The Crazed (10 page)

After his wife left him, Yuman Tan wept every night for a week. Then he filed for a divorce, which was granted him within five days, so that he could legally go about wife hunting. He soon began to dress foppishly—a three-piece suit, checkered ties, patent leather boots. He even wore a pocket watch with a gilt chain. He bought a Yellow River moped, which was so expensive that only two or three faculty members in our university owned one, and he rode that thing to school every day. On this account some people called him “Little Running Bug.” Rumor had it that his ex-wife had left him a tidy sum as a divorce settlement; this would explain why he had suddenly become rich.

To be fair, to many women he wasn’t a bad match. Dozens of them were introduced to him. One was just nineteen, a technician in a gasworks, healthy and normal and without any family burden. Yuman Tan bragged that he had once seen three women in a single night, though we remarked behind his back that he could meet them each just for a few minutes and only in the presence of their parents or friends, under “special chaperonage.” Unlike most marriage-oriented men, he had a two-bedroom apartment, which enhanced his worth considerably. Many newly married couples, without a place of their own, lived separately in their dormitories or at their parents’ homes. Recently the university Party Committee had promised to give every married couple at least a room, which was an urgent measure to prevent young faculty members from leaving for other schools that would offer them better housing. I couldn’t tell whether Weiya also had Yuman Tan’s apartment on her mind. She might, considering she loved painting and must have longed for a room as a studio, which she had never had in her life. In addition, she wanted a home, which a man without housing could hardly give her. Some of the young women who were interested in Yuman Tan might have been impressed by his lectureship and writing, just as conventionally a man’s learning amounted almost to a virtue, a virtue that would lead to a respectable position and yield more income. Besides his study of philology, Yuman Tan published personal essays regularly in reputable journals, so he had a name.

Yet to my mind, Weiya shouldn’t have degraded herself by being one of his choices. It must have been the she-fox Secretary Peng who had set this trap for her. Weiya was too smart not to see through it, but why would she throw herself into the trap?

Approaching her dormitory building, I broke the silence. “Weiya, Ying Peng just wants to destroy you. Please don’t play into her hands.”

“It’s not so simple,” she said thoughtfully.

“Why plunge into the trap she laid for you? You mustn’t do that.”

She looked at me steadily and said, “You’re a good-hearted man, Jian. Sometimes you’re a bit too emotional, perhaps because you’re not experienced in life yet. Meimei’s lucky to have a man like you who hasn’t lost his innocence. My situation is too complicated for me to explain in detail. Please don’t get involved, or you’ll only be hurt. Forget what I said about love just now. Keep in mind that whatever I did in my life, I’ve always been a virgin in my heart and I will always cherish our friendship. Good night.” She turned and strode away.

I was somewhat bewildered by the sentiment she had expressed, which contradicted the pragmatic way she coped with Yuman Tan’s interest. Why did she think me too green? What did this whole thing have to do with the virginity of her heart? Why was she so reluctant to tell me everything?

To be honest, I felt lucky that she had brushed aside my silly offer of myself as a potential man for her and hadn’t taken me to be a jerk. How foolishly I had acted! If she had accepted my self-recommendation, I’d have found myself in a dilemma—having to choose between her and Meimei, whom I couldn’t imagine jilting. Hotheadedness was my main problem; too often I was ruled by my impulses.

The wind was rising, tugging at the trees and the electric wires. It threatened rain, a peal of thunder rumbling in the northwest, followed by slashes of lightning, so I hastened back to my dormitory.

13

As I was reviewing my notes on political economics, Mr. Yang, sitting on the bed, broke out singing. He sang in a spirited falsetto:

Gallantly we are crossing the Yalu River.
To defend peace and guard our country
Is to protect our hometowns.
The good sons and daughters of China and Korea,
Let us unite closely—to defeat
The vicious American wolves!
To defeat the vicious American wolves!

He bellowed the whole thing out as if he were among a large crowd of people on a platform in a railroad station to see the Chinese People’s Volunteers off to Korea to fight the American army. I wasn’t interested in the song, which had become obsolete long ago. He might just want my attention, but I wouldn’t give him any. Instead, I kept perusing my notes. He seemed frustrated and lapsed into silence.

I had thought of wearing earphones during my shift, but decided not to, afraid of negligence when he really needed me. Besides, once in a while I wanted to listen to him, to glean secrets from his opened mind.

“What are you doing, Jian?” he asked calmly.

“Reading.”

“Good. Have you brought me my books?”

“What books?” I was bewildered, as he hadn’t asked me to bring him anything.

“All those on my bookshelf.”

“Which shelf are you talking about?”

“The one next to my desk.”

“I don’t have the books here.” He was crazy! There were at least a hundred volumes on that shelf in his office.

“Why?” he asked peevishly. “You’re reading, but what am I supposed to do? Sit here idle like a turnip? Go fetch them, please.”

For a moment I didn’t know how to deal with this madness. Dr. Wu, a graying fat-faced man, had instructed Banping and me, “Absolutely no reading material for your teacher.” Even if Mr. Yang were allowed to read, how could I have gone back to get his books while I was on duty here?

