by Ha Jin
“Why would you go to the Commerce Department?” I asked Banping. “You’ll have to grow another pair of eyes on the back of your head if you want to survive there.”
“I have my reasons.”
“What are they?” I asked.
“Yes, tell us,” Weiya urged.
“All right, number one, the Commerce Department has housing. They’ve promised me a three-bedroom apartment with a big balcony, all together more than a hundred square yards, which none of the young faculty here can even dream of. Number two, that department controls most of the merchandise produced in this province, so it’s a temple where companies and factories have to pay tribute—I’ll have lots of stuff to eat and drink. Are these two reasons not enough?”
“More than enough,” I said, nodding while thinking, He’s so materialistic. He shouldn’t have studied literature and written a thesis on ancient ballads.
“How big is the balcony?” I asked him.
“About the size of this room.”
“Wow, you can grow a kitchen garden on it.”
“Exactly.”
“We plan to do that,” added Anling.
“Yes, we’ll get some earthen pots,” Banping said.
“And a few sacks of fertilizer too,” I echoed.
Weiya tittered, then asked him, “Why don’t you go to the Policy Office? Doesn’t it want a graduate student from our school too?”
“It must have more advantages,” I said.
“That office is a bigger temple,” he explained. “In fact, it has some kind of control over all the departments at the Provincial Administration. Every clerk in that office is powerful because he works directly for the top leaders, who are lazy and depend on the clerks to think for them.” He pointed his thumb at me as if I were to become such a clerk. “You write their speeches, suggest ideas, and even handle small matters on their behalf. So you rub elbows with those big shots every day. If one of them is pleased with your work or just takes a shine to you, within a couple of years you’ll be an official of considerable stature. On top of that, you’ll learn about the workings of the government and gradually you’ll know how to run the province.”
“Well”—I snapped my fingers—“brother, if I were you I’d snatch the opportunity, to become an expert in governance.”
Without catching my mockery, he replied, “I don’t want to work there, though. So far I’ve only talked about the bright side of the picture. Let me tell you about the downside. If a leader happens to dislike you, or if any of your colleagues informs your superiors against you, or if you get involved in one of the factions, which is unavoidable, then you’re done for. Sooner or later they’ll kick you out of the office and banish you to a godforsaken region. They may even stick a criminal name on you and slam you into jail. Ah, it’s hard to protect your ass at a place like that.”
“How come you know so much about this?” I asked, quite impressed.
“A fellow townsman of mine told me about it. He works at the Provincial Administration.”
Weiya picked up, “If the Policy Office wanted a woman, I’d definitely go.”
Her serious tone surprised me. She looked at me with a straight face. I couldn’t tell whether she was expressing her genuine wish or just trying to enliven the conversation.
“That’s not a place for me, though,” Banping continued. “I don’t have the ambition or the charming personality, and my mind is too slow. I wouldn’t survive in the Policy Office. My goal isn’t high—all I want is a stable, comfortable life, which the Commerce Department can give me.”
I was amazed by his self-estimation. Obviously he was not as dense as I’d thought. I had sensed he possessed some kind of peasant cunning, but never had I expected he knew so clearly his place, needs, objects, and limitations. I bantered, “Come on, of course you have a great personality, or how could Anling have chosen you as her groom?”
“He tricked me!” his wife exclaimed. “You don’t know what a big liar he was. He made all sorts of promises. He said he’d take me to Golden Elephant Park every month after we got married. But he’s done that only once in a whole year.”
“She’s not very smart either,” her husband said flatly.
We all laughed, including Anling. She pinched the leathery back of his hand.
Having taken leave of Banping and Anling, I walked Weiya back to her dormitory. We didn’t talk much on the way; we were both deep in thought. The traffic was still throbbing in the west; now and then an automobile honked. The sidewalk was almost covered by broad sycamore leaves. Here and there moonlight filtered through the trees, casting dappled patches on the asphalt. Scabby-barked poplar trunks shimmered in the damp air while insects chirred. As we reached the eastern part of the campus, our shadows, mine almost twice as large as hers, collided time and again on the ground.
