Fortress Besieged

by Qian Zhongshu

“Yes.”

  Hung-chien was filled with suspicions and would really have liked to question Han in detail, but as it was their first meeting, he could not very well pin him down on it. That would only make it look as though he didn’t believe Han. Besides, the man was so sparing with words, he’d never get anything out of him. The best thing would be to take a look at Han’s diploma when he had the chance. Then he’d know for sure whether or not Han’s Carleton University and his own Carleton University were one and the same.

  On his way home Han Hsüeh-yü’s legs felt slightly limp. Lu Tzu-hsiao’s report was quite correct, he thought. This Fang fellow had had dealings with the Irishman. Luckily Fang had never been to America. He wished he knew whether Fang really hadn’t bought a diploma. Fang could be lying.

  Fang Hung-chien found the dinner at the Hans quite satisfactory. Though Han Hsüeh-yü did not say much, he was a thoughtful host. Mrs. Han was very homely with her red hair and freckled face, which looked like flyspecks on a cake, but her manner was so lively that she seemed electrifying. Hung-chien had found from close study that Westerners are ugly in a different way from Chinese: Chinese ugliness seems to be the result of the Creator’s having skimped on time and materials. It is a slapdash, perfunctorily put together ugliness. Westerners’ ugliness seems a mark of the Creator’s spite. He has purposely set out to play jokes with the facial features. The ugliness thus has a plan and a motive behind it.

  Mrs. Han declared repeatedly how much she loved China, but then at the same time she would say that daily life in China was not as convenient as in New York. Hung-chien felt in the end that her accent was not genuine. He himself had never been to America, but if Chao Hsin-mei were there, he could have detected it. Maybe she had immigrated to New York. No one had been so attentive toward him since he came to the school.

  His depression of the last few days gradually disappeared. Why should he care whether Han Hsüeh-yü’s diploma was fake or not? he thought. In any case Han and he were good friends, and that was all that mattered. One thing bothered him, however. When Mrs. Han was talking about New York, Han Hsüeh-yü had signaled her with his eyes, which had not escaped his notice. It was as though he had overheard someone talking about him behind his back. Maybe he was just being oversensitive, and he’d better forget about it. In high spirits, he went straight over to see Hsin-mei.

  “Old Chao, I’m back. Sorry about today—making you eat by yourself.”

  Since Han Hsüeh-yü had not invited him, Hsin-mei had eaten a cold, hard meal of the day by himself. The food he’d eaten soured his stomach, while what he hadn’t eaten soured his thoughts. He said, “So our international VIP is back! Did you have a good dinner? Was it Chinese or Western food? Was the foreign wife a good hostess?”

  “It was Chinese food that their maid cooked. Mrs. Han sure is ugly! You can find such an ugly wife in China, too. Why go abroad to search for such a treasure! Hsin-mei, I wish you’d been there today—”

  “Humph, thanks. Who else was there today? Just you? Well, isn’t that something! Han Hsüeh-yü ignores everyone else all the way from the president down to his own colleagues just to cater to you. Are you a relative of the foreign wife or something?” Hsin-mei couldn’t stop laughing at his own jokes.

  Inwardly pleased with all this, Hung-chien pretended to take umbrage, saying, “So an associate professor is a nobody, is he? Only you big department heads and professors are eligible to make friends with each other, are you? Seriously, Hsin-mei, if you’d been there today, we could have solved the question of Mrs. Han’s nationality. You’re an old America hand. If you’d heard her speak and put a few questions to her, then the truth would have been out.”

  Though Hsin-mei found these remarks very agreeable, he still wasn’t ready to look pleased.

  “You really have no sense of gratitude. After eating their food, you still have to poke your nose around and try to pry into their secrets. As long as she’s a woman, she can be a wife. What difference does it make if she’s American or Russian? Are you trying to tell me if she were an American she’d be twice as much a woman? More efficient than others at having children?”

  Hung-chien said with a smile, “I’m interested in Han Hsüeh-yü’s academic credentials. I just have a feeling that if his wife’s nationality is fake, then his academic credentials are open to question, too.”

