Fortress Besieged

by Qian Zhongshu

  Puzzled, Hung-chien asked quickly, “Aren’t you feeling well, Mr. Chang?”

  Mr. Chang looked at Hung-chien in astonishment and said, “Who’s not feeling well? You? Me? Why, I feel fine!”

  “Didn’t you say you had a headache?” asked Hung-chien.

  Mr. Chang roared with laughter. At the same time he instructed the maid who entered, “Go and tell my wife and daughter the guest is here. Ask them to come out. Make it snappy!” At this he snapped his fingers. Turning to Hung-chien, he said with a laugh, “‘Headache’ is an American expression for ‘wife,’ not ‘pain in head!’ I guess you haven’t been to the States!”

  Just as Fang Hung-chien was feeling ashamed of his ignorance, Mrs. Chang and Miss Chang came out. Mr. Chang introduced them to Hung-chien. Mrs. Chang was a portly woman of forty or more with the dainty little foreign name of “Tessie.” Miss Chang was a tall girl of eighteen with a fresh complexion, trim-fitting clothes, and a figure which promised to be just as ample as the capital in her father’s foreign company. Hung-chien did not quite catch her name. It sounded like Wo-Ni-Ta (I-You-He). He guessed that it was either “Anita” or “Juanita.” Her parents called her “Nita” for short. Mrs. Chang spoke Shanghainese better than her husband, but her native accent often showed through like an undersized jacket that doesn’t cover up the gown underneath. Mrs. Chang was a Buddhist and said that she recited the “Goddess of Mercy Chant”29 ten times a day to beg the Bodhissattva to protect China’s army in its fight for victory. This chant, she said, was very efficacious. When the fighting in Shanghai was at its worst, Mr. Chang had gone to the export company to work while she stayed at home reciting incantations and, sure enough, Mr. Chang had come through without being hit by any stray bullets.

  Hung-chien thought to himself, Mrs. Chang enjoys the latest gadgets of Western science and yet she still holds to such beliefs, sitting in the living room heated by hot water pipes to recite Buddhist chants. Apparently “Western learning for practical application; Chinese learning as a base’’ was not so hard to implement after all.

  Miss Chang and Hung-chien had little to talk about, so he could only ask her which movies she liked best. Two guests arrived next, both of whom were Mr. Chang’s sworn brothers.30 One of them, Ch’en Shih-p’ing, held a high position in the Euro-American Tobacco Company. Everyone called him Z. B., like the abbreviation in German for the words, “for example,” zum Beispiel. The other, Ting Na-sheng, whose foreign name was not Tennyson, the poet, but Nelson, the admiral, worked in a British steamship company. Mrs. Chang said that since there were enough people for a game of mahjong, why not play eight rounds31 before dinner? Fang Hung-chien was quite an amateur at gambling, and since he had little money with him, didn’t care to join in. He would have preferred to chat with Miss Chang, but unable to withstand Mrs. Chang’s repeated prodding, he finally agreed to play. Contrary to his expectations, by the end of the fourth round, he alone had won over a hundred dollars. He suddenly thought that if his luck held out, there was hope for the fur coat yet. By this time he had completely forgotten the French superstition he had told Mr. Sun on the boat. All he wanted was to win money. At the end of the eighth round, Fang Hung-chien had won nearly three hundred dollars. The three other players, Mrs. Chang, “For Example,” and “Admiral Nelson,” all stood up and got ready to eat without paying a cent or mentioning a word about paying. Hung-chien reminded them with the remark, “How lucky I’ve been today. I’ve never won so much money before.”

  As though waking from a dream, Mrs. Chang said, “Why, how stupid of us! We haven’t settled with Mr. Fang yet. Mr. Ch’en, Mr. Ting, let me pay him, and we can settle it among ourselves later on.” She then opened her purse and handed the notes over to Hung-chien, counting them out one by one.

