for the radical plan of sending millions of students to the countryside to reform their filthy intellectual thoughts by practicing the clean laboring habits of peasants.

  Many of the episodes Han relates, however, testify to the difficulties these "sent-down kids" had in adjusting to the local dialect and customs, and to the tragicomic clashes between peasants and students that resulted. Han Shaogong's Maqiao is very far from being a rural paradise: life is often violent, arbitrary, and oppressive (especially for women); food is in short supply, privacy nonexistent, the work backbreaking, and the cultural and recreational possibilities limited and generally monotonous. But Han achieves a balanced portrayal of the country-dwellers he worked alongside, one that neither romanticizes nor betrays contempt for its subjects. Throughout the book, Han never behaves like a moralizing spectator, but as a guilty participant, even leader, in some of the more ridiculous and insensitive episodes. As an earnest youth with a Maoist schooling, Han is at one point instructed to write a revolutionary opera glorifying the lives of the laboring peasants. Wanyu, one of the stars of the show, reacts badly to Han's script: "Sing this? Hoes and rakes and carrying poles filling manure pits watering rice seedlings? Comrade, I have to put up with all this stuff every day in the fields, and now you want me to get on stage and sing about it?'" Han and the local "cultural officials" arrogantly tell him to get on with it-this is art.

  Han's musings on the impossibility of universalizing or normalizing language and truth reveal a deeply Chinese, unmistakably Daoist strain of thought. "The Way that can be spoken is not the constant Way," pronounced Laozi, the great Daoist philosopher, and Han constantly draws attention to the confusion, comedy, and calamity that result from the uses and abuses of language, from the failure to accept the insufficiency of language. Yet neither, as A.C. Graham tells us, do Daoists reject language as useless.

  Taoists are trying to communicate a knack,
an aptitude, a way of living… [They] do not think in terms of discovering Truth or Reality. They merely have the good sense to remind us of the limitations of the language which they use to guide us towards that altered perspective on the world and that knack of living. To point the direction they use stories, verses, aphorisms, any verbal means which come to hand. Far from having no need for words, they require all available resources of literary art.

  Equally, how could Han, in undertaking the daunting task of compiling a dictionary, deny his esteem for language? Instead, his range of writing styles, subjects, and discussion reveal a truly Daoist openness to using all linguistic means available. Any component of Maqiao-its "purple-teeth soil," its demonic maple trees, its stubborn oxen-has a story to tell and a part to play of no less importance than the characters that people his pages. Several of Maqiao's inhabitants are also strongly Daoist in outlook-for example, the dropout Ma Ming, whose withdrawal from the corruption and hypocrisy of Communist/Confucian life encapsulates the archetypal life choice of the Daoist hermit through Chinese history.

  In tune with this Daoist receptiveness to ideas and influences, the book is as international and universal as it is local and particular. Han places himself within a broad channel of influences, from Confucius to Freud, and he is not afraid to leap between different countries and periods in his exploration of language. His frame of reference contains both Chinese and Western history and culture-the Crusades, American anti-Communism, modernist art and literature-resulting in a novel that is both fascinatingly Chinese and accessibly Western in approach. He is equally comfortable with conventional and magical realism, with philological musings and story telling. And although his characters live in Maqiao, "a little village, impossible to find, almost dropped off the map," we would do well to remember the conviction of the modern Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh that "Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals." The inhabitants of Han Shaogong's Maqiao are as universal and three-dimensional as a reader could hope for: Benyi, the loud-mouthed local Mr. Big; Tiexiang, his femme fatale wife; Zhihuang, the brutish idiot savant; Zhaoqing, the eccentric miser; Zhongqi, the village busybody; Yanwu, the "strange talent" who's just a bit too clever for his own good. As explored in Han Shaogong's Dictionary, the dialect, life, and inhabitants of Maqiao are fully deserving of their place in world literature.

  A note about the translation

  When I first wrote to Han Shaogong asking for his permission to translate A Dictionary ofMaqiao, I received a friendly but slightly bemused response. "I am very happy that you wish to translate the book, but I'm afraid it will be terribly difficult." He probably thought I was mad even to have suggested translating a book written in Chinese, about the language of one tiny corner of southern China, into English.

  I plunged on regardless and, for the most part, I have translated the novel in its entirety, from the 1997 Shanghai wenyi chubanshe edition. There are, however, five entries from the novel that I deemed to be so heavily dependent in the Chinese original on puns between dialect and Mandarin Chinese as to make extensive and distracting linguistic explanations necessary in English. I therefore decided, with the author's permission, to omit from my translation the following entries: "Bayuan"; "Lian xiang"; "Liu shi"; "Po nao"; "Xian"; and the final paragraph of the entry "Reincarnation."

