by Lu Xun
Of his twenty-strong audience dotted about the lecture hall, some seemed depressed by what he said, perhaps because they felt there was some truth in it. Others again grew agitated: probably because they suspected him of showing disrespect to the sacred principle of Youth. A few, however, smiled, guessing that the philosophy he was expounding was one of self-defence – for Fang Xuanchuo was himself now a civil servant.
They were mistaken. Fang’s ‘more-or-lessism’ was nothing more than an expression of a new sense of grievance against the world – though not one that he had the least intention of acting on. Whether it was because he was lazy, or just utterly inert – even he didn’t know – Fang Xuanchuo had always considered himself a stoically law-abiding sort of person, the kind that refuses to take part in any kind of public protest. While his own position in the bureaucratic cosmology was not under threat, his minister could accuse him of every neurosis under the sun and still the system wouldn’t hear a whisper of dissent from him. The university could owe him more than six months’ salary, but as long as his income from his government job kept coming, he would keep his head resolutely down. And when his university colleagues banded together to demand payment of their salaries, he would – keeping his views strictly to himself, of course – think them stridently importunate. He would come to their defence (and weakly at that) only when he heard colleagues in government sniping at them. Or perhaps because he was experiencing cash-flow problems at the time, and he was the only one among them who moonlighted between academic and government service – yes, he concluded, that sounded reasonable enough, and thought no more about it.
Although he was as short of money as any of his university colleagues, he’d never joined the teachers’ union. When everyone decided to go on strike, however, he cancelled his classes with the rest of them. And he didn’t like it more than anyone else when the government said that lecturers would get paid only when they started teaching again – as if they were monkeys that needed bringing to heel with the promise of bananas. It was on the day that one of the country’s great educationalists attacked Fang’s esteemed profession for their mercenary absence of dignity, for ‘holding their lecture notes in one hand, and asking for money with the other’, that he was at last roused to make a formal complaint to his wife.
‘Hey!’ he observed, surveying the dinner table. ‘How come there’s only two dishes?’
As neither of them had been blessed by a modern education, his wife had not been privileged to receive a serviceably dignified given name for public or private use. A more traditional sort of husband would have made do with Taitai, or ‘lady-wife’, but Fang was too progressive for that. ‘Hey!’ was his improvised alternative. His wife dispensed even with this nicety: as long as she was looking at him while she spoke, both understood that whatever she was saying was directed at him.
‘I’ve already spent the fifteen per cent of your salary they gave you last month.’ She stood by the table, directly facing him. ‘Yesterday, they almost refused to sell me rice on credit.’
‘They’ve started saying it’s undignified for teachers to ask to be paid. They don’t seem to understand people need to eat rice, and rice costs money. It’s not exactly a complicated idea.’
‘Quite right. You need money for rice, and rice for dinner.’
His cheeks bulged sullenly: was she regurgitating his ‘more-or-lessism’ back at him? He turned away, indicating – according to long-established marital code – the discussion was at an end.
Publicly demonstrating for the money they were owed, one cold, windy, rainy day the capital’s teachers had their heads smashed together by government soldiers on the mud in front of the Gate of New China.2 To general astonishment, however, this collision yielded a fragment of their overdue salaries. With the help of this wholly unearned windfall, Fang Xuanchuo succeeded in paying off a few old debts, but still his accounts found themselves alarmingly in the red – because now the government was dragging its feet over his other salary. It was at this point that our nation’s altruistic civil servants – and especially Fang Xuanchuo, who was holding down a teaching job himself – came slowly to the realization that salaries were things that wanted chasing up. Naturally enough, Fang began to feel a greater sympathy for the plight of his academic colleagues, and when everyone else was in favour of going on with the strike, he wholeheartedly endorsed the decision (taken in his absence).
