by Ha Jin
Early Friday afternoon a group of undergraduates came to visit him. They brought along a box of almond cookies, a small net bag of apricots, and a bunch of golden daisies that they must have picked on the slope east of our school. With the youngsters around him, Mr. Yang changed altogether. He was no longer a crazed patient, but instead returned to his former self—a powerful, wise, fatherly teacher. It was as if there were a switch in his head which he could flip on and off to alternate his personalities. The students put the fruit and the cookies on the cabinet and the flowers into a glass jar on the windowsill.
“How are you, Professor Yang?” two girls asked almost simultaneously.
“Not bad.”
“Do you feel better?” A boy touched the quilt over his legs.
“Of course I’m better. I’ll be back to school in a couple of weeks.” He smiled confidently.
Before he was ill, he had been a kind of guru to some undergraduates, who believed everything he said in class and were simply spellbound by his eloquence, vast learning, and lecturing style. Once after his seminar in traditional aesthetics, a sophomore girl went up to him and gushed, “Professor Yang, every sentence you said is full of truth!” I overheard her and was somewhat embarrassed by her naïveté, but that didn’t bother my teacher, who smiled at her indulgently. He wouldn’t deny that he was an authority on truth.
Look at him now. He conducted himself as if he were in a classroom. He knew every one of these students by name, and talked with them in a voice full of assumed kindness and consideration. Damn it! I cursed mentally. Even with his blasted brain he still can play the game.
He called a delicate girl Small Lili and asked her, “How are you going to prepare for your political test this time? Memorizing the entire textbook again?”
“No,” she said, shaking her bobbed hair. “I have too much to remember this semester.” Her voice invited you to pamper her.
A boy in glasses explained, “We’ve invented a new method of handling the brain-cracking test. Thank goodness this is my last one.”
“Everybody seems to hate the political science class. Why? I don’t understand,” Mr. Yang wondered.
“It’s a waste of time,” said Small Lili. “After every test I still have no idea what I’ve learned in the course, although I always get an A. I understand the words in the textbooks all right, but the ideas simply won’t stay in my head.”
“We prefer literature to politics,” a fat girl chipped in.
The nearsighted boy said, “The teacher of our political science class is really dumb. I doubt whether he believes in the stuff he’s selling us and whether he’s a Marxist himself.” He mimicked the teacher’s squeaky voice. “ ‘Comrades, Marxism is the only compass for our course of action.’ ”
Some of them laughed. A girl nudged a boy aside so that she could get closer to their teacher.
“That’s not a proper attitude,” Mr. Yang criticized. “Human beings have always lived in some kind of political environment, so we ought to study political science, some knowledge of which I believe is necessary and invaluable.”
“We don’t deny that,” the boy said, “but Marxism isn’t everything in political science.”
“Of course not,” Mr. Yang conceded. “Still, Marxism is a powerful theory that can explain social structures and the evolution of human society. When I started reading Engels’s On Feuerbach, I had headaches, but I stuck to it. Believe it or not, little by little I grew to be fond of the book. After that, I went on to study Marx’s and Engels’s works, one after another. I read Manifesto of the Communist Party; On German Ideology; Socialist: Utopian and Scientific; The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State; and the three volumes of Das Kapital. I enjoyed their writings a great deal, but I’m not an out-and-out Marxist. I respect their passionate arguments and their profoundly speculating minds.” Ignoring that these youngsters knew nothing about those titles, he talked without pause and got carried away by his own discourse, just as in his class, where I had often felt that he was addressing a visualized world beyond the reach of the audience. Unlike other experienced teachers, who would modulate their tones and rhythms and pound their points home, Mr. Yang would simply speak with great gusto and without any calculation, as if possessed by a spirit. I had always admired him as a born lecturer, though I was afraid that his voice might interfere with my own teaching. As a matter of fact, one of my students had once said to his classmates that I tried to imitate my teacher. “A cat plays the tiger” was the actual remark. Yes, Professor Yang was their “tiger.” The undergraduates adored him mainly because they couldn’t always understand him.
