The Crazed

by Ha Jin

  “Like a statesman, eh?” I couldn’t help being sarcastic, then heaved a sigh.

  He grinned and said, “He’s like a little kid now and we should humor him.”

  We both went back into the room. Banping had been rereading Jean-Christophe recently; he picked up the book from the armrest of the wicker chair and thrust it into the side pocket of his jacket. He looked unhappy and left without a word.

  I felt bad as I realized I shouldn’t have blown up at him. He might not have had a comfortable time staying with our teacher in this depressing room either.

  Soon Mr. Yang began reading an editorial aloud. His voice grew stronger and stronger as he continued. The newspaper was an old back issue. The article was about a flood in the provinces on the Yangtze River. Hundreds of people had drowned; sixteen thousand houses flooded; troops were sent over to help the victims; Vice Premier Zhang was flying from place to place to express the government’s sympathy and solicitude to the victims and to inspect the flood relief measures. Mr. Yang was reading the article ardently as if he were an official addressing an audience of hundreds of people. His mouth was ringed with foam, and spittle darted in every direction, some of it falling on the newspaper and some on the dark green blanket over his legs. He was so excited that he was trembling a little, his eyes glinting behind the lenses.

  I went up to him and tried to take the newspaper away, but he gripped it tightly. So I gave up.

  A few minutes later he put the newspaper down on his lap and started an official speech. “Comrades,” he shouted with his eyes closed, “our country has difficulties now, what shall we do to help? Under the wise leadership of our Communist Party, we are not afraid of any natural disaster. As long as we rally closely around the Party Central Committee and as long as we help one another, we shall defeat the river and conquer the flood. We Chinese are heroic men and women, capable of holding up the sky and restoring the earth. No natural calamities can daunt us, because we live in a new society now. In the old days a cataclysm of such magnitude would toss millions of corpses everywhere and turn our land upside down. But now it cannot overcome us at all. Why? Why is everybody here still alive, well clad and well fed? Why do many of you still have smiles on your faces? Why are you still healthy and hopeful? The reason is clear and simple—because we have our greatest Helmsman Chairman Mao and the wise leadership of the Communist Party. Comrades, our Chairman is deeply concerned about our well-being. He doesn’t go to bed at night. Instead, he pores over maps and holds emergency conferences to make plans. Although he’s tired and sleepy, he eats oranges and smokes Ginseng cigarettes to keep himself awake. He’s working his heart out to save us from this flood. There’s no doubt he will save us, every one of us! Comrades, we must work ten times harder, care for the old and the young, and faithfully follow the Party leaders. Remember, solidarity is strength!” He paused, panting, then resumed: “Most important of all, we must not lose hope. If you lost your house, our country will build you a new one. If your crops are gone, our country will allocate you seeds and provisions. If your livestock are drowned, our country will supply you with money and young animals. In one word, we shall have everything back and we shall defeat nature. There’s no reason to lose heart.”

  He lifted his right hand halfway, looking around with an air of authority; then he held the newspaper with both hands again. “Comrades,” he went on, “in a time like this, we must be more alert to class struggle. Our enemies will not sleep when we are in trouble. I’m sure they will creep out of their holes and sabotage our efforts at every opportunity. They will spread rumors, fan evil fires, and sow the seeds of discontent. Comrades, keep your eyes open on those blackhearted evildoers and redouble your vigilance against—”

  “Shut up!” I yelled with a shudder. He was pathetic. He had forgotten that he himself used to be maltreated as one of those so-called class enemies. Oppressed for decades, now he dreamed of ruling others. He didn’t know who he was anymore. I rushed to him, seized the newspaper, threw it to the floor, and stamped on it.

  He looked shocked and remained silent for a moment, still holding two tiny scraps of the paper with his thumbs and forefingers. Then he said wistfully, “They ought to have appointed me the general director of the flood relief work. I’m more capable than any of those bureaucrats, who are just rice bags and wineskins.”

