Han Shaogong - Novel structured as a dictionary of the Maqiao dialect: time and relationships are understood using the language of food...

Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao, Columbia University Press, 2003.

"One of the most-talked about works of fiction to emerge from China in recent years, this novel about an urban youth “displaced” to a small village in rural China during the Cultural Revolution is a fictionalized portrait of the author’s own experience as a young man. Han Shaogong was one of millions of students relocated from cities and towns to live and work alongside peasant farmers in an effort to create a classless society. Translated into English for the first time, Han’s novel is an exciting experiment in form—structured as a dictionary of the Maqiao dialect—through which he seeks to understand and translate the local life and customs of his strange new home.
Han encounters an upside-down world among the people of Maqiao: a con man dupes his neighbors into thinking that he has found the fountain of youth by convincing them that his father is in fact his son; to be scientific” is to be lazy; time and relationships are understood using the language of food and its preparation; and to die young is considered “sweet,” while the aged reckon their lives to be “cheap.”
As entries build one upon another, Han meditates on the ability of a waidi ren (outsider) to represent the ways of life of another community. In this light, the Communist effort to control the language and history of a people whose words and past are bound together in ineluctably local ways emerges as an often comical, sometimes tragic exercise in miscommunication."

"From the daring imagination of one of China’s greatest living novelists comes a work of startling power and originality–the story of a young man “displaced” to a small village in rural China during the 1960s. Told in the format of a dictionary, with a series of vignettes disguised as entries, A Dictionary of Maqiao is a novel of bold invention–and a fascinating, comic, deeply moving journey through the dark heart of the Cultural Revolution.
Entries trace the wisdom and absurdities of Maqiao: the petty squabbles, family grudges, poverty, infidelities, fantasies, lunatics, bullies, superstitions, and especially the odd logic in their use of language–where the word for “beginning” is the same as the word for “end”; “little big brother” means older sister; to be “scientific” means to be lazy; and “streetsickness” is a disease afflicting villagers visiting urban areas. Filled with colorful characters–from a weeping ox to a man so poisonous that snakes die when they bite him–A Dictionary of Maqiao is both an important work of Chinese literature and a probing inquiry into the extraordinary power of language."

"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

"A Dictionary of Maqiao is a wonderful, many-layered novel written as a series of definitions, which gains further depth from a good translation. It repays rereading, too, for the subtlety of the jokes emerges as the characters become more familiar. (...) Julia Lovell's translation is an impressive achievement, a fine reflection of a complex book." - Frances Wood

"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, . 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." - Publishers Weekly

