Before I started writing this book, I hoped to write the biography of every single thing in Maquiao. I’d been writing fiction for ten or so years, but I liked reading and writing fiction less and less—I am, of course, referring to the traditional kind of fiction, which has a very strong sense of plot. Main character, main plot, main mood block out all else, dominating the field of vision of both reader and writer, preventing any sidelong glances. Any occasional casual digression is no more than a fragmentary embellishment of the main line, the temporary amnesty of a tyrant. Admittedly, there’s nothing to say this kind of fiction can’t approach one angle on the truth. But all you have to do is think a little, and you realize that most of the time real life isn’t like that, it doesn’t fit into one guiding, controlling line of cause and effect. A person often exists in two, three, four or even more interlocking strands, outside each of which a great many other elements exist, each constituting an indispensable part of our lives. In this multifarious, scattered network of cause and effect, how valid is the domination of one main thread of protagonists, plot and mood?
Anything left out of traditional fiction is normally something of “no significance.” But when religious authority is all important, science has no significance; when the human race is all important, nature has no significance. When politics is all-important, love has no significance; when money is all important, art has no significance. I suspect the myriad things in this world are in fact all of equal importance; the only reason why sometimes one set of things seems to have “no significance” is because they’ve been filtered out by the writer’s view of what has significance, and dismissed by the reader’s view of what has significance. They are thus debarred from all zones of potential interest. Obviously, judgment of significance is not an instinct we are born with—quite the contrary, it is no more than a function of the fashion, customs and culture of one particular time, often revealing itself in the form into which fiction shapes us. In other words, an ideology lurks within the tradition of fiction, an ideology that reproduces itself only on passing through us.
My memory and imagination aren’t totally in line with tradition.
I therefore often hope to break away from a main line of cause and effect, and look around at things that seem to have no significance whatsoever, for example contemplate a stone, focus on a cluster of stars, research a miserable rainy day, describe the random back view of someone it seems I’ve never met and never will meet. At the very least I should write about a tree. In my imagination Maquiao couldn’t do without a big tree. I should cultivate a tree— no, make that two trees, two maple trees—on my paper, and plant them on the slope behind Uncle Luo’s house in lower Maquiao. I imagine the larger tree to be at least twenty-five meters tall, the smaller around twenty. Anyone visiting Maqiao would see from far away the crown of the trees, the tips of whose branches would spread out to encompass a panoramic view.
This is excellent: writing the biography of two trees.
A village without big trees is like a home without parents, or a head without eyes—it just doesn’t look right, as if it lacks a center. These two trees were just that, the center of Maqiao. There wasn’t a child in Maqiao who hadn’t breathed in their cool shade, who hadn’t drunk in the chirps of the cicadas, or in whom the bark’s gnarled tumors hadn’t induced bizarre and terrified imaginings. They didn’t need any particular looking after: when people had things to do they could just be left to themselves and forgotten about. But they were perfectly willing at any moment to welcome and provide company for the lonely, who would find their melancholy gently soothed away by the rustling of the leaves, and who under the leafy screen, on a patch of silver that was stippled and studded, dispersing and overlapping, sometimes tranquil, sometimes stormy, could set sail for a cloudless dream land.
There was no way of knowing who had planted these trees and the old- timers in the village production team wouldn’t shed any further light on the matter. As regards the name “Maple Demons,” apparently there’s been a mountain fire many years ago in which all the trees on the slope were burned to death, except for these two which escaped safe and sound; even their leaves and branches weren’t damaged in the slightest. Henceforth people eyed the trees with increasing awe and respect, and legends concerning them multiplied. Some said the gnarled patterns in the bark were in fact human shapes; in violent storms they secretly grew several feet, and only shrank back to normal when they saw people coming. Ma Ming told an even spookier story. Once, unthinkingly, he’d fallen asleep under the trees, hanging his bamboo hat on a broken forked branch. In the middle of the night, he was startled awake by the sound of thunder and made out, by a flash of lightning, that his bamboo hat was now hanging on the top of the tree. Very peculiar.
Ma Ming boasted that he used to be quite an artist when he was younger. He said that after painting these two trees, for three days afterwards his right hand swelled up dramatically and he ran a fever; he didn’t dare try again.