“Do you hear me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“For goodness’ sake, go pronto!”

I made no reply, then hit on an idea. “You’re too tired, Mr. Yang. Let me read to you, okay?” I thought I could use some paragraphs from my notes to beguile him.

“No, I want to study my books by myself. A good scholar mustn’t be a sluggard, letting others read to him, just as you can’t ask others to eat for you. Do you un-der-stand?” He stressed every syllable of the last word.

“I do, but I don’t have any of your books here,” I blurted out.

“What!” he cried with a vacant look on his face. “You mean you’ve lost them? Oh heavens, what can I do without my books?” He broke into tears, genuinely aggrieved.

“Professor Yang, please listen—”

“Oh, how can I live without books! I’m utterly bereft. Why, why did you do this to me?” He started sobbing.

How could I pacify him? Even if I found him a book, he might be too addled to make sense of it. I had only a spiral notebook in hand.
Why not appease him with this?
I thought.
No, he could tell it’s a hoax.

Then I saw the copy of Brecht’s
Good Woman of Szechwan
lying on the windowsill. I went to pick it up and put it on his palm. “Here’s your book. See now, I haven’t lost any of them. There’s no reason for you to blow up like this.”

He held the book with both hands, his fingers reddish and swollen, with fungus-infested cuticles. Clumsily he opened the soft cover and narrowed his eyes to look at the frontispiece, a photo of the play being staged by a Beijing troupe. Slowly he turned two pages to the foreword written by himself. “Yes, this is my new book,” he said. “The ink smells so fresh it must have just come from the printer. I like the peculiar fragrance of this book.” He paused to look at the page again, as if trying to locate a passage.

Fearful that he might demand another book and throw another tantrum, I sat stock-still. To my astonishment, he lifted his head and began to speak professorially. “Comrades, today we continue our discussion of high Tang poetry. First, let me read you a representative poem by Bo Wang.” He flipped a page and then chanted:

Serrate walls abut the imperial land.
In smoky wind we watch the ferry crossings.
This parting, my friend, strings us
Together despite our separate roads.

You may reach any end of the earth,
Yet I shall keep you close like a neighbor.
Please don’t stand at this fork
Wetting your kerchief with our children.

“A sad poem, isn’t it?” he asked and let out a sigh. I didn’t answer, wondering why he had picked this piece to begin his lecture with. In fact Bo Wang belongs to the early Tang period; Mr. Yang was mistaken about the date. To me, the poem wasn’t really sad.

“The theme here is friendship,” he announced. “Two scholar-officials appointed to posts in different provinces bid each other farewell outside the ancient city of Chang An. The parting, the spatial separation, can only tie them closer at heart. You see, people in ancient times had more amiable feelings, much more humane than we are. They cherished friendship, brotherhood, and loyalty. They wouldn’t fly at each other’s throats as we do nowadays . . .”

Cheap nostalgia,
I thought.
Yesterday is always better than
today, but who in their right minds can buy this kind of sentimental
stuff?
If he had been in his senses, Mr. Yang would have commented on the poem in more analytical language. Clearly his mind could no longer engage the text penetratingly, and his critical discourse had partly collapsed.

“On the other hand,” he resumed, “the poem isn’t maudlin at all. The lines are robust and simple, just as the emotion is dignified with restraint. Please note that the language has a fine balance between fluidity and poise. The poem differs remarkably from most of the farewell poems written in the high Tang period . . .”

I wondered why he was interested in this poem. He must have been obsessed with the traditional ideal—the union of the official life and the scholarly life. In other words, he might still hanker for the role of a scholar-official. Then it dawned on me that about twenty-five years ago Chairman Mao, in one of his letters to the Secretary of the Albanian Communist Party, Enver Hoxha, had quoted two lines from this very poem—“You may reach any end of the earth, / Yet I shall keep you close like a neighbor.” At that time, Albania was the only socialist country that supported the Chinese Communist Party’s opposition to Nikita Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin. It was China’s only ally in the camp of socialist countries. Chairman Mao cited the ancient lines to praise the friendship between the two Communist parties. His quotation made the poem immensely popular among the revolutionary masses for over a decade. It was even set to music.

“Comrades, you all know Chairman Mao is very fond of this poem,” Mr. Yang declared. “It’s a real gem. If Chairman Mao likes it, we all must love it. We must study it, praise it, memorize it, and use it as our moral compass, because Chairman Mao’s words are the touchstone of truth. Any one of his sentences is worth ten thousand sentences we speak.”

I was sick of him! Why did he suddenly talk like a political parrot? He had lost his sense of poetic judgment and again revealed his sycophantic nature. Many people want the power to rule others; Mr. Yang was no exception. The fact that he was a scholar must have made him all the more eager to become an important official, so that he might utilize his learning, put his ideas into practice, and participate in policy making so as to realize his ambition and ideal; otherwise, all his knowledge would serve no purpose and would just rot away in his head. To some degree, he must still have a feudalistic mind-set.

