Fortress Besieged

by Qian Zhongshu

  “That won’t do,” he protested. “When you call me ‘senior,’ I feel like a prehistoric relic. Why do you add the word ‘elder’? It’s my misfortune to have been born too early. Not being lucky enough to go to school at the same time you did is something I regret. If you call me ‘senior’ again, you’re just deliberately reminding me that I’m old and out of date. That’s too cruel.”

  Miss T’ang said, “Mr. Fang, you are too concerned with insignificant details. Forgive me. I’ll first retract the word ‘elder.’”

  At the same time Miss Su said lightheartedly, “Aren’t you ashamed? Do you still want us to call you Little Fang like they did on the boat? Hsiao-fu, ignore him. If he can’t accept the honor, then simply don’t call him anything.”

  Fang Hung-chien noticed that the trace of a smile lingered on Miss Tang’s face when she was not smiling, like the last few notes that float in the air after the music has ceased. Many women can smile just as sweetly, but their smile is only facial muscle calisthenics, as if a drill master were barking the order, “One!” and suddenly the whole face would be wreathed in smiles, then “Two!” and just as suddenly the smile would vanish, leaving a face as blank as the screen in a movie theater before the movie starts.

  Trying to make conversation, he asked what Miss T’ang’s major at college was. Miss Su, on the other hand, wouldn’t let Miss T’ang tell and insisted that he guess.

  Fang Hung-chien said Miss T’ang’s major was literature, which was wrong; he then said it was education, which was also wrong. When he found chemistry and physics were both wrong, he resorted to one of Chang Chimin’s English expressions: “Search me! Don’t tell me it’s mathematics. That would be too much!”

  Miss T’ang then told him. It was actually quite a common subject—political science.

  Miss Su said, “It’s still too much. In the future she will be our ruler, a lady official.”

  Fang Hung-chien said, “Women are natural political animals. Political tactics, such as saying yes and meaning no, retreating in order to advance, are what they know from birth. For a woman to study political science is really developing the innate through the acquired; it is as superfluous as adding flowers to embroidery. In Europe when I attended Professor Ernest Peygmann’s lectures, he said men have the capacity for creative thought and women for social activity. Thus, men’s work in society should be turned over to women, so that men can seclude themselves at home to think at leisure, invent new science, and produce new art. I think that makes a lot of sense. Women don’t need to study politics, but if present-day politicians want to succeed, they should all imitate women. In politics roles are being reversed.”

  Miss Su said, “You’re just purposely spouting weird ideas. You like that sort of thing.”

  Fang Hung-chien said, “Miss T’ang, your cousin really doesn’t appreciate the respect I’m showing her. I speak of women participating in government, yet she turns around and laughs at me for purposely spouting weird ideas! You be the judge as to who’s right. As the old saying goes, ‘The house must first be put in order before the kingdom can be ruled and the country pacified.’7 How many men, may I ask, can take care of domestic chores? They rely on women to manage the house, yet they go around boasting about how great men will run the country and bring peace. If they can’t be bothered with trivial little domestic chores, then it’s just like building a house by first positioning a roof in midair. There are several advantages in handing over the state and society completely to women. At least it would reduce the chances of war. Maybe diplomacy would become more complicated and there would be more secret treaties, but women’s biological limitation would make them shun war. And even if a war started, since women aren’t as mechanically minded as men, they would probably use simple weapons and apply basic military maneuvers such as pulling out the hair, scratching the face, and pinching the body. In such cases damage would be insignificant. At any rate, the new women today have already balked at raising a lot of children. By that time they’ll be so busy managing the affairs of the state that they’ll have even less time to procreate. With the population down, wars probably won’t even occur.”

  Miss T’ang sensed that Fang Hung-chien was saying all that to attract her attention. Laughing to herself, she said, “I can’t tell whether Mr. Fang is insulting politics or women. At the least, it’s not complimentary.”

  Miss Su said, “Oh, great, you spend all day beating around the bush trying to flatter her and she not only doesn’t appreciate it, she doesn’t even understand it. I suggest you save your breath.”

