A Dictionary of Maqiao Read online

  A Dictionary of Maqiao

  Han Shaogong

  From Publishers Weekly

  Maqiao, a fictitious rural village lost in the vitals of Mao's Communist empire, is to Han's magical novel what Macondo is to One Hundred Years of Solitude-a place in which the various brutalities and advances of contemporary history are transformed within the "fossil seams" of popular myth. Han adopts the rules of the dictionary to the rules of fiction, distributing mini-sagas of rural bandits, Daoist madmen and mixed up Maoists across the definitions of terms with special meaning in Maqiao. Han, narrator as well as author, is sent to Maqiao as part of a cadre of "Educated Youth" during the Cultural Revolution. A sharp, sophisticated observer, he narrates these folkloric tales from the vantage point of contemporary China, situating them within a richly informative historical and philosophical framework. Among the stories that deserve mention are those of Wanyu, the village's best singer and reputed Don Juan, who is discovered to lack the male "dragon"; of "poisonous" Yanzao, so called both because his aged mother has a reputation as a poisoner and because he is assigned to spread pesticides (and in so doing absorbs such a quantity of toxins that mosquitoes die upon contact with him); and of Tiexiang, the adulterous wife of Party Secretary Benyi, who takes up with Three Ears, so called because of the rudimentary third ear that grows under one of his armpits. Flawlessly translated by Lovell, this novel should not be missed by lovers of literature.

  Review

  "The best novel of the year isn't that DeLillo-on-automatic-pilot thing that broke out, along with SARS, this spring; nor the smutty anti-Islamic screed by the super-annuated French juvenile delinquent; nor even Jane Smiley's excellent investigation of the unlikely souls of real estate agents. Rather, it is this 'dictionary' of the dialect of a fictitious village, Maqiao, lost in the squat hills of South China." – San Francisco Chronicle Book Review "[A] subtle and smashingly effective critique of the futility of totalitarian efforts to suppress language and thought – and, more to the point, a stunningly imaginative and absorbing work of fiction." – Kirkus Reviews "[A Dictionary of Maqiao] is a magnificent book, epic in its ambitions and sweep without any of the sentimental obfuscation on which that genre so often depends." – The Village Voice "[B]oth fascinating and masterful… Han paints a detailed, intriguing and amusing picture of what happens when Marxism collides with entrenched village beliefs, and how traditional China coexists with modernity. The book is filled with peculiar, beguiling, tragic characters and scenery so real you can touch it… This is an intelligent, amusing, clever, fascinating and well-written view of a China most of us never see, or don't recognize when we do." – Asian Review of Books "To enter [A Dictionary of Maqiao]'s pages is to cross into a world of bandits and ghosts, where 'rude' means 'pretty,' and homosexuals are 'Red Flower Daddies' and people don't die, they 'scatter.'" – The New York Times Book Review " Dictionary of Maqiao is a wonderful, many-layered novel written as a series of definitions which gains further depth from a good translation… Han Shaogong's novel [is] clever, sympathetic and amused… Julia Lovell's translation is an impressive achievement, a fine reflection of a complex book." – Times Literary Supplement "Han Shaogong's novel has won wide acclaim, and deservedly so; through his treatment of language, he not only vividly portrays village life in rural China, but also inspires readers to rethink what they are accustomed to taking for granted." – Persimmon "Sometimes humorous, but crude and grim at other times, the entries all intertwine to give readers a picture of life in this distant region." – Library Journal "The narrator's folkloric stereotypes the provincial simpletons and fools, the cuckolded husbands, the long-suffering wives resolve affectingly into distinct human beings. And the peasant vocabulary vulgar, quaint, superstitious which so perplexesthe earnest young outsider is also revealed to be cunningly subversive, an antidote to the totalitarian imposition of a "reality"irreconcilably at odds with the real thing." – Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe "This is a serious, ground-breaking and finally brilliant novel by one of China's leading authors… The translation is everywhere excellent – fluent, colloquial where appropriate, without being excessively so, learned in places, and without any hint anywhere of 'translationese'… surely destined for classic status." – Bradley Winterton, Taipei Times "In its formal inventiveness, its nuanced depiction of Chinese peasant life, and its speculative explorations into the Chinese cultural psyche, this is one of the finest novels of the post-Mao era to so far make its way into English." – Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, Review of Contemporary Fiction "Worth reading…fascinating and surprisingly accessible." – Anton Graham, China Economic Review "Han is a good storyteller, ingeniously leading the reader into the heart of his stories… A Dictionary of Maqiao is readable and enjoyable." – Fatima Wu, World Literature Today

