“In other words, someone as intelligent as Mr. Fang would prefer a stupid, illiterate woman.”
“Woman has an intelligence all her own, and it is as nimble and lively as her person. Compared to that kind of intelligence, talent and scholarship are sediments. To say a woman is talented and scholarly is like praising a flower for balancing on the scale with a cabbage or potato—utterly pointless. A truly intelligent woman would never try to become a genius. She’d just find clever ways to loaf around.”
“What if she wanted to get a Ph.D.?” she asked with a smile.
“She’d never think of getting one in the first place. It’s only women with talents like your cousin who want a Ph.D.”
“But nowadays even to graduate from a run-of-the-mill university, you have to write a thesis.”
“Then the year she is to graduate, there’d be a change in the world situation. The school would hold its commencement exercise early, and they’d let her graduate without requiring a thesis.”
She shook her head in disbelief and dropped the subject. They quickly exhausted their topics of conversation, for pleasantries bear no repetition once they have been spoken. Though the words that lovers speak to each other are inexhaustible, Fang Hung-chien and Miss T’ang were not lovers. He felt that every subject that could be safely mentioned had been spoken, and he could not say any more if he were not to step beyond the bounds of propriety. Noticing his silence, she said with a smile, “Why don’t you say something?”
Responding with a smile, he said, “Well, why don’t you?”
She told him that in the courtyard of her country home were two cinnamon trees, each over a hundred years old. When she was little she often noticed that a whole flock of noisy sparrows in the trees would suddenly fall silent; then after a brief pause just as suddenly they would start up all at once. And she commented that it was the same way with human conversation.
On his way home Fang Hung-chien mentally drafted the letter to Miss Su, convinced that it would be more appropriate to write it in the classical style, since its ambiguity contained a terseness that would make it an excellent tool for glossing over or playing down an error.
After dinner he wrote a rough sketch, amazed at his greatly increased ability to write the untruth. Worried that the joke might have gotten out of hand, he lay down his brush halfway through the letter; but when he thought how Miss T’ang would appreciate and understand the letter and how the lies would bring smiles to her lips, he continued on happily. The letter read as follows:
Yesterday when you showed me the poem on the fan, I was vexed at seeing that such a beautiful piece of writing had been composed by none other than a vulgar common official. In my surprise and resentment, I made the unfair accusation that it must have had a model. Though I derived momentary pleasure, I really felt uneasy. I am beholden to you for your kindness. I deserve a stern rebuke.
At the end of the letter he backdated it to the day before and then added two more lines:
P.S. After writing this letter, I left a whole day and night go by before sending it to you. Suffering such a defeat in front of Mr. Ts’ao was most upsetting. I hated it.
He then put down the day’s date. He read the letter twice again with complete satisfaction. In his imagination, it was not Miss Su but Miss T’ang reading the letter.
The next day when he arrived at the bank, he dropped the letter at the mail section to be delivered to Miss Su by a special messenger. In the evening he went home and had just reached his bedroom when the telephone rang. He reached over and answered it.
“The Chous’ residence. Who’s calling, please?”
He heard a woman say, “Guess who this is.”
Hung-chien said, “It’s Miss Su, isn’t it?”
“Right.” Crisp laughter.
“Miss Su, did you get my letter?”
“Yes, I did. You are childish. I don’t blame you. Don’t I know your temperament?”
“You may be willing to forgive me, but I can’t forgive myself.”
“Oh, is it worth getting so upset about such trivia? Tell me, do you really think that poem is good?”
Making every effort not to let the smirk on his face slip into his voice, Hung-chien said, “I just wish such a good poem hadn’t been written by Wang Er-k’ai. It’s too unfair!”
“Let me tell you something. It wasn’t.”
“Then who wrote it?”
“I wrote it just for fun.”
“What? You wrote it? Well, I’ll be damned!”
He was thankful that they were talking by telephone and not by television. Otherwise, the interesting combination of the glee on his face and the alarm in his voice would have certainly made Miss Su suspicious.