  “You’ve forgotten who you are,” I said deliberately.

  “I’m a born official.”

  “No, you’re just a crazy bookworm.”

  “I’m destined to govern.”

  “You can’t even govern yourself.”

  He paused for a few seconds, then blustered, “Oh, how dare you talk to me like this! If you were not my son, I would have you hauled out and beheaded. Heavens, how can I have sired such an unfilial thing?” He began wailing, tears trickling down his fleshy cheeks.

  That frightened me. No matter how furious I was, I shouldn’t have disturbed him so much. I sat down on the bed and put my hand on his shoulder. I said, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Mr. Yang. I just hate to see you make a fool of yourself. Don’t be so heartbroken. See, I’m here to take care of you.”

  “Am I still an official?”

  “Sure, you hold the fifth rank, the same as the provincial governor’s.”

  “Do I have a chauffeur and a chef?”

  “Yes, a dozen servants.”

  “And a personal doctor?”

  “Of course, a complete staff.”

  “Including four armed bodyguards?”

  “Sure, you have a squad of them.”

  “Also a Red Flag sedan?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I like a Mercedes-Benz better.”

  “All right, you can have that.”

  He calmed down, but was still sniveling. Again with a spoon I slowly ground a sleeping pill in a cup, poured some orangeade into it, and fed the concoction to him. He obeyed me like a child exhausted by crying. After that, I put him back into bed.

  As he sank into sleep, I picked up the newspaper from the floor and looked through it. I was not interested in the old news, but a photo on an inner page caught my attention and gave me the creeps. It showed a young woman, eyes shut and crying with her mouth wide open as if she were laughing. She had jumped off a smuggling sampan, swimming toward Hong Kong, but a shark had attacked her and ripped a large piece of flesh off her thigh. Her femur showed, whitish like a debarked tree branch and dripping blood. A police boat had rescued her and carried her to a hospital nearby. Later she was returned, together with a pair of crutches, to her hometown in Hubei Province. Evidently the picture was intended to deter people from sneaking across the water into Hong Kong. There were other photos on the same page. One of them showed the fossil of a dinosaur egg found in the Mongolian Plain by a team of American paleontologists.

  I dropped the newspaper on the red floor and thought about Mr. Yang’s speech. Not until just now had it ever entered my mind that he might desire to become an official. He had often told me that he hated bureaucrats. If he really meant what he said, why did he yearn to be one of them? Probably he used to be able to quench this hankering, but now he was too ill to suppress it anymore. Or maybe this longing had been dormant in him all the time and even he himself wasn’t aware of it; now when he lost his mind, it manifested itself.

  On the other hand, I shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Yang. Empleomania was commonplace among the intellectuals I knew. A case in point was the provost of our university, Shengtan Bai, a renowned mathematician, who was now dying of cancer. Four months ago when he heard that he was being considered for the provostship, without delay he began to bike through the campus once every other day to demonstrate that he was in adequate health, though in reality he was suffering from rectal cancer. He was a stalwart man, weighing at least two hundred pounds. It was said that after every bicycle ride he’d lie in bed at home groaning in pain for hours on end. Eventually he did get the promotion and stopped teaching and doing research. Unfort
unately, he couldn’t enjoy the high post for long because his cancer had spread. He sat on the leather swivel chair in his new office only a few times, having to stay home two weeks after his appointment. Now he couldn’t even attend official banquets, unable to sit anymore.

  To be fair, when Mr. Yang was in his right mind, he had never appeared keen about any official position. Many times he told me to be detached and disinterested, which he believed was the only proper way of pursuing scholarship. He would say, “I’d talk of poetics only with those who have an unpolluted mind.” How often he expressed to me his contempt for some pseudo-intellectuals, whose sole ambition was to enter officialdom and whose main function was to write editorials for the Party’s publications, to prepare speeches for their superiors, and to attack the people the authorities disliked. In Mr. Yang’s own words, “A scholar must not be a clerk or a mouthpiece of others.”