“Next,” he announced, then broke off with a blank face. He fumbled, “What’s next?” He riffled some pages and shut his eyes, as if making an effort to recall a prepared lecture. “Ah yes, here’s the next poem we should discuss today.” He read from an interleaf:

1
You, who come from heaven
To soothe all sorrow and pain
And fill the doubly wretched
With double consolation.
Oh, I am tired of this pursuit!
What for all the pain and joy?
Come, Sweet Peace,
Oh come into my breast!

2
Over the mountain
It’s so quiet.
In all treetops you hardly
Feel a breeze.
The birds are silent in the wood.
Just wait, soon
You will be silent too.

I was impressed by the poet’s longing for a peaceful ending. Mr. Yang’s voice, full of pathos and choking with emotion, conveyed the inmost feelings of a tormented man. After he finished reciting it, the room seemed to be ringing, as if a voice were still descending from the ceiling. But the poetic mood was dispelled by his casual remark. “That’s beautiful, isn’t it?” He squinted at me, smirking.

“Y-yes,” I faltered, wondering what kind of poetry this was. It sounded foreign, definitely not a Tang poem.

“Do you know who the author is?” he asked me.

“No, I don’t.”

“Goethe, Johann Goethe, the great Tang poet. Do you know who translated it into Chinese?” Again he got mixed up—if it was a translation from the German, how could it be a Tang poem?

“I’ve no clue,” I said.

“Me, I did it myself. It took me a whole week.” His eyes brightened while his brows tilted mischievously. “Do you know who speaks in this poem?”

“Goethe, the poet, of course.”

“No, it’s not Goethe who speaks. The speaker can be anyone.” He lifted his face and began lecturing in his normal way. “Comrades, when we analyze a Western poem, we should bear in mind that the speaker and the poet are rarely identical. The fundamental difference between Chinese poetry and Western poetry lies in the use of the persona. In the Chinese poetic tradition the poet and the poetic speaker are not separate except in some minor genres, such as laments from the boudoir and folk ballads. Ancient Chinese poets mostly speak as themselves in their poems; the sincerity and the trustworthiness of the poetic voice are the essential virtues of their poetry. Chinese poets do not need a persona to alienate themselves from their poetic articulation. By contrast, in Western literature poets often adopt a persona to make their poetry less autobiographical. They believe in artifice more than in sincerity. Therefore, when we read a Western poem, we must not assume that the poet speaks. In general the speaker is fictional, not autobiographical.”

I liked his comments, which seemed to make sense. At least they brought him back to his former self, an eloquent professor. Yet I wasn’t sure if his observation was accurate. Before I could consider it further, he continued: “How did such opposite attitudes toward the use of the persona come into existence? In his paper published in
Poetic Inquiry
three years ago, Professor Beiming Liang argues that this difference should be attributed to the fact that the Western poetic tradition originally had a parallel dramatic tradition, whereas Chinese drama reached its maturity much later than Chinese poetry— in other words, the poetry doesn’t have such a parallel relationship with Chinese drama. Since the persona is essentially a dramatic device, the predilection for it in Western poetry must have originated from the primal connection between the poetic and the dramatic traditions. I agree with Professor Liang in principle. However, I believe we can go further than his theory. To my mind, the difference between the two poetic traditions’ relationships with their respective dramatic traditions may not be the fundamental cause of the opposite attitudes toward the use of the persona. The cause should be explored deeper in the different social orders and cultural structures of the two civilizations.

“The essence of Western culture is the self, whereas the essence of the Chinese culture is the community. But poetry in both cultures has a similar function, that is, to express and preserve the self, though it attains this goal through different ways. In Chinese culture, poetry liberates and sustains the self despite the fact that the self is constantly under the overwhelming pressure of the community. Thus Chinese poets tend to speak as themselves, too earnest to worry about having a characterized voice to conceal their own—they desperately need the genuine self-expression in poetic articulation. In other words, the self is liberated in poetic speech, which is essentially cathartic to the Chinese poet. On the contrary, in Western culture poetry tends to shield and enrich the self, which on the one hand is threatened by other human beings and on the other hand has to communicate with others. Therefore, the persona becomes indispensable if Western poets intend to communicate and commiserate with others without exposing themselves vulnerably. In this sense, the persona as a poetic device functions to multiply the self.”

He fell into silence, as if purposely leaving some time for his words to sink in and for his students to take notes. I was impressed by his thesis, which I felt might be original. But his view was too sweeping and still crude: it would have to be substantiated and thoroughly examined before it could be shared with others. Besides, there were holes in his argument. He ought to have taken into account the Romantics in the West, such as Byron and Keats, who seldom use a persona in their lyric poems. Even Dante often speaks as himself in
The Divine Comedy.
Furthermore, the notion that the concern for the self differentiated Western culture from Chinese culture sounded arbitrary and rather simplistic. For instance, Christianity—the core of Western civilization—cares about God more than about the individual. Perhaps Mr. Yang should focus on the poetry written in one Western language instead of the whole body of Western poetry, which was too colossal for him to tackle.

“Do you know I write poetry too? I have always been a poet at the bottom of my soul.” He didn’t mention my name, but his intimate tone of voice indicated he was talking to me.

“No. You never told me that,” I said.

“You want to listen to one of my poems?”

Before I could answer, he closed the book and began chanting solemnly: