A Dictionary of Maqiao

*Officials' Road

: When I look at it written down before me, the phrase "officials' road" conjures up visions of a narrow roadway paved with stone, twisting and turning as it stretched over the mountains to Maqiao-it wasn't just any old pathway that got to be called an "officials' road." I'd guess its history went something like this: way back in the past, someone from the village who'd left to take up an official post elsewhere had needed to ride back home to visit his elders; a good road being thus essential, his first act as an official was to build a road to his home village, an officials' road. Officials' roads were usually built by convicts. The official would allocate punishment through differing lengths of construction work, according to the respective gravity or levity of a crime: one hundred or two hundred feet, and so on. The construction of roads was not only a testament to wealth and honor: their growth rested on the crimes of bygone days.

Neither the officials nor criminals of Maqiao's past left their names to posterity.

As time went by, it fell into disrepair: some of the stone slabs shattered, or simply disappeared entirely. The fragments remaining sank into the surrounding topsoil, with only the part not yet grown over still poking out, trampled to a slippery gleam by passing bare feet, like a row of human spines lubricated with oil and sweat, eternally subjugated below our feet. I was once suddenly seized by an impulse to dig these spines out of the earth, to permit the skulls at the other end, slumped down into the soil, to rise up from their long darkness and look upon me-who were they?

When the soil on the officials' road began to smell of dung, that was when you'd arrived at the village. A dazzling plum-blossom tree, a rustling burst of brightness, stood there marking the place.

Panting, I turned to ask; "Aren't we in to Maqiao yet?"

Fucha was hurrying along forward, as he helped us Educated Youth haul our luggage: "Almost there, almost there, can't you see it? That's it in front, not too far now, is it?"

"Where?"

"Underneath those two maple trees."

"That's Maqiao?"

"That's Maqiao."

"Why's it called that?"

"Du

My heart sank, as I took one step after another into the unknown.

Afterword

Humans are linguistic animals, but speaking is actually very difficult for humans.

In 1988, I moved to the south of South China, to Hainan Island on China's southernmost tip. I couldn't speak Hainan dialect and, furthermore, I found their dialect very hard to learn. One day, going to the market with a friend to buy food, I spotted a fish I didn't know the name of, and so asked the salesman, a local. He said it was fish. I said I know it's fish, could you please tell me what fish? "Sea fish," he said, staring at me. I smiled and said, I know it's sea fish, could you please tell me what-sea-fish? He stared even more, seemingly impatient: "Big fish!"

Afterwards, my friend and I couldn't help laughing when we thought back over this dialogue.

Hainan has the largest coastal area in the country, countless fishing villages and a fishing industry with a long history. It was only later that I discovered they have the largest fish-related vocabulary of just about any people anywhere. Real fishing people have set vocabulary, have detailed, precise expressions and descriptions for all the several hundred types of fish, for every fishy part, every fishy condition, enough to compile a big, thick dictionary. But most of these can't be incorporated into standard Mandarin. Even the 40,000-odd characters in the Kangxi Dictionary, the largest compilation of definitions, are too remote from this island, have banished this abundant mass of deep feeling beyond its field of vision, beyond the controlling imperial brush and inkstone of scholars. When I speak standard Mandarin with the local people, when I force them to make use of a language they're not very familiar with, they can only fudge their way through with "sea fish" or "big fish."

I almost laughed at them, I almost thought they were pitifully linguistically impoverished. I was wrong, of course. To me, they weren't the people I saw, they weren't the people I've been talking about, their chao-jiu-ou-ya-ji-li-wa-la mocking chirping spitting babbling gabbling gibbering crying jabbering was concealed behind a linguistic screen that I couldn't penetrate, was hidden deep in a dark night that standard Mandarin had no hope of illuminating. They had embraced this dark night.

This made me think of my own hometown. For many years I've studied Mandarin. I realize this is necessary, it's necessary in order for me to be accepted by neighbors, colleagues, shop assistants, policemen, and officials, to communicate through television and newspapers, to enter into modernity. It's just that my experience in the market buying fish gave me a sudden jolt: I realized I'd been standardized. This implied that the hometown of my memories had also been standardized, that every day it was being filtered through an alien form of language-through this filtering, it was being simplified into the crude sketchiness of "big fish" and "sea fish," withering away bit by bit in the desert of translation.

This isn't to say that hometowns can't be talked about. No, you can still use standard Mandarin to talk about them, you can also use Vietnamese, Cantonese, Fujianese, Tibetan, Wei language, every foreign language there is to talk about them, but is "Beethoven's Fifth" played on a Peking Opera violin still "Beethoven's Fifth"? Does an apple that has left its native soil, an apple that's been steamed and pickled, still count as an apple?

Of course, dialect isn't the only linguistic obstacle, neither is region the only linguistic tie. Apart from regionalization, language at the very least also has epochal gradations. A few days ago, I was chatting with friends, sighing over how the development of transportation and communications was strengthening horizontal links across humanity, ever accelerating the process of cultural renewal; in the not-too-distant future, maybe regional differences in culture would be rooted out, would melt away, leading to a possible increase and intensification of epochal differences. People of the same era in the global village would eat the same kind of food, wear the same kind of clothes, live in the same kind of houses, propagate the same kind of ideas, even speak the same kind of language, but by then, for people of the 1950s to understand people of the 1930s, for people born in 2020 to understand people born in 2010, could be as difficult as it is now for Hunanese people to understand Hainanese culture, for Chinese people to understand British culture.

This process has in fact already begun. Within any one dialect, the "generation gap" shows up not only in ideas about music, literature, clothing, employment, politics, and so on, it also shows up in language-we're already used to seeing an old person having to work up a real sweat to understand his children's vocabulary. "Three-in-one," "bean coupons," "team worker," "(class) status," a whole batch of Chinese terms have rapidly become archaisms, although they haven't yet been banished to ancient manuscripts, they haven't yet been withdrawn from daily life, they remain current in a few, fixed circles of exchange, just as dialect is still current in old village circles. It's not region but era, not space but time which are producing all these new kinds of linguistic communities.

We could explore this question a bit further. Even if people can overcome the obstacles of region and era, can they still find any kind of common language? A linguistics professor once carried out a classroom experiment: he pronounced a word, such as "revolution," then got students to say the first image that flashed into their brains on hearing it. The responses were enormously varied: there was red flag, leader, storm, father, banquet, prison, politics teacher, newspapers, market, accordion… The students produced totally different subconscious interpretations of the word "revolution" according to their totally different individual life experiences. Of course, having entered into the realm of public exchange, they have to submit to standards of authority such as large dictionaries. This is the compromise the individual makes to society, the compromise of lived and living feelings to cultural tradition. But who can say for sure that the ephemeral images secretly omitted in these compromises won't be stored up in some dark layer of consciousness, evolving into language that could erupt at any given moment and change the course of events? Who can say for sure, while people search for and use a broadly standard form of language, while they are overcoming all kinds of linguistic obstacles in their quest for communication with other minds, that new divergences in sound, form, meaning, regulations aren't emerging at all stages? Aren't psychological processes of nonstandardization or antistandardization constantly, simultaneously in progress?