*Kuiyuan

: In 1968,1 helped out in the making of a survey. A mass association called "Forever Eastwards" in the CCP Hunan Provincial Party Committee organ, wanted to expel two cadres from the Provincial Party Committee. Firstly, though, they had to carry out a thorough political investigation of all these cadres' relatives. So as to avoid being attacked by the opposing faction, they agreed to accept public scrutiny and invited the Red Guards to send someone along to help out with the survey. And so it was that I managed to get onto a cadre inspection team while I was still barely out of diapers, that I wangled my way onto this cushy number, onto a publicly funded pleasure trip around the whole country.

First of all we went to a number of prisons in Beijing, Jinzhou, and Shenyang to find out about a male cousin of one of the cadres. The cousin used to be a broadcaster at an important broadcasting station, but after mispronouncing the name of the important Communist Party member "An Ziwen" as that of the important GMD member "Song Ziwen" during a live broadcast in the 1950s, he was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years, and had been serving out his sentence in the above-mentioned prisons. I discovered, to my surprise, that however many appeals he wrote, all his hearers felt it was entirely right and proper that he should pay for one single written character with fifteen years of his life. By the time we spoke to him, he'd thought things through for himself, was full of apologies to the Party and to Chairman Mao, and no longer felt his own sentencing was overly harsh. "Government," he addressed me-me! all of fifteen-year-old me-"I won't appeal again, I'll concentrate on reforming my thinking."

As I walked out from under the electric wire fencing and high walls, back to the hotel where we were staying, a sudden terror rose up in me: a nameless terror toward "An," "Song," and all other such words.

Round upon round of gunfire from armed struggles resounded outside the hotel; everywhere there were street barricades, bullet holes, and gunpowder smoke; convoys of vehicles bearing yelling, screaming combatants with guns loaded and at the ready would often whistle past on the street, waking the people in the hotel up to violent starts. In Liaoning in 1968, the "Red Company" was locked in battle with the "Revolutionary Company," while the "Mao Zedong Thought" faction was encircling the "Mao Zedongism" faction. A brutal battle being fought near the station brought all the trains to a stop, trapping me and three colleagues in the hotel for a full two weeks. All this is perhaps very hard for later generations, like my daughter, for example, to understand. In the eyes of those who were born later, in terms of thinking, theory, conduct, interests, expressions, dress, or language there was nothing much to choose between those fighting on opposite sides, beyond the slight linguistic differences between, for example, "Red Company" and "Revolutionary Company"; in other circumstances, they would have done business or worked together, studied for diplomas or played the stock-market, would have done all sorts of things together. So how did these endless bouts of furious hand-to-hand fighting come about?

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."