Eventually, another payment was forthcoming, and classes restarted. A few days earlier, however, the Students’ Association had presented the government with a petition: ‘If teachers don’t teach,’ the complaint had gone, ‘they shouldn’t get paid.’ Although no one took any notice of them, Fang Xuanchuo couldn’t help see the similarity with the view the government had taken earlier. Once more dancing determinedly before him, his new philosophy of more-or-lessism now made its second public appearance in the lecture hall.
While this doctrine, in its fundamentals, did of course serve the not entirely disinterested purposes of our hero, it was a little more than an opportunistic justification for taking up a government post. The difficulty was that whenever he got going on the subject, he extrapolated just a little too far – into tirades about the future of China, etcetera, etcetera. All too easily, he became a fearless patriot, carrying the cares of the nation on his own two shoulders. Such is the human disinclination towards self-knowledge.
Another illustration of the principle soon presented itself. Fully occupied for a time ignoring those pesky lecturers, the government in due course got round to paying the same compliment to its civil service drones. Month upon month of unpaid salaries stacked up, until eventually a sizeable portion of those fine upstanding government employees who, in previous existences, had despised those importunately money-grubbing teachers, were pressed by circumstance into intemperate radicalism at mass protest meetings. For which they were ridiculed by a number of broadsheets. Neither surprised nor offended by the coverage, Fang Xuanchuo knew the reporters took their view only because they were still drawing their salaries. The moment the government or their backers withdrew their subsidies, they’d be on their soapboxes, too.
Given, then, that he had already expressed sympathy for the plight of his fellow academics, he very naturally approved the demands of his government colleagues. Yet still he sat in his bureau, docilely bureaucratizing, letting others go and call in the debt on his behalf. Not because he felt it was below his dignity to go in person; do not jump to such a rashly mistaken conclusion. Instead, he pleaded inexperience. He had never, he said, collected a debt in his life – he had always been the target of debt-collectors. Menacing defaulters, therefore, was not one of his areas of specialism. Encounters with financial authorities turned him weak at the knees at the best of times. Take their powers over purse strings away, and they became meek as Buddhist mice. But while they were still comfortably in charge, they would always scorn supplicants at their feet. He had neither the nerve nor the wish to see them himself. He could never quite decide whether this was a sign of arrogance or of a lack of backbone.
Everyone scraped by, from week to week, borrowing here and borrowing there. But life for Fang Xuanchuo was infinitely harder than it had once been. In time, everyone he had day-today dealings with – his servant, the local shopkeepers, even Mrs Fang – became increasingly lacking in deference. His wife had been finding less and less to agree with him about of late; often enough, she even expressed her own opinions, and was decidedly off-hand in manner. Just before noon, on the eve of the Dragon Boat Festival in early May, she took the unprecedented course of thrusting a pile of receipts in his face as soon as he arrived home.
‘We need at least a hundred and eighty dollars,’ she snapped, without deigning to glance at him. ‘Did they pay you?’
‘Humph! I’ve had enough – I’m resigning tomorrow. They’ve drawn the cheques, but the Salary Petition Association’s not giving them out. First they said they wouldn’t give them to anyone who hadn’t gone and complained
, then they said you had to pick them up in person. Now the boot’s on the other foot, they’re as bad as the government. I’m not going – I don’t want the money, anyway. I’m going to resign, I’m tired of having my face rubbed in the dirt…’
This rare display of indignation startled Mrs Fang into brief silence. ‘Just go and pick it up,’ she resumed more docilely, looking at him this time. ‘No one’ll think the less of you.’
‘No! It’s not a bonus – it’s my regular salary. Payroll should just send it out like they always do.’
‘But how’ll we manage if they don’t?… Oh, I forgot to say, the children told me yesterday the school’s been after them again for their fees. If we don’t get it to them soon – ’
‘What a nerve! So I don’t get paid for teaching, but my children’s teachers do?’
His grip on logic, she began to fear, was weakening. She wasn’t the school principal – why take it out on her? She let the matter drop.
The two of them ate lunch in silence. After a brief postprandial sulk, he returned irritably to work.
