by Ha Jin
“Professor Yang, please listen—”
“Oh, how can I live without books! I’m utterly bereft. Why, why did you do this to me?” He started sobbing.
How could I pacify him? Even if I found him a book, he might be too addled to make sense of it. I had only a spiral notebook in hand. Why not appease him with this? I thought. No, he could tell it’s a hoax.
Then I saw the copy of Brecht’s Good Woman of Szechwan lying on the windowsill. I went to pick it up and put it on his palm. “Here’s your book. See now, I haven’t lost any of them. There’s no reason for you to blow up like this.”
He held the book with both hands, his fingers reddish and swollen, with fungus-infested cuticles. Clumsily he opened the soft cover and narrowed his eyes to look at the frontispiece, a photo of the play being staged by a Beijing troupe. Slowly he turned two pages to the foreword written by himself. “Yes, this is my new book,” he said. “The ink smells so fresh it must have just come from the printer. I like the peculiar fragrance of this book.” He paused to look at the page again, as if trying to locate a passage.
Fearful that he might demand another book and throw another tantrum, I sat stock-still. To my astonishment, he lifted his head and began to speak professorially. “Comrades, today we continue our discussion of high Tang poetry. First, let me read you a representative poem by Bo Wang.” He flipped a page and then chanted:
Serrate walls abut the imperial land.
In smoky wind we watch the ferry crossings.
This parting, my friend, strings us
Together despite our separate roads.
You may reach any end of the earth,
Yet I shall keep you close like a neighbor.
Please don’t stand at this fork
Wetting your kerchief with our children.
“A sad poem, isn’t it?” he asked and let out a sigh. I didn’t answer, wondering why he had picked this piece to begin his lecture with. In fact Bo Wang belongs to the early Tang period; Mr. Yang was mistaken about the date. To me, the poem wasn’t really sad.
“The theme here is friendship,” he announced. “Two scholar-officials appointed to posts in different provinces bid each other farewell outside the ancient city of Chang An. The parting, the spatial separation, can only tie them closer at heart. You see, people in ancient times had more amiable feelings, much more humane than we are. They cherished friendship, brotherhood, and loyalty. They wouldn’t fly at each other’s throats as we do nowadays . . .”
Cheap nostalgia, I thought. Yesterday is always better than today, but who in their right minds can buy this kind of sentimental stuff? If he had been in his senses, Mr. Yang would have commented on the poem in more analytical language. Clearly his mind could no longer engage the text penetratingly, and his critical discourse had partly collapsed.
“On the other hand,” he resumed, “the poem isn’t maudlin at all. The lines are robust and simple, just as the emotion is dignified with restraint. Please note that the language has a fine balance between fluidity and poise. The poem differs remarkably from most of the farewell poems written in the high Tang period . . .”
I wondered why he was interested in this poem. He must have been obsessed with the traditional ideal—the union of the official life and the scholarly life. In other words, he might still hanker for the role of a scholar-official. Then it dawned on me that about twenty-five years ago Chairman Mao, in one of his letters to the Secretary of the Albanian Communist Party, Enver Hoxha, had quoted two lines from this very poem—“You may reach any end of the earth, / Yet I shall keep you close like a neighbor.” At that time, Albania was the only socialist country that supported the Chinese Communist Party’s opposition to Nikita Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin. It was China’s only ally in the camp of socialist countries. Chairman Mao cited the ancient lines to praise the friendship between the two Communist parties. His quotation made the poem immensely popular among the revolutionary masses for over a decade. It was even set to music.
“Comrades, you all know Chairman Mao is very fond of this poem,” Mr. Yang declared. “It’s a real gem. If Chairman Mao likes it, we all must love it. We must study it, praise it, memorize it, and use it as our moral compass, because Chairman Mao’s words are the touchstone of truth. Any one of his sentences is worth ten thousand sentences we speak.”
I was sick of him! Why did he suddenly talk like a political parrot? He had lost his sense of poetic judgment and again revealed his sycophantic nature. Many people want the power to rule others; Mr. Yang was no exception. The fact that he was a scholar must have made him all the more eager to become an important official, so that he might utilize his learning, put his ideas into practice, and participate in policy making so as to realize his ambition and ideal; otherwise, all his knowledge would serve no purpose and would just rot away in his head. To some degree, he must still have a feudalistic mind-set.
“Next,” he announced, then broke off with a blank face. He fumbled, “What’s next?” He riffled some pages and shut his eyes, as if making an effort to recall a prepared lecture. “Ah yes, here’s the next poem we should discuss today.” He read from an interleaf:
1
You, who come from heaven
To soothe all sorrow and pain
And fill the doubly wretched
With double consolation.
Oh, I am tired of this pursuit!
What for all the pain and joy?
Come, Sweet Peace,
Oh come into my breast!
2
Over the mountain
It’s so quiet.
In all treetops you hardly
Feel a breeze.
The birds are silent in the wood.
Just wait, soon
You will be silent too.
I was impressed by the poet’s longing for a peaceful ending. Mr. Yang’s voice, full of pathos and choking with emotion, conveyed the inmost feelings of a tormented man. After he finished reciting it, the room seemed to be ringing, as if a voice were still descending from the ceiling. But the poetic mood was dispelled by his casual remark. “That’s beautiful, isn’t it?” He squinted at me, smirking.