You couldn’t even paint them, much less cut them down. The two trees therefore grew taller and taller, and became a landmark for miles around. When someone had sawed off a branch, they hung a piece of red cloth from their door to ward off evil, or carved a wooden fish out of the wood, to beg the spirits to ward off misfortune; all of which was, apparently, very effective. Once, while taking part in an irrigation project, I went to the commune to draw up some plans. I went together with Teacher Fan from the Middle School (who had also been allocated to the project) to the country irrigation office and copied the map of the commune. I found out, as we choked on the archive room dust, that even after 1949 the government had still not drawn up a comprehensive map of the area, and that all plans were still based on the military maps left by the Japanese army at the time of their invasion of China. These looked to be the contour maps of great and resourceful strategists, drawn in black and white on a scale of 1:5000; the commune took up one large sheet. Instead of sea level, the map used the foundation stone of the Changsha city wall at Xiaowumen as its starting point for elevation.
Apparently, before the Japanese invaded, they bribed Chinese traitors to draw up plans in secret. The ingenuity and thoroughness of their preparations are nothing short of astonishing.
I saw that on this map too, Maqiao’s two maple trees were so awesomely imposing that they’d been ringed in red pen by the Japanese. Teacher Fan said knowledgably that they’d been a landmark for navigating Japanese planes.
This set me to thinking that Maqiao people had actually seen Japanese planes. Benyi said that the first time they caught sight of this freak apparition, Benyi’s elder uncle thought it was a big bird and yelled at some lads to spread grain on the ground to entice it down, and got everyone else to run and fetch ropes to catch it.
The plane didn’t descend, and his uncle hurled abuse up at the sky:
I know you’re up there! I know you’re up there!
Only Long Stick Xi guessed then that it was a Japanese plane, come to drop bombs. Unfortunately, this outsider’s rough speech was barely intelligible, and no one understood him. Benyi’s uncle wondered how a Japanese bird could grow that big, since Japanese people were so very small.
For a day the villagers watched and waited in vain for the plane to come and peck at the grain. The second time the planes came, they relieved themselves of bombs, setting off earth shattering explosions. Benyi’s uncle died right there, mouth blown off to the tree top, as if it wanted to nibble on the bird’s nests. Benyi even today is still a bit hard of hearing, but I don’t know if it’s from the explosion or from the shock of seeing that mouth fly up the tree.
Three villagers were killed in the bombing. If you add Xiongshi, who died in a delayed explosion twenty years later, then the death toll rises to four.
When you think about it, if it hadn’t been for those trees, would the Japanese planes have found their way there? Would they have dropped bombs? After all, there was no particular reason for the Japanese to take any great interest in a small mountain village. If they hadn’t used those trees as a navigation mark, they wouldn’t necessarily have flown through, probably wouldn’t have seen the crowd of people down below shouting and yelling, and probably would have dropped their bombs somewhere they considered more important.
Everything, including the deaths of four people and all that subsequently occurred, happened because of those two trees.
From that point on, there was always a flock of crows perched on those two trees, a fractured blackness erupting as they flapped their wings. Sometimes people would try to chase them away by burning or smashing their nests, but these creatures of ill omen waited until people’s backs were turned, then flew back, stubbornly defending the tops of the trees.
The crows cawed year in, year out. I heard it said that three women hanged themselves under this tree, one after another. I don’t know their backgrounds; I only know that one had had a big argument with her husband, and she hanged herself after poisoning him. All this happened a very long time ago.
When I passed by these two trees, it was like passing any tree, any blade of grass, any stone—I wouldn’t take too much notice of them. I wouldn’t think, aha, there they are, lurking in the depths of the day, concealing unfathomable possibilities, harboring menace under their canopies, rumbling and erupting at portentous moments, sealing such-and-such a person’s fate.