Usually, on the eve of a public holiday, he would never be home before midnight. In he would walk, pulling a wad of crisp banknotes out of his breast pocket and presenting them proudly to his wife: ‘I’ve been paid!’ This evening, however, saw him back by seven.
‘I wasn’t… expecting you so…’ a bewildered Mrs Fang began, trying to read his face, trying to work out whether he had indeed resigned. He didn’t look particularly out of sorts.
‘They didn’t get the cheques out before the banks closed. I’ll have to wait till the eighth.’
‘Will you have to go and pick it up yourself?’ she asked nervously.
‘They’ve already changed their minds about that. Now they’re saying Payroll’s going to send them out as usual. But the banks are shut for three days over the holiday, so we’ll have to wait till the morning of the eighth.’ He sat down and studied the floor, taking a sip of tea. ‘There shouldn’t be any problem,’ he eventually went on. ‘I expect they’ll get us the money in the end… Though I can’t say it’s been much fun trying to borrow money off friends and relatives. I forced myself to call on Jin Yongsheng this afternoon. First we chatted a while, and he told me how well he thought I’d behaved through the whole business, not asking for my salary, refusing to pick the cheque up myself, and so on and so forth. Then I asked him if I could borrow fifty dollars off him, just for the next few days. He made this face, as if I’d just stuffed a handful of salt in his mouth. Then he started going on about how everyone’d been late with the rent, about how bad business was. Why don’t I go and ask for the money I’m owed, he said, no shame in that. He couldn’t get me out of the door fast enough.’
‘No one’s got any cash to spare around holiday times,’ Mrs Fang murmured faintly, not sounding particularly aggrieved.
Fang Xuanchuo looked back down at the floor; he wasn’t surprised – especially as he’d never been on particularly good terms with Jin Yongsheng. At the end of last year, he now remembered, someone who’d grown up in his own part of the country had asked to borrow ten dollars. He’d had his salary all right, and in full, but he was worried his petitioner wouldn’t pay him back. He’d not been paid, he’d lied, his face contorting with distressed regret, either by the government or by the college – the spirit was willing, the bank account was weak. Then he’d sent him packing. Though he couldn’t conjure up the exact expression he had worn at the time, the memory was discomforting. He shook his head, his lips trembling slightly.
But a new inspiration swiftly came to him. Tell the servant, he ordered, to go and buy a bottle of White Lotus liquor on credit. All the shopkeepers, he knew full well, would try to call in their debts tomorrow. If anyone refused credit now, they might not get a penny back the following day; and serve them right.
The bottle of White Lotus duly obtained, two swiftly downed cups brought some colour back into his pale face. By the time dinner had been eaten, his spirits were a little on the mend. Lighting a long Hatamen cigarette, he picked up a book of avant-garde poetry and lay down on the bed to read it.
‘But what will we say to the shopkeepers tomorrow?’ Mrs Fang had come in after him and was now standing at the foot of the bed, looking directly at him.
‘Tell them… tell them to come back on the afternoon of the eighth.’
‘I can’t say that. They’ll never believe me. They’ll never agree.’
‘Why not? Tell them to check at the ministry – they’ll find out no one’s getting paid till the eighth.’ His finger, pursued by Mrs Fang’s eyes, described a semicircle in the air beneath the mosquito net, then returned to the experimental poetry.
Seeing the mood he was in, she fell briefly silent, then tried changing the subject.
‘We can’t go on like this, we have to find some other way of getting by.’
‘What else am I fit for? I don’t write well enough even to be a copyist; if I joined the army, I wouldn’t scrape into the fire brigade.’
‘Didn’t you send something to a publisher in Shanghai?’
‘That publisher? The one in Shanghai? They pay by the word and don’t count the spaces. Just take a look at my free verse: almost every other word’s a space. I probably wouldn’t get more than three hundred coppers for a whole book. Anyway, I haven’t heard anything from them for six months now. Distant water won’t put out nearby fire. I can’t wait for ever.’