  On the theme of dictionaries, the reader will find an alphabetically arranged glossary at the end of the book to explain any possibly unfamiliar terms that occur in the text. I have included also a list of principal characters and a guide to pronunciation of Chinese words.

  – Julia Lovell

  Guide to Pronunciation of Transliterated Chinese

  According to the pinyin system, transliterated Chinese is pronounced as in English, except for the following:

  vowels:

  a (as the only letter following a consonant): a as in after

  ai: I (or eye)

  ao: ow as in how

  e: uh

  ei: ay as in say

  en: on as in lemon

  eng: ung as in sung

  i (as the only letter following most consonants): e as in me

  i (when following c, ch, s, sh, zh, z): er as in driver

  ia: yah

  ian: yen

  ie: yeah

  iu: yo as in yo-yo

  o: o as in fork

  ong: oong

  ou: o as in no

  u (when following most consonants): oo as in food

  u (when following j, q, x, y): u as the German (i

  ua: wah

  uai: why

  uan: wu-an

  uang: wu-ang

  ui: way

  uo: u-who

  yan: yen

  yi: ee as in feed

  consonants:

  c: ts as in its

  g: g as in good

  q: ch as in chat

  x: sh as in she

  z: ds as in folds

  zh: j as in job

  Editorial Note [2]

  Producing the dictionary of a village has been a somewhat experimental undertaking for us.

  We received this offering from the dictionary's compiler, Han Shaogong, a renowned gentleman of letters whose oeuvre includes "Homecoming," "Dadada," "Womanwomanwoman," and a host of other hugely influential works, and whose mighty skills in penmanship extend to both fiction and essays; not, however, to dictionaries. But having considered the specialized content of this dictionary, as well as the opportunity that a lexicon affords for exploration and discussion, we encouraged his brave experiment and permitted him to retain his own distinctive literary style within the work.

  To clarify for the reader:

  1. The compiler originally arranged the entries in alphabetical order. In order to make it easier for readers to grasp the narrative thread and to increase the readability of the novel, the entries were rearranged into their present order. The original index of headings (presented in the "List of Entries" which follows this section), however, was retained to make the book easier to consult.

  3. For ease of reading, the author has used as little dialect as possible in the definitions. However, this should not prevent interested readers from using the knowledge of dialect this book provides by mentally replacing corresponding words in definitions with dialect as they read. In so doing, a reader can get even closer to the original feel of life in Maqiao.

  List of Entries [3]

  Agreed-Ma

  Army Mosquito

  Asking Books

  Asleep

  Awakened

  Bandit Ma (and 1948)

  Bandit Ma (continued)

  Barbarian Parts

  Beginning (End)

  Born-to-the-Pen

  Boss Hong

  Bramble Gourd

  Brutal

  Bubbleskin (etc.)

  Cheap

  Clout

  Colored Tea

  Confucian

  Curse-Grinding

  Daoist Ritual

  Dear Life

  Delivering Songs

  Democracy Cell (as Used by Convicts)

  Dragon

  Dragon (continued)

  Dream-Woman

  Eating (as Used in Springtime)

  Flame

  Floating Soul

  Form

  Ghost Relative, the

  Gruel

  He-Ground (and She-Field)

  Hey-Eh Mouth

  House of Immortals (and Lazybones)

  Jasmine-Not-Jasmine

  Jackal-Fiend

  Knotted Grass Hoop

  Kuiyuan

  Lax

  Lazy (as Used by Men)

  Lettuce Jade

  Ligelang

  Light the Sky Red

  Lion Dance

  Little Big Brother (etc.)

  Low (and X-Ray Glasses)

  Luo River

  Maple Demon

  Maqiao Bow

  Master Black

  Master Black (continued)

  Menstrual Holes

>   Model Worker (as Used on Fine Days)

  Mouth-Ban (and Flip Your Feet)

  Nailed Backs

  Nine Pockets

  1948 (continued)

  Officials' Road

  Old Chum

  Old Forder

  Old Man (etc.)

  On the Take

  Open Eyes

  Placing the Pot

  Precious

  Precious (continued)

  Presenting the Vine

  Pressing Names

  Public Family

  Purple-Teeth Soil

  Qingming Rain

  Qoqo Man, the

  Red Flower Daddy

  Reincarnation

  Resentment

  Riding a Wheelbarrow

  River

  Root

  Rough

  Rude

  Rude (continued)