"A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO, a literary experience unlike any other I can put my finger on, is constructed in the form of discourses on the words and phrases of the dialect of Maqiao, a small village to which the narrator, an "Educated Youth", was sent during the Cultural Revolution. These sections take the form of interlinked short stories, essays, character sketches and vignettes.
There is very little in the way of plot; rather HAN SHAOGONG builds up a picture of the village, its (eccentric) inhabitants and their daily life piece by overlapping piece. The process is both fascinating and masterful as is HAN SHAOGONG's ability to include his own (or the narrator's) musings on philosophy, sociology, history and any number of other topics without disrupting the narrative -- yes, there is narrative in spite of the lack of an explicit plot.
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.
However, this is no country bumpkin vs city slicker account: Han explores Maqiao through its use of language, the way that words in Maqiao often mean the complete opposite of what they mean elsewhere, and how this difference in the use of language embeds itself in the pysche of the village and each of its inhabitants.
This a world where a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet, where "scientific" is a synonym for "lazy", where "awakened" means "stupid", where village get "streetsick" in the city.
I am not able to evaluate the translation on the basis of a comparison with the original, but translator Julia Lovell seems not to have put a word in the wrong place: the best translations, like the best windows, are perhaps those that one doesn't notice because they don't impede the view.
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.
I hesitate to even mention that the novel is also most decidedly "experimental", because it's the sort of comment that might put people off. So, if "ethnolinguistics" is the sort of term that is going to turn you away from a very enjoyable and interesting book, then please stop reading the review now.
While time does pass in A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO, there is very little sense of it. Just as a painting compresses three dimensions into two, Han seems to have compressed his work along the fourth dimension so that it hardly exists. The effect is highly unusual: the only way I can describe it is that is like watching a fresco being painted: each piece is prepared and painted separately (one cannot go back and correct frescoes) -- and it is only when considerable portion has been completed that one is able to discern what the work might be about.
HAN SHAOGONG is very interested in language and A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO also explores the way that language affects culture and thought. That language should affect culture and thought (and vice versa) will, of course, come as no surprise to anthropologists and linguists -- and there are large parts of A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO that are laid out as a work of ethnolinguistics. In fact, Maqiao reminds me rather more of one of the more readable anthropological classics (e.g Clifford Geertz or Napoleon Chagnon) that any other novel I can think of.
Indeed, I find the ethnolinguistics so interesting, and so well presented, that I rather wish we knew how much of it is actually true and accurately described - quite a lot, I presume.
But A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO's discussion of the peculiarities of the Maqiao dialect is not merely esoteric (as Han explains in an Afterword) - many of the book sections are mirrored in the daily interplay between Cantonese and Mandarin that those of us who live in Hong Kong encounter every day.
Does the book have any drawbacks at all? Well, I doubt that the explicit technique of exploring a place through its vocabulary and structuring a novel as work of ethnolinguistics (a more accurate description than "dictionary") can be repeated without the result being entirely derivative, which rather limits the value of the experiment: I think A DICTIONARY OF MAQIAO might be a one-off.
Oh, and the cover is rather dull, making the book appear like it might be an actual academic dictionary: that's taking illusion one step too far." - Peter Gordon

"Language," Han Shaogong writes in A Dictionary of Maqiao, "isn't something to be sneezed at." Certainly not in China, where the wrong word can still land you in prison, and not here either, where we practically swim in the stuff, sucking it in like smog-choked air, and yet too often forget to see that it's words that make the world. In his first novel to be translated into English (Homecoming? and Other Storiesappeared here in 1995), Han sections off one small corner of the world, the tiny village in southern China to which he was consigned during the Cultural Revolution, and attempts to describe it through its words alone. Of course words are never alone—they are unruly, parasitic little brutes that can't survive without human breath and blood—so defining words, for Han, means telling stories, situating words in their lived, terrestrial contexts, naming the ghosts that haunt them, that shift and bend them with time.
The result is a magnificent book, epic in its ambitions and sweep without any of the sentimental obfuscation on which that genre so often depends. The novel is organized, as the title suggests, as a dictionary. Some entries are a paragraph long, while others stretch on for pages. Some confine themselves to brief philological speculation, while others spin out long, intertwining tales about the village and its inhabitants. A page-long "Guide to Principal Characters" is provided at novel's end, though enough are omitted (and enough are surnamed Ma) that it's not a bad idea to map them out as you read. But try not to let the tangle of lines you draw between characters blot out the whole page, for this is not a novel in the traditional plot-and-protagonist sense. Suspecting that, as he puts it, "an ideology lurks within," Han rejects the standard novelistic model in which "Main character, main plot, main mood block out all else, dominating the field of vision of both reader and writer, preventing any sidelong glances," in which "any occasional casual digression is no more than a fragmentary embellishment of the main line, the temporary amnesty of a tyrant."
Digression rules here, but if it's no tyranny, it's not quite lawless, either. Han's wanderings are roundabout, but he's always going somewhere. Open the book at random, to, say, the entry under "Dear Life," a phrase used in Maqiao to refer to youth. (Old age, which arrives shortly after 30, is "cheap life.") The section begins with an account of the sad and premature end of "Zhihuang's snot-nosed son Xiongshi," who unearths a Japanese artillery shell which, having failed to explode when dropped 30 years earlier, promptly does so when Xiongshi bangs it with a sickle, dissolving him into "a few icy drops of rain." The next entry pushes Han into the tale of Xiongshi's mother's descent into madness and subsequent ascent to regional celebrity, and a brief discussion of insanity, Freud, dreams and prophetic ability. Then, sliding into an explication of a word translated as stick (roughly synonymous with fuck), and some thoughts on rural resistance to Maoist linguistic puritanism, he jumps without further ado into the story of Old Master Nine Pockets, the beggar king of Changle, jailed under Mao, and thence to Bandit Ma, "the one great historical figure who came out of Maqiao," who led a barefoot Taoist bandit army in the war against the Japanese, briefly landed on the wrong side of the Communist-Nationalist divide, and later killed himself fearing he would be arrested. His story is told through a great leap forward to 1982, as Han sits in Ma's miserable son's bean-curd stall, just after Ma has been rehabilitated, 30 years too late for it to matter much. Thus Han skips deftly back and forth (and side to side, and to and fro) through a half century of Chinese history.
History, after all, is very much Han's topic here—its contradictions and ambiguities, how words move history and history shapes words, "how act upon act of bitter farce have played themselves out" over decades of poverty, famine, and violence. For all that, Dictionary is not a gloomy book, and Han's no Solzhenitsyn. At least three characters take their own lives, more still are driven mad by suffering, but their stories are relayed with almost Rabelaisian wit. Han recounts an old peasant's death by accidental auto-decapitation: "And so, amidst such confused circumstances, Zhaoqing's head fell off."
Such light spirits come in conscious rebellion against the heavy-pawed revolutionary realist affection for the drudgeries of rural life (one peasant bristles at being forced to sing about "hoes and rakes filling manure pits watering rice seedlings . . . why don't I make it even more artistic by hauling a bucket of shit around?"). Formal and political concerns are bound tight here; when Han writes of the tyranny of narrative, he's not being coy. Maoist restrictions on literature meant that between 1949 and 1966, only eight novels on average were published in China each year, and fewer in the decade that followed. Dictionary is as much an exhilarated exploration of the relative freedom that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution as it is a stern reminder that "language equals the power to control," a sustained polemic against any attempt to freeze and fetishize the word. Lest anyone try turning that into dogma, Han ends on a healthy note of Taoist disavowal, that "language is just language, and nothing else... its importance shouldn't be exaggerated." - Ben Ehrenreich