The bespectacled boy admitted to Mr. Yang, “What you said makes sense, but we’re going to take several tests and have no time to read any of Marx’s books. At most we can only spit out what the teacher has fed us.”
“I know,” Mr. Yang said. “All I’m saying is that Marxism is a powerful theory in social sciences, which you may like or dislike, but you cannot simply dismiss it as charlatanism.”
“I didn’t say that,” protested the boy.
“But you implied that. ‘The stuff he’s selling us,’ what does this phrase mean? See, I caught you, my boy.” He gave a belly laugh.
Everybody cracked up except the nearsighted boy, who grinned, scratching the back of his head.
Arms folded, I stood in a corner and observed them with loathing. Nobody seemed aware of my presence. They prattled on and on, their topics moving from Tang poetry to contemporary fiction, from the cases in German grammar and French verbal inflections to English tenses, from painting to calligraphy, from the food quality to the dormitory conditions at different schools. They also talked about the student demonstrations in Beijing and other cities. Mr. Yang assured them in all seriousness that the government would resolve this crisis reasonably; he advised them not to act like hotheads.
I was amazed that he blended in with them so well, like a leader of a student association. He even looked healthy and happy now.
Why did he need to do this? He didn’t have to pull such a trick. They all knew he had suffered a stroke and wouldn’t have thought ill of him even if he had shown them his true condition. He was just addicted to wearing masks.
Never had he betrayed to me any knowledge of Marxism before, and I hadn’t seen a single volume of Marx’s or Engels’s writings in his home or office. God knew if he had actually read those titles he just now mentioned. I couldn’t imagine him spending months, or even years, poring over Das Kapital. But these undergraduates simply lapped up whatever he gave them. Although Mr. Yang knew German well and could read French, he didn’t know English at all; at most, his knowledge of this alphabet was merely a smattering deduced from his knowledge of the other two European languages; very often when he came across an English sentence in his reading, he’d ask me to translate it for him. How come he had the temerity to talk about the English subjunctive mood and its future perfect tense? Some of these undergraduates had studied this language since middle school, but they were too fascinated by him to question the truthfulness of his words. They loved being duped.
I was sick of him, sick of his chicanery, sick of his nonsense, sick of these ignoramuses, sick of academia, sick of the hospital! I was sick of everything!
At long last the students were ready to leave. They said, “See you soon in class, Professor Yang.”
He smiled and promised, “Sure, see you later.” He even lifted his swollen hand halfway, waving at them slowly.
Passing by, Small Lili turned and locked her eyes on me. I recognized the meaning of her gaze—she envied my good fortune in accompanying their great teacher, their demigod. It was as if just by staying with him in this room I were crowned with an aureole and achieved a sort of apotheosis, attractive to girls despite my unremarkable face.
The door closed, leaving him and me alone. I wondered what he was going to say. I waited patiently for him to explain why he had acted like a fraud.
“Why do
you keep looking at me like that?” he asked without turning his face to me.
I stared at him sullenly.
He broke into tears. He bent down and buried his face partly in the right arm of his hospital gown. He wept almost without noise for a while. Then he moaned, “Oh, how can I get out of this suffocating room, this indestructible cocoon, this absolute coffin? How can I liberate my soul? I don’t want to die like a worm.”
I realized he was referring to the dark rubber-surfaced room he had talked about some time ago. My anger abated a little, but still I felt embittered.
“I want to use my office, I want to teach,” he whimpered timidly.
I made no response. He cried in gasps, “Ah, I know you’re de-disgusted with me. You think I’m an . . . an arch-hypocrite, don’t you?”
I kept silent. He went on, “I feel the same about myself, sick of the sound of my own voice. Oh, how repulsive I am! I’m a worm, a maggot, a coward, and a feckless crook! Why, why should I live? I have wasted my life and others’ lives. Why should I continue like this? Oh, if only I could quit this world!”
