“Am I good enough to put on airs?” said Miss T’ang. “I keep getting bossed around; is it so strange that I don’t come until summoned? If I refuse to come after being invited, then you can call me self-important.”
Afraid that Miss T’ang might say something about her three telephone calls the day before, Miss Su quickly put her arm around Miss T’ang’s waist and said placatingly, “Look at you. I was joking and you take it so seriously.” She then peeled an orange Hung-chien had brought and shared it with him.
The doorman showed in a perfectly round-faced man, announcing, “Mr. Ts’ao.” Hung-chien gave a start. How did his last year’s shipmate, Mrs. Sun’s child, grow so big already, he wondered, and nearly called Mr. Ts’ao “Brother Sun.” Mrs. Sun’s child and the guest did resemble each other a great deal, and somehow Fang felt that it was inappropriate for a poet to have such a plump face and big ears, as if those features would mean that his poetry couldn’t be any good. Then he suddenly remembered that the T’ang poet Chia Tao18 noted for his poetic leanness, was also round-faced and squat in stature, and he shouldn’t judge Ts’ao Yüan-lang by his appearance. When the introductions and pleasantries were over, Ts’ao Yüan-lang took a redwood-bound copybook from his briefcase and solemnly presented it to Miss Su, saying, “I brought this today especially to ask for your opinion.”
Hung-chien then realized it was not a copybook but a notebook of fine Hsüan calligraphy paper in a deluxe mounting put out by the Jung-pao Printing House.19 Miss Su took the notebook and leafed through it, saying, “Mr. Ts’ao, let me keep it so I can study it. I will return it next week. OK? Hung-chien, you haven’t read Mr. Ts’ao’s work, have you?”
Hung-chien was just thinking what wonderful poetry this must be to be recorded in such a fancy notebook. Reverently he took it from Miss Su; he found standard-type-face characters written very evenly with a brush. The first poem of fourteen lines was entitled “Adulterous Smorgasbord,” with the small number “1” beneath it. After studying the poem carefully, he discovered that the poet’s annotations were on the second page. This “1,” “2,” “3,” “4,” and so on indicated the sequence of the annotations. Note “1” was “Mélange adultère.” The poem read as follows:
The stars of last night tonight stir ripples on the wind swirling into tomorrow night (2).
The full, plump white belly of the pregnant woman is pasted tremblingly to the heavens (3).
When did this fleeing woman who had maintained a chaste widowhood find a husband? (4)
Jug! Jug! (5) In the mud—En ange e il mondo!20 [sic] (6) a nightingale sings (7),
Hung-chien skipped to the last couplet:
The summer evening after the rain is saturated and washed; the earth is fertile and fresh.
The smallest blade of grass joins in the soundless outcry. “Wir sind!” (30)
At the end of the poem the sources of the words and phrases were carefully noted, including excerpts from the poetry of Li I-shan,21 T. S. Eliot, Tristan Corbiere, Leopardi, and Franz Werfel. Hung-chien surmised that the “belly of a pregnant woman” referred to the moon; the “fleeing woman,” to Ch’ang O;22 and the “nightingale in the mud,” to a frog. He did not have the stomach to read any further and put the book down on the tea table, saying, “There’s not one word without a source. It’s almost like what traditional poets call ‘scholar’s poetry.’ Isn’t that style neoclassicism?”
Ts’ao Yüan-lang nodded and repeated “neoclassic” in English. Miss Su asked which poem it was and then she read through “Adulterous Smorgasbord.” When she finished reading it, she exclaimed, “Such a marvelous title. There’s one phrase that’s especially good: ‘the soundless outcry.’ Those words truly capture summer’s bursting, squirming vitality. How wonderful that Mr. Ts’ao was able to express everything so well!”
Upon hearing this, the poet was so delighted that his plump face, as round as the T’ai-chi diagram,23 was flooded with butter. Hung-chien suddenly had the alarming suspicion that Miss Su was either a big idiot or a superb liar.
Miss T’ang also went over the poem and said, “Mr. Ts’ao, you’re too cruel to us unlearned readers. I can’t read any of the foreign words in the poem.”