"Han Shaogong, who worked in the Chinese countryside during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), has written an eccentric handbook on one forgotten village. In this novel in the form of a dictionary, entries describe the provenance of local expressions. The result is a collage of stories that loosely cohere as the reader becomes fluent in the bizarre logic of Maqiao (''impossible to find, almost dropped off the map''). During the reign of Mao, standardization threatened to smooth the varied texture of Chinese dialects. Han's work exposes the subtle losses -- as well as the hilarious clashes -- that attended the project. For example, through stories about a man called Nine Pockets, whose wealth impedes his effectiveness as a beggar, and ''streetsickness,'' a disease that afflicts peasants who visit urban areas, the author illuminates what he calls linguistic blind spots. No pastoral romance, ''A Dictionary of Maqiao'' tells of villagers' abusive habits and the bloody, sweaty origins of native euphemisms. In a book whose dominant theme is frustrated understanding, the translator, Julia Lovell, faced an especially important task; her preface, pronunciation guide and other aids contribute to the novel's force in English. The book, the winner of several prizes in China, stubbornly resists analysis. To enter its pages is to cross into a world of bandits and ghosts, where ''rude'' means ''pretty,'' homosexuals are ''Red Flower Daddies'' and people don't die, they ''scatter.'' Cross-references abound, and slowly the novel emerges as one grand idiom. This is a meditation on the trapdoors of language and on the microhistories buried within words." - Katherine Wolff