  The previous winter when he returned from Canada, he had told me excitedly that scholars in the West lived more like intellectuals. He and I were sitting in his living room, which also served as a dining room. He explained to me over Dragon Well tea, “My friend at UC-Berkeley said that in his department nobody coveted the chair, because they all wanted more time for research. Contrary to this darned place”—he knocked the dining table with his knuckles as if it were the desk in his office. “Here to become a departmental chair is the pinnacle of a professor’s career. But scholars abroad are more detached and don’t have to be involved in politics directly, so they can take up long-term research projects, which are much more valuable and more significant. Oh, you should have seen the libraries at Berkeley, absolutely magnificent. You can go to the stacks directly, see what’s on them, and can even check out some rare books. Frankly, I would die happy if I could work as a librarian in a place like that all my life.”

  True, he might have romanticized the academia in the West, but he was genuinely moved. Later he advised me to consider attending graduate school in the United States, saying, “You can live a real intellectual’s life there after you earn a Ph.D. from an American college.”

  His advice surprised me, because I had never imagined living in a foreign country. Although it was fashionable among graduate students to study abroad, I hadn’t thought about this matter for myself. How could Mr. Yang talk of emigrating from our homeland like moving to another province? Did he make this suggestion also for the sake of his daughter? In other words, he might have figured that it was impossible for Meimei to go abroad on a scholarship in medicine, whereas I might receive some financial aid in the humanities, so only through me could she get to America. But I soon dismissed my misgivings and was convinced that he mainly had my interest in mind. Despite lacking confidence in my English, I decided to contact some schools in the United States. I applied to Yale, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and UC-Berkeley. Mr. Yang wrote a stunning recommendation for me, saying I was a rising scholar in poetic studies in mainland China. I was somewhat embarrassed by his excessive praise, though he meant what he said. He even offered to pay the twenty-nine-dollar TOEFL fee for me, since I couldn’t come by any foreign currency myself.

  A month later I sat for the test, in which I didn’t do well. The written part went all right now that I had a solid grasp of English vocabulary, idioms, collocations, and syntax, but the part on listening comprehension dragged my scores down. I left many questions unanswered, not able to follow a meteorologist’s forecast and the conversation between a postman and a woman customer. So my total score was merely 570, below the 600 standard most Ph.D. programs in the humanities required. To my amazement, the University of Wisconsin accepted me, though it wouldn’t offer me any financial aid. Without a penny I couldn’t possibly go to the United States. To be honest, I wasn’t disappointed at all, because I still could not see the point of studying Chinese poetry in a foreign country. What’s more, I was unsure if I could survive in America. A former graduate student of our department, an excellent calligrapher, had gone to New York to study toward a master’s degree in journalism, and ever since he arrived there he had slaved as a busboy in a Cantonese restaurant in Manhattan. His parents were terribly worried that he might lose his mind, as he often complained in his letters that he had become an educated coolie, working more than fifty hours a week to earn his tuition, and might never graduate—he was too exhausted to study.

  Last winter I began to prepare for the Ph.D. exams seriously. Mr. Yang once said that after I entered Beijing University, it would be easier for me to get a scholarship from an American college. He explained, “You’ll hold a vintage position.” His words implied that Beijing University was a prestigious school, internationally known, so foreign colleges would be more willing to accept its students. He was still bent on sending me abroad. I was not enthusiastic about the idea, still daunted by English, which I could read but couldn’t write or speak. How could I accomplish any significant work in poetic studies in America without the ability to write well in English? Besides, I was not fully convinced that a foreign country could be a better place than China for studying Chinese poetry. Mr. Yang’s eagerness suggested that he might indeed have his daughter’s interest in mind. My doubts revived.

  Now as I was sitting in this sickroom and thinking whether I should apply for a graduate program in America again, Mr. Yang yawned and said, “I must save my soul.” He smacked his lips as if chewing something tasty.