  They had Western food. “Admiral Nelson,” who was a Christian, rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling and thanked God for bestowing the food before he sat down. Because he had won so much money, Fang Hung-chien was full of talk and banter. After the meal everyone sat about smoking and drinking coffee. He noticed a little bookcase next to the sofa and supposed it contained Miss Chang’s reading material. Besides a big stack of West Wind and Reader’s Digest in the original, there was an unannotated, small-type edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare in the original, the Bible, Interior Decorating, a reprint of The Biography of Madame Curie, Teach Yourself Photography, My Country and My People [by Lin Yutang], and other immortal classics, as well as an anthology of a dozen screen plays, one of which, needless to say, was Gone with the Wind.

  There was one small blue volume with the title in gilt letters on the spine: How to Gain a Husband and Keep Him. Hung-chien could not resist taking it out and skimming through it. He came across a paragraph which read: “You must be sweet and gentle to the man in order to leave a good impression deep in his heart. Girls, never forget always to have a bright smile on your face.” As he read this, the smile transferred itself from the book to his own face. When he looked again at the cover, he noticed the author was a woman and wondered if she were married. She should have written “Mrs. So-and-So,” then the book would have obviously been the voice of experience. At this thought his smile broadened. Raising his head, he suddenly noticed Miss Chang’s gaze on him and hastily replaced the book and wiped the smile from his face.

  “For Example” asked Miss Chang to play the piano, and they all echoed the request in unison. When Miss Chang had finished playing, in order to rectify the misunderstanding which had caused his smile, Hung-chien was first to say “Wonderful,” and called for an encore. He stayed for a while longer, then said goodbye. Halfway home in the rickshaw, he remembered the title of the book and burst out laughing. Husbands are women’s careers. Not having a husband is like being unemployed, so she has to hold tightly to her “rice bowl.”32 Well, I don’t happen to want any woman to take me as her “rice bowl” after reading that book. I’d rather have them scorn me and call me a “rice bucket.”33 Miss Wo-Ni-Ta, we just weren’t meant to “raise the bowl to the eyebrows.”34 I hope some other lucky guy falls in love with you. At this thought Hung-chien stamped his foot and laughed loudly. Pretending the moon in the sky was Miss Chang, he waved goodbye to her. Suspecting he was drunk, the rickshaw puller turned his head and asked him to keep still, for it was hard to pull the rickshaw.

  After all the guests had left, Mrs. Chang said, “That Fang fellow isn’t suitable. He’s too small-minded and values money too highly. He showed his true colors the moment I tested him. He acted as if he were afraid we weren’t going to pay him off. Isn’t that funny?”

  Mr. Chang said, “German goods don’t measure up to American ones. Some doctor! He’s supposed to have studied in England, but he didn’t even understand a lot of the English I spoke. After the first World War, Germany fell behind. All the latest designs of cars, airplanes, typewriters, and cameras are American made. I don’t care for returned students from Europe.”

  “Nita, what do you think of that Fang fellow?” asked Mrs. Chang.

  Miss Chang, who could not forgive Fang Hung-chien for his smile while reading the book, replied simply, “He’s obnoxious! Did you see the way he ate? Does he look like someone who’s ever been abroad! When he drank his soup, he dipped his bread in it! And when he ate the roast chicken, instead of using a fork and knife, he picked a leg up with his fingers! I saw it all with my own eyes. Huh! What kind of manners is that? If Miss Prym, our etiquette teacher, ever saw that, she’d certainly call him a piggy-wiggy!”

  When the affair of marriage with the Changs came to naught, Mrs. Chou was greatly disappointed. But when Fang Hung-chien was young he was brought up on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Tale of the Marshes, Monkey,35 and other such children’s literature that were not in line with basic educational principles for children. He was born too soon to have had the good fortune to take up such fine books as Snow White and Pinocchio. He remembered the famous saying from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, “A wife is like a suit of clothes,
” and of course clothes also meant the same as wife. He now had himself a new fur coat. The loss of a wife or two wasn’t about to worry him.

  3

  PERHAPS BECAUSE so many people had died in the war, the unspent life energy of all those who had died in vain merged into the vital force of spring. The weather that spring was especially beautiful. Stirred by the invigorating spring, men, like infants cutting their teeth, somehow itched painfully from the budding of new life. A boomtown, Shanghai had no scenic spots in which spring might rest its feet. In the parks and lawns the grass and trees were like the wild beasts confined in iron cages at the zoo—restricted and lonely; there simply was no place for spring to release its full splendor. Lodged only in the minds and bodies of men, spring brought an upsurge of illnesses and infections, adulteries, drunken brawlings, and pregnancies. Since the wartime population needed replenishment, pregnancies were a good sign. But according to Mrs. Chou, children born in that year were really the souls of all those who had died prematurely in the war hurrying to be reborn so that they could live out the allotted years of their lives. Consequently, she believed, they wouldn’t live long.