I glanced at her. She looked pale in the moonlight, but her face glowed with a soft shine. Her footsteps were springy and vigorous. For some reason I was suddenly gripped by the desire to touch her, my right hand, so close to her waist, trembling a little. I thrust it into my pants pocket and focused on watching our shadows mingling on the ground. Probably it was the grief and madness jammed into my chest during the afternoon that drew me closer to her. Walking with her made me feel less lonely. To me, she was quite attractive, but I liked her also because she was reliable and well read and had her own opinions. She could paint almost like a professional, and was especially good at portraiture. I was glad she would remain in the department as an instructor in classical fiction.
We said good night at the ilex bushes about fifty yards away from her dormitory building. I turned back without waiting for her to disappear from the dimly lighted doorway as most men would do for their female friends. It was safe on campus.
4
It was well past midnight, and my roommates were sleeping soundly. Outside, the drizzle rustled through the leaves of trees. The room was dank and fusty. A mouse scuttled across the ceiling; there were at least a dozen mice in the roof. Mantao murmured something and let out a curse in his sleep. He went on grinding his teeth, which, according to folk medicine, indicated that he might have roundworms in his stomach. I envied the way he slept—day or night, the moment his head touched a pillow, he’d begin to snore loudly. Sometimes my other roommate, Huran, would shout at him and beg him to roll on his side so that he would stop snoring for a while. Tonight I couldn’t sleep, missing my fiancée and puzzling over the possible causes of my teacher’s stroke.
According to Banping, it was Professor Song, the chairman of the Literature Department, who had crushed our teacher. Indeed, Mr. Yang and Professor Song had often locked horns. The animosity between them culminated in a quarrel over the birthplace of the great poet Li Po a year ago. In his paper on Tang poetry, Professor Song had adopted a recent claim that the poet was born in Kazakhstan, somewhere south of Lake Balkhash. In fact, this “biographical discovery” might have been intended to validate the patriotic view that China’s map in the Tang Dynasty was much vaster than today, so as to refute the Russian assertion that the Great Wall used to be China’s borderline. Mr. Yang believed this was pseudo-scholarship, so he insisted that Professor Song change the poet’s birthplace to Szechwan if the paper was to be included in Studies in Classical Literature, a journal he was editing. Professor Song refused and asserted that nobody was really clear about this issue. Separately the two scholars looked it up in a number of books, which gave at least seven places as Li Po’s birthplace, including Shandong Province and Nanjing City, both in eastern China, probably because the poet was peripatetic all his life. “I wouldn’t even alter a dot,” Professor Song declared to others. So Mr. Yang turned down his paper. The chairman was outraged and told everyone that he had withdrawn it by choice. A few days later the altercation resumed. This time they both lost their temper, calling each other names and banging their fists on the pinewood desktop in Mr. Song’s office. They pointed at each other’s faces, as if each was trying to thrust
his own idea into his opponent’s head. There might have been a scuffle if their colleagues hadn’t separated them.
Eager to retaliate, Professor Song prevented Mr. Yang from being promoted to full professor and even said he’d get the journal transferred to “reliable hands.” In recent months he seized every opportunity to criticize Mr. Yang. For this reason, Banping believed it was the pressure from Professor Song that had crushed our teacher.
I didn’t take this to be the main cause. Though the two professors disliked each other, their enmity had originated from their common interest—literary scholarship. The chief obstacle to their reconciliation might be that Professor Song was the chairman and that if Mr. Yang had apologized first, he’d have appeared to stoop to power. Even if their falling-out were irreconcilable, Professor Song could hardly have destroyed my teacher. During the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Yang had been paraded through campus as a Demon-Monster once a week for more than half a year; if he had survived that kind of torment, a few skirmishes with a colleague shouldn’t have driven him out of his mind.
