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 he 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.