“You were entirely justified in saying that the poem had a model. I got the idea from Tirsot’s collection of old French folk dance tunes and felt it was fresh and interesting, so I wrote a poem in imitation. According to you, there’s a similar German version. It’s obviously very common.”
“Yours is more lively than the German poem.”
“You mustn’t flatter me. I don’t believe you!”
“That’s not flattery.”
“Are you coming over tomorrow afternoon?”
Hung-chien answered quickly that he was, and since she still hadn’t hung up, he didn’t hang up either.
“Yesterday you said men don’t give their own things to women. What did you mean by that?”
He laughed apologetically and replied, “Because his own things are so lousy, he’s ashamed of them, so all he can do is borrow someone else’s things to offer. For instance, in inviting a lady out for dinner, if his house is too cramped and the cook’s no good, then he has to go to a restaurant and make use of its facilities and cooking.”
Miss Su giggled and said, “OK, you win. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
His head damp with perspiration, he wondered whether it was from nervousness or from his hurried walk home.
That evening Fang Hung-chien copied out a draft of the letter, enclosed a short note with it, and sent it to Miss T’ang. He wished he could have written in English, since the tone of a letter in literary style was so impersonal, while the tone of a letter in colloquial style too easily turned into obnoxious familiarity. Only a letter in English would permit him to write openly, “My dear Miss T’ang,” and “Very truly yours, Fang Hung-chien.” These common terms of address in Western correspondence only sounded offensive and sickening in Chinese. He was well aware that his English was imbued with the spirit of the free speech of the British and the Declaration of Independence of the Americans in not being bound by the rules of grammar. Otherwise, were he really to depend on a foreign language to “dear” Miss T’ang, it would be like a political offender carrying out his activities while hiding in the foreign concessions in China.
In the next month or two he saw Miss T’ang seven or eight times, wrote her a dozen or so letters, and received five or six replies from her. The first time he received a letter from her, he read it once before going to sleep, then put it next to his pillow, and when he awoke in the middle of the night, he turned on the light to read it again. When he had read it through, he switched off the light and settled back down; then mulling over what the letter had said, he couldn’t resist turning on the light again and reading it once more. Later on the letters he wrote gradually became a day-to-day collection of random notes, which he took to the bank with him. Whenever he came across a subject of interest or thought of a phrase, he would pick up his pen and carry on a private, intimate talk with Miss T’ang on paper. Sometimes even when he had nothing to say, he would still want to write something such as, “Today at the bank I drafted several letters and now at last I can catch my breath, stretch, a-a-a-ah! Can you hear my yawn? The waiter came to say lunch is ready. I’ll talk to you later. Maybe you’re having lunch now. May you ‘Eat a bite more and live till 9994,’ or, I still have more to say in this letter I’m about to send you, but as you can see, the page is a
lready full. There’s only this tiny space on the paper and I can barely squeeze in the sentence from my heart, which is still too shy to look you in the face. Oh! The page—”
He always considered letter-writing a small comfort which, while better than nothing at all, couldn’t compare with the joy of meeting her face to face. Then when he did see her, there was so much he couldn’t bring himself to say; he would then think it was still better to have written a letter. However, seeing her soon became an addiction. At first, a date with her could “wonderize” the day before and the day after by virtue of their association. Gradually he wished he could see her every day and even every minute. Once he had written and sent a letter off, he would be forever worrying about it, afraid that when it, like a flaring arrow, reached its destination, it would be nothing but dead ashes by the time she received it.
Miss Su and Miss T’ang saw less of each other than before, but Fang Hung-chien, caught between Miss Su’s alternating threats and kindness, had no choice but to go to the Sus often. Waiting for him to make his formal declaration of love, Miss Su inwardly faulted him for being so frivolous and tardy; he, on the other hand, was waiting for a chance to explain that he did not love her, and wished he weren’t so tenderhearted and could be courageous enough to cut the Gordian knot. Every time he went to the Sus, he came away reproaching himself for having gone one more time and talked so much again. He gradually realized that he was what Westerners called a “moral weakling,” and was worried that Miss T’ang would detect this major flaw in his character.
