by Ha Jin
He was capable, and his boss and coworkers liked him. On occasion I went to the restaurant for a bowl of noodles or fried rice. I rarely ate dinner at that place, which I frequented mainly to see how Mr. Meng was doing. To my discomfort, the waitstaff called him “professor.” He’d been rash to reveal his former identity to his fellow workers, but I said nothing about it. He seemed at ease in spite of washing dishes all day long. He told me he’d been observing the staff wait tables and concluded that he could do it easily. In a month or two he might switch jobs, either working as a waiter at the same place or moving on to another restaurant.
One Sunday afternoon my coworker Ah Min and I went to Panda Terrace for a bowl of wontons. As we were eating, two white girls in their late teens pulled into the parking lot and came over to the front door. Mayling, the barrel-waisted hostess and also a co-owner of the place, went up to them and snapped, “You can’t eat here, no more.”
The girls stopped short in the doorway, one wearing a sky blue sarong and bra, hoop earrings, and mirror sunglasses, while the other was also in a sarong and bra, but a yellow one. They were both chewing gum. “Why? We have money,” the tall one in blue said, smiling spuriously and baring her flawless teeth.
The other girl grinned with her rouged lips, her kohl-rimmed eyes flickering. She said, “We love your eggplant fries. Mmm, yummy! Your dumplings are excellent too.”
“Go away. We don’t serve you,” said Mayling, who tended to speak English haltingly unless she was angry.
“This is America and you can’t throw your customers out, d’you know?” the shorter girl kept on.
“You’re not our customer. You two didn’t pay last time. I follow you to parking lot, and you saw me, but you just drived away.”
“How can you be so sure it was us?”
“Get outta here, thief!”
“Don’t be so nasty, China lady,” the tall one said, smirking while her tongue wiped her bottom lip. “How can you prove we didn’t pay you? You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“Don’t call me dog! Go away!” The hostess flung up her hand, rattling the jade bangles around her wrist.
The girl in yellow put in, “You can’t accuse us like this. See, I have money.” She took out a sheaf of singles and fives and waved them in front of Mayling’s face.
Purple with anger, the hostess warned, “If you don’t leave now, I call police.”
“Oh yeah?” the tall girl shot back. “We’re the ones who can use a cop. You accuse us of theft with no evidence. D’you know what this means in America? It’s called slander, a crime. We can sue you.”
“Yeah, we’re gonna sue your pants off,” added the one in yellow.
Mayling looked confused, but Mr. Meng strolled up to them, his hands clasped behind his back. In an even voice he said to the girls, “Ladies, you mustn’t take advantage of us again. Please leave.”
“God, I’m so hungry! Why can’t we just have a little bite?” persisted the shorter one in yellow.
Mayling roared, “Get the hell outta here, you robber! We don’t want to serve you.”
“How dare you call us that?”
“You are robber. You rob us. What else you are? If you want to eat here again, give us thirty-seven dollars you didn’t pay.”
“C’mon. Like I said, you’re talking to the wrong people.” The tall girl put on a suave smile. “Did you ever see this pair of sunglasses before?”
“No, but I remember your earring.”
“Give me a break. Lots of women wear this type of earrings. You can get these at Macy’s for eighteen bucks.”
Mr. Meng said again, “We have kept a record—your car’s plate number is 895 NTY, right?”
“Yes,” Mayling picked up. “If you don’t go away now, I call Officer Steve again, and you can’t see your mama tonight.”
The girls both gave a gasp. Observing them from where I sat, I wanted to laugh but checked myself. The one in yellow grasped her friend’s elbow and said, “Come, let’s get out of here. This is nuts.”
They both went out, teetering in wedge heels toward their scarlet coupe, their purses flapping. As they were pulling away, both Ah Min and I stood to look at the license plate, which matched the number Mr. Meng had declared.
“Bravo!” my coworker cried.
“Wow, that was extraordinary,” I told my teacher.
Michael Chian, Mayling’s husband, had witnessed the scene, but was unable to put in a word the whole while. Now he kept saying to Mr. Meng, “Amazing. You remembered their plate number, tsk tsk tsk. I can never do that, not even if you beat me to death.”
Later Mr. Meng told me in private that he had just snuck out and looked at the license plate while Mayling and the girls were quarreling. That cracked me up. Indeed, he was a clever man, worldly wise.
His resourcefulness impressed his boss so much that Michael offered him the manager’s position at the new place in upper Manhattan that the Chians were about to open, but Mr. Meng said he was too old for a job like that.
One night in the following week he returned with a copy of Big Apple Journal, a local Chinese-language newspaper, and slapped it on the dining table. “Damn Michael, he blabbed to some reporter about the two shameless girls!”
I looked through the short article, which gave a pretty accurate account of the incident and described Mr. Meng as “Professor Liu.” Lucky for him, he’d been using an alias all along. I put down the paper and said, “It’s no big deal. Nobody can tell you’re the wizard with an elephant’s memory.” I knew he feared that the consulate might pick up his trail.
He said, “You don’t know how long the officials can stretch their tentacles. I’ve heard that this newspaper is financed by the mainland government.”