"A Dictionary of Maqiao is a novel, but, as the title suggests, it is presented as a dictionary. The Maqiao are a southern Chinese people, and the lexicographer cum narrator was sent to the region during the Cultural Revolution -- an intellectual of sorts (he can actually write -- and is often enlisted to paint Mao's slogans where needed) getting re-educated. In this dictionary he collects Maqiao vocabulary and designations, using each entry to describe the use or origins of the term, spinning stories and descriptions of characters, places, local customs and more. It is not, however, merely an alphabetical collection of terms unique (at least in how they are used) to this region: A Dictionary of Maqiao is a novel, full of smaller, connected narratives, ultimately making for a sweeping picture of Maqiao and its people (and also, more generally, of China in these times).
The entries are, understandably, not presented in alphabetical order in the English translation ("In order to make it easier for readers to grasp the narrative thread and to increase the readability of the novel", an editorial note explains). Each entry begins with the term being discussed ("River" is the first), the Chinese characters for the word in parentheses and one of two star-variations, to indicate whether the term is unique to Maqiao ("or even that it is used by only one individual in Maqiao") or used elsewhere (as many of the words are). The entries themselves are then not presented like normal dictionary definitions, but rather range from explanations focussed on the meaning and use of the word to far more digressive accounts of events and people in Maqiao. Most are a few pages in length (and none longer than about seven). There are obvious difficulties in presenting a dictionary, even a fictional one, written in Chinese in translation. Readers should note that translator Julia Lovell omitted ("with the author's permission") four entries, and the final paragraph of a fifth, explaining that she felt they were "so heavily dependent in the Chinese original on puns between dialect and Mandarin Chinese as to make extensive and distracting linguistic explanations necessary in English".
Despite the perhaps unpromising sounding premise and the additional hurdles of translation, A Dictionary of Maqiao is an often remarkable read. Much of Han Shaogong's piece by piece presentation is impressive. There isn't much effort for continuity, but chunks of Maqiao life are presented at a time and a larger picture does emerge. Characters recur (and a 'Guide to Principal Characters' appended to the book helps keep track of them), and Maqiao, with all its (and its inhabitants') idiosyncrasies, comes to life over the course of the novel. The novel is also not limited to the time of the Cultural Revolution, though most of what is described takes place during this period: stories from the past are also offered in explanation, and the narrator does also look at the transformation Maqiao underwent in the post-Mao years.
The narrator explains that he had originally "hoped to write the biography of every single thing in Maqiao". He's unable to do that, but he does maintain the biographic focus (which, in many cases here, manifests itself as lexicographic). The traditional demands of fiction -- plot, character, mood - frustrate him, as he explains why this is a book of "sidelong glances", the focus often away from what would dominate in conventional fiction and instead on the peripheral and what is often seen as being of no significance - but, since it is part of everyday life, often is, in fact, of considerable significance.
The approach is especially effective when, for example, he discusses time. Out in the countryside, time moves at a different pace, innovations take hold much later, and history itself has a different meaning. The Maqiao 1948 is different from that even elsewhere in China, and it is in passages about such contrasts that Han is particularly convincing. Similarly the difficulty those of Maqiao have in their encounters with the more fast-paced and modern towns and cities is nicely developed in the concept of "streetsickness", an illness like sea- or car-sickness which many Maqiao suffer from when they visit any urban centre
The author recognises that language is not only a marvelous advance, but that it comes with its own burdens:
'Once human beings have become linguistic beings, they attain possibilities that other animals lack completely -- they can harness the magical powers of language; language becomes prophecy, a mass hysteria that confuses true and false, and that establishes fictions, manufacturing one factual miracle after another.'
He is keenly aware of how this has occurred in Maqiao, and his examples illustrate his point well, the Maqiao use of language making for a great deal that is special about the place, but also isolating and insulating it from the greater world.
""Mouth-bans" -- linguistic taboos -- also exist in Maqiao. As do wordgames, a playing with language that shifts at least the superficial sense of what lies behind an act. "Language can change the way people feel", the narrator notes, and in Maqiao that is certainly the case: butchering animals, for example, is called "reincarnation" -- "a turn of phrase that makes it sound like a loftily noble undertaking.".
The language of Maqiao is rich in its peculiar meanings, and near the end the author contrasts it with the deadened baihua - "empty talk", or "vernacular" (though in Maqiao it does have three different overlapping meanings). Language has generally (and specifically under Mao) been degraded in this way: simplified, stripped of the expressive meanings and allusions underneath. The author acknowledges that fiction, with which he has long occupied himself, is a sort of baihua - "fiction is, in the end, fiction - nothing more" - which suggests, of course, that this twist (of trying to grasp and convey the Maqiao language (not yet degraded into baihua) is a superior and more worthy attempt. There are numerous moments in the book that the reader can be convinced he ahs a point.
A Dictionary of Maqiao is an impressive achievement, but not entirely a success. There is no clear chronology, but Han also can't commit to an almost entirely timeless Maqiao, leading to an occasionally unsettling (and confusing) jumping back and forth. The failure to clearly position the narrator / author / lexicographer is also problematic: for the most part he merely recounts, an observer or re-teller of tales, but he also figures in many of the episodes and encounters, without his presence being adequately developed. The many pieces are also not always easy to piece together or keep track of: the book largely remains a series discrete units which don't quite add up to a complete picture. Still: an interesting work." - The Complete Review

