Fortress Besieged

by Qian Zhongshu

  Hung-chien could not help defending his father, “He wasn’t asking you to be a maidservant, merely urging you not to go out and work.”

  “Who doesn’t want to stay home and enjoy herself?” she argued. “I don’t like going out to work. Tell me, how much money do you earn a month that you can afford to keep me at home? Or do you Fangs have some family property? And as for your own job for the rest of the year, I have yet to see a single sign of it! Isn’t it a good thing if I earn my own money? All you can do is make flippant remarks!”

  “That’s another matter,” he said crossly. “There’s some sense to what he says.”

  She replied with a scornful laugh, “You and your father’s ideas are antiques from several thousand years back, and you of all people are a returned student.”

  Also smiling scornfully, he said, “What do you know about antiques! Let me tell you something. My father’s idea is quite fashionable abroad. You lost out in not having studied abroad. When I was in Germany, I learned about the German women’s Three K Movement: Kirche, Küche, Kinder—”

  “I don’t want to hear whatever you have to say,” she said. “But I did learn today what a filial son you are. You’re so obedient to your father. . . .”

  The quarrel never became serious because they couldn’t go to the Suns to quarrel, neither could they return to the Fangs to quarrel, and they couldn’t very well quarrel there on the street. Thus there was no place for them to match wits and clash tongues. Sometimes not having a home to return to is a real blessing.

  The families had met, invited each other out, visited back and forth, and even exchanged looks of disdain in their hearts. Neither was satisfied with the other. The Fangs despised the Suns for their rudeness; the Suns detested the Fangs for their outmoded ways. And behind each others’ backs, each hated the other for not being rich.

  One day after hearing his wife criticize Mrs. Sun, Tun-weng in a sudden inspiration added a splendid passage to his diary stating that now at last he understood why two families seeking a marriage alliance called it “joining together as Ch’in and Tsin. In the Spring and Autumn Period, the two states of Ch’in and Tsin were allied through marriage, and yet every generation thereafter took up arms. The mutual hatred between inlaws being at its fiercest today, to call it Ch’in and Tsin is quite fitting.”2 He was extremely pleased when he had finished and only wished he could have sent it over to Mr. Sun for him to enjoy.

  Faced with difficulties from both families, when Hung-chien and Jou-chia had taken all the frustration they could hold, they just had to take out their frustration on each other. While he was made to suffer because of his wife, he discovered at the same time the convenience of having a wife when one is made to suffer. When he had been frustrated before, he had had to keep his feelings pent up inside, unable to release them as he pleased. There was no one to serve as an outlet for him. Now it was different. There is no one on whom a person can vent his anger with as much all-out relish as on his wife. Friends will break off and servants will go on strike, not to mention parents and brothers. Only a wife, like the Wind God’s leather bag in Homer’s epic poem, has such a tremendous capacity for taking in hot air, for divorce after all is not easy.

  Jou-chia also discovered that one needn’t have as many scruples toward one’s husband as toward parents. But she had more forbearance than Hung-chien. Whenever Hung-chien began to get really angry, she would simply stop and not say another word. It was as if she and Hung-chien were having a tug of war with a piece of rope, each pulling with all his might on one end. When the rope grew so taut it was about to snap, she would take a few steps closer and let the rope go slack.

  Though in the heat of anger they might find quarreling a great relief, when the quarrel was over they both felt exhausted and empty, the feeling one gets at the end of the opera or when one wakes from a drunken sleep. Before they returned to Shanghai, they would make up a quarrel soon afterward, like a rich family’s food which isn’t kept overnight. But now Hung-chien’s hostility toward his wife after a quarrel lingered until the next day. And sometimes when no one seemed to be the winner, he would speak to her even before making up.

  After one fight, Jou-chia said half in earnest and half in jest, “When you get angry, it’s like a wild beast biting someone. You not only won’t listen to reason, you don’t even have any feeling. You’re the eldest son, but I can see your father and mother never spoiled you in any way. Why are you so unrestrained?”

