Chapter 103

Fatty obviously had the same idea as me, but it wasn’t good to refute Xiao Hua in front of so many people, so he winked at me, silently urging me to ask.

Xiao Hua saw our exchange and patted Fatty’s thigh, “Finish watching.”

In the video, that voice continued asking the villager questions. Sure enough, it didn’t take them long to ask the same question we were wondering, “Why not move?”

The interviewee quickly answered in sign language, while the voice stumbled to translate it, “If you leave here, your life will be very short. After many people left the village and stayed away for more than three years, they quickly aged.”

The video shook and then I saw Black Glasses smugly looking at the camera, “You’ve seen the situation here. I’ll share some information with you so that you can analyze it. First, the sign language used in this village isn’t standard sign language, but an ancient sign language. Sign language appeared very early in ancient China and was called hand language. The most famous deaf thinker was He Guanzi from the Warring States Period. If you know Huang-Lao, you’ll know this guy’s name (1). This person can use both hands to sign, but the sign language here doesn’t belong to the ancient hand system at all.”

After saying that, Black Glasses left the room, as if he didn’t want to be overheard. When he finally got outside, he continued, “There’s no signal here, so I’m recording this so as not to lose any details. People here think they go deaf when they hear thunder because there’s a heavenly secret in the thunder. God doesn’t want them to tell the secret, so they’re not allowed to speak. I asked them if they knew what the secret was. It’s pretty amazing. They told me directly that they could hear it, but there aren’t any words in their sign language to express what it is. In other words, they know what God is saying, but they can’t express it.”

Everyone listening to the video looked at each other. “Since ancient times, it’s been difficult to distinguish between deaf and mute,” Black Glasses suddenly said mysteriously. “Do you remember how to write the Chinese character for ‘deaf’?”

I paused, but Fatty quickly answered, “There’s a dragon on ear (2).” After that, I realized it was a video and this guy was just messing around.

Black Glasses continued, “The character for deaf is ‘a dragon on ear’. Why did the ancients structure the character for deaf like this?”

We all took a deep breath, waiting for him to finish. Black Glasses had a despicable look on his face and I really wanted to say “Fucking give it to us straight”, but I realized that it was just a recorded video and not an actual video call.

I suddenly felt a little knot in my heart, not knowing what had happened to Black Glasses. Logically, I should’ve called him directly and had him talk to us in person. I hadn’t seen him for a long time and didn’t know what he had going on, but Xiao Hua had brought me this video.

Black Glasses took out another cell phone and began to read the contents to us. I didn’t know where he got the information from:

Phonogram (3). The character “deaf” came from the characters for ear and dragon. The character for dragon also sounded the same as the character for deaf. “Dragon” originally referred to the mythical creature that could bring rain, and by extension, referred to spring thunderstorms. “Ear” meant “hearing”, so the combination of the “ear” and “dragon” characters could also mean “ears hear the sound of spring thunder”.

The original meaning of this character referred to old farmers who were hard of hearing and couldn’t hold normal conversations with people. But at the spring equinox, they could hear the sound of thunder and knew it was time to sow the fields. This character also referred to the general problem of hearing loss. In other words, someone speaking at a normal volume behind you sounded inaudible or unintelligible, but you could hear them if they shouted loudly. “Deafness” didn’t mean a hundred percent hearing loss, but more like a certain percentage of hearing loss.

Black Glasses looked at us, “Deafness here refers to ears that can’t hear other sounds, but can definitely hear thunder.”

According to the ancient descriptions, deaf people couldn’t hear other sounds besides thunder. So, for deaf people, most of the sounds they could hear during their lifetime were thunder. As a result, their memories of sounds all featured thunder.

“A lot of deaf and mute people become fortune-tellers. Why do you think that is? Think about it carefully.”

He looked at the sky and I saw a flash of lightning appear in the video. “It’s going to thunder,” he said. “I want to continue observing. Bye-bye.”

<Chapter 102><Table of Contents><Chapter 104>

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TN Notes:

(1) I wasn’t finding much on the guy himself, only this unverified blurb in Chinese. But Heguanzi is a mixed collection of writings from the Chinese Hundred Schools of Thought. Huang-Lao is one of these schools of thought that’s more politically driven. It looked for solutions to strengthen the feudal order as depicted in Zhou propaganda and was generally interpreted as a school of syncretism, developing into a major religion–the beginnings of religious Taoism.

(2) 聋=deaf (pinyin is “lóng”), 龙=dragon (pinyin is also “lóng”), and 耳=ear (pinying is “ěr”). If you squint, 龙 looks like it’s stacked on top of 耳 to form 聋, the character for deaf. “Deaf” and “dragon” also sound the same in Chinese.

(3) A symbol representing a vocal sound. One of the six methods of forming Chinese characters.