“Y-yes,” I faltered, wondering what kind of poetry this was. It sounded foreign, definitely not a Tang poem.
“Do you know who the author is?” he asked me.
“No, I don’t.”
“Goethe, Johann Goethe, the great Tang poet. Do you know who translated it into Chinese?” Again he got mixed up—if it was a translation from the German, how could it be a Tang poem?
“I’ve no clue,” I said.
“Me, I did it myself. It took me a whole week.” His eyes brightened while his brows tilted mischievously. “Do you know who speaks in this poem?”
“Goethe, the poet, of course.”
“No, it’s not Goethe who speaks. The speaker can be anyone.” He lifted his face and began lecturing in his normal way. “Comrades, when we analyze a Western poem, we should bear in mind that the speaker and the poet are rarely identical. The fundamental difference between Chinese poetry and Western poetry lies in the use of the persona. In the Chinese poetic tradition the poet and the poetic speaker are not separate except in some minor genres, such as laments from the boudoir and folk ballads. Ancient Chinese poets mostly speak as themselves in their poems; the sincerity and the trustworthiness of the poetic voice are the essential virtues of their poetry. Chinese poets do not need a persona to alienate themselves from their poetic articulation. By contrast, in Western literature poets often adopt a persona to make their poetry less autobiographical. They believe in artifice more than in sincerity. Therefore, when we read a Western poem, we must not assume that the poet speaks. In general the speaker is fictional, not autobiographical.”
I liked his comments, which seemed to make sense. At least they brought him back to his former self, an eloquent professor. Yet I wasn’t sure if his observation was accurate. Before I could consider it further, he continued: “How di
d such opposite attitudes toward the use of the persona come into existence? In his paper published in Poetic Inquiry three years ago, Professor Beiming Liang argues that this difference should be attributed to the fact that the Western poetic tradition originally had a parallel dramatic tradition, whereas Chinese drama reached its maturity much later than Chinese poetry— in other words, the poetry doesn’t have such a parallel relationship with Chinese drama. Since the persona is essentially a dramatic device, the predilection for it in Western poetry must have originated from the primal connection between the poetic and the dramatic traditions. I agree with Professor Liang in principle. However, I believe we can go further than his theory. To my mind, the difference between the two poetic traditions’ relationships with their respective dramatic traditions may not be the fundamental cause of the opposite attitudes toward the use of the persona. The cause should be explored deeper in the different social orders and cultural structures of the two civilizations.
“The essence of Western culture is the self, whereas the essence of the Chinese culture is the community. But poetry in both cultures has a similar function, that is, to express and preserve the self, though it attains this goal through different ways. In Chinese culture, poetry liberates and sustains the self despite the fact that the self is constantly under the overwhelming pressure of the community. Thus Chinese poets tend to speak as themselves, too earnest to worry about having a characterized voice to conceal their own—they desperately need the genuine self-expression in poetic articulation. In other words, the self is liberated in poetic speech, which is essentially cathartic to the Chinese poet. On the contrary, in Western culture poetry tends to shield and enrich the self, which on the one hand is threatened by other human beings and on the other hand has to communicate with others. Therefore, the persona becomes indispensable if Western poets intend to communicate and commiserate with others without exposing themselves vulnerably. In this sense, the persona as a poetic device functions to multiply the self.”
He fell into silence, as if purposely leaving some time for his words to sink in and for his students to take notes. I was impressed by his thesis, which I felt might be original. But his view was too sweeping and still crude: it would have to be substantiated and thoroughly examined before it could be shared with others. Besides, there were holes in his argument. He ought to have taken into account the Romantics in the West, such as Byron and Keats, who seldom use a persona in their lyric poems. Even Dante often speaks as himself in The Divine Comedy. Furthermore, the notion that the concern for the self differentiated Western culture from Chinese culture sounded arbitrary and rather simplistic. For instance, Christianity—the core of Western civilization—cares about God more than about the individual. Perhaps Mr. Yang should focus on the poetry written in one Western language instead of the whole body of Western poetry, which was too colossal for him to tackle.
“Do you know I write poetry too? I have always been a poet at the bottom of my soul.” He didn’t mention my name, but his intimate tone of voice indicated he was talking to me.
“No. You never told me that,” I said.
“You want to listen to one of my poems?”
Before I could answer, he closed the book and began chanting solemnly:
In late August the autumn wind howls
Peeling my roof of three-layered straw.
The straw flies across the brook,
Hanging on the top of the woods
And tumbling into gullies and ponds.
The children from South Village
Bully me for my old age,
Daring to be thieves before my eyes:
They take away my straw and vanish
Into the bamboo grove.
Lips cracked and tongue dried
I can no longer cry. And coming back,
I keep sighing over my cane.
He paused and raised his head, his eyes flashing. “What do you think of that?” he asked me proudly. “A powerful beginning, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I forced myself to agree. Anyone could tell that those lines were the beginning of Tu Fu’s “Song of My Straw Hut Shattered by the Autumn Wind.” How could Mr. Yang believe he had written the poem himself? Yet the earnest look on his face showed that he didn’t doubt his authorship at all. I remained quiet. Whoever he fancied himself to be was fine with me, as long as he didn’t throw a fit.