But what Weiya had said at the dinner might be a matter of ugly consequences. A year ago Mr. Yang had received an invitation to speak at a conference in Vancouver. For a long time he couldn’t get funding for the trip. The Canadian side assumed he might never make it, so they replaced his talk with another one. Meanwhile, Mr. Yang wrote letters to our school leaders and even to officials at the Provincial Administration, begging for dollars. To be fair, our college did take the invitation seriously, because this was the first time a faculty member in the humanities here had been invited to lecture abroad. To Mr. Yang, this must have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; never having gone abroad, he was naturally eager to visit Canada. Yet not until a month before the conference did he obtain enough funding from our school. Despite the tardiness, he set out anyway, probably knowing he was no longer on the panel. He didn’t give his talk in Vancouver, but met some foreign sinologists there.
On his way back he stopped at San Francisco for two days to see a friend of his, a philosophy professor at UC-Berkeley. He returned unhappy and slightly fatter, but with a two-door refrigerator, which kindled a great deal of envy among the faculty and staff here. Soon people began to whisper that he had gone to North America just for sight-seeing and so that he could pocket the foreign currency (he had been given an allowance of thirty-four dollars a day, which he saved for the refrigerator of Chinese make). He couldn’t exonerate himself from such an accusation. If the school now demanded the $1,800 back, Mr. Yang couldn’t possibly pay up such a debt.
Although I could accept Weiya’s explanation, I wouldn’t exclude overwork as a major cause of his stroke. Since the previous year he had been compiling a textbook of Tang poetry for graduate students. It was a critical edition, so he needed to supply comments and notes on the poems. Every night he stayed up late at his tiny desk, with books spread on his bed and on the floor, working until three or four in the morning. During the day he had to teach, meet students, and attend meetings. How could he hold out for long if he worked like a camel, sleeping only four or five hours a night? The publisher in Shanghai had pressed him several times, and Mr. Yang had promised to deliver the manuscript by the end of May. I often said to him, “When can you slow down a little?” He would answer with a smile, “I’m a harnessed horse. As long as I’m on my feet, I have to pull the cart.” He slapped his belly to show he was strong.
Besides working and writing, he had to take care of himself, since his wife and daughter were not around. He ate lunch in the school’s dining hall, but cooked a simple dinner for himself in the evening, always cornmeal porridge or dough-drop soup mixed with vegetables. He hand-laundered his clothes himself. I helped him clean his apartment twice. Three weeks ago he and I together planted a dozen sunflower seedlings in his small backyard.
There could be another cause of his stroke, which was probably more ruinous than those I have described but which I was reluctant to reveal to my fellow graduate students, namely that his marriage might have been floundering. I couldn’t put my finger on the problem, but was certain that Mrs. Yang had gone to Tibet not just for professional reasons. Last May, three months before she left, I had happened to witness a scene. I went to his home to return his volume of Book of Songs, an anthology compiled by Confucius 2,600 years ago. Mr. Yang’s copy of the book was filled with comments in his cursive handwriting at the tops, margins, and bottoms of the pages. I was the first person he had ever allowed to read his marginalia. At the door of his apartment I heard Mrs. Yang yell from inside, “Leave! Get out of here!”
Mr. Yang countered, “This is my home. Why don’t you go?”
“All right, if you don’t, I’m leaving.”
As I wondered whether I should turn back, the door opened slowly and Mrs. Yang walked out. She was a small angular woman with deep-socketed eyes. Seeing me, she paused, her face contorted and sprinkled with tears. She lowered her head and hurried past without a word, leaving behind the rancid smell of her bedraggled hair. Her black silk skirt almost covered her slender calves; she had bony ankles and narrow feet, wearing red plastic flip-flops.
Mr. Yang saw me and waved me in. On the concrete floor were scattered a brass pen pot and dozens of books, most of which were opened and several with their spines loosened from their sutures. He grimaced, then sighed, shaking his head.
Silently I handed him his book. Though I didn’t know why they had fought, the scene unnerved me as I replayed it in my mind later on. Whenever I was with the Yangs I could sense an emotional chasm between my teacher and his wife. I was positive they had become estranged from one another. For some time I couldn’t help but wonder whether my fiancée had inherited her mother’s fiery disposition, or whether her parents’ fights had disturbed her emotionally. But my misgivings didn’t last long, as I was soon convinced that by nature Meimei was a cheerful girl, even more rational than myself.