  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate what he said,” said Miss T’ang. “I am truly grateful that Mr. Fang is willing to show off his eloquence. If I were studying mathematics, I bet he would have some other viewpoints and say that women are natural calculating animals.”

  Miss Su said, “Maybe he would say that if someone like you wanted to study mathematics, he’d stop hating mathematics from then on. Anyway, no matter how you put it or how ridiculous the arguments get, it’s all just talk. I never knew he had such a glib tongue. I guess I found that out on the boat returning home. When we were classmates in college, his face would turn scarlet whenever he saw us co-eds from a distance and get redder the closer he came. It was so red that we’d get hot and uncomfortable all over just looking at his face. We used to call him ‘The Thermometer’ behind his back since his facial coloring indicated his relative distance from girls. It was so much fun. I never would have thought that once he’d gone abroad he’d get so thick-skinned and brazen-faced. Maybe he got his training from running around with girl friends like Miss Pao.”

  “What rubbish!” said Hung-chien nervously. “What’s the point of bringing all that up? You co-eds are really something! You act serious in a person’s presence, but as soon as his back is turned, you tear him apart. You really have no sense of decency!”

  When Miss Su saw how distressed he had become, her displeasure at seeing him show off in front of Miss T’ang completely vanished. She said with a smile, “Look how upset you are! You yourself are probably guilty of fancy talk in front of people while belittling them behind their backs.”

  At that moment a tall, thirtyish, imposing-looking man walked in. While Miss T’ang greeted him as “Mr. Chao,” Miss Su said, “Oh, good, you’re here. I’ll introduce you: Fang Hung-chien, Chao Hsin-mei.”

  Chao Hsin-mei shook hands with Fang Hung-chien, superciliously glancing at him from head to toe as if Hung-chien were a page from a large-type kindergarten reader to be glossed over at one glance. He asked Miss Su, “Didn’t you come home with him on the boat?”

  Hung-chien was dumbfounded. How did this Chao fellow know who he was? Then it suddenly occurred to him that Chao might have seen the item in the Shanghai paper, and the thought made him feel uncomfortable. Chao Hsin-mei looked smug to begin with, and after hearing Miss Su confirm that Hung-chien indeed came home with her on the same ship, he acted as if Hung-chien had turned into thin air and ignored Hung-chien completely. If Miss Su hadn’t bothered to speak to him, Hung-chien would really have felt that he had thinned into nothingness, like a phantom of early dawn upon the cock’s crowing or the Taoist truth, which can be “looked at but not seen, expounded but not grasped.”

  Miss Su explained to Hung-chien that Chao Hsin-mei was a family friend, a returned student from the United States, a former section chief of the foreign office who had not gone with the office to the interior because of illness. She added that he was at the moment a political editor at the Sino-American News Agency. She did not, however, recite Hung-chien’s background for Chao Hsin-mei, as if Chao already knew all about it without being told.

  With a pipe in his mouth, Chao Hsin-mei lounged on the sofa; looking at the ceiling light, he asked, “Where do you work, Mr. Fang?”

  Somewhat annoyed by the question, Fang Hung-chien felt he must answer it. And since the “Golden Touch Bank” didn’t sound impressive, he answered vaguely, “For the time being I’m working at
a small bank.”

  Admiring the smoke ring he had blown, Chao Hsin-mei said, “A great talent gone to waste. Such a pity! Such a pity! What did you study abroad, Mr. Fang?”

  “I didn’t study anything,” said Hung-chien crossly.

  Miss Su said, “Hung-chien, you studied philosophy, didn’t you?”

  Chortling, Chao Hsin-mei said, “In the eyes of those of us engaged in real work, studying philosophy and not studying anything amount to one and the same.”

  “Then you’d better find an eye doctor right away and have your eyes examined. Eyes that see things like that must have something wrong with them,” said Fang Hung-chien, purposely guffawing to cover up his ill feelings.

