Translated by Julia Lovell © 2003 Columbia University Press
WINNER – 2011 NEWMAN PRIZE FOR CHINESE LITERATURE
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.
♦River
The word for river (jiang in Mandarin) is pronounced gang by Maqiao people (in southern China) and refers not just to vast bodies for water, but to all waterways, including small ditches and streams. In northern China, on the other hand, the word “sea” is used to cover everything from lakes to ponds, which must seem equally strange to southerners. Size, it appears, is something left for people to worry about later.
In English, difference in size can be expressed by
“stream” or “river.” Yet in French, fleuve refers to rivers entering the sea and rivière indicates an inland river or tributary entering another river, while size remains unspecified. It seems that the world contains many systems of naming, which do not necessarily relate to each other.
Although Maqiao people later on became more specific about size, they still didn’t seem to attach much importance to it, only differentiating it slightly by tone. Gang pronounced in a high, level tone refers to a larger river and in a rising tone to a rivulet or stream; it takes some time for outsiders to attune their ears to avoid misunderstandings. As a newcomer to
Maqiao, I ran into such difficulties myself when I went off in excited search of a river, following directions from locals. My destination turned out to be a gurgling brook so narrow I could reach the other side in one flying leap. Some dark waterweed lay within and watersnakes would flash by unannounced, but for washing or swimming it was of no use...
The Institute for U.S.-China Issues at the University of
Oklahoma engages in research and outreach activities that seek to better understand and improve U.S.-China relations. The focus is on the deeper structure of the bilateral relationship: its dynamics of security and insecurity, perception and misperception, identity and power. The Institute promotes academic research that has policy-relevant implications, and seeks to have an impact on the broader national debate on U.S. China policy.
The Institute also seeks to advance education about China at OU and across the state of Oklahoma.
announces a
for Oklahoma high school students:
$1,000 1 st Prize
$1,000 and a certificate will be awarded on Feb. 18,
2011 to the Oklahoma high school student(s) whose
“mini-dictionary/encyclopedia” best captures the character of their high school. “Entries” can explore the people, places, slang, or rituals that help define their school. Students should read excerpts from Han
Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao, winner of the 2011
Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, for inspiration.
Single or co-authored entries welcome.
Competition Requirements:
 2-3,000 words.
 Minimum of five “dictionary entries.”
 Entries due to uschina@ou.edu
by Feb. 1, 2011.
More information is available @
www.ou.edu/uschina/newman/youngwriters.html
The Newman Prize for Chinese Literature is awarded biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition, and is conferred solely on the basis of literary merit. Any living author writing in Chinese is eligible. The Prize consists of $10,000, a medallion, and a certificate, and may serve to crown a lifetime’s achievement or to direct attention to a developing body of work. An international jury of distinguished experts both nominate the candidates and select the winners, based on a transparent voting process.
The Newman Prize is hosted by the University of
Oklahoma’s Institute for U.S.-China Issues. OU is also home to World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
The Newman Prize honors Harold J. and Ruth
Newman, whose generous endowment of a chair at
OU enabled the creation of the Institute.

Excerpts from
Translated by Julia Lovell © 2003 Columbia University Press
♦Little Big Brother (etc.)
“Little big brother” means big sister. Clearly, by the same token, “little little brother” means little sister, “little paternal uncle” means an aunt on the fathers’ side, “little maternal uncle” means an aunt on the mother’s side, and so on.
I noticed very early on that because Maqiao and places nearby didn’t appear to have an independent system for female nomenclature, most female names were formed simply by preceding the male name with the word “little”, thus tying women forever to the diminutive. This meant, in effect, that women were people of little consequence, petty people. I can’t be certain whether there’s any link between this kind of ruling and ancient sayings such as Confucius’s dictum that “women and petty people are hard to handle.”