The poet said, “The style of this poem is such that those who can’t read the foreign words can appreciate it all the more. The title is an assortment, a mixture of different ideas. You just have to note how each person’s poetic phrase is used. Naturally the mixture of foreign words with the Chinese gives it a random, disorganized impression. Miss T’ang, didn’t you get this haphazard, mixed-up feeling?”
Miss T’ang nodded her head in agreement. Like the surface of a pond at the drop of a pebble, Ts’ao Yüan-lang’s face was wreathed in smiles. He said, “Then you’ve grasped the essence of the poem. There’s no need to look for its meaning. If the poem has any meaning, so much the worse for it.”
Miss Su said, “Excuse me, all of you wait here a minute. I will show you something.”
When Miss Su had gone, Hung-chien said, “Mr. Ts’ao, when Miss Su’s second edition of the Eighteen Poets of the Colloquial Style comes out, it’ll certainly include you as the nineteenth.”
Ts’ao Yüan-lang said, “Not a chance. I’m much too different from the other poets; we don’t go together. Miss Su told me yesterday that she wrote that book to get her degree. Actually she doesn’t think much of their poetry.”
“Oh, really?”
“Mr. Fang, have you read her book?”
“I did, but I don’t remember much.” When Miss Su gave him a copy, he had merely flipped through it to see who the eighteen poets were.
“In the preface she quotes a parable by Jules Tellier about a man whose hair was falling out. The man went to get a haircut, but the barber told him he needn’t bother because his hair would all fall out by itself in a few days. For the same reason, most of modern literature is not worth criticizing. That parable is quite apt.”
“I guess I didn’t notice that,” Hung-chien could only say, thinking to himself: Good thing I don’t want to marry Miss Su; otherwise, I’d have to read her book just as carefully. Too bad Chao Hsin-mei’s French is not good enough to read books; otherwise, he could certainly make Miss Su happy the way Ts’ao does now.
Miss T’ang said, “The poets my cousin discusses in her book are like eighteen strands of fallen-out hair; in the future Mr. Ts’ao will be like the single strand of hair that the miser refuses to part with.”24
They all laughed. Miss Su returned to the room carrying a purple sandalwood fan case. Winking at Miss T’ang who smiled and nodded, Miss Su removed the case’s lid, took out a woman’s carved garu-wood folded fan, handed it to Ts’ao and said, “There’s a poem on it. Please read it.”
Yüan-lang opened the fan and read it aloud in the tone of a monk begging alms or an actor reciting the spoken part of opera. Hung-chien couldn’t make out a word, for the chanting of a poem, like a dying man talking in his sleep, was in the native dialect. After reading it aloud, Yüan-lang then read it once more to himself, his lips puttering up and down in the manner of a cat chanting the sutra. Then he exclaimed, “Very good! It’s simple and sincere and has the flavor of an ancient folk song.”
Seemingly bashful, Miss Su said, “How sharp you are, Mr. Ts’ao! Tell the truth. Is the poem any good?”
Fang Hung-chien took the fan from Ts’ao Yüan-lang. As soon as he saw it, he was filled with disgust. On the perfectly good gilt-flecked fan was the following poem written askew with a fountain pen in purple ink:
Surely I’ve not imprisoned you?
Or have you taken possession of me?
You burst into my heart,
Shut the door and turned the key.
The key to the lock was lost
By me, or maybe by you yourself.
Now there’s no way to open the door.
Forever you are locked in my heart.
Below in small characters were: “Autumn, twenty-sixth year of the Republic (1937), an old
work copied for Wen-wan. Wang Er-k’ai.”
This Wang Er-k’ai was a well-known young politician, a middle-level official in Chungking. Miss Su and Miss T’ang meanwhile both looked at Fang Hung-chien, anxiously waiting for his reaction to the poem. He put down the fan and with a wry face said, “The palm of whoever wrote those characters should be spanked. I’ve never seen fountain pen writing on a fan; well, at least, he didn’t write anything in English.”
Hastily Miss Su said, “Never mind the calligraphy. What do you think of the poem?”
Hung-chien said, “Could someone as ambitious as Wang Er-k’ai for high political office write good poetry? I’m not asking him for a job, and there’s no obligation for me to flatter him,” totally unaware that Miss T’ang was frowning and shaking her head at him.
“You are so obnoxious!” fumed Miss Su. “You’re completely prejudiced. You shouldn’t be discussing poetry.” With that she took the fan from him.
