There was a house with a large shop sign hung over it, "Tianzi International Culture Club," apparently provided by the owner of Tiananmen to serve his fellow villagers for free.

As part of the club, there was also a big theater stage to the left of the building. The guide said that in the first month of this year, the county theater troupe had come to sing opera here for three whole days, again paid for solely by Yanwu for the free entertainment of his fellow villagers.

The visiting party was discussing something to do with one of the actresses in the troupe. Their argument caught the attention of the roosters perched under the eaves, finally giving their sallow gazes a focus.

I was, of course, surprised that Yanwu could build such a big mansion, and also that he'd built it in such a contentious style-if he'd built it ten or so years earlier, wouldn't it have been condemned as a counterrevolutionary conspiracy punishable by death? Only later, when I bumped into an old acquaintance, Zhihuang, did I learn the whole story that lay behind this. Zhihuang said that when Yanwu was in high school, when his family class status was very poor and he hardly counted as human, he'd once stuck a picture of Tiananmen on his bed, which had been confiscated by the class representatives. If poor and lower middle-peasants didn't own photographs like this, said the class cadre, what right did landlord scum like him have to pine for Chairman Mao? To see Tiananmen everyday? He was plotting to blow up the great leader with dynamite, now, wasn't he?

Presumably this incident had hurt him very badly, very deeply. Now that he had money, he built his very own Tiananmen before he did anything else.

In the past, he'd had no right to look at Tiananmen; now, he wanted to let everyone know that not only could he look at it, he could even build one, and build one right under all their noses. He could let his wife and two kids play with the crickets and dogs, eat sesame cakes, and sneeze in Tiananmen.

He took out large loans, was kidnapped several times by debt-collectors threatening to snap his tendons, was even taken away once in a police inspection-unit car-all for this project.

*Brutal

: In Maqiao, "brutal" means capable, skillful, a high level of technical know-how. The problem is, "brutal" at the same time implies ruthless, vicious, malicious. Uniting these two meanings in one word never made me all that comfortable. As I've said before, my handwriting was quite good, and during my time in Maqiao I'd often be ordered to paint displays of Chairman Mao's quotations everywhere in red and yellow oil paint. When the peasants saw me writing on the walls, neither using templates nor tracing out the characters, just climbing up the ladder and writing, there'd be astonished murmurs:

"This transfer kid's really brutal!"

I could never work out how much of this was admiration, how much was criticism.

Being able to write nicely was brutal, knowing a lot of characters was brutal, helping the team leader fix the grain threshing machine was brutal, being able to dive down and fill in the leaks in the pond was brutal, even factories from barbarian parts that manufactured appliances, diesel oil, chemical fertilizers, and sheet plastic (and therefore, of course, the workers) were clever, were brutal. When Maqiao people talked like this, maybe they were unaware that they were implicitly relegating knowledge and skill to the category of moral corruption, of savagery.

I suspect that, according to their past experience, people with a grasp of some particular knowledge or skill possessed a natural tendency toward violence and terror. The first time they saw a piece of rumbling machinery, it dropped Japanese bombs on them from the sky; the first time they saw a radio amplifier, it cut off their "capitalist tails" by confiscating their own private land. What was there to reassure them that clever people they later encountered wouldn't do them similar sorts of harm?

Under these circumstances, was there anything wrong in them using the word "brutal" in this way?

Maqiao language isn't unique on this point.

In a lot of places in Sichuan, people with a high level of skill are described as "fierce," a word close in meaning to "brutal." "Really fierce," that's what they say about someone with a great deal of skill.

In a lot of places in the north, people with a high level of skill are described as "wicked," again close in meaning to "brutal." "Wicked so-and-so," is what they call someone with a lot of skill.

In standard Mandarin Chinese, the term lihai (severe), widely used to refer to people possessing a high level of ability in some area, provides another example of the sting in the tail of praise, of the anxiety concealed within the pleasure. Li means fierce, severe, while hai, meaning evil or harm, provides a warning of even greater clarity and bluntness. In Hunanese, calling someone lihai refers to someone with ability who's always taking ill-intentioned advantage.

So it seems that in a lot of Chinese dialects, knowledge and skill, and evil (or brutality, fierceness, wickedness, harm, etc.) are two sides of the same coin. Two thousand years ago, Zhuangzi expressed anxiety and hatred toward all forms of knowledge and skill. "There are few good people in the world, but many bad, there are few sages that benefit the world, many that harm it" (Zhuangzi, The Outer Chapters, chapter 10). He believed that only by exterminating knowledge would the thieves of the nation be routed; only following the destruction of jewels would the numbers of property thieves decline; only by smashing tokens and documentation would people grow honest and contented with their lot; only by breaking the scales would people be unable to haggle and argue; only by destroying laws and religion would people be able to comprehend nature and the Way of the ultimate in human life… Zhuangzi's resentment of knowledge has long since been submerged beneath the modern advance of technological progress, become a faint glimmer lying over the horizon, ignored by the majority. But in linguistic heritage, at least in the many southern dialects I mentioned above, it continues to eke out a stealthy existence.

*Strange Talent

: Maqiao dialect has another term for people who demonstrate great ability: "strange talent." The Origins of Words (Commercial Book Center, 1988) gives three definitions for guai, the word for "strange" in Mandarin: the first is bizarre or unique; the second is particularly, extremely, very-presumably the gradual evolution of the first meaning into a function word; the third is censure, blame. From the looks of it, in Chinese bizarre things are forever linked with censure and blame, are perilously out of the ordinary.

Maqiao's "strangest talent" was Yanwu. When the original batch of Educated Youth had all been transferred or retired due to illness, only two remained, of whom I was one. Those who could sing revolutionary operas had all gone, and when the arts propaganda team were ordered to go out and perform, we couldn't even get the gongs going, so someone suggested Yanwu to us. He was still studying at middle school, but he responded to the call and sang very well, as it turned out; though he didn't have time to come and rehearse, and was so short he couldn't get on the stage, he concealed himself in a dark spot behind the stage, where he sang through operas from start to finish, good guys, bad guys, male roles, female roles; he just learned the words and out they came, so all the people on stage had to do was mouth. The difficult high notes he hit without batting an eye, producing an astonishing stream of rich, full sound that reverberated in the night sky over the countryside. That head of his poked in and out at everyone else's waist height: it was impossible to see his face clearly without bending at the middle. So as not to miss class, he'd run off after having finished singing, disappearing into the darkness before I'd got a proper look at him.