Language, it seems, it never absolutely objective or neutral. A linguistic space will always be distorted under the influence of a particular set of beliefs. Bearing in mind the namelessness of females, it’s easy to draw further conclusions about their social status around here; it’s easy to understand why they always bound their chests flat, crossed their legs tightly, and lowered their eyes timidly onto steps or short grass, harboring a deep-felt fear and shame that sprang from their status as females …
♦Army Mosquito
A very small variety of mosquito, this was, and very dark in color; if you examined it carefully, though, you’d see there was a small white dot on its black head. Its sting produced a red bite, not that big but unbelievably itchy, that lasted about three days. Maqiao people called it the “army mosquito.”
People said Maqiao didn’t used to have this sort of mosquito, only the vegetable mosquito, a large, grayish creature.
Although the bites it produced were big and extremely itchy, they disappeared pretty quickly. Miaoqiao people also said that the army mosquito had been brought by the provincial army, the year that Donkey Peng’ provincial army had fought their way up to Changle. They’d been stationed there for ten days, leaving behind piles of pig bristles, chicken feathers, and this vicious breed of mosquito.
That’s how the army mosquito got its name …
♦Beginning (End)
In Maqiao dialect, the word for “end” (pronounced wan in Mandarin) is pronounced the same as the word for
“beginning” (yuan). Two temporal extremes are thus phonetically linked. In that case, when Maqiao people say
“yuan,” do they mean end? Or do the mean beginning?
If things always have an end, then time always advances forward in a straight line, never repeating itself, with forward and back, this and that, right and wrong permanently in diametric opposition to each other, implying a certain standpoint for making comparisons and judgment. If, conversely, things always go back to the beginning, then time moves in a circle, always going around and starting again, with forward and back, this and that, right and wrong always confusingly and overturned.
As I see it, history’s optimists insist on the division between beginning and end, viewing history as an everadvancing straight line, in which all honor and disgrace, success and failure, praise and blame, gains and losses are always precisely recorded, ready to receive true and just final judgment. Perseverance will receive its final reward. History’s pessimists, however, insist on the unity between beginning and end, viewing history as an ever-repeating loop in which their retreats endlessly advance, their losses are endlessly gained, everything is futile.
Which yuan would Maqiao people choose? Beginning or end?
Consider 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 never-ending flow of its waters gurgles with the sounds of thousands of years; the pearls of dew of thousands of years still hang on the blades of grass at the roadside; the sunlight of thousands of years now shines so brightly we cannot open our eyes— a blazing white heat that buzzes on the face.
On the other hand, Maqiao is not, of course, the Maqiao of former days, or even the Maqiao of a moment ago. A wrinkle has appeared, a white hair has floated to the ground, a withered hand has turned cold, everything moves silently on.
Faces appear pone by one, then one by one fade away, never to return. Only on these faces can we look nervously for traces of the march of time. No power can stop this process, no power can prevent this succession of faces from sinking into Maqiao soil— just as one note plucked after another sounds and softly dies away.
♦Gruel
This was a kind of thin porridge, pronounced gang in
Maqiao dialect (jiang in Mandarin). As Maqiao was a poor mountain village short of grain, “gruel” was a pretty commonly used word.
One of the “Odes of the small states” in the Book of Odes says: “It is better to serve guests wine than gruel,” and the word “gruel” is generally used to refer to a drink one rung below wine, such as corn soaked in water. The biography of
Bao Xuan in Chapter Seventy-two of the Han History contains the phrase “wine into gruel, meat into bean leaves,” referring to those who live in extravagance and luxury, treating wine like gruel, meat like the leaves on beans. From this it becomes clear how the term “gruel” has since come to refer more generally to the food and drink of the poor.
When the Educated Youth first came to Maqiao, they often misheard “eating gang (gruel)” as “eating gan (dry grain),” thus confusing it with its exact opposite. In fact, the people around here always replace the j sound with a hard g sound: the word for “river” (jiang), for example, was also pronounced
gang. So “eating gruel” sometimes sounded like “eating river.”
When the harvest was late and the pot in every household held nothing but water thickened with only sprinkling of grain, this phrase fit perfectly well.