One Saturday afternoon after returning home from having tea with Miss T’ang, he saw on the table an invitation from Chao Hsin-mei for dinner the next day and was struck with the horrible thought that this might be Hsin-mei’s engagement party. That would be disastrous. Miss Su would start concentrating her affections on him all the more. Miss Su called to ask if he had received the card or not and Hsin-mei had asked her to invite him; moreover, she told him to see her the next morning.
The next day Miss Su said that Hsin-mei had insisted that he come, as a chance for everyone to get together. At first he was going to ask why Hsin-mei had invited him, but the words shrank away from the tip of his tongue. Not wishing to mention Hsin-mei’s antagonism toward him any more for fear of deepening Miss Su’s misunderstanding of him, he asked instead if any others were invited. She said two of Hsin-mei’s friends had also been invited.
“Is that little fatso and big poet Ts’ao Yüan-lang included? If he is, they can save on the food. Just looking at that meatball face of his will make people feel full,” he said.
“Probably not. Hsin-mei doesn’t know him. I know how petty both you and Hsin-mei are. Hsin-mei would start quarreling the moment he saw Yüan-lang. Well, my place here is not a battlefield, and I am not going to let the two of them meet. Yüan-lang is a very interesting fellow. You’re so biased; I think your heart must be way over in your armpit. Since that time, I haven’t let you and Yüan-lang meet so as to avoid any squabble.”
He was going to say, “Actually it makes no difference to me,” but under her doting gaze, he couldn’t say anything. At the same time, he was greatly relieved to learn that Ts’ao Yüan-lang had been added to the list of Miss Su’s worshipers.
“What do you think of Chao Hsin-mei?” she suddenly asked.
“He is more capable than I and has a very dignified bearing. He is sure to be a success in the future. I think he is in fact an ideal—uh—man.”
If God had praised the devil or a socialist had eulogized the petty bourgeoisie, Miss Su could not have been more astonished. She was all set for Hung-chien to ridicule Hsin-mei, whereupon she was going to uphold justice by arguing in Hsin-mei’s defense. She then said with a sniff, “The guest is already praising the host before he’s even had a bite of food! Hsin-mei’s been writing letters to me almost every other day. I needn’t repeat what’s in the letters, but they all say he’s losing sleep. I get so sick of reading them! Who told him to lose sleep? What’s that got to do with me? I am not a doctor!”
She knew perfectly well his losing sleep had quite a bit to do with her without having to ask a doctor’s opinion.
“As the poem from the Book of Odes27 goes, ‘The noble young lady,/ Waking and sleeping he sought her;/ He sought her but could not find her,/ Waking and sleeping he longed for her.’ His letters are a manifestation of genuine Chinese culture,” Hung-chien said with a grin.
Glaring at him, Miss Su said, “Isn’t it a pity he doesn’t have your good fortune! You don’t know how lucky you are. All you do is make fun of people with your wisecracks. I don’t like that about you. Hung-chien, I wish you’d learn to be more kind. I’m really going to get after you about that in the future.”
He became speechless with fright. Miss Su had business to attend to at home, so she agreed to meet him that evening at the restaurant. He went back home and for the rest of the day remained glum and despondent, feeling he could no longer go on as before and must clarify his position to her as soon as possible.
When Hung-chien reached the restaurant, the other two guests were already there. One was hunchbacked with a high forehead, large eyes, and a pale complexion. He was wearing a gold wire-rimmed pince-nez and a Western suit with cuffs covering his fingers. His face smooth, with neither a mustache nor wrinkles, he resembled an infantile old woman or an elderly child. The other guest had a very proud bearing. His nose was straight and high; his profile gave the impression of a ladder propped against his face. The bow tie at his neck was so large and neat that Hung-chien was struck with hopeless admiration. When Hsin-mei saw Hung-chien, he greeted him warmly. During the introductions, Hung-chien learned that the hunchback was the philosopher Ch’u Shen-ming and the other was Tung Hsieh-ch’üan, a former attaché at the Chinese legation in Czechoslovakia. Transferred back to China, Tung had not yet been assigned a new post; he wrote excellent old-style poetry and was a great literary talent.