  I was puzzled, but tried to imagine where he was now and to whom he was speaking. Then he declared, “I’m only afraid I’m not worthy of my suffering.”

  I listened hard, but his voice trailed off.

  12

  The next evening all the graduate students in the Literature Department were gathered for a meeting, at which Secretary Peng presided. She was a macho woman with a Mongolian face, which would remain stern on such an occasion. Although she was not old, just in her mid-forties, she looked down on women who wore skirts. Even on broiling summer days she would dress in baggy pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Sometimes she put on an army uniform that had lost its green. Despite having only six years’ schooling, she was well versed in officialese and tended to digress in front of an audience. Without the help of a text, she’d talk on and on, “rambling like a tumbling river,” as people say about such a speaker. So at most meetings she would read from a speech or a report ghostwritten for her. Several faculty members in the department served as her “pens”; among them Yuman Tan, a man of thirty-nine and a lecturer in philology, was the glibbest one.

  After everybody was seated, Yuman Tan lifted a bamboo-cased thermos and refilled the secretary’s glass teacup with scalding water. The water went on roiling the soggy tea leaves for a good while in the cup, which was a jam jar. He sat down and his rabbity face began to turn right and left. He seemed to be checking to see if every one of us had shown up. What a snob. Holding no official position whatsoever, why should he assume such a responsibility? Probably Secretary Peng had told him to count heads for her. He looked quite happy today, smirking continually.

  Sitting at the head of a long table formed by six desks grouped together, Ying Peng wore a yellow pongee shirt with two baggy breast pockets. Her hooded eyes made her look sleepy. Strange to say, though this meeting seemed ominous, she had no written speech in her hands. She waved us to quiet down, then started to speak in her abrasive voice.

  “Comrades, you’ve all heard some students are making big scenes in Beijing. We just received orders from the Municipal Administration that says no demonstration will be tolerated here in Shanning City. Two weeks ago, the People’s Daily brought out an important editorial that defined the nature of the disturbance in Beijing as ‘a plotted conspiracy—a riot.’ You all understand the full weight of those words. Without doubt some people are conspiring to overthrow the Communist Party’s leadership, to sabotage the unity of our country, and to rattle the security of our socialist system. I know that some undergrads on campus are restless, planning to take to the streets, but you grad
uate students, older and more mature, must keep your heads cool and must discourage every undergrad from making trouble. Let me remind you that thirty years ago lots of intellectuals were sent to jail and labor camps just because they yammered a few words against the Party leaders of their work units. Some of them were merely college kids, still wet behind the ears, but they lost their youthful years in no-man’s-land. All was due to a few rash words they let out. Comrades, please learn from the historical lesson and don’t repeat the same silly mistake. Behave yourselves and tuck your tails between your legs—like a modest creature. Bear in mind that our Communist Party has never been forgetful. As long as our Party’s in power, we won’t let you get away with your wrongdoing. So don’t go to the streets. Don’t take part in any reactionary activities. Mark my words, I won’t make any effort to protect you this time if you get into trouble. Even if you go down on your knees calling me Grandma, I won’t. Even if you treat me to a sixteen-course dinner, I won’t. Even if you present me with an eighteen-inch color TV, I won’t. Even if you open a savings account for me in the bank, I won’t!”

  Laughter rang out. She looked amused, though her face remained tight. She went on: “Comrades, if you get arrested and become a counterrevolutionary, your whole family will suffer. Your siblings won’t be able to go to college no matter how smart they are. Also, nobody will marry you, and you’ll have to live as a bachelor or an old maid for the rest of your lives. Just imagine the lonesome years you’ll have to go through. So think twice before you join in anything. If you can’t help but poop and pee, come to my office or Chairman Song’s office, and let your stuff out within our department. That’ll be better than to make a big fuss on the streets, where the police will definitely whip your asses.”

  A few people tittered at the foot of the table. The secretary turned to order Banping to read out the brief document that had just arrived.