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jason_pym's review against another edition
4.0
This book is an involving, vivid, occasionally funny portrait of a rural village told in the form of a dictionary. Each entry has the definition of a word from the local Maqiao dialect, and with it a new chapter of the story is told.
Aside from an entertaining story, the book is two things; an example of how Chinese village life is timeless no matter what political maelstrom is raging outside, and secondly a lamentation for the rich, earthy local languages lost to the bland functionalism of standard modern Chinese.
‘Maqiao: A little village, impossible to find, almost dropped off the map, with a few dozen households in the upper and lower village combined, a strip of land, set against a stretch of mountain. Maqiao has a great many stones and a great deal of soil, stones and earth which have endured through thousands of years. However hard you look, you won’t see it changing. Every particle is a testament to eternity…’
The story is the fictional account of an educated youth sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Local figures include the Communist party secretary, and there are occasional direct references to the Cultural Revolution (the narrator goes to paint Maoist slogans), however despite being the most intense political period of Communist China, this all feels like a thin veneer. Local life carries on as it has a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. Though there are variations on the tune, different families and different faces, and the titles of the leaders might change (Ming military governor, warlord, Communist branch secretary), for the local people life goes on. The personal, physical and spiritual struggles are the same as they ever were: People argue, go to work, get married, have affairs, have children, die. Superstitions thrive.
On language, the book in embodying a rich local dialect is itself a rallying cry for local culture. That is that the ties Maqiao people have with their land, their ghosts, and each other is uniquely manifest in their language. The book is a passionate denunciation of the linguistic standardisation through imposing a bland lingua franca: ‘Strictly speaking, what we might term a “common language” will forever remain a distant human objective. 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.’
For historical reasons, up until a couple decades ago people did not move about much in China. Most people would be born, live and die in the same village, and this stability means that the country had a rich stew of dialects. So many and so rich that middle aged people where I live now can tell you where someone is from to within a few streets just by hearing them speak.
Mandarin Chinese, in the sense of a national, official lingua franca, has been around since at least the Ming dynasty (700 + years). But the intention of making it everyone’s first language has only come into effect in the last 70 odd years since the end of the civil war. In the 1950s it was made the language of instruction in all schools in both mainland China and Taiwan. In my experience, anyone who is middle-aged today has dialect as their first language. But the under-twenties, exposed to so much online media and the much more intense rigours of the modern education system, are at best bilingual.
There is another reason for the loss of local languages: Migration. Nowadays China is a much more mobile country, intense redevelopment of towns and cities and urban migration means that families will grow up in a foreign language environment, so that Mandarin is the language they use with everyone – classmates, workmates, neighbours. So modern capitalism is just compounding the original plan of creating a true standard national language.
I love Han Shaogong’s passion about local dialects, which is a cold way to label organic language that grows with living, human communities. It is a rallying cry for all that makes us human, and I love that he portrays Maqiao people in all their spite, pettiness and ridiculousness, all that make us human as much as our virtues. Unfortunately, I think he’s wrong, our language is not ‘indomitable’ I think it’s already part of the walking dead.
But why care? Mandarin is part and parcel of everyone getting a decent place to live and enough to eat, it seems like a small price to pay. But now that people are comfortably well off, they do start to talk about what’s been lost. Dialect is inseparable from local culture, when he talks about language he’s talking about both, that dialect words are often the only terms available for certain foods or customs or descriptions. And the loss of these dialects is much like seeing multinational shopping malls stamping local business into the dust. I recently travelled through four different cities in four provinces, all not only had the same shopping malls with the same shops (Starbucks and McDonalds of course, but also Clarkes Shoes and Debenhams), they even had multiple identical shopping malls right next to each other. And after a week of feeling the elation of seeing shiny things I ended up drained, like a human Matrix battery, spitting out my pathetic little pay check to feed the corporate machine. And so even though Han Shaogong wrote this in the 1990s, before the rise of the shopping mall, he is writing about the symptom of the same disease.
From the Afterword: ‘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 I said I know it’s sea fish, could you please tell me what-sea-fish? He stared even more, seemingly impatient: “Big fish!”…
‘Hainan has the largest coastal area in the country, countless fishing villages and a fishing industry with a long history. It was only later I discovered they have the largest fishing-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 cannot be incorporated into standard Mandarin… 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… [Their] 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 hometown. For many years I’ve studied Mandarin. I realize this is necessary, it’s necessary in order for me to be accepted by neighbours, colleagues, shop assistants, policeman, 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’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.’
There are many accounts and stories of the Cultural Revolution that describe the bleak horror and endless catalogue of atrocities, this is not one of those. In fact, I have read enough of that now that I tend to avoid those books. The point in setting it during this time is to say that even in the most extreme circumstances, people’s ties to place, to each other, and the crystallisation of this in language cannot be erased. It is somewhat depressing that rampant capitalism is destroying what communism could not, but at least the comforts capitalism brings are making people reflect on the loss.