"During the Cultural Revolution, Han Shaogong was one of seven Educated Youth sent to the hamlet of Maqiao in northern Hunan, which consisted of "forty-odd households, about ten head of cattle, and pigs, dogs, chickens, and ducks, with two long, narrow paddy fields hugging its perimeters". His observations of people and customs and language during the six years he spent there form the basis for his novel A Dictionary of Maqiao.
This takes the ostensible form of a dictionary or encyclopedia, with over a hundred "entries" named after Maqiao terms or idioms; the prologue claims these were originally in alphabetical order, but in fact they follow each other in a logical sequence and are much closer to short stories than reference material.
The vignettes and stories in A Dictionary of Maqiao jump around chronologically: most are set during the narrator's time in Maqiao, but there are also episodes from a return visit many years later and from meetings with Maqiao residents elsewhere, as well as the explorations of earlier history. The narratorial perspective also changes: there are pieces in the third person, but in others the narrator intrudes, through first-person presence or commentary, and in some he plays a central role.
Despite its pointillist rendering and lack of a central plot, The Dictionary of Maqiao is an effective novel. It is centred by the community of Maqiao, following key individuals within it, the relationships between them, and the working out of their stories, over a span of decades. Twenty or more figures feature prominently: Party Branch secretary Benyi; his wife Tiexiang, daughter of beggar king "Nine Pockets"; the stonemason Zhihuang and his ox "Three-Hairs"; landlord's son and "traitor to the Chinese" Yanzao, and his "poison woman" grandmother and younger brother Yanwu; the ascetic dropout "Daoist Immortals"; and many more.
Shaogong devotes several entries to Maqiao's place in the historical record, going back into deep history and myth. More recent times are remembered by the villagers — the warlord period, the bandit leader Ma Wenjie, and the events in 1948 when the communists took control — but these are subject to different and changing interpretations. A Dictionary of Maqiao doesn't focus on politics, however. The effects of the Cultural Revolution and the sending of urban elites into the countryside are depicted rather than described, and comments on bureaucracy, Western stereotypes of Chinese politics, and so forth are mostly incidental.
Sociolinguistics provides the strongest recurrent theme. Shaogong explores the way language, and in particular lexical choice, marks social status, moulds the way people think, and reflects the forms of social control. (He never succumbs, however, to the lure of a naive linguistic determinism.) And he highlights the ways in which Maqiao dialect diverges from standard Mandarin — a translator's note mentions that five entries were omitted because they were dependent on untranslatable puns. A Dictionary of Maqiao is not an ethnography, with stories that have been selected and quite likely exaggerated for effect. But it is a powerful demonstration of just how different a remote rural village can be — or, for the Western audience of this translation, of the diversity of China.
A Dictionary of Maqiao is skillfully arranged to provide motive force, with far more momentum than a collection of short stories. And despite the sometimes dark subject material, its overall tone is light, with some detachment provided by the framing. The result is a gripping read." - Danny Yee

"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 only 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." - Poornima Apte

