In the Pond

by Ha Jin

Bin nodded expectantly.

  “Your friend Yen Fu is a good talker,” Liu resumed. “He has convinced us that you are a budding genius. You know our plant is not a large unit. Only three hundred people here, it’s too small a pond for a large turtle like you, so we hope you’ll transfer to another place that can offer you a suitable job. We won’t keep you here and let you miss the opportunity to develop your talent. You see, we are always concerned with our young people’s growth.”

  “Yes, when you find a new place that’s willing to accept you, we’ll let you go,” Ma added with a sneer.

  Bin remained wordless, never having thought they would get rid of him like this. So they have me here only to give me a hard time and make me miserable, he reasoned. Damn you, idiots. You two did your calculation on a wrong abacus. I’m not leftovers that nobody will touch.

  As the leaders were smirking and observing his confused face, Bin stood up and said stridently, “All right, I shall try.”

  “You know,” Liu said, “your problem is that you always believe you know exactly how high the sky is and how deep the sea is. You’re a smart jackass.”

  “That’s true,” Ma put in. “You overestimate yourself all the time.”

  Without responding, Bin turned to the door and walked out with his back and neck straight. However, the moment he was out of the office, he felt giddy, overwhelmed by hatred and confusion. He had to hold the iron handrail to descend the stairs.

  Yen visited Bin in the evening. When Bin told him what had happened in the office, Yen was outraged. The leaders’ breach of promise verified Bin’s account of their evil nature and deeds. They would lie to your face. This time they had tricked not only Bin but also Yen himself, to whom Liu and Ma had given their word that they would improve Bin’s standing in the plant and utilize his learning and talent. Now, they were trying to drive him out. What a bunch of hoodlums. How could any decent human being work and live under their leadership? No wonder Bin had a hellish time here.

  After cursing the leaders together for half an hour, they began talking about the matter of a job transfer. What had seemed disastrous at first didn’t look so bad after careful consideration. It was too exhausting to stay in this mad water and fight against those unscrupulous men, with too much of Bin’s energy and time being dissipated. As an artist, he needed peace of mind for artistic creation and development, and needed concentration, especially in his formative years. Everybody knows tranquillity is the soil in which talent grows. But in a place like this, with one trick after another, nobody could live artistically; and just one unhappy incident would ruin a few days, during which any real work was impossible. Bin ought to find a more nurturing place.

  Yen was almost certain some work units would take a man of Bin’s ability. He promised that he would help him look for a job in the county town.

  When Yen was leaving, it was already past eleven; both Shanshan and Meilan had fallen asleep in the bed. Bin walked Yen all the way to East Wind Inn opposite the train station. The air was full of the fragrance of pagoda-tree blossoms, which were shimmering like snow in the moonshine. Somehow even the pulverizer, which always rumbled in the distance at the fertilizer plant, became silent tonight. The railroad track, lit by a string of lights, curved gradually and disappeared into the dark mountain. The town was asleep and peaceful.

  Yen inhaled the intense air and said, “What a beautiful night! Nature is so good.”

  “Only man is not,” added Bin.

  They both laughed. Their laughter was free and gusty in the quiet night.

  Bin said, “God, I haven’t laughed like this for a long time.”

  At the entrance to the inn, an old drunk, a crippled peasant, stopped them and begged for money. Yen gave him a five-fen coin, waving him away. The two friends then said good-bye.

  From the next night on, Bin began to write letters to editors and art cadres who he thought might be interested in hiring him. To be sure, he used a good brush, the new one with sturdy marten’s hair, and made every word look handsome and masculine, every line straight and well measured, and every page evenly distributed with lovely characters. He informed the recipients that he had an urban residence card, which allowed him to live in any city, and that he didn’t expect to have housing and a high salary. His family could stay in Dismount Fort for the time being, and once he settled in the new place, he would try to find housing for them by himself.

  He understood he had to make his way step by step. It would be foolish to appear too expensive in the beginning.

  Seven

  BECAUSE OF HIS BAD MOOD, Bin couldn’t paint or practice calligraphy for two weeks. His brushes seemed to have lost their vigor, drooping in the pot cut from a tin can. The need to find a new work unit grew more and more urgent, and the anxiety became insupportable. Meilan often felt her husband was as tense as a clock wound up every hour.

  Whenever Bin ran into Liu or Ma, they would ask him whether he had found a place yet; with false smiles they would advise him to be flexible, not to demand too much. At a meeting they even announced to the plant that Bin was going to leave of his own choice, which they fully supported.

  One day in early May, Bin received a letter from Gold County’s Cultural Center, which notified him that they would like to “borrow” him from the plant for a year, and they might keep him if everything worked out properly. He would be given an office and a small fund for stationery. The letter also said the center had already written to the Harvest Fertilizer Plant for his file.

  Having read the letter three times, Bin felt his blood circulating again. He had been afraid that the frustration and depression might turn him into a true misanthrope, really worthy of the nickname Man Hater. Now, he realized there were still decent human beings on the earth, and by nature not all men were bad.

  The next afternoon he came across Secretary Liu in the changing room of the bathhouse. Liu, standing on a long bench, was taking off his undershirt; his columnar thighs were clothed in red shorts. Bin, done with bathing, was walking to the door, buttoning his shirt with one hand and holding a basin in the other. Seeing nobody near Liu, he moved close and asked, “Secretary, have you received a letter from the county’s Cultural Center?”

  “Oh yes.” Liu put his hands behind the elastic waist of his silk shorts, about to take them off; but he changed his mind, pulled out his hands, and sat down on the bench.

  “So you’ll let me leave?” Bin asked.

  “Director Ma and I have considered that. Unfortunately, no. It can’t be so easy. We don’t want to ‘lend’ you to anyone. We just wrote them back and insisted that if they really want you, they must take you for good and never send you back. Our plant has a fixed quota of employees. You can’t keep your position here while working for others. We want you to leave for good, so we can use the quota to hire someone else. It’s unfair that you occupy the latrine if you don’t crap.”

  “Damn you!” Bin cursed, tears gathering in his eyes. “You promised to let me go! Why did you change your mind? Why?” He shook the white basin, in which his soapbox and slippers clacked.

  Liu cringed a little. Then seeing two men at the other end of the room, he regained his composure. He said, “It’s true we promised that, but we didn’t say you could leave this way, did we?” He chuckled, resting his left foot on the bench and fondling his big toe.

  Bin realized he had been tricked again. The two leaders meant to make him suffer and enjoyed seeing him miserable. “There’ll be no end between us!” Bin said through his teeth, and stomped out of the bathhouse.

  The leaders had never expected an important place like Gold County’s Cultural Center would be interested in Bin. To some extent, they were scared by the breakthrough in his job search. The official letter stated clearly that Bin might become an art cadre in the future if their quota allowed. How could Liu and Ma let him occupy such an important position? That would be like allowing a caged tiger to return to its native mountain or a poisonous snake to grow wings, turning into
a wild dragon. Once they lost control over him, he would write and paint in any way he pleased and would certainly take revenge on them. Understandably, Liu and Ma changed their minds and were determined to keep Bin in their hands.

  However, the process of job transfer had started and couldn’t be stopped overnight. Within two weeks, a newspaper owned by the Dalian Railroad Company and a magazine of folk arts each sent people to the plant to read Bin’s file and make arrangements for transferring him to their editorial offices. Both Liu and Ma were impressed by the arrivals of these visitors, never having thought Bin was so resourceful. The two propaganda units were each willing to offer him an excellent job, of which neither Liu nor Ma would ever dream for his own children. It was evident that once he became an art cadre, Bin would make them stink beyond the radius of a hundred miles; he was so narrow-minded that he might try to ruin their children as well; therefore, at any cost, they must not let him go. Liu told the visitors, “We are glad that you’d like to take Comrade Shao Bin. We won’t keep him; but you must promise us one thing.”

  “What?”

  “You will never send him back.”

  “Why?”

  “Mental,” Ma said, his forefinger pointing at his temple with the thumb cocked up. One of his eyes was shut as though he were in pain.

  That was enough to scare anyone away. Having heard those words, one pair of the visitors didn’t bother to read Bin’s file and left the plant within ten minutes.

  Bin was informed by the newspaper and the magazine that the plant’s leaders thought him inadequate for the jobs. Outraged as he was, he couldn’t figure out why the leaders had changed their minds.

  When he asked them for an explanation a week later, Ma yawned and told him plainly, “We do want to help you find a decent ‘home,’ but you’re such an important man that we have to get Secretary Yang’s permission to let you go.”

  “Yes,” Liu chimed in. “Secretary Yang wants to keep you here for some special use in the future. He told us to take good care of you.”

  They laughed, seeing that he believed them. Ma sneezed and spat on the floor, though a yellow spittoon sat in a corner of his office.

  As if struck by a calamity, Bin couldn’t control his tears anymore. He rushed out of the office, his heart pounding. Once he was outside, tears flooded his cheeks; he put his palm over his mouth to prevent himself from wailing out. Never had he expected Secretary Yang would interfere with the job transfer.

  If Yang was so determined to keep him in his clutches, it meant Bin would be stuck in this madhouse for good. How he regretted having disrupted the election six months before! Again, without a second thought he had laid a trap for himself.

  That evening he told his wife about Yang’s interference; Meilan was so disappointed that she said it served him right and he had asked for it. Everyone understood the importance of peaceful coexistence, even a first grader knew that, but Bin, a man of almost thirty-two, had purposely provoked a clash with the commune’s Party secretary. Nothing good would come of this. He had set himself on fire.

  Bin didn’t talk back, realizing he had indeed acted too rashly. What a painful lesson. He rapped his chest with his fists now and then.

  The Office of Workers’ Education had been encouraging young employees to take the college entrance exams in June. The previous year nobody in the plant had entered for them, whereas many factories and companies in the county had one or two persons that had passed the exams and got enrolled in a college or a professional school. This was not good for the image of the plant, and therefore Secretary Liu announced at a meeting that the leaders supported whoever would compete in the exams. “We don’t want others to think we are an illiterate tribe,” Liu told the staff and workers. “If any of you would like to try, we’ll give you two weeks to prepare yourself. Our plant will pay you for doing that.”

  Nobody dared try except Bin. When he entered his name for the exams, both the leaders laughed and thought he’d gone berserk again. First, he was overage; no school was accepting a freshman older than twenty-eight. Second, he had only five years’ elementary education; although he was capable of wielding a brush and throwing out a few lines of ancient poetry once in a while, by no means could he handle the systematic exams in mathematics, chemistry, physics, political science, ancient Chinese and literature, and a foreign language — English or Japanese or Russian. So they let him put in his name, provided he wouldn’t withdraw under any circumstances. Bin promised he would not; at all costs he had to leave the plant. The leaders were pleased that he had begun weaving a net for himself again, and they expected to make him a laughingstock.

  Eight

  IN DISMOUNT FORT streets were swept and walls whitewashed. Slogans were posted on tree trunks and electrical poles; paper flowers, red flags, and colorful bunting decorated porches and gates; all the windows facing the streets were washed and wiped clean. The town had just launched a crackdown on flies, mosquitoes, mice, and bedbugs. The air was heavy with the smell of dichlorvos.

  A conference on the use of methane in country households was going to be held here, and several important officials from the provincial capital would be present. Dismount Fort had been chosen to host the conference because Willow Village in the commune had finished constructing methane pits for all its households. For cooking and lighting, the villagers began to use the gas produced from rotten vegetables, grass, and manure. The village was the first one methanized in the province, and it became a model. In Dismount Fort, many brick walls carried slogans in whitewash, such as UTILIZE METHANE, TURN WASTE INTO TREASURE; SAVE ENERGY RESOURCES TO BUILD OUR MOTHERLAND; METHANIZATION IS A GREAT CAUSE; ANSWER THE PARTY’S CALL, BEAUTIFY OUR HOMES.”