Ch’u Shen-ming’s original name was Ch’u Chia-pao. After attaining fame he found Chia-pao (literally, family treasure) unsuitable for a philosopher and changed it, following the precedent set by Spinoza, to Shen-ming (literally, careful and clear), taken from the expression “consider carefully and argue clearly.” He was known as a child wonder, though some wondered about his sanity. He had refused to graduate from grade school, high school, or college, for he felt no teacher was good enough to teach or test him. He harbored a special hatred for women, and though extremely nearsighted, he had refused to be fitted for glasses for fear of getting a good look at women’s faces. He always said that man’s nature was composed of a natural humaneness and an animal disposition, and that he himself was all natural disposition. He was an avid reader of foreign philosophical journals, and if he came across the addresses of any world-renowned philosophers, he would write them saying how much he enjoyed their works. He culled his praise of their works from the review sections of philosophy journals and added a word here or deleted a word there and passed everything off as his own opinion.
In the intellectual world, Western philosophers are the biggest whiners; they don’t wield the experts’ authority as scientists nor do they enjoy as much popular fame as men of letters. So, when suddenly from thousands of miles away came a letter of praise, needless to say they were so thrilled that they nearly forgot philosophy. China, as they saw it, was a primitive country, heaven knows how mean and backward, and yet here was a Chinese who wrote with sense. In their replies to Ch’u Shen-ming, they praised him as the founder of a new philosophy of China and even sent him books. If he wrote them again, however, he rarely received any more replies. The reason was that these vain old men would show off his first letter among their colleagues only to find that everyone else had received a similar letter and had been similarly called “the greatest philosopher of modern times.” Inevitably they became angry and disappointed.
With some thirty or forty of these replies, Ch’u Shen-ming had awed innumerable people. One wealthy, talent-loving
official spent ten thousand ounces of gold to send him abroad. The only Western philosopher who did not respond to his letter was Henri Bergson, who dreaded having strangers come pester him and kept his address confidential and his telephone number unlisted. After Ch’u Shen-ming arrived in Europe, Ch’u, in a last-ditch effort, sent a letter to Bergson to make an appointment for a visit, but to his chagrin the letter came back unopened. From then on, he bitterly hated Intuitivism. On the other hand, Bergson’s rival, Bertrand Russell, was willing to humor the Chinese and therefore invited him over for tea. From then on Ch’u studied mathematical logic.
When Ch’u went abroad, for the sake of convenience, he had to wear glasses, and so it happened that his attitude toward women gradually changed. Though he loathed women and could smell them three doors away, he desired them, which was why his nose was so sharp. His mind was filled with them. If he came upon the expression a posteriori in mathematical logic, he would think of “posterior,” and when he came across the mark “X” he would think of a kiss. Luckily he had never made a careful study of Plato’s dialogues with Timaeus; otherwise he would be dazed by every “X” mark. Now he was translating into English a work on the Chinese view of life written by the official who sent him abroad. Every month he drew out a sum of money from the National Bank for living expenses and lived a very leisurely life.
Tung Hsieh-ch’üan’s father, Tung I-sun, was an old scholar who had served as an official for the Republic of China but had not forgotten the former Manchu regime. Hsieh-ch’üan himself was quite gifted and wrote old-style poetry in the same way his father did. A country of active scholar-generals, China is unlike France, which, if it had one or two generals capable of wielding a pen, would want them to be revered at the National Academy. While Hsieh-ch’üan’s military strategems were not too different from those of most scholar-generals, his poetry, even if it hadn’t been the work of a scholar-general, would still have been considered quite good. But writing can reduce one to poverty. He never had much luck as an official, even though this was not necessarily a misfortune for the soldiers. As a military attache, instead of discussing military affairs, he criticized his superiors and peers for their literary incompetence, and for this reason he was transferred back to China. Shortly after his return, he decided to look for another job.
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