Hung-chien said, “All right, all right, let me read it again calmly and objectively.”
Miss Su pouted and said, “I don’t want you to,” but she let him have the fan again.
Suddenly pointing at the poem on the fan, Hung-chien exclaimed, “Oh, terrific! This poem was cribbed.”
Miss Su’s face livid, she said, “Don’t be ridiculous! How could it have been cribbed?”
Miss T’ang opened her eyes wide in amazement.
“At the very least it was borrowed—a foreign loan. Mr. Ts’ao was quite right when he said it had the flavor of an ancient folk song. Remember, Miss Su? We heard the professor talk about this poem in the history of European literature class. It’s a German folk song of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. When I studied German with a tutor before I went to Germany, I came across it again in a beginning reader. It started out, ‘I am yours, you are mine,’ and the rest of the poem went something like, ‘You’ve been shut in my heart. The key is lost, and you can never get out.’ I can’t remember the exact words but I couldn’t be mistaken about the general outline. There could never be such a coincidence.”
Miss Su said, “I don’t remember this poem ever being discussed in the history of European literature class.”
Hung-chien said, “How could you not have? Maybe you didn’t pay close attention in class. You didn’t have to jot down everything the way I did. You can’t be blamed for that. You were attending classes in your own major and your not taking notes just showed how knowledgeable you were. You knew everything the professor said, but I was an auditor from the Chinese literature department; if I didn’t keep my pen busy in the classroom, I’d have been laughed at by you for being so ill prepared for the course that I couldn’t understand the lecture well enough to take notes.”
Miss Su became wordless; Miss T’ang just lowered her head. Ts’ao Yüan-lang guessed that Fang Hung-chien’s knowledge of German was about as good or as bad as his own. Besides, Fang was a Chinese major, so he couldn’t be too brilliant. For in a university, science majors look down on humanities majors, foreign language majors on Chinese majors, Chinese majors on philosophy majors, philosophy majors on sociology majors, and sociology majors in turn on education majors. Since education majors have no one to look down on, they can only despise the professors in their own department.
Immediately Ts’ao Yüan-lang blurted out, “I knew the poem had a model. Didn’t I say it had the flavor of an ancient folk song? But Mr. Fang’s attitude is contrary to the spirit of literary appreciation. You Chinese majors all have the nasty habit or even obsession of textual authentication. If a poem has allusions, it means more to someone who can recognize them; reading it will bring to mind countless others which can set it off in contrast.25 Mr. Fang, if you read T. S. Eliot’s poetry, you’d realize that every phrase in modern Western poetry has its source, but we never accuse those poets of plagiarism. Do we, Miss Su?”
Fang Hung-chien wished he could have said, No wonder your honorable work is such a hodgepodge. You experts don’t find it at all strange, but we laymen feel obliged to report to the police when we have nabbed the thief and recovered the goods. Instead, he merely said with a smile, “Don’t take it too hard. Gifts to women are rarely one’s own; it’s nothing more than borrowing flowers to offer to Buddha. If the donor is an official, you can assume that the gift was fleeced off someone else.” As he spoke he wondered why Miss T’ang was not paying much attention.
Miss Su said, “I don’t like your cutting remarks. So Fang Hung-chien is the only intelligent person in the world.”
Hung-chien stayed a little longer; with no one in the mood for more conversation, he said goodbye and left before anyone else. Miss Su did not try to keep him. After he’d left the house he was vaguely uneasy, aware that his remarks might have offended Miss Su, that Wang Er-k’ai must be one of her worshipers. But remembering he was to visit Miss T’ang the next day, he, in anticipation, forgot everything else.
When Fang Hung-chien arrived at the T’angs the next day, Miss T’ang’s maid told him to wait in Miss T’ang’s study. When Miss T’ang saw him, she said, “Mr. Fang, you made a terrible mistake yesterday. Did you know that?”
Fang Hung-chien reflected for a moment; then he said with a smile, “You mean your cousin is mad at me because I criticized that poem?”
“Do you know who wrote the poem?” She saw his blank uncomprehending look and went on, “It was written by my cousin, not by Wang Er-k’ai.”
“What!” he exclaimed. “Don’t put me on. Didn’t it plainly say on the fan, ‘An old work copied for Wen-wan’?”
