in the morning i arrive and announce my interest in seeing any materials to do with pigs. i also mention my invitation by the 档案馆长, which draws only looks of confusion. the sleepy woman at the front desk gives me the 县志, a sort of ‘historical guide to the city’ and says that’s all there would be. her colleague next to her agrees. overhearing her, a stout man in a black jacket sitting further off stands up, curses and slams cabinets for a few minutes, then stomps out. 神经病, she mutters. mental issues. he comes back with one old meeting pamphlet from 1941 that had one line about the uses of pigs. he points it out. i look at him, amazed that he found one source from 1941 that had one line about pigs in it when none were supposed to exist.
as the hour passed he brought me file after file. when the workers were taking off for lunch, he brusquely asked if I was going to eat. i asked is there a place around here I can eat? he says yes there’s a cafeteria, it’s cheap. I follow him there. we begin talking about his encounters with pigs in his youth. being from the countryside, pigs were everywhere. he said there was a peak in the 90’s, when household had at least two, and some had as many as seven. He tells me about picking 猪草 as a kid and cooking it. my PKU advisor 王老师, also from rural 湖南, has told me about this before. filling two big 框 and cooking it after school (on saturday!), sprinkling in 大麦 husks to sweeten the deal, because as it turns out, pigs don’t always like to eat their boiled veggies either.
in line for lunch he apologizes for the southern cuisine, says he’s noticed my northerner’s accent. and…even though many of my colleagues and advisors have cautioned me against revealing my nationality, i can’t help it. i tell him i’m american. the man in front of him looks back at me in astonishment and more than a little suspicion. what are you doing here? he asks. I’m studying pigs, I reply. he makes a baffled face and turns back to the line.
I confusedly misorder at the counter but the lady refuses to change what she put on my platter. I follow 孙 to a big tub, like a metal garbage bin filled with cooked rice, and spoon some onto my tin platter with a long-handled ladle. 孙 walks to a round table where his coworkers are seated, and sits down. I hover awkwardly. he gets up and moves to an inner seat. here, there’s a spot, he says. i sit down and quietly eat my lunch as everyone speaks a dialect I can’t understand. I guess it would be called “hunnanese.”
孙 stays after everyone else at the round table waiting for me to finish my lunch. the last woman to leave smiles at me as she walks away. you’d have to stay in a village for a couple months to really understand the traditional pig-raising culture, he says. you can just take a sack and walk through a village he says, with a chuckle. after lunch, he asks if I want to go on a walk through the park behind the government buildings. i hesitate. my mind wanders maniacally. is he trying to get me to a place where we can be alone? there’s enough people milling about for me to think someone would hear me scream, so i agree. instead, about half way through our walk, he makes a call to someone who used to work for the archives, asking if he could gift me a set of his books written about party history, which are sure to have something about pigs.
he asks me 我什么时候回国 and I say july, thinking he means to ask me when I would return to the US. but what he was asking was, when did I return to China, the country that I’m in now. there’s no past present or future tense in Chinese so the temporality of the phrase is utterly ambiguous, its meaning hinging solely on what country we consider me as “returning” to. I say oh. I’ve been back a week. i realize my americanness is still something he is trying to wrap his mind around.
when we get back to the archives reading room, he gives me another source, tells me I can take pictures. It’s the best one thus far, an account written from the central archives about the history of pigs in 宁乡. throughout, the most interesting bits cite “全宗” folders and files numbered into the hundreds. none of them show up in the citations given at the end of the booklet, which are all various encyclopedias and newspapers, even though 全宗 makes up for most of the citations. i ask about them. oh, every 单位 has a number, that’s the internal archives. you don’t have to at those, though. i don’t have to look at them? or i can’t? i ask. still looking very focusedly at the book, as if repeating what he had just said, he says, you can’t look at those. i pause and say, oh. okay. he steps away and looks at me. those sources include great structural changes, he says, at the broad societal level. as if it were obvious I would never be able to get my hands on them. you can just get a 片面的理解, a one-sided understanding from this, he says, like an offer.
i sit back down at the table, deflated. he brings me one more source, a huge thick book full of anonymous sayings and accounts of Mao’s visits to 宁乡 with no citations. he’s folded over a page containing some limerick about the ideals of pig. it goes like this:
猪的理想
天上纷纷降饲料，地上屠夫都死掉，
人类全部信佛教，猪栏栅子都不要。
pig’s ideal
feedstuffs falling from the sky, all of earth’s butchers* die
all of humanity believes in buddhism, and nobody wants a pigsty.
*also a colloquialism for dictators
he leaves the office, as well as his coworker. i sit there for awhile, flipping again through what I was given. two people come in and show me their ID’s, asking me to look up files for them. twice I have to tell them i don’t work here. when he finally comes back, i let him know people came in. he says oh, i went to the bathroom. i say okay, well, I’m going to head out now. thanks for helping me so much today. he ignores my expression of gratitude. a well-worn chinese habit. he says, as i walk towards the door, do you need to see anything else? i ask, well, is there anything else? of course, there’s lots more, he retorts. I say well, then, yes. I’ll come back tomorrow. his face assumes a look of consternation. bring some sort of 单位证明, he says. a work unit affiliation. all day they haven’t even asked for my passport. they don’t know my name. okay, i say, and walk out into the misty afternoon.
hog maw 