The Crazed (24 page)
Authors: Ha Jin
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literature Teachers, #Literary, #Cerebrovascular Disease, #Wan; Jian (Fictitious Character), #Cerebrovascular Disease - Patients, #Political Fiction, #Political, #Patients, #Psychological, #Politicians, #Yang (Fictitious Character), #Graduate Students, #Teachers, #China, #Teacher-Student Relationships, #College Teachers, #Psychological Fiction
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
eISBN: 978-0-307-42835-6
v3.0