“Still, it’s unlikely they can connect ‘Professor Liu’ with you.”
“I hope you’re right,” he sighed.
But I was not right. Three days later the phone was ringing when I came back from work. I rushed to pick it up, panting a little. The caller, in a mellifluous voice, said he was Vice Consul Gao in charge of education and cultural exchanges. He wanted me to come over to the consulate. Flabbergasted, I tried to keep a cool head, though my temples were throbbing. I told him, “When I was there last time, I was not allowed to set foot inside the building and someone on your staff even called me a gasbag. I was so mortified I thought I’d never go there again.”
“Comrade Hongfan Wang, I personally invite you this time. Come and see me tomorrow.”
“I’ll have to work.”
“How about the day after tomorrow? That’s Saturday.”
“I’m not sure if I can do that. I’ll have to speak to my boss first. What’s this about, Consul Gao?”
“We would like to know if you have some information on your teacher Fuhua Meng’s whereabouts.”
“What? You mean he disappeared?”
“We just want to know where he is.”
“I don’t have the foggiest idea. The last time I saw him was at Columbia, where we visited Professor Natalie Simon.”
“That we know.”
“Then I have nothing else to report, I’m sorry.”
“Comrade Hongfan Wang, you must level with me, with your motherland.”
“I told you the truth.”
“All right, let me know when you can come.”
I said I’d phone him after speaking to my boss. Hanging up, I couldn’t stop fidgeting. Whenever I had to deal with those officials, I felt helpless. I knew they might view me as an accomplice in Mr. Meng’s case and might give me endless trouble in the future. Perhaps I wouldn’t be able to get my passport renewed.
That night when I told my teacher about the phone call, he didn’t show much emotion. He merely said, “I knew all along they were on my trail. I’m sorry to have dragged you into my trouble, Hongfan. You must be careful from now on.”
“I know they may have put me on their list as well. But they can’t do much to me as long as I live here legally.
What are you going to do?”
“I can’t stay in New York anymore. In fact, I’ve been in touch with a friend of mine in Mississippi. He opened a restaurant there and asked me to go down and work for him.”
“That’s a good idea. You should live in a remote place where the officials can’t find you. At least stay there for a year or two.”
“Yes, I’ll live in complete obscurity, dead to the world. I won’t go to Panda Terrace tomorrow. Can you return my uniform for me and tell Mayling and Michael that I’m no longer here?”
“Well, I shouldn’t do that because they could easily guess I know where you are, and then the consulate might demand a tip from me.”
“Right. Forget about the uniform, then.”
He decided to leave for the South the next day, taking the Greyhound directly to Jackson. I supported his decision.
To my surprise, he pulled his suitcase out of the closet and opened it. He took out a big brown envelope stuffed with paper. “Hongfan,” he said with feeling, “you’re a good young man, one of my best students. Here are some articles on Hemingway I brought out with me. I planned to translate them into English and publish them as a book with a title like Hemingway in China, and to be honest, also as a way to make some money and fame. Now I’m no longer in a position to work on this project, so I’m leaving these papers with you. I’m sure you can make good use of them.”
He was tearful as he placed the envelope in front of me. I put my hand on it but didn’t pull out the contents. I was familiar with most of those articles published in the professional journals over the years and knew they were poorly written and ill-informed. Few of them could be called scholarly papers. Had Mr. Meng rendered them into English, they’d have amounted to an embarrassment to those so-called scholars, some of whom had never read Hemingway in the English, except for the bilingual edition of The Old Man and the Sea. They’d written about his fiction mainly in accordance with reviews and summaries provided by official periodicals. Few of them really understood Hemingway. Before I read The Sun Also Rises in the original, it had never occurred to me that Hemingway was funny, because the wordplay and jokes were lost in translation. I was positive that no publisher in the United States would be interested in bringing these useless articles out in English. It was foolish for Mr. Meng to have conceived such a secretive project and to assume that one could make fortune and fame with it. All the same, I told him, “Thank you very much for trusting me.”
He then handed me a bundle of cash, more than $1,100, and asked me to send it to his wife. I promised to mail her a check in my name.
He sighed and said our paths would cross someday. He stood, then went into the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash before going to bed. The next day would be a long day for both of us.
I’ve never seen him again since, nor do I know where he is now. For two decades I’ve moved from one state to another and never returned to China. Eventually I lost those Hemingway papers. But I remember that it was on the day Mr. Meng left New York that I sat down at night and began my first novel in English.
An English Professor
FINALLY RUSHENG TANG COULD RELAX, having turned in the materials for his tenure evaluation—three large files, one for research, the second for teaching, and the third for service. To get the promotion after being an assistant professor for seven years, he had to be excellent in one of the three areas and very good in the other two. Among the three, research was the most important, though his school was basically a teaching college. He was neither an exceptional teacher nor had he done a lot of service. He’d sat on two departmental committees and each spring helped run the students’ writing contest. In research he didn’t excel either, but he was lucky because a manuscript of his had recently been accepted by the SUNY Press. The monograph would be a slender volume on some divisions between male and female Asian American writers. It was not a substantial piece of scholarship, but the editor at the press had written to assure him that they would bring out the book the next spring—a year from now. Rusheng made a copy of the official letter and included it in his research file. He had already started on a second book, which was about the use of cultural heritages among Asian American authors, and he had even placed the first chapter of this project with a journal. Some of his tenured colleagues, especially the few who had begun teaching three decades before, had never published a book, and so Rusheng felt he was was in decent shape—his case should be solid.