His self-hatred shocked me. Still, I wouldn’t speak.
23
Yuman Tan came to see Mr. Yang the next day. He was a bony man with a shock of hair falling over his forehead. His sallow but intelligent face, slightly pitted, had large, whitish eyes that were often bleary as though he was under-slept. Today he wore leather bluchers, a beige shirt, and buff pants held by a belt with a shiny brass buckle. In such a light-colored outfit he looked less skinny, as if he had gained a coating of flesh.
Although to me Weiya deserved a better man than him, from his standpoint she might not be the best choice. There were a good number of unmarried women among the faculty, and I was told that two of them were actively after him. What’s more, he often received letters from female fans of his essays, some of whom even sent him their photos. But in my opinion, his writing tended to be verbose and pretentious. He indulged too much in self-display and overused ah’s and oh’s as if they were punctuation marks; he was so fond of the adverb “very” that it would appear four or five times on a single page; besides, he tried too hard to titillate his readers.
Mr. Yang’s collapse had presented a rare opportunity to Yuman Tan, who in a way was Professor Song’s right-hand man. By now he was fully in charge of the journal Studies in Classical Literature, though Mr. Yang in name remained its editor in chief. After I let him in, I wondered why he had come. Despite respecting Mr. Yang in appearance, he had never been close to him. He sat down, opened his leatherette briefcase, and said, with his eyes shifting between my teacher and me, “Professor Yang, I’m here to see how you’re doing. Do you feel better?”
“No, I’m getting worse,” Mr. Yang snorted without moving his head. His right hand was fingering the elastic waist of his new pajamas.
“Professor Yang, may I report to you on the editorial plan for the next issue of the journal?”
“What journal?”
“The one you’ve been editing.”
“That’s a pamphlet.”
“Okay, whatever you call it. So far we have picked eight papers for the next issue. Two of them are on the regulated verse, one on Ming fiction, one on ancient folk songs, two on—”
“Why are you talking to me about this propaganda stuff? I’m not a clerk anymore.”
Yuman Tan looked confused, then turned to me searchingly. I forced a smile while my forefinger was cranking my temple. “Well,” he answered Mr. Yang, “because you’re the editor in chief, I’m just your assistant, and you have the final say.”
“I quit long ago so that I can take a trip.”
“A trip? Where to?” Yuman Tan closed the briefcase and put it on his lap.
“To Canada.”
“Why Canada? Isn’t it very cold there?” He sucked his breath as if feeling a sensitive tooth.
“No. Every room is heated in Vancouver, warm inside.”
“Doesn’t it snow a lot in winter?”
“Snow can clean the air and purify your spirit.”
“I don’t get it, Professor Yang. Don’t you get laryngitis when it’s cold?”
“This country is a pickle vat and I don’t want to be marinated in this filth anymore. Like the lotus flower, I came out of the mud but will not be soiled by it.”
That made me panic, because Yuman Tan might report Mr. Yang’s twaddle to the leaders. He said unctuously, “You can’t desert us like this, Professor Yang. We need your guidance and leadership. Without you we’d be totally lost.”
“You should leave this place too. In such a pickle vat even a stone can be marinated and lose its original color and begin to stink. You should find a peaceful place that has clean water and fresh air, good for the health of your soul.”
Yuman Tan frowned, but immediately his face softened. He turned to me and said under his breath, “Maybe I shouldn’t bother him with this trifle for the time being.”
I replied, “Yes. He can’t think clearly now.”
“Don’t badmouth me!” Mr. Yang snapped.
“All right,” said Yuman Tan, “Professor Yang, you’re very tired today. We’ll talk about the editorial stuff another time. Take good care of yourself.” He stood up, stepped forward, and patted the back of Mr. Yang’s hand. Then he turned to me and said, “I’d better get going.”
