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The Anecdotes of Section Chief Maimaiti (1984)

Author Information
Writer: Wang Meng (1934 - )
Writer's Country: China
Original Language: Chinese
Genre: Essays
Event: Chinese History

There are six necessities for the maintenance of life: air, sunlight, water, food, friendship, and a sense of humor. The exhaustion of tears leads to joy. A sense of humor is but the sense of superiority in wisdom.
--From "Bon Mots of an Optimistic Philosopher" (Forthcoming)

I. Why Does Youth Spring Eternal for Section Chief Maimaiti?

On the warm and agreeable day of May 6, 1979, when the willows were still a fresh and delicate green, for the first time in over ten years I met with Section Chief Maimaiti and his twin brother at the Crossroads Muslim canteen in Arumqi, Sinkiang. I had a look at Maimaiti:

Although unfeeling Time has grooved ridges and troughs on his face,
A full head of black hair does his ever brimming vigor reveal.
His flushed shiny visage resembles a croissant just pulled from the oven;
Smiling to his heart's content, he imparts a joy and mischievousness absent of guile.

Now for a look at Saimaiti, his brother:

His rickets-afflicted spine's just like a quivering drawn bow,
The gloomy reflection of a vanquished spirit flashes in his dark pupils;
His unexplained sighs make one think he has the grippe,
He always clutches a medicine bottle with nitro-glycerin filled.

All sorts of feelings welled up in my heart as we exchanged salaams and sundry greetings.
Whereupon I ventured a query:

"Now during these past years, you've..."

SAIMAITI: I met with calamities.
MAIMAITI: I also met with calamities.
SAIMAITI: As soon as the events without historical precedent took place, I became a "black-ganger" and was locked up in a "cow shed."
MAIMAITI: I was also ferreted out and locked up in 1966.
SAIMAITI: I was pummeled.
MAIMAITI: I was thrashed.
SAIMAITI: I went up mountain paths lugging stones.
MAIMAITI: I went down mine shafts lugging coal.
SAIMAITI: After I was labeled a counterrevolutionary element my wife divorced me.
MAIMAITI: After I was labeled a "Three-Antis" element, my wife remarried and took our kids with her. A schlemielish mess to have turned out this way! You could say that the two men's experiences were like eight ounces and half a pound, not varied at all. I couldn't help but ask in alarm. "Since you two's encounters were so similar as this, why does Maimaiti's youth spring eternal, yet Saimaiti's countenance droop so decrepitly?"

Saimaiti slammed his fists down against his thighs and moaned and groaned, his eyes swimming with tears.

Maimaiti smiled slightly in reply. "All it boils down to is that he's forever pulling a long face; as for me, there's not been one day pass by without my cracking a joke."

Credit: Excerpted from The Anecdotes of Section Chief Maimaiti: Uighur 'Black Humor' by Wang Meng. Translated with an annotated introduction by Philip F. Williams. Journal of Asian Culture 8 (1984): 1-30.

Biography:

Wang Meng was born on October 15, 1934 in Beijing. Nurtured by his father who taught philosophy at a university, he read avidly during his childhood. While a student in high school, he took an active part in the revolutionary movement led by the underground organization of the Chinese Communist Party, which he eventually joined in 1948. Soon after the founding of the PRC in 1949, he was assigned to work at the headquarters of the Communist Youth League of China. In 1953 he published his maiden work titled "Long Live the Youth." Two years later, he wrote "The Young Newcomer in the Organization Department," a realistic portrayal of the clash between youthful and idealistic revolutionaries and older and entrenched party bureaucrats. He was labeled "rightist" in 1957 and sent down to labor on a farm in Xinjiang Province for seven years, where he learned to speak, read and write in Uighur. A member of the Chinese Writers Association, Wang Meng has many publications. In 1985, he became a member of the Central Committee Party, and later he was appointed Culture Minister, an official post from which he resigned in 1989 because he refused to criticize the students and workers who protested for democracy at Tiananmen. He is now vice chairman of the CWA.

Bibliography:

The Stubborn Porridge and other stories, Trans. By Zhu Huong, New York: George Braziller, 1994.

Bolshevik Salute, Trans. by Wendy Larson, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989.

Snowball, Trans. by Kathy Silber and Deirdre Huang, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1989.

The Strain of Meeting, Trans. by Dennis C. Mair, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1989.

The Butterfly and Other Stories; Beijing: Panda Books, 1983.

From the Afterword by P. Williams:

The Anecdotes of Chief Section Maimaiti "might be called a satiric pastoral. It is an example of Northrop Frye's "satire in the low norm," for it "takes for granted a world which is full of anomalies, injustices, follies and crimes " (Anatomy of Criticism, p 226). The objects of satire are everywhere, including everything associated with the excesses of the Cultural Revolution as well as the group of Uighurs' alternately clumsy and ingenious means of dealing with those excesses...

Wang Meng seems to exalt down-to-earth rural pragmatism over the self-important and idealized conceptualizations all too common in urban culture. Finally, as a somewhat exotic outsider (in terms of Chinese society), Maimaiti is able to satirize Chinese ideological excesses with more impunity than that available to either the Chinese intellectual, who cannot appeal to linguistic barriers as a justification for misconstruing unpalatable ideologies, or the observer from the industrialized West, whose complaint that Chinese ideology has often obstructed socio-economic amelioration may seem condescending."