by Ha Jin
The next morning she and I went to the hospital again. Banping was happy when we relieved him. After combing Mr. Yang’s hair and brushing his teeth, we both sat down, she seated on my lap as there wasn’t another chair in the room. The night’s sleep had refreshed her thoroughly; her features were vivacious again, mischievously mocking at times. Her checkered dress was rather homely, washed out, hanging on her loosely, so I didn’t have to worry about rumpling it. She was visibly excited, her eyes radiating a soft light and her full lips slightly curled. I couldn’t help nuzzling her hair to inhale its hazelnutlike scent. Now and again I’d kiss her neck or gently twist her small silken ear despite fearing that her father might notice what I was doing.
We chatted about the students’ demonstrations in Beijing while Mr. Yang listened quietly. Gradually our topic shifted to preparations for the exams. For one of the six slots in a graduate program in pediatrics, Meimei would have to compete with over a hundred applicants.
“We’ve formed a group to study political economy and the Party’s history,” she told me.
“Does it help?”
“Of course, a lot. We test each other with the questions that may appear in the exam. This method can make us remember the answers better, and also gives us some fun when we’re working on the questions together. Besides memorizing all the answers, there’s no other way to prepare for the political exam.” She smiled and her chin jutted.
“That’s true,” I agreed. “But what a waste of time. Each year some of the answers differ from the previous year, especially in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. All depends on who is in power now—the winners always revise the history to make the losers look like a bunch of criminals.”
“Don’t be so cynical,” she said. “We’ve no choice but to give the expected answers.”
“I can’t spend too much time on politics. The other subjects make more sense to me.”
“You ought to take the political exam seriously. Last year a student in my school scored the highest in all subjects except politics. He flunked it miserably, only got forty-six points. That gave him a terrible time, although he was really smart, fluent in both English and Russian.”
“Did he get into a graduate program eventually?”
“Yes, but only after a lot of trouble. The Shanghai Military Medical University was determined to have him and sent a team of three people to our school. They held meetings and asked the other students about his political attitude and activities. Everybody said something in his favor, so he was admitted as a special case two months later, approved by the Ministry of Education.”
“Lucky for him.”
“Yes, only because he was absolutely phenomenal. We may never have that kind of luck, so work hard on the Party’s history and dialectical materialism.” Somehow she left out political economy and current events, each of which would constitute a quarter of the exam as well.
“I will, don’t worry,” I said. “To tell the truth, I fear Japanese most. In the political exam, even if you don’t have a definite answer to a question, you can bring your imagination into play, especially when writing the short essays—just make up some sentences. But in a foreign language test, every answer is fixed and there’s no room to waffle.”
“You know English better than most applicants, so even if you don’t do well in the Japanese exam, you’ll still have an edge over others. Don’t lose heart.”
Suddenly Mr. Yang chimed in, “She’s right. Also bear in mind that you have a strong recommendation from me. The professors at Beijing University will take my words seriously. So don’t waste your time looking after me here. Concentrate on your study. I want to see you two get married and settle down in Beijing. That will make me happy.”
I was amazed that he spoke so rationally. Meimei stuck out her tongue, which was red, thin, and narrow. Her face grew naughty, rather boyish. She was so charming that I couldn’t help touching her forearm and stroking her legs, though we dared not neck too much in her father’s presence. She had a little leg hair, which was brownish and would turn lucent in sunlight. If only we could have stayed outside in the open air.
She had to catch the 12:30 train back to Beijing. She wouldn’t let me buy her lunch, saying she could eat in the dining car, which would be a good way to pass the time on the train. Before leaving, she asked me to forgive her for blowing her top the night before. I was not really bothered by that, I told her. I promised to do a better job in taking care of her father—I would sponge him, brush his teeth, and rub his sore with cotton balls soaked with alcohol or peroxide. I would do those every day. Also, I’d bathe his feet and clip his nails regularly, and make sure he didn’t get bedsores.
I couldn’t go to the train station to see her off, so she left alone.
In the spring of 1987, three months before I met Meimei, a Hong Kong trade company had come to Shanning University to recruit employees. They wanted only graduate students who knew both English and Chinese well, and they gave the applicants written tests in both languages. Dozens of people applied for the jobs, which paid at least ten times more than a regular college graduate could earn in mainland China. I took the tests and somehow came out second, probably because my English was better than the others’. So the company was eager to hire me. The head of the recruiting group talked to me twice, promising me subsidies for housing and even for my future children’s education; he also mentioned I’d receive a generous bonus at the end of every year. Most people here coveted this opportunity. After hearing of my test results, Banping congratulated me, saying he wished he had studied English devotedly. He hadn’t even attempted the tests. Yet I was unsure whether I should go to Hong Kong. I asked Weiya, who couldn’t say for certain either; she too thought this was a rare opportunity, though she believed I was not cut out to be a businessman. Numerous faculty members said to me in private that I shouldn’t hesitate to grab the offer. One of them whispered to me, “Don’t just have a one-track mind, Jian. Whatever we do, teaching or writing, in essence we all struggle to make a living. That job pays so well that you’ll become a millionaire eventually.”