  For the last few days, Fang Hung-chien had been drowsy during the day but wide awake at night. When he woke up at dawn and heard the birds chirping in the trees outside his window, for no reason at all he felt happy, full of inexplicable expectations. Also his heart seemed to have become lighter, giddy, floating, but it was an empty joy. Like the balloon released by a child, it would rise no more than a few feet and then burst into nothing, leaving only an indefinable sense of loss and disappointment. He was restless and eager for action and yet lethargic. He was like willow catkins floating about in the spring breeze, too light and too powerless to fly far. He felt this indecisive and confused state of mind was exactly like the mood evoked in the springtime poetry1 describing the longings of maidens secluded in their chambers.

  Since women themselves no longer bothered with such springtime sentiments and he, a man, was still afflicted with such thoughts, he felt ridiculous. A woman like Miss Pao, for instance, would never have time for springtime longing, but Miss Su? It would be hard to tell, for she seemed to be the model of the traditional beauty of sentiments. He had promised to visit her, and why shouldn’t he visit her once? Although he knew the visit might lead to complications, he also realized that life was too terribly boring and there were so few ready-made girl friends. He was like an insomniac disregarding the ill effects of sleeping pills and thinking only of the immediate relief.

  When Fang Hung-chien arrived at the Sus’ residence, he imagined Miss Su dashing into the living room, full of laughter and noise, and chiding him for not having come sooner. Instead, her doorman served him tea, informing him, “Miss Su will be right out.”

  In the Sus’ garden, the peach, the pear, and the lilac trees were in full bloom. It was only the end of February by the lunar calendar, but the flowers were already in bloom. He wondered what would be left of the spring scene by the time of the Ch’ing Ming Festival in early April. One of the windows in the living room was open, and the fragrance of flowers baked by the sun was thick enough to stuff one’s nose and warm enough to make one drowsy. The fragrance of flowers resembles the odor of garlic and onions: both are scents from plants but smell meaty and not much different from the thick smell of human hair at a summer dance. Among the wall scrolls was a poem by Huang Shan-ku,2 calligraphed by Shen Tzu-p’ei. The first line read, “Flower scent overcomes man, making him wish to break Zen.”3 He was amused by the line, thinking that if a monk had been affected by the fragrance outside the window, the monk had already violated his principle of total concentration and this transgression was similar to a monk’s eating meat. After looking at the scrolls and antiques in the room for more than three times, he was struck by the thought that the foot stroke of Shen Tzu-p’ei’s character for “man” closely resembled the tiny bound foot of an elderly Peking maidservant. The top part of the leg character was stiff and bulky while the bottom part suddenly came to a tiny point and ended. Some foot that was!

  Just then Miss Su appeared. Her faint smile was like an overcast sky on a cold dreary day. As she shook his hand, she said, “I haven’t seen you for a longtime, Mr. Fang. What brought you here today?”

  She shook my hand with such warmth at our parting last year but now grasping her hand is like clutching a cold-blooded shark fin. We were on such good terms when we parted, so why this reserve today? Hung-chien wondered. Like a student who has crammed for an examination but finds he has forgotten everything after a night’s sleep, Hung-chien could only lie, saying that he hadn’t been in town for more than a few days and had made a point of coming to see her. Miss Su courteously thanked him for “honoring her with a visit,” and asked him where he was “making his mark.” He stammered that he had not yet found a job, was thinking of going to the interior, and for the time being was helping out at a bank run by a relative.

  Eyeing him, she asked, “Isn’t the bank run by your father-in-law? Mr. Fang, you are really something! When was the wedding? Here I am, an old classmate from years back, and yet you kept your wedding all to yourself and didn’t breathe a word about it. You were coming home to get married after you got your Ph.D., weren’t you? That’s really a case of having your name on the golden rolls4 and figured candles in the nuptial chamber—what they call double happiness. I haven’t had the honor of meeting Mrs. Fang.”