  “Why don’t you save yourself the trouble? Look, you can’t get away with a lie. Ever since you pulled that trick, you’ve been oversuspicious of other people. I know the whole thing was a joke, but a joke can end up causing a lot of trouble! People like us who behave ourselves properly don’t get so suspicious of everything.”

  “Oh, doesn’t that just sound beautiful?” said Hung-chien crossly. “When I first told you Han Hsüeh-yü’s salary was a grade higher than yours, why did you get so mad you wanted to throw away your cone-shaped hat?”7

  “I’m not that small-minded. It’s all your fault. You come to me with all these rumors you’ve heard. Otherwise, I have peace of mind and no reason to pick a quarrel with anybody.”

  Hsin-mei had learned a new pose. While listening to someone, he would recline in his chair with his eyes closed; only the smoke curling from the pipe at the corner of his mouth indicated he was not asleep. Hung-chien was already peeved at seeing him this way, and these last few remarks were more than he could take.

  “All right, all right! I’d sooner die than argue with you.”

  Sensing that Hung-chien was really aroused, Hsin-mei quickly opened his eyes and said, “I was only joking. Don’t get so mad that you upset your stomach. Here, have a cigarette. Later you probably won’t be able to go to someone’s house for dinner! Didn’t you see the notice? Oh, of course, you couldn’t have. There’s a school administrative meeting the day after tomorrow to discuss the implementation of the tutorial system. I’ve heard the tutors will have to eat with the students.”

  Hung-chien returned dejectedly to his room. A rare moment of high spirits had to be ruined by a friend. Man was created to be lonely. Each one has to keep to himself and never have anything to do with anyone else to his dying day. When the body can’t hold something, whether it be digested or eliminated, it is the individual’s own business. So why does one have to seek out a companion to share the emotions his heart can’t contain? When he’s with other people, he is forever offending or being offended. As with porcupines, each one just has to keep a distance from the others. If they get close, this one will be sticking that one’s flesh, or that one will be scraping this one’s skin. Hung-chien really felt like unburdening these emotions to someone who could understand. Miss Sun seemed to understand him better than Hsin-mei. At least she listened with great interest to what he had to say—but then, if as he had just said, people should avoid contact with each other, how could he go seeking out a woman! Maybe when men are together they are like a herd of porcupines, while men together with women are like—Hung-chien couldn’t think what they were like, and he opened his notebook to prepare for the next day’s class.

  Hung-chien was still teaching three hours of class. Whenever other faculty members began talking about his teaching load, they never failed to tell him to his face how much they envied his leisure. It seemed Kao Sung-nien had his own motives for giving him special treatment. Hung-chien had never studied logic before and had no reference books handy. Though he worked hard at preparing, he found no interest in it, and the students in his class were there for the credits only. According to the school regulations, students in the College of Letters and Law had to choose one course among Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Logic. Most of them swarmed like bees to Logic, because it was the easiest—“It’s all rubbish”—and not only did they not have to conduct experiments, but when it was cold, they could stick their hands in their sleeves and not take notes. They chose it because it was easy, and because it was easy, they looked down on it the way men look down on easy-to-get women. Logic was “rubbish,” and so naturally the person teaching logic was
a piece of “trash.” He was “nothing but an associate professor,” who belonged to no department besides. In their eyes, Hung-chien’s position was not much higher than that of instructors of party ideology or military drill. But those teaching party ideology and military drill had been sent by a government agency. Hung-chien didn’t have as much status as they did. “I’ve heard he’s Chao Hsin-mei’s cousin. He came with him. Kao Sung-nien just hired him as a lecturer, but Chao Hsin-mei wangled an associate professorship for him.” No wonder Hung-chien always had the feeling that the students in his class did not take his lectures very seriously. In that kind of atmosphere teaching could hardly be very exciting. What made it worse was that logic was so dry and tasteless at the start. It wasn’t until he got to the third stage of dialectics that he could spice it up with a few jokes. In the meantime there was no way to make it more palatable.