  Chao Hsin-mei, quite pleased with the wisecrack he had made a moment ago, was for the moment unable to say anything in reply and puffed away furiously on his pipe. On the other hand, Miss Su tried hard not to laugh, though she was a little ill at ease. Miss T’ang, meanwhile, sat with a distant, aloof smile on her face, as if she were watching a fight from the clouds. It suddenly dawned on Hung-chien that Chao’s rudeness toward him had stemmed from jealousy, for Chao had obviously taken him as his love rival. All of a sudden, Miss Su began calling Fang Hung-chien Hung-chien instead of Mr. Fang, as though she wanted Chao Hsin-mei to know her intimacy with Fang. Having two men battle over her must be a woman’s proudest moment, Fang reflected. Well, why should I make myself Chao’s enemy for nothing. Let Chao go ahead and love Miss Su! he decided.

  Unaware of Fang Hung-chien’s intention, Miss Su thoroughly enjoyed the battle of two men over her, but she was worried that the exchange might get too fierce and in a moment separate the victor from the vanquished, leaving only one of the two as the sole survivor and terminating all the excitement around her. She was even more worried that the vanquished might be Fang Hung-chien. She had tried to use Chao Hsin-mei to rouse Fang Hung-chien’s courage, but perhaps Fang Hung-chien, like the war news in the newspapers for the last few days, had been “maintaining the present strength through strategic retreats.”

  Chao Hsin-mei’s and Su Wen-Wan’s fathers had been colleagues and had rented a house in Peking together during the early years of the Republic. Hsin-mei and Miss Su had been friends since childhood. When Mrs. Chao was pregnant with Hsin-mei, everyone thought she would have twins. By the time he was four or five, he was as tall as a seven-or eight-year-old, so that whenever the servant took him on a trolley car, the servant would always have to argue with the conductor over the “no fare required for children under five” rule. Though Hsin-mei’s body was huge, his head, resembling a large turnip with nothing in it, was not. In grade school he was the butt of his classmates’ jokes; for with such a large target, no shot could ever miss the mark. With Miss Su and her brother and sister, he used to play “cops and robbers.” The two girls, Miss Su and her now married older sister, could not run very fast, so when it came their turn to play the “robber,” they insisted on being the “cop.” When Miss Su’s elder brother played the robber, he refused to be caught. Hsin-mei was the only one who would be a good little robber and take a beating. When they played Little Red Riding Hood, he was always the wolf, and when he ate up Miss Su or her sister, he would pick them up and make a strange expression by rounding his eyes and opening his mouth wide. In the part where the woodcutter kills the wolf and cuts open the wolf’s stomach, Miss Su’s brother pressed him into the mud and tried to dig at his stomach. Once Miss Su’s brother did really cut through his clothes with scissors.

  While Hsin-mei was amiable by nature, it didn’t follow that he therefore must have a poor mind. His father believed in physiognomy, so when he was thirteen or fourteen, his father took him to see a famous woman physiognomist who praised him for his “fire planet square, earth shape thick, wood sound high, cow’s eyes, lion’s nose, chessboard piece’s ear, and mouth shaped like the character for ‘four.’” And she said his physiognomy fit the description of a high official according to her Hemp Robe fortunetelling book.8 Moreover, she predicted that he would achieve great fame and high political status surpassing that of his father. From then on Hsin-mei considered himself a statesman.

  When Hsin-mei was little, he had a secret crush on Miss Su. One year when Miss Su was critically ill, he overheard his father say, “Wen-wan is sure to recover. She is destined to be an official’s wife and has twenty-five years of a ‘helpmate’s fortune.’” He henceforth concluded that she would be his wife since the woman physiognomist had predicted he would be an official. When Miss Su returned from abroad, he thought he would renew their childhood friendship and propose to her at an appropriate time. But to his surprise, when Miss Su first came home, every other word she said was Fang Hung-chien, a name which she abruptly dropped after the fifth day. The reason was that she had discovered an old issue of a Shanghai newspaper and her sharp eyes had noticed an item in it that others had overlooked.

  It must be said that her long years of friendship with Hsin-mei did not add up to love, just as in winter no one can add today’s temperature to yesterday’s to come up with a warm spring day for tomorrow. It must also be said that Hsin-mei excelled in making speeches in English; his resonant and fluent American speech, resembling the roll of thunder in the sky, when oiled and waxed, would slip halfway through the sky. Speeches, however, are delivered from a podium, with the speaker looking down at his audience. On the other hand, a marriage proposal has to be made by the person stooping down to half his height and earnestly entreating the other with an uplifted face. And since Miss Su was not his audience, he never had a chance to exercise his talent.