  Fang Hung-chien felt so ashamed that he wished he could hide somewhere. Remembering the news item in the Shanghai paper, he said quickly that she must have obtained that information from a newspaper. Roundly cursing the paper, he briefly recounted, in the manner of the Spring and Autumn Chronicles,5 the full story behind his having an adoptive father-in-law and a fake doctorate. By purchasing a fake degree he was thumbing his nose at the world, he said; by accepting an adoptive relative, he was conforming to tradition, he argued. Then he added, “When I saw that item in the paper, first I thought of you, of how you would ridicule and despise me. I even got into a big row with my so-called father-in-law about the whole news release.”

  Her expression gradually changing, Miss Su said, “What for? Why naturally all those insufferable, vulgar businessmen expect a return on their money. You can’t expect them to understand that true learning doesn’t depend on a degree. Why quarrel with him? After all, this Mr. Chou is your elder and he does treat you well enough. He has the right to put the item in the paper. Anyway, who’s going to notice it? Those who do will forget it the moment they turn their backs. You thumb your nose at the big things, yet you take the trivial things so seriously. This contradiction is hilarious!”

  Fang Hung-chien sincerely admired Miss Su for her eloquence. He replied, “When you put it that way, I don’t feel so guilty anymore. I should have come and told you everything earlier. You are so understanding! What you said about my getting hung up on trivialities is especially perceptive. The world’s major issues can always be dealt with in one way or another; it’s the minor issues that can’t be treated carelessly. Take a corrupt official, for instance. He would accept millions in bribes but would never steal a man’s wallet. I suppose I am not consistent enough in my cynicism.”

  Miss Su felt like saying, That’s not true. He doesn’t steal the wallet because it isn’t worth stealing. If there were millions in the wallet and stealing it were as safe as taking bribes, he’d steal it too. But she kept her thoughts to herself, eyeing Hung-chien momentarily; then staring down at the designs on the rug, she said, “It’s a good thing that cynicism of yours doesn’t apply to everything. Otherwise your friends would always be afraid that while you were humoring them on the outside, you were laughing at them inwardly.”

  Hung-chien quickly went out of his way to assure her how much he valued friendship. In their conversation, she revealed that her father had already gone to Szechwan with the government,6 that her brother had gone to work in Hong Kong, that her mother, her sister-in-law, and she herself were the only ones
at home in Shanghai, and that she was thinking of going to the interior. Fang Hung-chien said perhaps they could again be travel companions going to the interior. Then she mentioned she had a cousin who had finished her first two years of college at their alma mater in Peking, and that since the university had moved to the interior because of the war, her cousin had quit school and stayed home for six months but was planning to resume her study again. It so happened that the cousin was at the Sus’ that day, so Miss Su went in to get her to meet Hung-chien. They all could become travel companions in the future.

  Miss Su led out a cute little girl of about twenty and introduced her to Fang, “This is my cousin, T’ang Hsiao-fu.” On Miss T’ang’s charming, well-proportioned, round face were two shallow dimples; one look at her fresh and natural complexion, which most girls would have had to spend time and money to imitate, was enough to make one drool and forget his thirst, as though her skin were a piece of delicious fruit. Not especially large, her eyes were lively and gentle, making the big eyes of many women seem like the big talk of politicians—big and useless. A classics scholar, upon seeing her lovely teeth when she smiled, might wonder why both Chinese and Western traditional and modern poets would want to turn into the pin in a woman’s hair, the belt around her waist, the mat on which she slept, or even the shoes and socks, that she wore, and not think of transforming themselves into her toothbrush. Her hair unwaved, her eyebrows unplucked, and her lips unadorned by lipstick, she appeared to allow nature to take its own course with regard to her looks and had no wish to amend it in any way. In short, she was one of those rarities of modern civilized society—a genuine girl. Many city girls who put on all the precocious airs cannot be considered as girls; then there are just as many others who are confused, silly, and sexless, and they too don’t deserve to be called women. Fang Hung-chien immediately wanted to impress her, while she called him “elder senior schoolmate,” a respectful term of address.