"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 superannuated 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. Under the disguise of an excursion in ethnographic linguistics, Han Shaogong creates a compendium of stories, observations and reflections that, stroke by stroke, give the place more textual density, more history and, finally, more reality than all of the county seats of Utah and Montana combined.
Han's method is experimental, insofar as he does not give us the adventures of any single personality or confine himself to the tried-and-true methods of realism. The stories, reflections and so on occur in the course of the definitions that are affixed to about 100 Maqiao terms. By my count, there are approximately 30 interconnecting episodes involving characters from the village. And there is always Han -- first as a kid, really, a cadre with the "educated youth," possessed by the prejudices of his social class, and gradually as an observer, a participant and finally as a nostalgic memorialist.
Like W.G. Sebald, Han likes the idea of intruding bits of his real autobiography into the narrative; and this, by a sort of rhetorical catalysis, makes the fiction seem more real and the narrator more fictitious.
Han Shaogong was an "educated youth" during the Cultural Revolution. Like hundreds of thousands of other urban teens, he was sent out into the countryside to spread Mao Zedong thought. This meant hauling dung, planting rice, cutting trees and performing other acts of exhausting manual labor; leisure time was occupied by painting platitudes from the Little Red Book on all available public surfaces. Those years in village China, a world away from modernity, stimulated the writer in him, even if they exhausted the animal. Han's problem was how to preserve the core weirdness of this experience. This is how Han explains his experiment:
"Before I started writing this book, I hoped to write the biography of every single thing in Maqiao. 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."
The reader who is unfamiliar with Chinese literature might find the first 15 pages daunting. Han begins with a little disquisition on the travails of the Luo people, and references the "Spring and Autumn Period" and "The Chronicles of Zuo." Strange names, yes, but no stranger than the genealogies and geographies of Middle Earth. However, the episodes soon take over: the story of the Four Immortals - four Daoist madmen who live in a dilapidated house and survive on earthworms and grass in order to avoid, entirely, the sullying influence of productive labor; the story of the village's best singer and supposed Don Juan, Wanyu, upon whose death it is discovered that he possesses no "dragon," that he is a eunuch; the story of the leader of the beggars of the region, Nine Pockets; and the story of the most famous bandit of the region, Ma Wenjie; the long, tangled story of the village Cleopatra, Tiexiang, daughter of Nine Pockets, and so on. The stories are imbued with Han's peculiarly meditative style. This, for instance, is how Han describes the end of Bandit Ma's group, captured by the Communist army, ordered to dig a pond in the prison camp and then machine-gunned.
"The rat-a-tat-tat of the machine gun hidden on a roof somewhere suddenly went off -- a sudden noise, it was, that would have sounded very foreign, very distant to its hearers. The rain of bullets whistled over, rolled up into a whirlwind. None felt the bullets passing through his flesh, but as clouds of dust leapt up from the mud slope behind them and sand splattered in all directions, it became very obvious that something had exploded through one side of their bodies before blossoming out into a whole chain of dust-cloud blooms on the other side. Maybe they were just beginning to understand what kind of a thing metal is, what kind of a thing speed is, how freely and easily metal bullets passed through flesh and how hard this instant was to grasp. And finally, they fell, one after another, into the hole in the ground they themselves had just dug."
One wonders why we are not in the midst of a literary China boom in this country, given the flowering of the Chinese novel since the death of Mao. In the '70s, Garcia Marquez, Cortazar and Vargas Llosa, among other Latin American writers, became famous in the United States partly because there was an audience of readers willing to try foreign writers and partly because there were commercial publishers willing to push them. Similarly, commercial houses pushed Central European writers, from Milan Kundera to Milorad Pavic, in the '80s.
Recently, however, American publishers have displayed an alarming timorousness about trying to persuade Homo americanus to read foreign authors. Perhaps this is another indication of some nationwide popular disengagement with the rest of the world: It is getting harder to get people to go to foreign films, too. The commercial presses are obviously lying down on the job.
Han's novel, so lovingly translated by Julia Lovell, should shame them all." - Roger Gathman