  Hung-chien laughed shamefacedly. He had just won a round of name-calling; victory had made him magnanimous. He didn’t have to retort, “Your mother and father favored the male over the female and never doted on you, yet you’re pretty hard to please yourself.”

  After he’d been to the Suns twice he could see that while Jou-chia was always full of “Papa this” and “Mama that,” her parents were cool toward her affairs to the point of indifference. Mr. Sun was a nice man in the bad sense of the term—a useless fellow, who worked as chief accountant at the newspaper office and had no influence. Mrs. Sun had given birth to a son quite late in life. Having had only one male descendent continuously for three generations, the Suns made a religion out of raising their son, keeping his hair slick and his clothes starched like a high-class hairdresser in a beauty salon or a waiter in a Western restaurant. They had fulfilled their responsibility of supporting their daughter through college and had no more interest in managing her affairs. Perhaps if their son-in-law were rich, they might have taken a little more interest in their daughter.

  The person closest to Jou-chia was her aunt, a returned student from America, the kind who called one’s child “your baby,” and one’s wife “your Mrs.” This kind of aunt Jou-chia of course called “Auntie.” She had been quite popular in her youth and still hadn’t forgotten it. She was quite harsh in her judgment of the younger generation of women students. Jou-chia loved hearing her reminisce, so Jou-chia became the sole recipient of her affection. Mr. and Mrs. Sun stood in great awe of this aunt and had to bring her in on most of the family affairs. Her husband, Mr. Lu, who always had an unforgivably smug expression on his face, enjoyed discussing current events. Because he was slightly deaf in both ears, people didn’t have the energy to argue with him, and the fact that he could only hear his own voice made it even harder to reason with him. Husband and wife both held important positions in a large textile factory. He was chief engineer, and she was head of the personnel department. Thus Jou-chia also found a position in personnel.

  The aunt felt her niece was mismatched and was openly contemptuous of Hung-chien’s abilities and qualifications. Whenever Hung-chien met her, his feelings of inferiority rose like wartime commodity prices. The aunt, who was childless, kept a little Pekingese dog named Bobby, which was as dear to her as life itself. The dog would bark at Hung-chien whenever it saw him. Its mistress’s oft-repeated remark, “Dogs are quite clever the way they can tell good from bad,” only irritated Hung-chien more. But alas, dogs are made noble by dint of their master’s own status, just as husbands are ennobled by their wives or wives by their husbands, and Hung-chien didn’t dare beat the dog. Jou-chia tried to get her aunt to like her husband more by always having Hung-chien take the dog out to relieve itself, something which did nothing to improve Hung-chien’s feelings for it.

  Once Hung-chien remarked maliciously to Jou-chia, “Your aunt loves her dog more than she does you.”

  “Don’t talk rubbish,” said Jou-chia—adding the senseless remark—“That’s just the way she is.”

  Hung-chien said, “The way she likes a dog’s companionship just shows she is not fit for human company.”

  Eyes blazing, Jou-chia said, “It seems to me dogs can sometimes be nicer than people. At least Bobby is nicer than you. He has a sense of loyalty and doesn’t bite just anyone. Someone like you deserves to be bitten.”

  Hung-chien said, “You’re sure to be just like your aunt some day and keep a dog. Why, a poor devil like me should keep a dog. My relatives look
down on me, I have no friends; my wife—uh—my wife gets mad easily and ignores me. If I had a dog around to wag its tail at me, at least there’d be something in the world lower than myself anxious to curry favor. That aunt of yours has the factory employees all catering to her wishes, while at home her niece is so obedient and dutiful, to say nothing of the other people there! You’d think she’d be satisfied, and yet she still has to keep a running dog to nod its head and wag its tail at her. Obviously there’s no limit to the amount of flattery a person wants.”

  Controlling her voice, Jou-chia said, “Would you mind not talking so much? I can’t have three days of peace. We’d just been getting along fine for the last few days, and now you have to stir up trouble over nothing.”

  Hung-chien spouted out with a laugh, “Oh, so fierce, so fierce!”

