by Ha Jin
My thoughts turned to Secretary Peng. Why had she moved so swiftly to have me arrested? There were many more important “counterrevolutionaries” in this city; why would the police come for me in such a hurry? It flashed through my mind that Ying Peng must have been determined to get rid of me once and for all, and that she wanted to do this mainly for personal reasons. Although Vice Principal Huang’s son was carrying on with Meimei, there was still a slight possibility that someday I might go to Beijing and rekindle the old flame in her heart. She couldn’t leave for France with that man, who was going to the Sorbonne in the fall just for a year or two. Even if he decided to stay abroad afterward, legally she wouldn’t be allowed to join him until he married her and made the amount of francs required for getting the visa for her. In other words, there would be a period of physical separation between them, so I would have time to step in to reclaim my fiancée. Ying Peng must have been aware of that possibility and knew I was in high dudgeon against her, so she had resolved to root me out now to forestall the trouble down the road. Probably Vice Principal Huang was involved in this scheme too.
This realization made me see how essential personal motives were in political activities. Just as I rushed to Beijing to demonstrate my bravado to Meimei, in the name of revolution people acted on the basis of all kinds of personal interests and reasons. But our history books on the Communist revolution have always left out individuals’ motives. I remembered that when talking about why they joined the Red Army or the Communist Party, older revolutionaries had often said it was because they had wanted to escape an arranged marriage or to avoid debts or just to have enough food and clothes. It’s personal interests that motivate the individual and therefore generate the dynamics of history.
In retrospect, Secretary Peng wasn’t totally wrong about me. I indeed acted like a counterrevolutionary: I aspired not only to show my bravery to Meimei but also, like a free man capable of choice, to dislodge myself from the revolutionary machine. By so doing, I defied a prescribed fate like my teacher’s.
An hour later I arrived at Black Brook. Having little money on me, I couldn’t buy a train ticket for Guangzhou. It occurred to me that the only way to get some cash was to sell my Phoenix bicycle, which was still pretty new. Two years ago I had paid 196 yuan for it, so it was worth at least a hundred now. I walked along the clothing and food stands on the sidewalk of a wide street and asked a few people whether they wanted to buy my bicycle. Nobody was interested.
Finally at a fruit stand I offered it to an old vendor, who looked at it with a curious smirk. Hungry and thirsty, I could hardly take my eyes off the pile of apricots on a trestle table; my mouth was salivating, but I suppressed my craving and focused on selling him my bicycle. Asked again, he shook his gray head and kept waving his palm-leaf fan, though it wasn’t hot at all. Then he gave me a peculiar smile, which seemed to insinuate that he had the cash but suspected the goods were ill-gotten.
I was desperate and pleaded, “Uncle, have pity! My sister is dying in Tianjin and I have to be there as soon as possible. But I don’t have the money for the train fare. Come, take this bike. It’s as sturdy as a mule.”
He chased away a few bluebottles with his fan and shook his bullet-shaped head again.
“You think I’m a thief?” I pressed on.
He squinted at me, waggling his long eyebrows and clattering his carious teeth.
“You really think I’m a thief? Look, I’m a graduate student.” I took my picture ID out of my trouser pocket and showed it to him. “See the big seal here? Absolutely the real thing.”
He looked at the photo, then at me. “Seventy yuan,” he said dryly, and blew his nose onto the ground with his thumb pressing his nostril.
“Plus some apricots,” I responded, having no time to haggle for more.
He grinned, stood up, folded a piece of straw paper into a triangular bag, and put some apricots into it. “Here you are,” he said.
I accepted the fruit. Then he handed me twelve fivers and ten greasy singles. Having given him the bicycle key, I left without delay. In the one-room train station I bought a ticket for Nanjing, where I would switch to an express bound for Guangzhou. I planned to sneak across the border into Hong Kong, though I didn’t know how to do it exactly, unfamiliar with the terrain there. The photo of the woman attacked by a shark, which I had seen in the newspaper in Mr. Yang’s sickroom a month ago, came to mind, but I was not daunted. If need be, I would attempt to swim across the shark-infested water. I was a good swimmer and with luck should be able to make it. From Hong Kong I would go to another country— Canada, or the United States, or Australia, or some place in Southeast Asia where Chinese is widely used.
The train wouldn’t come for two hours. I walked east for about a hundred yards and found a quiet spot behind a stack of used ties. On one of them, a pair of rusted spikes still held a loosened plate. Lifting my eyes, I saw that the sidings and the main tracks all had ties made of concrete now, so these pieces of timber here must have become obsolete. In the distance two sets of shiny rails curved away and disappeared beyond a patch of young aspens. The air smelled of pungent asphalt oozing from the ties behind me. I sat down on a cinder block and began to eat the apricots, most of which were raw and sour; the only two sweet ones were wormy with deep holes in them. I couldn’t stop sucking my breath. I knew I had been taken in. The old fruit seller must purposely have picked some unsalable apricots for me; otherwise he wouldn’t have given them to me so willingly.
Done with the fruit, I noticed a barbershop at a street corner in the northwest, its signboard displaying a scissors, a hair clipper, and a pot of steaming water. With a black-headed match I burned my student ID, then rose to my feet and went to the shop to get a crew cut. Without my long hair my face would appear narrower, and from now on I would use a different name.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My heartfelt thanks to Judith Grossman, who read an
initial draft of this book and convinced me that it
would become a novel; to LuAnn Walther for her advice
and suggestions; to Lane Zachary for her comments.
I am also grateful to Wallace–Reader’s Digest
Funds for its generous support and to the
Ucross Foundation for a residency.
HA JIN
THE CRAZED
Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of the internationally bestselling novel Waiting, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award; the story collections The Bridegroom, which won the Asian American Literary Award, Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Ocean of Words, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award; the novel In the Pond; and three books of poetry. He lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.
INTERNATIONAL
ALSO BY HA JIN
FICTION
UNDER THE RED FLAG
OCEAN OF WORDS
IN THE POND
WAITING
THE BRIDEGROOM
POETRY
BETWEEN SILENCES
FACING SHADOWS
WRECKAGE
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 2004
Copyright © 2002 by Ha Jin
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Jin, Ha, 1956–
The crazed / Ha Jin.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Teacher-student relationships—Fiction. 2. Cerebrovascular disease—
Patients—Fiction. 3. Literature teachers—Fiction. 4. Graduate
students—Fiction. 5. College teachers—Fiction. 6. China—
Fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. 8. Political fiction.
I. Title.
PS3560.I6 C73 2002
813’.54—dc21
2002022427
www.vintagebooks.com
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42835-6
v3.0