He went to Whitney Hall, where he was teaching his immigrant literature course this semester. On this day, a Thursday, the class was discussing America Is in the Heart, by Carlos Bulosan. Rusheng spoke at length about the problems involved in choosing the form of fiction or that of nonfiction. Bulosan originally wrote his story as a novel, but the press persuaded him to publish it as a memoir. The same thing happened to other books by Asian American authors—for instance, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. That was why the writer Frank Chin claimed: “The yellow autobiography is a white racist form.” To what extent can Chin’s assertion be justified? Rusheng asked the class. And what are the fundamental differences between the memoir and the novel? What are the advantages and disadvantages of publishing in either form? The students were stimulated by the questions and even argued with one another.
A good class was gratifying to Rusheng, but this didn’t happen very often. Most times he felt as frustrated as if he were singing to the deaf. Sometimes he couldn’t help but smirk cynically in class. At the end of the previous semester a student had written in a course evaluation: “Professor Tang seemed to despise us. He often laughed at us when we said something he disliked.” This semester Rusheng had been more careful about his demeanor and refrained from chuckling in front of his class. He understood that a professor was like an entertainer, obliged to make his students feel good, but he had yet to learn how to please them without revealing his effort. However, he was pretty sure that his course evaluations would be better this time around. That would demonstrate to the senior faculty that he’d been making progress in teaching.
After the class, nobody showed up during his office hours, so he left work at four p.m. On his way to the subway station he ran into Nikki, a popular teacher and an advocate for his promotion in the department; a tall black woman, she always wore a checkered headscarf and gemstone earrings at work and spoke and laughed in a hearty voice. Rusheng told her that he had just submitted his materials.
“Wow, you’re quick,” Nikki said. “If I were you, I would’ve waited until the last day. But it doesn’t matter, I guess. Did you go over everything a couple of times before you handed them in?”
“I did.”
“No typos, no inconsistencies?” she asked half jokingly. Two dimples appeared on her cheeks.
“I proofread everything.”
“Now you can relax and wait for good news.”
“Thank you for all the help, Nikki.”
Although he assured her that he had carefully reviewed his materials, he felt a little uneasy. He’d gone over the research and the service files three times, but he had proofread the teaching file only once. He hoped there weren’t any typos or slips in it. The deadline was the next Monday, March 31, and Nikki was right about keeping everything in his hands until the very last moment. He should have waited a few extra days. After dinner, Rusheng felt more agitated. While his wife was watching a Japanese show, Under the Same Eaves, he retreated into his study and put on a jazz CD. The tumbling music floated up. He flicked on his computer, accessed his teaching file, and began reviewing it. Everything was fine—the writing was not terribly brisk, but clean and lucid; he should feel confident about it. But coming to the end of the long report, he noticed the phrase “Respectly yours.”
With a sagging heart he pulled one dictionary after another from his bookcase. None of them listed “respectly” as a word. Webster’s gave “respectfully” as the right usage, and so did the American Heritage. How about “respectedly”? he asked himself. Can you put �
��Respectedly yours” at the end of a letter? That must be all right. He vaguely remembered seeing such an expression in a bilingual dictionary—but which one? He couldn’t recall. That must have been the source from which he had inadvertently derived “respectly.” Oh, how silly the error looked on paper!
What to do? Should he inform Nikki of this mistake? No, that would amount to advertising his stupidity and ineptitude. But what if the whole department, not to mention the college tenure committee, saw the blunder? People wouldn’t treat it as a mere typo or slip. It was a glaring solecism that indicated his incompetence in English. If he were in science or sociology or even comparative literature, the consequences of the mistake would have been less dire. But for an English professor, this was unforgivable, regardless of his sophisticated use of various methodologies to analyze a literary text. People would shake their heads and say that an English professor must at least be able to write decent English.
Worse was the thought of what a spiteful colleague might do. Rusheng knew some of the other professors had had misgivings about his ability all along. He spoke English with a heavy accent and didn’t know how to praise a book or an author that he didn’t like. He had once offended Gary Kalbfelt, the Melville expert in the department, by saying Moby-Dick was as clumsy as a deformed whale. Peter Johnson, the chairman, had never liked him, perhaps because Rusheng had been hired when Johnson was on sabbatical. He had expressed his doubts about Rusheng’s adequacy as a teacher at his fourth-year review. Fortunately, Nikki had stuck up for him and convinced their colleagues that he’d been making a name in the field of Asian American literary studies. That was true to some degree, since he had often given talks at conferences. But this time it would be different—Nikki was just an associate professor, not powerful enough to sway full professors in the matter of awarding tenure. Rusheng was worried that Johnson might exploit his mistake to ruin him.