“It was Wen-wan’s old work that was copied. Wang Er-k’ai knows my uncle and was Chao Hsin-mei’s boss. He’s married, but last year when my cousin returned from abroad, he was trying to ingratiate himself with her. He made Chao Hsin-mei so angry that Chao lost weight. Usually, when a person is filled with rage, he swells up and gets fat, don’t you think? Later the executive offices of the government all moved to the interior. Anxious to be an official, Wang finally cast my cousin aside and went to the interior, too. This is why Chao Hsin-mei refused to go there. The fan was Wang’s present to my cousin, and he had someone specially carve the design on it. And the poem was my cousin’s favorite piece.”
“That moron, two-bit politician. The inscription on the fan was so ambiguous that it got me in trouble. Damn! What do I do now?”
“What do you do? Luckily, you are a smooth talker. A few sentences should be enough to clear the matter.”
Pleased and humbled by this remark, he said, “It’s such a mess now; I am afraid it won’t be easy to remedy the situation. I’ll go home and write a letter of apology to your cousin immediately.”
“I’d really like to know how you’d write such a letter. Let me learn how and maybe I can use one someday.”
“If it proves very effective, I’ll certainly make a copy of the letter for you. Did they criticize me much after I left yesterday?”
“The poet said all kinds of things, but my cousin didn’t say much. She said your Chinese is very good. So quoting a friend of his, the poet said that nowadays if someone wanted to have good Chinese, he’d have to study foreign literatures. Before, people majoring in Western science had to know foreign languages, and now people in Chinese literature have to be well versed in Western languages first. This friend of his is supposed to be returning from abroad soon, and Ts’ao Yüan-lang wants him to meet my cousin.”
“Oh, another jerk! If he’s a friend of that poet, he couldn’t have much on the ball. You saw that poem of his, something about the ‘smorgasbord and adulterer.’ You can’t tell what it’s all about. And it’s not honest, unpretentious incoherence, but presumptuous, arrogant, and shameless. It insults the reader’s intelligence.”
“I’m too ignorant about such matters; I am not qualified to comment, but it seems to me somebody who has studied at a prestigious university abroad couldn’t be as bad as you say. Maybe that poem of his was meant to be funny.”
“Miss T’ang, studying a
broad today is like passing examinations under the old Manchu system. My father used to say that if a man failed the third-degree examination, no matter how high an official he became, he’d carry that regret around for the rest of his life. It’s not for the broadening of knowledge that one goes abroad but to get rid of that inferiority complex. It’s like having smallpox or measles, or in other words, it’s essential to have them. Once a child has had the smallpox or measles, he can grow up protected, and if he comes in contact with these diseases later on, he has no fear of them. Once we’ve studied abroad, we’ve gotten the inferiority complex out of the system, and our souls become strengthened, and when we do come across such germs as Ph.D.’s or M.A.’s we’ve built up a resistance against them. Once we’ve had smallpox, we can forget about ever having caught it; similarly, someone who’s studied abroad should also forget about ever having gone abroad. People like Ts’ao Yüan-lang can never forget that they have studied abroad; everywhere they go they have to brag about their Oxford or Cambridge backgrounds. They are like those people who have contracted smallpox and got pockmarked and brag about their faces as if they were starred essays.”26
Smiling, Miss T’ang said, “If people heard you say all that, they’d just say you were jealous because their universities are more famous than the one you went to.”
Unable to think of a reply, he gave a silly smile. She was glad that she sometimes caught him speechless. She then said, “Yesterday I wondered why you didn’t know that the poem was my cousin’s. You must have read her poems before.”
“I came to know your cousin on the boat coming home. It’s been a very short time. We’d never even talked before. Remember that day when she said my school nickname was ‘The Thermometer’? I am not interested in new-style poetry, and I don’t think it’s worth getting interested in it just for your cousin’s sake.”
“Hmm, if she found that out—”
“Miss T’ang, listen to me. Your cousin is a very intelligent and talented woman, but how should I put it? An intelligent and talented woman was born to make a stupid man swoon before her. Since he himself has no talent, he looks upon her talent as something mysterious and wonderful, and so he prostrates himself before her in worship the way a penniless pauper idolizes a rich man.”
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