"This is a serious, ground-breaking and finally brilliant novel by one of China's leading authors. Laid out in the form of a dictionary of the dialect spoken in a minute part of southern China, A Dictionary of Maqiao quickly develops into a story of the lives of a group of so-called "educated youth" dispatched to such remote regions during China's Cultural Revolution.
Much of it is in fact the story of Han Shaogong's own experience. The result is a masterpiece, and at the same time a clarion call in defense of the local and particular as against the international and the uniform.
For Han to call it a "dictionary" is to stretch the term, to put it mildly. Each word, rather, acts as a stimulus to provoke seemingly random thoughts on the subject referred to, a process aided by the words not being in Western alphabetical order. So you begin with "River," then a particular river, then a term used to describe the local rustic population -- and before you know where you are you are listening to a tale of how a group of urban youth once tried to cheat a ferryman of his fare, and on another occasion threw a gun they shouldn't have possessed down into the mud, and so on. After only a few pages an array of characters has been established, and their interactions begin to constitute the material of an almost conventional story.
This method, as the translator Julia Lovell comments, actually harks back to the traditional Chinese literary form of the "jottings" (biji) essay - loosely connected thoughts prompted by a particular idea or quotation. There are European precedents too. The penultimate section of Joyce's Ulysses is one example in English, as are all the many long fictions, such as Don Quixote or Gargantua and Pantagruel, that proceed by episodes, digressions, and animadversions irregularly inserted on any subject under the sun.
A Dictionary of Maqiao conjures up once again the world of remote upland China made familiar in so many other novels written by former "educated youth" about their experiences. Rain falls for days on end, winds howl, people find shelter from evil spirits in thatched huts and have long been conditioned to eating the most abominable horrors. Yet today the former urban evacuees remain ambivalent, continuing to feel that their tame life back in the cities has never attained quite the same level of memorability.
The meeting of two such different forms of sensibility lies at the heart of the novel's method. The migrants tend not to have much religious belief, have more or less ingested Maoist orthodoxy, however grudgingly, and approach problems with a generally rational outlook.
The locals, by contrast, embody as weird a collection of attitudes as you could imagine. Imported novelties such as dangerous agricultural pesticides and Communist Party hierarchies are treated with equal wonder and puzzlement. Their patched-up, hand-to-mouth world had had its own bizarre coherence, and these new intrusions, which the city youth understand and accept, give rise to comic contortions of resentment and adaptation in the peasants.
An example of the episodic technique is the entry under the headword "This him." This refers to a Maqiao word meaning "someone here, standing in front of you," and distinct from another word meaning "someone not here, someone far away."
Han, however, raises his definition to an intense pitch of emotion by using it as a pretext to describe an incident involving an ultra-humble character, Yanzao. He is someone who is given all the most menial tasks, things even more disgusting than the norm in that deprived and forsaken village. Han returns after many years and asks after him. That evening he shows up from many miles away, carrying a huge log on his shoulder. In the event they barely talk.
Han feels disgusted at Yanzao's swollen gums, the bulging veins in his neck, his grunts and his sour country smell. After half an hour they part, but as Yanzao leaves, Han catches sight of a tear in the corner of his eye. Among all the pressures of city literary life, he writes, whether sleeping or awake, he can't forget that tear. It's the difference between the Maqiao words for the man who's far away, and the one who's real, present, and standing crying in front of you. It's the difference between an abstract idea of backward peoples, and the reality of their poverty, their need, and their inability to escape who they are.
In an important Afterword, Han comments on how differences of language define people, giving character to not only regions but also to generations. The people of Hainan Island, he points out, have what is perhaps the largest fish-related vocabulary in the world. Yet when he asked one market salesman to identify an item in Mandarin, all the Hainan man could come up with was "big sea fish."
Not only was the fish's identity blurred and diminished by the man having to speak Mandarin, Han asserts - so was the speaker's.
When it first appeared in Chinese in Taiwan, this book won the China Times Best Novel award, and has elsewhere been cited as one of the Top 100 works of 20th century Chinese fiction. It was first published in English last month.
It would be a pity if, at a time when foreign-language films as well as translated books are reportedly becoming harder and harder to sell to the American public, this magnificent fictional work was left gathering dust on bookstore shelves. It's that rare pleasure, something that is both of high quality and yet at the same time readable and enjoyable. The translation is everywhere excellent - fluent, colloquial where appropriate, without being excessively so, learned in places, and without any hint anywhere of "translationese."
This is a wonderful book, surely destined for classic status. When you start it you think it's just the working out of a clever idea. But in the event the depths it touches are extraordinary." - Bradley Winterton