‘How about writing for one of the local papers?’
‘To get into one of the decent ones, I’d have to call in a favour from an ex-student who’s now an editor at one of them. And even so, it would be a few coppers per thousand words. I’d be working all hours for a pittance. Anyway, I don’t have enough to say.’
‘How are we going to get by after the holiday?’
‘I’ll go back to the ministry… Tomorrow, when the shopkeepers want their money, just tell them the afternoon of the eighth.’ He made as if to return to his experimental poetry.
‘I think,’ she stammered out, afraid her opportunity would be lost, ‘I think we ought to buy a lottery ticket on the eighth…’
‘Rubbish! What an idiotic idea…’
He suddenly recalled something that had happened after his ejection by Jin Yongsheng. Walking dejectedly past a shopping arcade, his heart had leapt at a busy large-print advertisement for a TEN THOUSAND DOLLAR PRIZE. But even as he slowed down, a reluctance to part with the last sixty cents in his wallet hurried him resolutely on. Reading vexation on his face at her vulgar superstition, Mrs Fang quickly retreated, leaving her sentence hanging in mid-air. Stretching out, Fang Xuanchuo decided to leave his response equally unfinished, and went back to mumbling his experimental poetry.
June 1922
THE WHITE LIGHT
It was well past noon by the time Chen Shicheng was back from seeing the results for the county-level civil service examinations. He had set out early and begun searching for the surname Chen the instant he saw the list. Though there was no lack of Chens clamouring for his attention, none was followed by the all-important words shi and cheng. Carefully, methodically, vainly he made a second search through the twelve-page roster. By the time he had finished, he stood alone before the wall opposite the college of examinations, the crowds of other interested onlookers long dispersed.
A cold wind was ruffling his short, greying hair, as he soaked up the warmth of the early winter sun. Dazzled by its brightness, his exhausted, puffy eyes glinted strangely within his ashen face. The list now swam before him, a shoal of black circles.
With the county competition behind him, he could have tried his luck at the provincial level, soaring through the ranks of government… All the best people would try to marry their daughters off to him, worshipping him like a god, regretting their earlier, short-sighted lack of respect… He would get rid of the tenants who had rented rooms in the derelict old family house – though likely as not, they would all have deferentially moved out of their own acco
rd, to make way for him. The whole house would be made good as new, its gate embellished with a flagpole and plaque… If he preferred to work behind the scenes, away from the cut-and-thrust of local politics, a cosseted job in the capital would be his; otherwise, he could settle for a lucrative post in the provinces… Like a tower of barley sugar attacked by rain, his glorious future crumbled about him, leaving only fragments at his feet. He turned dejectedly towards home, numb with disappointment.
When he reached the door to his house, seven schoolchildren began reciting in chorus. His ears buzzed – as if a brass gong had just been struck next to them. Seven heads and seven queues swayed before him, black circles dancing in the gaps between them. As he sat down, they handed their homework to him, contempt written over their faces.
‘Off you go,’ he managed miserably, after a brief hesitation.
Throwing their books into their bags and tucking them under their arms, they scattered into the afternoon.
But the plague of tiny heads and black circles went on dancing before him, sometimes in chaotic freestyle, sometimes in strange, decorous formations, until they slowly faded into a single, blurred mass.
‘Failed again!’
Who said that? He jumped to his feet, the words ringing in his ears, and looked around him: no one in sight.
‘Failed again!’ the voice repeated, his ears still buzzing.
He held up his hand, counting on his fingers: eleven, thirteen, sixteen times, counting this year – sixteen times not a single examiner had known a good essay when he saw it. A pitying laugh escaped him. Fury succeeded: from the bottom of his bag, he whipped out transcribed examination essays and poems, and made for the door. But as he approached, the light shone uncomfortably in his eyes again and a flock of chickens cackled with laughter. He retreated back inside, his heart pounding.