  At a preparatory meeting, both Secretary Yang and Chairman Ding Liang of the commune emphasized that hosting the conference was the principal task at the moment and that everybody ought to participate in the preparations. These days the amplifier in the corridor of the dormitory house where the Shaos lived kept announcing Willow Village’s achievement.

  Bin had seen most of the slogans, but he had to remain uninvolved, because he was going to take the college entrance exams in a few days. He noticed that all the big characters on the walls were badly written. They looked shaky, hardly able to stand on their own; only because they were lined up together did the words appear rather neat, keeping each other from falling down. What is more, he didn’t find a single painting or poster in town. What a shame, he said to himself; a commune of over thirty thousand people can’t find a man capable of doing a propaganda poster. For sure the visitors will think there’s no talent here.

  If he had not been busy cramming for the exams, Bin would have gone to the Commune Administration and volunteered to paint a few pieces — to impress that bureaucrat Secretary Yang. But he had to work on math and political economics now. Fortunately, he had just been informed that no foreign language was required in his case, because he had applied for the fine arts; neither would he have to take physics or chemistry. He was to write only three exams: math, Chinese language and literature, and politics. Ten days before, he had mailed a bunch of photographs of his paintings and calligraphy and a list of his publications to three colleges, hoping his work would impress some professors, so that they might treat him as an outstanding applicant. Now he had to concentrate on math. Day and night he was lost in a maze of algebraic equations, logarithms, and trigonometric functions, of which he had never heard before and which made his head throb. Yet he persevered.

  There was no time to review literature, classical Chinese, the history of the Chinese Communist Party, or dialectical materialism. He would have to depend on his general knowledge and common sense to tackle the questions in those areas. If only he could have had a year or two to study them. The more he pored over the math books, the more disappointed he became; from time to time he had to restrain a wild impulse to tear the textbooks to pieces.

  One morning in late June, Bin took the five o’clock train to Gold County, wi
th three fountain pens stuck in his breast pockets and six sodas and twenty hard-boiled eggs in his army satchel. He was to take the exams at a middle school and stay there overnight. On the train he ran into a group of students who were from the Bearing Factory’s middle school in Apple Town and were going to take the entrance exams too. Bin talked with two of the boys and found that their exam location was the same as his. They assured him that he could follow them to the school; this was a relief for Bin, because he didn’t know how to get there. They arrived at the school at eight, just in time.

  First came math, which was disastrous. Most of the problems were simply incomprehensible to Bin, and he had to skip them. Section One, the algebraic calculation, didn’t seem very difficult at first glance, but he was stuck on a complex quadratic equation and simply couldn’t recall the formula that he had just reviewed on the train two hours ago. As a result, he had to leave more than half of this section untouched; then he moved ahead to attack the verbal problems. The first one alone, about the efficiency ratio of a bulldozer and shovels and picks, which initially looked very simple, took him almost an hour. After that, his eyes began aching, yet he compelled himself to do as much as he could. Time and again he looked through the four large sheets — most of the problems were well beyond his knowledge. He was sweating all over and kept murmuring to himself, I shouldn’t be here.

  He looked around. The others were all busy writing. The room was so quiet that he heard their pens rustling. He gazed at the faces on the right and then on the left; the boys and girls were so young; by contrast, he was almost old enough to be their father. It was foolish for him to compete with these fully educated teenagers, to seek humiliation. He felt heartbroken, but he reined in his wandering mind and forced himself to work on another verbal problem.

  The bell rang. Every page of his exam paper remained almost blank, and he felt so embarrassed that he turned the sheets over when handing them back to the teacher. Walking out of the schoolhouse with others who were chattering, comparing notes, and complaining, Bin felt uncertain about even the few problems he had solved. Perhaps he had not given any correct answer. He tried to forget the math and pull himself together for the next exam, though from time to time a miserable feeling overwhelmed him.