  Hung-chien’s lament over the Pekingese was partly true. Just as last year he had regretted going to the interior, so now he regretted having listened to Jou-chia and returned to Shanghai. While in the small town, he was afraid of getting pushed out in a power struggle; now that he was in a big city, he hated the callousness of people and felt instead that getting pushed out was at least an indication that people had some respect for him. Even a germ could go about smug in the expectation that it might be put under a microscope and looked at. The loneliness in the crowds and the desolateness amidst all the excitement made him feel like many other people living on this solitary island. His mental state too was like a solitary, isolated island.

  Shanghai this year was quite different from what it was last year. The situation in Europe was rapidly deteriorating, and because of this the Japanese in the two large concessions were getting more out of hand every day. Britain and America, which were later to “fight side by side” with China, at that time thought only of maintaining a neutral stand. Since neither neutrality nor a stand could be maintained, their “neutral stand” eventually became a mere attempt to keep a foothold in China. Beyond this foothold the Japanese were allowed to run rampant. John Bull only “shot the bull,” and Uncle Sam proved to be none other than Uncle Sham. As for Marx’s clever analogy of the so-called “crowing French Chantecler,” it did indeed have a Chantecler’s instinct—to turn to the East and crow long and loud, the only trouble being that it mistook the sun flag [of Japan] for the real sun. America shipped load after load of scrap iron to Japan, while Britain considered blockading the Burma Road. Though France still had not cordoned off the Yünnan-Vietnamese border, it had already impounded a batch of Chinese munitions.

  In Shanghai, commodity prices, like a kite with its string broken in the wind, soared high above the ground as though they had achieved Nirvana and immortality. Public workers struck again and again. Trams and buses wished they could have hung out “Full House” signs like movie theaters and hotels. Copper and nickel coins were all confiscated. Stamps were temporarily put to a new use as supplementary currency. If only people could have been sent like mail, then the painfully crowded conditions on public buses could have been avoided. The struggle for survival was gradually stripped of mask and ornament to reveal a primitive brutality. A reasonable sense of shame was not cheap at all; many could not afford it.

  The number of people profiting and the number going bankrupt from the national crisis increased simultaneously. Neither interfered with the other since the poor begged only in the major thoroughfares and bustling marketplaces and stayed away from the quiet residential areas of the rich. They asked for money only from those on foot, unable to catch up with the rich in their sleek cars. Slums gradually spread like ringworm over the face of the city. Political terrorist incidents occurred nearly every day. Men of good will were so depressed that, like the transportation lines in major Western cities, they slowly began to go underground, while the dark, insidious reptiles in human form, which had been underground all along, boosted their prestige by latching on to them. Newspapers promoting “Sino-Japanese Peace” every day published lists of new comrades who had joined their ranks, while at the same time in another newspaper these “Japanese collaborators” were often declaring themselves “apolitical.”

  Five days after returning to Shanghai, Hung-chien went to the Sino-American News Agency to see the editor-in-chief. Hsin-mei had already made an appointment for him by mail from Hong Kong. Not wanting to ask his father-in-law to act as guide, he went by himself to the building in which the newspaper office was located. The office was on the third floor. A sign on the elevator stated that it stopped only at the fourth floor. Though he knew the lovely T’ang poem, “For a thousand li view, ascend another flight of stairs,” he did not take the elevator. And though he didn’t know Dante’s melancholy line, “How hard the passage to descend and climb/By other’s stairs,” by the time he had climbed the two flights, he was already feeling so downcast and disheartened he wished another few steps could have been added to the stairs so he could delay a little longer.

  He pushed open the swinging door and walked in. A long counter separated the people in the office from those outside. The mere addition of a copper railing on the counter would have made it look no different from a bank, pawnshop, or post office. The newspaper agency was divided into an inner and outer room. At a desk facing the door in the outer room sat a young woman filing her red fingernails with her curled third finger, on which was a diamond ring. When someone pushed the door open and entered, she did not so much as lift her head. Ordinarily Hung-chien might have wondered how someone in an office could have had red polish on her fingernails without any ink stains on her fingers, but in his haste, it never crossed his mind. From the other side of the counter he removed his hat and made his inquiry. She raised her head, her face filled with an expression of solemn unapproachability, as though having been wronged by men in a previous life, she was still keeping her guard up in this one. She looked him over a moment, shot her red lips over toward the left, then lowered her head and continued filing away at her nails.

  Looking in the direction indicated by her lips, Hung-chien saw something which resembled the small, square ticket seller’s booth at a train station with the words “Messages Transmitted” written on it and quickly went over to it. Inside a sixteen-or seventeen-year-old boy was sorting mail. Hung-chien called his attention by saying, “Pardon me. I’m looking for Mr. Wang, the editor-in-chief.”

  The boy kept on sorting his mail and answered absently, “He’s not here.” He had used the most economical movement of the mouth muscles to utter these three words—just enough for Hung-chien to hear and no more. Not a single nerve was twitched nor a single breath of sound emitted unnecessarily.

  Hung-chien was so alarmed his legs went limp and he exclaimed, “Ai, how could he not be here! Why, he must be. Would you please go in and check?”

  Having been a messsenger for two years, the boy was an old hand at dealing with people and knew that callers fell into two categories: the unimportant ones who requested meekly, “Excuse me, would you please do such and such,” and the big customers who ordered gruffly, “Kid, here’s my card. Go get so-and-so.” The one here today belonged to the former category. As he himself was now busy, he had no time to pay attention to the caller.

  Hung-chien thought to himself that if he did get the job, he would certainly find some way to have this little punk dismissed. Screwing up his courage, he said, “I have an appointment with Mr. Wang at this time.”

  At this the boy finally turned to the woman and asked, “Miss Chiang, is Mr. Wang in?”

  She shook her head impatiently and said, “How should I know!”

  The boy sighed, grudgingly rose to his feet and asked Hung-chien for his card. Hung-chien had no card and just gave his name. The boy was just about to carry out his transmitting duty when someone came by, and the boy asked him, “Is Mr. Wang in?”

  “I guess not,” the other replied. “I haven’t seen him today. He probably won’t be in till this afternoon.”

  The boy spread out his hands to indicate that he could not produce Mr. Wang.
Hung-chien suddenly spotted his father-in-law working at a far-off desk by a window. His delight was akin to meeting an old friend in a strange place at a time of distress. He was immediately shown in by his father-in-law, met Mr. Wang, and had a warm talk with him. Because it was Hung-chien’s first visit there, Mr. Wang insisted on seeing him out past the counter. The woman was no longer filing her nails but was busily working the Chinese typewriter, the finger with the diamond ring curling upward as before. Mr. Wang instructed Hung-chien to go up to the fourth floor and take the elevator down, and when he came to work the next day to take the elevator up to the fourth floor, then walk down. This would save him from walking one flight of stairs. Having learned his lesson, Hung-chien was as happy as could be, already feeling like an old hand at the newspaper office.

  That evening he wrote a letter to Hsin-mei, thanking him for his kindness in recommending him for the job. In a postscript he added jokingly that to judge from his experience with the message counter that day, the newspaper’s other stories and news reports probably weren’t too accurate either.

  Housing proved harder to find than a job. The streets were filled with houses, but none was available for Hung-chien. Shanghai seemed to expect every newcomer to bring his own house with him the way a snail carries its shell. Hung-chien and his wife grew tired and discouraged looking for a place to stay, and to this were added pointless arguments. Finally, relying on Tun-weng’s good offices, they managed, without paying any commission to a housing agent, to rent two small rooms in the home of a relative. Part of this relative’s family were returning to their village, and since the Fangs’ large house was vacant, they wanted to live there. Tun-weng suggested that these two rooms be given in exchange. The matter was settled at once, and Tun-weng had good reason to vaunt his accomplishment in front of his son and daughter-in-law. His son, of course, docilely went along.