Sometimes I think that one tree is very unlike another, just as people are very unlike one another. Hitler, say, was also a human being. Suppose aliens happened to read of him: on the basis of his possession of five senses, four limbs, upright posture, and frequent emission of regulated sounds to others of his kind, the aliens, on leafing through the dictionary that they might possess, would define him as human. This would not be incorrect. TheSongs of Chu is the title of a book excavated in the Han dynasty. If a copy was given to a Hebrew man who understood no Chinese, on the basis of the shape of its characters, writing implements and its state on being unearthed, the Hebrew man might, through sufficient ingenuity and erudition, conclude that the writing was Chinese. This similarly, would not be incorrect. But how meaningful is this “not incorrect?”
Just as we call the Maple demon a tree, a maple tree, how meaningful is this degree of correctness?
A tree lacks human will and freedom, but in life’s complex network of cause and effect it can often occupy a position of quiet importance. In this sense, the difference between one tree and another can sometimes be comparable to the difference between Hitler and Gandhi, to the distinction between The Songs of Chu and the instruction manual for an electric razor—it can be much greater than we imagine. Even if we’ve read cartloads of botanical books, when confronted with an unfamiliar tree our knowledge seems rudimentary indeed.
The two maple trees finally disappeared in early summer of 1972, when I was away from the village. On the journey back, I couldn’t see the crowns of the trees from far off and immediately felt there was something not quite right about the panorama before me; I almost thought I’d taken a wrong turn. After I entered the village, I found that the houses seemed much more spaced out, much lighter, and that there was a rather striking patch of bare, empty ground. It turned out the shade from the trees was no longer there. Everywhere I saw wood chippings and sawdust reeking of sap, and mounds of branches and leaves sandwiched with bird’s nests and spider’s webs, yet no one was taking them home for firewood; the soil lay overturned in waves, testifying to the violent struggle that had taken place not long before. I smelled something rather peppery, but couldn’t say where it came from.
The crunching sound of feet trampling leaves and branches was the sound of advancing old age.
The trees were cut down under commune orders, to make, it was said, rows of seats for the newly built commune assembly hall and also to dispel the superstitions surrounding the Maple Demons. When the time came, absolutely no one was prepared to put hand to axe or saw, and in the end the commune cadres had no choice but to order a landlord under official surveillance to get on with it. They also added workers from two hard-up families, to whom they had to promise to cancel a ten-yuan debt before they could finally make them hesitantly start work. Later I saw in the commune row upon row of those spanking new maplewood chairs, used for Party meetings, family planning meetings, irrigation and pig feeding meetings and so on. I also saw filthy footprints left behind as well as oily banquet remains. It was probably from this time on that a kind of skin irritation started to rage through dozens of nearby villages: when sufferers, male or female, happened to meet, they would scratch wildly, pulling up their clothes all over the place, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Some, unable to stand it, would place their backs to a wall and move up and down, or from side to side, or discuss instructions from the county with a hand down their pants all the while. Herbal remedies were tried with no result. Apparently the county medical team were completely flummoxed, found it all very puzzling.
It was rumoured that everyone had caught “maple pox”, instigated by the Maquiao Maple Demons—they wanted to make people suffer for their arrogance, taking revenge on the murderers who had chopped them down.
This excerpt, by kind permission, from A Dictionary of the Maqiao, published in October 2005 by Dial Press.
Han Shaogong 韩少功 is one of the representative names of Chinese contemporary literature, often mentioned in the same breath as Wang Meng, Feng Jicai and Liu Suola. During the mid-eighties, he led the development of a literary school called "Root-seeking literature," the practitioners of which sought to distill an independent, "Chinese" narrative from their rural backgrounds. Something of a hermit, Han Shaogong moved back to the countryside of his native Hunan province after several years working for the Writer's Association of Hainan. A prolific writer, Han Shaogong is famous for his novellas Da Da Da and Woman Woman Woman, as well as for the full-length novel A Dictionary of Maqiao, first published in 1996 and translated by Julia Lovell into English in 2003. In 1987, he collaborated on a translation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being into Chinese.
Julia Lovell teaches modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature, The Great Wall: China Against the World and The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China. Her several translations of modern Chinese fiction include Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao (winner of 2011 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature), Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars, and Lu Xun’s The Real Story of Ah-Q, and Other Tales of China. Recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize, she is currently working on a global history of Maoism.