  Though Chao Hsin-mei was jealous of Fang Hung-chien, it was not an it’s-either-you-or-me type of enmity. His haughty rudeness was an imitation of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s attitude toward representatives of small nations during negotiations. He thought he could overwhelm and scare off Hung-chien with the forbidding mannerism of Mussolini or Hitler. But when he encountered a retort from Hung-chien, he could neither pound the table nor roar like the Italian ruler or raise a fist in a shout of authority like the German leader. Fortunately he knew the diplomat’s secret of using a cigarette to create a smoke screen if he found himself temporarily at a loss for words. When Miss Su came to his rescue and asked him about the war, he proceeded to recite from memory the editorial he had just written. Continuing to ignore Fang Hung-chien, he kept up his guard against Fang; his attitude resembled that of a person toward germs when inquiring after the health of someone with a contagious disease.

  Hung-chien was not interested in Hsin-mei’s talk and thought primarily of striking up a conversation with Miss T’ang, but Miss T’ang was listening to Hsin-mei with rapt attention. He prepared to wait for Miss T’ang to leave, then he would get up himself and ask her for her address when they left together.

  Hsin-mei finished analyzing the current war situation, looked at his watch and said, “It’s now almost five o’clock. I’ll run to the newspaper office for a while and then come take you to dinner at the O Mei-ch’un. If you want Szechwanese food, that’s the best Szechwan restaurant. The waiters all know me there. Miss T’ang, you must join us; Mr. Fang, if you are in the mood, why not come join the fun? I’d be glad to have you.”

  Before Miss Su could answer, Miss T’ang and Fang Hung-chien both said it was late and they had to go home. They declined the invitation but thanked Hsin-mei, nonetheless.

  Miss Su said, “Hung-chien, stay a while. There’s something I want to talk to you about. Hsin-mei, my mother and I have a social engagement today, so let’s eat at the restaurant some other day, all right? Tomorrow afternoon at four-thirty, all of you are invited to come here and have tea with Mr. and Mrs. Shen, who’ve just returned from abroad. We can have a good chat.”

  When Chao Hsin-mei saw Miss Su detain Fang Hung-chien, he left in a huff. Fang Hung-chien rose and intended to shake hands with him but had to sit down again. “That Chao Hsin-mei is strange. He acts as if I had offended him in some way. He hates me so much that it shows on h
is face and in his speech.”

  “Don’t you hate him too?” asked Miss T’ang with a sly smile.

  Miss Su blushed and scolded her, “You’re awful.”

  When Fang Hung-chien heard Miss Su’s remark, he dared not deny hating Chao Hsin-mei but merely said, “Miss Su, thanks for inviting me to tea, but I don’t think I will be coming.”

  Before Miss Su could open her mouth, Miss T’ang said, “You can’t do that? It’s all right for the audience not to show up, but you’re one of the principal actors. How can you not come?”

  Miss Su said, “Hsiao-fu! If you utter any more nonsense, I’m not going to pay any attention to you. Both of you must come tomorrow!”

  Miss T’ang left in Miss Su’s car. Hung-chien, face to face with Miss Su, tried his best to say something that would dilute or clear the thick and stifling atmosphere of intimacy. “Your cousin has a sharp tongue. She seems quite intelligent too.”

  “That girl is very capable for her age. She has a slew of boy friends that she fools around with!” Hung-chien’s disappointed look sent a twinge of jealousy through Miss Su’s heart. “Don’t think she’s naive. She is full of schemes! I always thought that a girl just entering college who is already involved in love affairs can’t have much of a future. I mean, how can someone who runs around with boys and leads a wild mixed-up life still have time for study? Don’t you remember our classmates, Huang Pi and Chiang Meng-t’i? Who knows what’s become of them now?”

  Fang Hung-chien quickly said he remembered them. “You were quite popular yourself in those days, but you always looked so arrogant. We could only admire you from a distance. I never dreamed that we would be such good friends today.”