A locomotive blew its steam whistle in the south like a mooing cow. The night had grown deeper and quieter. Having considered these happenings in Mr. Yang’s life, I felt none of them alone could have triggered his collapse. Perhaps they had joined forces to bring him down.
5
Nurse Chen put a thermos of hot water on the bedside cabinet in Mr. Yang’s room and asked me, “Was your professor educated abroad?” She looked perkier than two days ago.
“No, he’s a genuine Chinese product, homebred like you and me.”
“I heard him speak foreign words last night.”
“Really, in what language?”
“I’ve no clue, but it was definitely not English or Japanese. It sounded strange.”
“Was it like this, ‘Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?’ ”
She shook her head in amazement, then giggled. “What language is that? You sounded like an officer rapping out orders.”
“It’s German.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s the beginning of a book of poems Mr. Yang often quoted, Duino Elegies. It means ‘Who, if I cry, would hear me among the angelic order?’ Something like that.”
“My, that’s deep, I’m impressed. Tell you what, he might have spoken German.”
Her praise embarrassed me a little, for that line was the only part of the long poem I had memorized. We often committed a passage or a few lines to memory not only because we liked them but also because we could impress others with them. That’s one of the tricks of the academic game.
Mr. Yang had never spoken foreign words during my shift. He could read German and knew some French. He loved Rilke and had once made me read Duino Elegies in a bilingual edition after he came to know I had studied German for a year. But I didn’t like the poems that much, perhaps because I hadn’t read them carefully.
Mali Chen raised her hand, looking at her wristwatch. “I should be going, the doc must be here already. Bye-bye now.” She fluttered her fingers at me as she made for the door. She left behind a puf
f of perfume like almond.
I knew she had come to see Banping, who had left fifteen minutes before. Although Banping appeared clumsy and dull, he had a way of getting along with others, especially with women. We had started caring for our teacher just a few days before, but already he was mixing with the nurses as chummily as if he had known them for months. I wondered whether this was due to his rustic looks and manner, which might tend to put most women at ease—they would drop their guard without fearing any emotional entanglement with him. By comparison, I must have seemed like an eccentric to them, a typical bookworm, high-strung and a bit morose.
Mr. Yang was quiet and stationary. I took out my textbook, Contemporary Japanese, and began reviewing some paragraphs marked in pencil. The exams were just a month away, and I had too much to study. Japanese would be a jinx on me; if only I had taken it up a few years earlier.
As I tried parsing a complicated sentence in my mind, Mr. Yang snickered. I raised my head and saw his lips stir murmuring something. I averted my eyes and made an effort to concentrate on the textbook, but in no time his words grew clear. He chuckled and said, “They look like peaches, don’t they?” He smacked his lips, his face shining.
My curiosity was piqued. What did he compare to peaches? I put down the book and listened attentively. He beamed, “I’m such a lucky man. He-he-he, you know, your nipples taste like coffee candy. Mmmm . . . ah, let me have them again.” His lips parted eagerly.
I was amazed. He was talking to a woman! No wonder he looked so happy. He chuckled, but his words turned ragged.
Who was the woman? His wife? Unlikely. They two had been aloof toward each other in recent years; besides, she couldn’t possibly have that kind of breasts. In my mind’s eye I saw Mrs. Yang’s chest flat like a washboard. She was as thin as a mantis, so the peachy breasts must have belonged to another woman. Could he be having a fling with someone? That was possible. There was a fortyish woman lecturer in the Foreign Languages Department, named Kailing Wang, who had recently collaborated with him in translating Brecht’s Good Woman of Szechwan. She was quite busty, soft-skinned, and convivial. Mr. Yang and she had been pretty close and often teased each other playfully. Several times I had seen them together in his apartment working on the translation. They laughed a lot and seemed to enjoy each other’s company. Once I saw them chatting over a bottle of plum wine; another time I found her cooking a sausage dinner for him in his apartment. Besides her, a few women faculty members in the Literature Department were also close to him, though they dared not show their friendship overtly for fear of Professor Song’s notice.