On the translation: Lovell does a lovely job, and it can’t have been easy. She walks the line of making the village feel familiar and real, without losing the ‘Chineseness’ of it all. A pleasure to read.
Aside from an entertaining story, the book is two things; an example of how Chinese village life is timeless no matter what political maelstrom is raging outside, and secondly a lamentation for the rich, earthy local languages lost to the bland functionalism of standard modern Chinese.
‘Maqiao: A little village, impossible to find, almost dropped off the map, with a few dozen households in the upper and lower village combined, a strip of land, set against a stretch of mountain. Maqiao has a great many stones and a great deal of soil, stones and earth which have endured through thousands of years. However hard you look, you won’t see it changing. Every particle is a testament to eternity…’
The story is the fictional account of an educated youth sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Local figures include the Communist party secretary, and there are occasional direct references to the Cultural Revolution (the narrator goes to paint Maoist slogans), however despite being the most intense political period of Communist China, this all feels like a thin veneer. Local life carries on as it has a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. Though there are variations on the tune, different families and different faces, and the titles of the leaders might change (Ming military governor, warlord, Communist branch secretary), for the local people life goes on. The personal, physical and spiritual struggles are the same as they ever were: People argue, go to work, get married, have affairs, have children, die. Superstitions thrive.
On language, the book in embodying a rich local dialect is itself a rallying cry for local culture. That is that the ties Maqiao people have with their land, their ghosts, and each other is uniquely manifest in their language. The book is a passionate denunciation of the linguistic standardisation through imposing a bland lingua franca: ‘Strictly speaking, what we might term a “common language” will forever remain a distant human objective. 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.’
For historical reasons, up until a couple decades ago people did not move about much in China. Most people would be born, live and die in the same village, and this stability means that the country had a rich stew of dialects. So many and so rich that middle aged people where I live now can tell you where someone is from to within a few streets just by hearing them speak.
Mandarin Chinese, in the sense of a national, official lingua franca, has been around since at least the Ming dynasty (700 + years). But the intention of making it everyone’s first language has only come into effect in the last 70 odd years since the end of the civil war. In the 1950s it was made the language of instruction in all schools in both mainland China and Taiwan. In my experience, anyone who is middle-aged today has dialect as their first language. But the under-twenties, exposed to so much online media and the much more intense rigours of the modern education system, are at best bilingual.
There is another reason for the loss of local languages: Migration. Nowadays China is a much more mobile country, intense redevelopment of towns and cities and urban migration means that families will grow up in a foreign language environment, so that Mandarin is the language they use with everyone – classmates, workmates, neighbours. So modern capitalism is just compounding the original plan of creating a true standard national language.
I love Han Shaogong’s passion about local dialects, which is a cold way to label organic language that grows with living, human communities. It is a rallying cry for all that makes us human, and I love that he portrays Maqiao people in all their spite, pettiness and ridiculousness, all that make us human as much as our virtues. Unfortunately, I think he’s wrong, our language is not ‘indomitable’ I think it’s already part of the walking dead.
But why care? Mandarin is part and parcel of everyone getting a decent place to live and enough to eat, it seems like a small price to pay. But now that people are comfortably well off, they do start to talk about what’s been lost. Dialect is inseparable from local culture, when he talks about language he’s talking about both, that dialect words are often the only terms available for certain foods or customs or descriptions. And the loss of these dialects is much like seeing multinational shopping malls stamping local business into the dust. I recently travelled through four different cities in four provinces, all not only had the same shopping malls with the same shops (Starbucks and McDonalds of course, but also Clarkes Shoes and Debenhams), they even had multiple identical shopping malls right next to each other. And after a week of feeling the elation of seeing shiny things I ended up drained, like a human Matrix battery, spitting out my pathetic little pay check to feed the corporate machine. And so even though Han Shaogong wrote this in the 1990s, before the rise of the shopping mall, he is writing about the symptom of the same disease.
From the Afterword: ‘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 I said I know it’s sea fish, could you please tell me what-sea-fish? He stared even more, seemingly impatient: “Big fish!”…
‘Hainan has the largest coastal area in the country, countless fishing villages and a fishing industry with a long history. It was only later I discovered they have the largest fishing-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 cannot be incorporated into standard Mandarin… 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… [Their] 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 hometown. For many years I’ve studied Mandarin. I realize this is necessary, it’s necessary in order for me to be accepted by neighbours, colleagues, shop assistants, policeman, 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’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.’