Mr. Yang said crossly, apropos of nothing, “I shall forgive none of you. You all hate me, but I don’t care. I shall leave this mousetrap soon, for good.”
Shocked, Yuman Tan furrowed his forehead, but he didn’t say a word. I followed him out of the room. In the corridor I begged him, “Please don’t take Mr. Yang at his word. He’s beside himself today. You know he loves our country.”
“No doubt about it. Don’t worry.” He put on a smile that showed some smugness.
As he headed toward the stairwell, I wondered why he looked so happy. Was it because my teacher’s wretched condition might assure him that the journal would be in his hands permanently? There seemed more to it than that. What else motivated him to come here? I stood at the broad window and thought about the visit of this crafty man, who appeared younger than his age and quite spirited today.
I craned my neck to look out of the building. Yuman Tan was coming out the front door. Hurriedly descending the concrete steps, he walked away with a bouncing gait. He even skipped briskly as if jumping an invisible rope. A few swallows were darting back and forth in front of him, making tinny squeaks while catching gnats. He waved at the birds, as if inviting them to land on his shoulders. He was more than happy, he was elated. Why?
Then it dawned on me that he had come mainly to find out whether Mr. Yang could recover from the stroke. Now obviously to him my teacher was beyond convalescence. This must be why the little upstart was so ecstatic: Mr. Yang’s permanent absence from the department would create a new quota for a professorship, to which Yuman Tan was very likely to be promoted, since he was on good terms with both the Party secretary and the chairman and had published a good deal. How mysterious life was! The two men used to have nothing to do with each other, but Mr. Yang’s misfortune had produced windfalls for Yuman Tan, who was now editing his journal, busy carrying off his mistress, and might soon rise to the rank of associate professor. Did he know about the affair between Weiya and Mr. Yang? Probably not. It crossed my mind that perhaps Weiya had decided to go with him because she was afraid that the secret might come to light someday, which would make her completely unmarriageable. She had better rush to get a man. Maybe Secretary Peng already knew about the affair; that must be the truth Weiya had withheld from me when she said Ying Peng could hurt her badly.
Then the thought occurred to me that Vice Principal Huang might have known about the affair as well. His words to Mr. Yang—“Let her decide what to do herself, all right?”— now began to make sense. He must have been referring to Weiya. No wonder she feared that she might get kicked out of the university.
Mr. Yang had been reciting
poetry while I was away. When I came back, he was chanting an ancient lyric:
Beyond the curtain the rain drizzles.
Spring is fading.
A satin quilt cannot keep out
The cold of a tattered night.
In dream I have forgotten I’m a guest,
Still indulging in merriment.
Do not lean upon the balustrade alone.
Oh, the boundless rivers and mountains,
How easy it was to leave them,
How hard it is to see them again!
Spring is gone with fallen
Flowers in flowing streams—
A difference like heaven and earth.
“What a sad poem, heartbreakingly sad,” he muttered. “Like the spring, I must be leaving too.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Canada.”
“What will you do there?”
“I shall write a book on Ezra Pound. Have you heard of him?”
“Yes, he translated some of Li Po’s poems.”
“Correct. He also translated Book of Songs in its entirety with little knowledge of Chinese. My friend at UC-Berkeley told me that there were hundreds of mistakes in the translation, so I’m going to write a book entitled Ezra Pound: A Multitude of Fallacies.”
He was ludicrous and again possessed by the academic hysteria that often prompted scholars to trash one another’s books and papers. I asked him, “Why not go to the United States? You may find more material for such a book there.”
“Canada is a larger country, and my soul needs more space.” I kept quiet and wondered why he talked so much about his soul and Canada lately. He used to insist that he was a dialectical materialist who didn’t believe in the soul. Had he changed into an idealist? Or had he become religious at heart? Or had his physical deterioration intensified his awareness of the spiritual life? In any case, he appeared to be struggling to take possession of his soul, yearning for some free, unsullied space, which in his case, absurd as it seems, might be symbolized by Canada.