  Besides this there were two other things which disturbed Hung-chien. One was calling the roll. He recalled that among the prominent professors he had had, none of them ever called roll or reported student absences. This was how a great scholar went about it: “If you want to listen, then come listen. It’s all the same to me.” Overcome with admiration, he could not but imitate them. At the first class Hung-chien was like Adam in the Book of Genesis calling out the names of the newly created animals. After that, he didn’t even bring his roll book. By the second week he discovered that of the fifty-odd students, seven or eight were absent. Those empty seats were like the empty gaps in a mouth after several teeth have been lost. They gave one an uncomfortable feeling. The next time he noticed that while the women students were holding firmly to their original seats in the first row, the men students seemed to have taken the seats starting from the back, leaving the second row empty. One student sat all by himself in the third row. As Hung-chien was surveying this formation, the men students all grinned mischievously and lowered their heads. Following his glance the women students turned and glanced back, then looked around at him and smiled. He at least managed to refrain from commenting, “Obviously my power to repel you is greater than the women’s power to attract you.” After that he decided he would just have to take roll. At this rate there’d be no one left to listen to him but the desks and chairs, which had feet but were without the power to run away. But then, how humiliating it was suddenly to go from the permissiveness of a great scholar to the tediousness of a grade school teacher! These students were not to be outfoxed. They had seen through his intention.

  The other thing was the lectures. It was like trying to make clothes out of a piece of material that is not big enough. He thought he had prepared sufficient material, only to find when he got to class that as he spoke, it shrank away faster than he could stop it. When he had just about reached the end of his notes, the dismissal bell was still a long way off. An empty stretch of time in which there was nothing to say approached like a white torrent of rushing water heading toward a car driven at full throttle. He stood watching in panic with no place to escape. His thoughts in turmoil, he searched desperately for something to say to fill in, but after a few sentences it was all finished. He stole a glance at his watch and found that he had delayed only half a minute. At that point he turned hot all over, his face flushed slightly, and he began to stutter, certain that the students were all secretly laughing at him. Once, just like a man given a laxative after going hungry for a few days, he could not even squeeze anything out no matter how hard he tried, and he just had to dismiss class a quarter of an hour early. When he talked to Hsin-mei about it, he found that Hsin-mei had the same problem and said that after all, someone just starting to teach had no experience. Hsin-mei added, “Now I understand why foreigners say ‘kill time’ to mean beat the few moments of misery before the bell! I really wish I could chop it in two with one blow.”

  Hung-chien had just recently hit upon a way, if not to kill time instantly, at least to inflict it with a few mortal wounds. He was forever writing on the blackboard. It took as much time to write one word on the blackboard as it did to speak ten. His face and hands would be covered with chalk dust, and his arm would be sore for a while, but it was all worth it. At least he wouldn’t have to dismiss class early any more. The students, however, did not put much effort into taking notes. Often when he threw all his energy into lecturing, some of them just sat there without writing down a word. Only after he began to stare at them menacingly did they finally take pen in hand and reluctantly draw a few characters in their notebooks. This annoyed him, though he didn’t think he could be as bad as Li Mei-t’ing. But next door in Li Mei-t’ing’s class on “The History of Social Customs of the Ch’in and Han,” the students’ laughter never ceased, while his own class was always dull and lifeless.

  When he was in school, he thought, he wasn’t such a bad student. So why was he so undistinguished as a teacher? Surely teaching wasn’t something like writing poetry, which required a “special talent”? He regretted not having picked up an expert’s title while studying abroad. Then when he came back, he could awe everyone with his authority, giving a few courses from his collection of notes taken in all his foreign professors’ classes. He wouldn’t have to hang around doing odd jobs the way he was now, taking charge of the leftover subjects. People like Li Mei-t’ing, who had been teaching for years, had ready-made lecture notes. He himself had no experience or even any preparation, and was teaching a course that was not of his own choice. If he wanted to consult references, there were no books available, so of course he couldn’t teach very well. If he could just make it through this year and Kao Sung-nien kept his promise to promote him to professor, then in the summer when he returned to Shanghai, he could get some foreign books to look over and by next school year he could surely do just as well as Li Mei-t’ing. With these thoughts in mind, Hung-chien regained his self-confidence.