Yet the more I heard from others, the more uncertain I became. I dared not seek Mr. Yang’s advice, fearing he might scold me. I knew he disliked the idea of my going into business.
One late afternoon, as I was leaving the classroom building, my teacher caught sight of me and called to me. I froze in my tracks at the side door.
Coming up to me, he said, “Going home?”
“Yes,” I answered, then together we resumed walking. Silently we strolled toward the street outside the campus. On the dusty playing field some undergraduates were chasing a soccer ball and two stout women were practicing the shot put. A group of students in sweat suits were drawing lines for a sports meet, dribbling liquid whitewash from kettles to the ground on the outskirts of the field.
Mr. Yang said to me, “I’ve heard you want to go to Hong Kong to become a businessman.” His tone was rather sardonic.
Disconcerted, I replied, “They are interested in me, but I haven’t decided yet.”
“Do you think you’re good at handling imports and exports?” His voice turned serious.
“I don’t know.”
“Can you dispense with the study of poetry? Maybe you can, and I have been wrong about you.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Honestly I don’t feel like going into business. I love poetry, you know that, but everybody wants to get rich nowadays.”
“Well, you are not everybody.” He slowed down his pace and pointed at a thirtyish man pulling a cart loaded with cinders and garbage, the man’s naked back dripping sweat. “Look at that fellow over there,” Mr. Yang went on. “No matter how much money he has, I bet he will sleep on the street tonight. Even if he makes tens of thousands of yuan someday, he will never become a man who is really rich. He won’t want to stay at a hotel or fly to Shanghai. He was born poor and will remain so.”
“What do you mean?” I mut
tered, uneasy about the superiority he felt over the trash collector.
“If you are determined to study literature, spiritually you must be an aristocrat. Many of us have been poor all our lives, but we are rich in our hearts, content to be a Don Quixote.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that and kept walking silently.
Placing his hand on my shoulder, he added, “Think about this matter carefully, Jian. I won’t make you do anything against your heart, but it’s time for you to choose your way of life.”
It took me a few days’ soul-searching to make up my mind. When I told Mr. Yang about my decision to abandon the lucrative opportunity, he said with his eyes shining, “Jian, I knew you would be clearheaded about this. If you were someone else, I wouldn’t have bothered to talk to you about it. From now on, I’ll make you work harder.”
“I’m looking forward to that.”
I was moved by my own choice, which I regarded as a sacrifice. On the other hand, once the decision was made, I suddenly felt at peace, and even my dinner tasted better. Gradually I could see that Professor Yang treated me differently from the other graduate students; he often assigned books and papers for me to read alone.
Half a year later, his daughter and I got engaged.
8
I apologized to Banping for being late, delayed on the way by traffic.
“That’s all right,” he said.
“How was he this morning?” I asked about Mr. Yang.
“Awful.”
“What happened?”
“He sang a lot of songs.”
“What did he sing?”
“All kinds of stuff, from revolutionary chants to opera snatches.” Banping shook his head, smiling facetiously.
His smile evoked a strange feeling in me, a mixture of sadness and aversion. In my head a voice suddenly said about our teacher, He’∂ be better off if he lost his speech.
Meanwhile Mr. Yang was asleep, his nose making a tremulous sound.
Banping walked out, holding a battered black umbrella and a bulky book, An Omnibus of Spy Stories. He had been writing a detective novel, which I wasn’t sure he’d ever finish. I had noticed that his feather bookmark was moved toward the back of the book about a hundred pages a day. He still could read quite a bit while attending our teacher, whose rigmarole didn’t seem to bother him at all. Today I had with me only a pocket English dictionary. I sat down and began reviewing the word entries I had underlined.
About half an hour later Mr. Yang stirred and muttered something. I tried to ignore him, but couldn’t help glancing at him from time to time. His flabby face, less puffy today, was duck-egg green, and his hair looked shaggy despite the fact that I had washed and combed it the previous afternoon. His lips quivered weirdly. For a moment I couldn’t understand his odd facial expression—the corners of his mouth jerked while he breathed noisily.
Was he crying? He didn’t look so. He must be smiling at someone. I knew that whenever he was in good spirits, his tongue would lick his upper teeth. He had often smiled like this in class. I averted my eyes. As long as he kept everything to himself, I’d go on perusing the dictionary.
But soon he started speaking aloud. I couldn’t help but crane forward listening. He seemed to be reciting something. He definitely looked happy, pinkish patches rising on his face while his lungs labored wheezily. All of a sudden words poured out of his mouth:
Oh glorious stars, oh light infused with
Divine Power, to you I owe all my genius—
Whatever be its worth.
Born with you and hidden with you,
He who is the father of mortal life,
When I first breathed the Tuscan air.
And far away, as I was granted the grace to enter
The high wheeling sphere in which you roll around,
Your very region was assigned to me.
Devoutly my soul sighs to you now
So that it may gain the strength
For the hard journey leading to the final end.
He paused, beaming, but his mouth, its corners twitching, reminded me of a rabbit that had just bitten hot pepper. “You cannot trap my soul, nobody can!” he cried stridently.