“See how simple these lines are. It’s the simplicity that stirs the soul. Comrades, bear in mind that the traditional poetic theory believes there’s an inverse relationship between ideas and emotions. If an idea in a poem is too complicated and too arcane, the poem begins to lose its emotional power. Conversely, if the poem is too emotional, its intelligence will diminish. A good poet intuitively knows how to strike a balance between thoughts and emotions. When I read this poem for the first time, I wondered to myself, ‘My goodness, how could he write these lines? They are as sturdy and supple as green branches.’ ”
Now he seemed to have dropped his conviction that he himself was the author. Somehow he couldn’t affix his mind to an idea for long; his thoughts rambled too much. I wondered whether there was a way to make his mind more focused and more coherent. Perhaps he should be treated by a psychiatrist; acupuncture or acupressure might help him too.
“Listen carefully,” he demanded, as if he knew I was wool-gathering—thinking about his brain instead of his views. He went on reciting huskily:
Then the wind subsides, murky clouds
Thickening while the sky turns misty and dark.
Our quilts, ragged for years,
Are hard as iron. Full of cracks
They can’t keep my kids warm in their sleep.
Again I fear that rain will fall in
Through the leaky roof, swaying like
Endless hempen threads and soaking our beds.
Ever since the war I’ve seldom slept.
How hard it is to pass such long dank nights!
He paused for breath, then commented, “I wrote these lines when I was ‘reeducated’ in the countryside. During the day we pulled plows in the fields like beasts of burden, or hoed soybean seedlings, or planted rice shoots, or cleaned latrines and pig-sties, or shipped manure to the fields. Although the work was backbreaking, it was not as nerve-racking as at night, because the hard labor could numb and vacate my mind. I could hardly think of anything while my body was busy. Once I started working, I just went on like a machine. Besides, when the work was heavy and urgent, we were often given better food, not as in the regular time when we had to eat sweet-potato strips and bran buns—both were indigestible and gave me heartburn and stomachaches. When we gathered in crops or loaded sun-dried bricks into the kiln or carried them out of it after they had been fired, we could eat as many corn buns as we wanted, and sometimes there were even slivers of pork belly in the vegetables. We were also given mung bean soup, which we could drink to our fill. But it was horrible at night. I suffered from insomnia. So many things came to mind that I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Once I didn’t sleep for thirteen days in a row. I begged the farm’s doctor to prescribe some soporific for me, but the leaders wouldn’t let him give me any, saying, ‘We ought to save the sleeping pills for the revolutionary masses. You can’t sleep because you haven’t worked hard enough.’ In the daytime I walked in the fields as if treading the clouds. My eyes ached and my head swelled with a shooting migraine. I was frightened that I was going to lose my mind, but the more fearful I was, the more sleepless the night became. I hated all the men around me for being able to sleep at night and get up refreshed the next morning. How often I envied the pigs in the sties behind our house, because they just ate and slept until one day they were hauled out to the butcher’s.”
He swallowed, then resumed: “The roof of our room was full of holes, through which night after night I listened to the wind whistle and watched the moon and the clouds move by slowly. In spite of my wakefulness, I dared not make any noise. If by chance my movement
in bed woke somebody, he would curse me relentlessly and wake others up. Then all the people in the room would heap abuse on me. On the one hand, I wished the night would end sooner so that I could stop thinking; on the other, I wished daylight would never arrive so that I could stay in bed longer and rest my body more. In that state of mind I composed these lines.” He patted Brecht’s play in his lap and continued, “Genuine poetry originates from the author’s personal experience. It’s something that overflows from the soul.”
I prodded him, “But you once said in class that most poems came from other poems.”
He looked askance at me, then admitted, “Yes, most poems are small potatoes that come from big potatoes, the real poems from original, genuine human experience. The big potatoes, the real poems, are planted by some people first. Then the children of the big potatoes are planted; then the grandchildren are planted. Year after year the great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, great-great-great-grandchildren of the big potatoes grow smaller and smaller until they have shrunk to nothing. Then people must look for other big potatoes to grow.”
This was crazy. His analogy was wild, though refreshing. I asked without any irony, “So you think this is a big-potato poem?”
“Of course. It’s a piece in which authenticity overcomes artifice. Only after I had suffered all the miseries and abuse and the sleepless nights could I write such truthful lines. Listen, there’s not a single false sound here.” He recited again:
If only I had ten thousand mansions
To shelter all poor scholars on earth
And brighten their faces with smiles.
Look, the mansions stand like mountains
Unshakable in wind and rain!
Ah, once before my eyes arise such mansions,
I shall be happy, even though my own hut
Falls apart and I freeze to death!
“Oh, when can I see those mansions?” he cried and burst into sobs. His tears fell on the apricot-yellow cover of the book in his lap. “Where are those grand mansions?” he shouted. “Let me see them. Then I’ll die happy. Where, where are they?” He was wailing now, his mouth writhing.