There are many accounts and stories of the Cultural Revolution that describe the bleak horror and endless catalogue of atrocities, this is not one of those. In fact, I have read enough of that now that I tend to avoid those books. The point in setting it during this time is to say that even in the most extreme circumstances, people’s ties to place, to each other, and the crystallisation of this in language cannot be erased. It is somewhat depressing that rampant capitalism is destroying what communism could not, but at least the comforts capitalism brings are making people reflect on the loss.
On the translation: Lovell does a lovely job, and it can’t have been easy. She walks the line of making the village feel familiar and real, without losing the ‘Chineseness’ of it all. A pleasure to read.
rnmcfarlane's review against another edition
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
saraxuherondale's review against another edition
funny
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
It's almost 1AM (12:56 to be precise) July 12th, year 2023. On this very fine night, I have finally done something I should've done months before, finally finished this book. During the last 100 pages I was really thinking about giving it 4 stars for all these months I've been dragging this book but in the end I just couldn't do it. It's a phenomenal book, a fantastic Serbian translation (bravo Zoki), and I just couldn't bring myself to lower the rating.
This book is something I would have never picked up on my own, solely because the title has word "dictionary" in it and idk about you but that does not sound like a fun time to me. Turns out, after getting through the first few boring words (geography related) I started to get really invested. The writing of this book is actually insane, I can't believe someone is able not only to write a novel in which the language itself is a main character, but also freaking translate it into another language?? I'm very pleased I decided to start reading this book right before I've heard the author himself talk about it (back in October), but I'm also extremely happy that I was familiar enough with Chinese history to understand where these characters were coming from and what was happening around them at the time. That way you can fully get inside Han Shaogong's brain and understand his thoughts and feelings about the stories he's trying to tell to the readers. Also one of the things that I absolutely loved was the fact that a couple of the words Maqiao people used can also be found in my native language too! My mother read around 50 pages and we had a very nice talk about it, she was really surprised and pleased to see some language similarities.
Overall, I really really enjoyed this book, I wish I hadn't read it for almost a year but better late than never. I also think that it's a very important novel about language, generation gaps, culture, and just simply about life and how a certain time can shape people (and how quickly almost all of it could go away).
This book is something I would have never picked up on my own, solely because the title has word "dictionary" in it and idk about you but that does not sound like a fun time to me. Turns out, after getting through the first few boring words (geography related) I started to get really invested. The writing of this book is actually insane, I can't believe someone is able not only to write a novel in which the language itself is a main character, but also freaking translate it into another language?? I'm very pleased I decided to start reading this book right before I've heard the author himself talk about it (back in October), but I'm also extremely happy that I was familiar enough with Chinese history to understand where these characters were coming from and what was happening around them at the time. That way you can fully get inside Han Shaogong's brain and understand his thoughts and feelings about the stories he's trying to tell to the readers. Also one of the things that I absolutely loved was the fact that a couple of the words Maqiao people used can also be found in my native language too! My mother read around 50 pages and we had a very nice talk about it, she was really surprised and pleased to see some language similarities.
Overall, I really really enjoyed this book, I wish I hadn't read it for almost a year but better late than never. I also think that it's a very important novel about language, generation gaps, culture, and just simply about life and how a certain time can shape people (and how quickly almost all of it could go away).
bored_and_confused's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.75
lesliebeach's review against another edition
One of the best things I've read this year.
spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
3.0
Han Shaogong's unusual book was published in 1996 and translated into English a decade later in 2006. The translator, Julia Lovell, relates in her introduction that she asked Han Shaogong for permission to translate the book, whereupon he responded, "I am very happy that you wish to translate the book, but I'm afraid it will be terribly difficult." She did it anyway. My kind of book exactly.
kellyelizabeth27's review against another edition
2.0
There were pages of this that I liked, pages that explored how language is rooted in place. There were small stories within the larger novel that were fascinating. But on the whole, it felt like work to finish it, like an unfinished promise.
mslaura's review against another edition
4.0
This was such a unique book; part novel, part short story collection, part memoir, part treatise on language and culture. The author was one of the "Educated Youth" relocated to the countryside, specifically the village of Maqiao, in the 1950's as part of Mao's Cultural Revolution. The author presents his somewhat fictionalized experiences in Maqiao as vignettes, each revolving around a particular word, name, or phrase from the Maqiao dialect. Through these we are introduced to a cast of eccentric and entertaining characters and grow to appreciate the unique culture of the village. There is a rough chronology to the entries, so that by the end we are able to feel some degree of resolution. This is just such a smart book; by turns humorous and heartbreaking and through it all informative and enlightening. My favorite entry was "This Him", which explains the two different words for "him" in the Maqiao dialect: "qu" or "this him" and "ta" or "that him". It is unexpectedly touching and poignant, as was this book as a whole.
aweekinthelife's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.25