  ***

  In a country where much can hinge on the written word, Chinese author Han Shaogong gives it the respect it deserves. In a beautiful afterword to his A Dictionary of Maqiao, he writes: “Words have lives of their own. They proliferate densely, endlessly transform, gather and scatter for short bursts, drift along without mooring, shift and intermingle, sicken and live on, have personalities and emotions, flourish, decline, even die out.”

  Contrary to what the title suggests, A Dictionary of Maqiao is actually a novel, written in an interesting technique, almost through the point of view a spectator. Han spends much of the years of the Cultural Revolution in China, in a small village in the south called Maqiao. He spreads the words of the authority while staying useful and productive in the village. Han knows as well as anybody that the language of a region is an effective mirror of its culture. Through “dictionary entries,” explanations of region-specific terms, a picture of Maqiao (arguably even China) appears. The entries are fascinating some just a paragraph in length, others going for at least a few pages. A single entry can count for larger criticisms or appreciation of culture. For example, an examination of the word, “sweet,” indicates that the word can actually cover a wide spectrum of flavors in Maqiao. Han also makes a beautifully executed leap to generalizations peoples of the world make about each other: “Even today, the majority of Chinese people still have great difficulty in distinguishing the facial types of western, northern, and eastern Europeans, and in making out cultural differences between the British, the French, the Spanish, the Norwegians, the Poles etc. The names of each European people are no more than empty symbols in school textbooks, and many Chinese, when put on the spot, are still unable to make any link between them and corresponding characteristics in facial type, clothing, language and customs. This baffles Europeans, just as it baffles the Chinese that Europeans cannot differentiate clearly between people from Shanghai, Canton, and the Northeast.”

  Another interesting “entry” is one on science where the residents consider science to be the product of “lazybones” and therefore deride its use. As with any culture, modern values soon make their appearance even in Maqiao. Towards the end, Han explains: “In Maqiao during the 1990s, a lot of new words came into fashion and passed into common usage: 'television,' 'paint,' 'diet,' 'operate,' Ni-Ping (a well-known television host), 'disco dancing,' 'Highway 107,' 'seafood,' 'lottery tickets,' 'build the Great Wall (play Mahjong),' 'bump-the-butt' (motorbike), 'hold the basket' (act as mediator) and so on.”

  While these dictionary entries make for a fascinating glimpse into China, the book is not easy reading. For one, the very small print creates practical difficulties. This combined with the heft of the material can weigh the reader down significantly. Still, the end result is well worth the reader’s effort. A Dictionary of Maqiao (translated ably by Julia Lovell) emerges as a wonderful, if fractured, portrait of China. Han Shaogong, through his award-winning novel, provides not o
nly a nuanced look into modern China, but also focuses on language as an instrument of keeping culture alive. “Strictly speaking, what we might term a 'common language' will forever remain a distant human objective,” he says, “providing we don’t intend exchange to become a process of mutual neutralization, of mutual attrition, then we must maintain vigilance and resistance toward exchange, preserving in this compromise our own, indomitable forms of expression.” A Dictionary of Maqiao establishes wonderfully, the vital link between language and culture. In a world of rapid globalization, the subtle warning about the increasing loss of languages is only too timely and important.

  Reviewed by Poornima Apte

  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.