What poem is that? I wondered. Its joyful, sonorous tone and its fluid cadence suggested a foreign poem. The heavenly vision was definitely not something that would occur in Chinese poetry. Then I realized it must be a passage from The Divine Comedy.
He recited again:
“You are so close to the ultimate bliss,”
Beatrice began, “that you must purify your passion
And keep your eyes clear and keen.
Before you go further into it,
Look down and see how much of the world
I have spread beneath your feet,
So that your heart, with full joy,
May show itself to the triumphant throng
Who comes rejoicing through the surrounding air.”
He stopped, as if to think about the words voiced by Beatrice, whose name enabled me to locate where Mr. Yang was in The Divine Comedy. He was in Paradiso, because only in that book did Beatrice meet Dante.
As he went on reciting, his face became more relaxed, but his words were disordered and unintelligible at times. I made no effort to follow him. Even if I had understood everything he uttered, I couldn’t have shared Dante’s heavenly vision. I was on earth, in this hellhole, whereas he was led by Beatrice through the divine domain and basked in the chaste love and the celestial light. Perhaps only a deranged person could enjoy such a sublime illusion.
Then I curbed my irreverent thoughts as I remembered what The Divine Comedy meant to Mr. Yang. The poem had once saved his life.
Two years ago, on an early-summer morning, I had gone to his office and found him hunched over his desk reading a well-thumbed book. Stepping closer, I attempted to sneak a look at its title. He realized my intention and raised the book to show me its front cover, which contained a picture of numerous fists, of various sizes, all stabbed upward into the air. It was Inferno. “Have you read Dante?” he asked me in a nasal voice. He had a stuffy nose as a result of a cold.
“No, I haven’t.” Unable to say yes, I was somewhat embarrassed.
“You should read The Divine Comedy. After you finish it, you will look at the world differently.”
So I borrowed all three books of the poem from the library and went through them in two weeks, but I didn’t enjoy the poem and felt the world remained the same. On the other hand, I was horrified by the filth and torture to which the damned are subject in Inferno. When I told Mr. Yang that I had read the poem, he asked me to comment on it. Taken by surprise, I had little to say and just summarized some grisly scenes in hell. My thoughts rambled, and I even talked about the austere woodcut illustrations.
I was making a fool of myself, because he knew those scenes by heart. A copy of Purgatorio was lying on his desk. He must read Dante every day.
“Where are we now?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?”
“Which one of the three worlds described by Dante are we in now? We’re certainly not in paradise, are we?”
Somehow a popular song came to mind, so I quoted its last line with a straight face, “Our life is sweeter than honey.”
He burst out laughing. “You have a sense of humor, Jian. That’s good. Humor can make one detached. I wish I had it.” Then his face went somber again. “We’re neither in paradise nor in hell. We’re stuck in between hell and purgatory, don’t you think?” He smiled enigmatically, chewing his lip.
“Maybe. I’ll think about it,” I mumbled, unable to understand his bizarre notion. I wanted to end our conversation there. There was enough Tang poetry for me to work at, and I had no need for such a huge Christian poem to clutter my mind. I turned my head. On the wall hung a painting Weiya had done for him. In it a tubby, smiley monk was eating a gourd ladle of figs while fanning his naked paunch, on which were stuck a few scraps of fig skin.
Mr. Yang resumed, “This is my favorite poem. It saved my life.”
“How?” My interest revived.
“When the Cultural Revolution broke out, I came under attack as a Demon-Monster because I had translated some foreign poems and once argued that Goethe was a great poet. Sometimes the Revolutionary Rebels on campus planted on my head a dunce hat with my family name written on it. Sometimes they tied a bucket filled with water around my neck to bend my body and keep my head low. Sometimes they made me kneel on a washboard. Even when my knees began bleeding, they wouldn’t allow me to get up. But during the torture I would recite to myself lines from The Divine Comedy. They could hurt me physically, but they could not subdue my soul. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the scenes in Inferno. If they forced me to open my eyes, I’d imagine that the crazed people below and around me were like the blustering evildoers, devils, and monsters cast into hell. They were cruel and desperate because they were hopeless. While reciting The Divine Comedy in my heart, I felt that my suffering was meant to help me enter purgatory. I had hope. Suffering can refine the soul. Beyond purgatory there’s paradise.”
“Are you a Christian?” I blurted out, unable to see why he had taken pains to memorize such a long poem.
“No, I’ve never been truly religious. But at that time, under torture, I often wished I were a Christian so that I could have prayed to God wholeheartedly. Religion is spiritual opium, as Marx has taught us. No doubt about that, yet once in a while human beings need some spiritual narcotics to alleviate pain. The flesh alone cannot sustain us. In any case, this poem helped me, comforted me, encouraged me, tided me over many moments when I thought of ending my life.” With a grimace he lifted his hand and clutched his throat, sticking out his fat tongue. He then picked up the copy of Purgatorio from his desk and waved it at me, as if to convince me of the boundless power the flimsy paperback possessed.