  In the year since Hung-chien had come back, he had drifted away from his father. In the old days he would always report every last detail to his father. Now he could just imagine what that reply would be. If his father were in a good mood, he would console him with such words as “Sometimes a foot is too short and an inch is too long. A scholar doesn’t necessarily make a good teacher.” It was enough to make one cringe with shame. If his father were in a bad mood, he would undoubtedly rebuke him for not having studied harder before and only cramming everything in at the last minute. There might even be admonitions about “Repairing the fold after the sheep are lost,” or “One learns as one teaches.” This was what the students had to listen to during the weekly Commemoration Assembly.8 He had heard enough of it already as a faculty member. There was no need to have it sent in from hundreds of miles away.

  The day before the administrative meeting was to be held, Hung-chien and Hsin-mei decided to go to town for dinner, afraid that once the tutorial system was put into effect they would no longer have that time. That afternoon Lu Tzu-hsiao dropped by for a chat and asked Hung-chien if he heard about Miss Sun. When Hung-chien asked him what had happened, Lu replied, “If you don’t know about it, then never mind.”

  Knowing Lu’s ways, Hung-chien didn’t press him. After a moment Lu Tzu-hsiao stared sharply at Hung-chien as though trying to peer through him and said, “You really don’t know? How could that be?” Then enjoining him to keep it strictly confidential, he told him the whole story. As soon as the Office of Instruction had announced that Miss Sun was going to teach Section Four English, the Section Four students had called an emergency meeting and sent a representative to the president and the dean to protest it. Their reason was this: Since they were all students, those in charge should not discriminate. Why were the other sections taught by associate professors while Section Four was assigned to a teaching assistant? They knew their level wasn’t very high, and that was why, they argued with righteous indignation, they deserved a good professor to teach them. Thanks to Kao Sung-nien’s skill, the turmoil had been quelled. The students had no fear of Miss Sun, however, the discipline in the classroom was rather po
or, and the compositions they wrote for her were simply atrocious. Miss Sun asked the Foreign Languages Department Chairman Liu for permission to have the Section Four students practice writing sentences instead of compositions. When the students learned of that, they fussed and asked Miss Sun why when other people were writing compositions, they were making sentences and being treated like high school students. She had said, “Because you can’t write compositions,” to which they replied, “We can’t write compositions, so we should be learning how to.” She could get nowhere with them and had to ask Chairman Liu to come explain things to them before the matter was finally settled.

  It was composition day. When Miss Sun entered the classroom, she saw written on the board [in English]: “Beat down Miss S. Miss S. is Japanese enemy!” The students were all waiting expectantly with grins on their faces. Miss Sun asked them to make sentences, but they all said they hadn’t brought any paper and would only do oral exercises. When she asked one student to make a sentence in each of the three persons singular and plural, the student rattled off in one breath as if reciting, “I am your husband you are my wife he is also your husband we are your many husbands—” The whole class roared with laughter, and Miss Sun stalked out in a rage. There was no knowing how the matter would end. Lu Tzu-hsiao further declared, “That student is in the Chinese Literature Department. I gave the students in our History Department a private talk, urging them not to make trouble in Miss Sun’s class. It might make people think Mr. Han wanted his wife to teach that section and was inciting the students to chase Miss Sun out.”

  “I didn’t know anything about it,” said Hung-chien. “I haven’t seen Miss Sun for a long time. So that’s what’s been happening.”

  Lu threw Hung-chien another sharp glance and said, “I thought you saw a lot of each other.”

  Just as Hung-chien was saying, “Who told you that?” Miss Sun walked in. Lu quickly got up and offered her his seat. On his way out, he cocked his head to one side and gave Hung-chien a nod to show that he had caught him in his lie. Hung-chien, who didn’t take the time to pay attention, quickly asked Miss Sun how she’d been lately. Abruptly turning her face away, she covered her mouth with her handkerchief. Her shoulders heaved and she burst into sobs. Hung-chien rushed out to call Hsin-mei, but when they came in, she had stopped crying. When Hsin-mei had gotten the matter straight, he comforted her for a long time with kind words, which were echoed by Hung-chien.