The Bridegroom

by Ha Jin

  The two peasants slept well in the cell, happy for the free dinner of sorghum porridge and stewed pumpkin, but they still had no inkling of what crime they had committed. At 9:00 A.M. the three salesgirls arrived at the police station. One of them was ordered to repeat what she had heard the jokers say. She pointed at the tall man’s concave face and testified, “He said, ‘All the prices go up, but Deng Xiaoping never grows.’ ”

  “Goddamn it!” the man shouted and slapped his knee, his slanty eyes flashing. “I never heard of him. How could I ever come up with that weird name?”

  The short man cut in, “We never mentioned him. We said, ‘Our chairman never will change.’ ”

  “What did you say exactly?” asked the bald policeman in charge of the team of detectives.

  The tall peasant replied, “ ‘All the prices go up and only our chairman never grows.’ I meant our Chairman Lou—of our commune.”

  The short peasant added, “Dwarf Lou is an awful man. We all hate him. He wouldn’t let us have more than one and a half yuan for a day’s work, ’cause he wants to use the money to build a reservoir for catfish and big-headed carp. What can little shrimps like us get from a reservoir? Not even fish droppings. Everybody knows all the fish will end up in the officials’ bellies. If you don’t believe me, you go check and see if Chairman Lou is a dwarf.” He gave a broad grin, displaying his carious teeth.

  A few men and women chuckled, but they turned silent at the sight of the interrogators’ somber faces.

  The chief asked the salesgirls to recall the original words of the joke. To his bewilderment, they remembered that the tall peasant had indeed said “our chairman never grows.” In fact, when they relayed the words to others, they hadn’t mentioned Deng Xiaoping either. Somehow in the process of dissemination, the joke had changed into its present monstrous form. Could this whole thing have originated from a misinterpretation? Perhaps, and perhaps not.

  The interrogators were at a loss now. How could they determine when and where the joke had shed its original ambiguity and acquired its definitive meaning? It was unlikely that their superiors would accept misinterpretation as the explanation for what had happened. The crime was already a fait accompli. And how could there be a crime without a criminal? Even though a deliberate misinterpreter might never be identified, someone had to be responsible for the final version of the joke. So, how should they proceed with the interrogation?

  Again the chief had the peasants returned to the cell. He then sent a jeep to their commune to fetch Chairman Lou.

  Everybody was impressed by Chairman Lou’s good looks: a round forehead, ivory teeth, curved brows, large eyes shaded by miniature fans of lashes. What a handsome and intelligent face he had! If he were not three foot two, you could easily have taken him for a movie star. In addition, he had dignified manners, and his voice sounded so elegant that anyone could tell he was well educated. Small wonder that even with such a deformed physique he could govern a large commune. At noon he met with the police chief and said, “Look, Comrade Chief, you ought to punish the two hooligans, teach them an indelible lesson. Else how can I lead thirty-one thousand people? In the countryside no leader can afford to be the butt of ridicule.”

  “I can sympathize with that,” said the chief. “In fact, last week the provincial governor called our city and asked about this case. Probably Beijing already knows of it too.”

  At 2:10 P.M. the interrogation resumed. A few minutes after they sat down in the room, the two peasants insisted that they were wronged and should be released. They declared they both came from poor families and always loved the Party and the socialist motherland, though they had not been active in political studies and were ignorant of current affairs. They promised the chief that they would take great pains to educate themselves and would never make trouble again. The first thing they’d do after their release, they said, was buy a radio so that they could keep up with news.

  The chief waved his hand to cut them off. “You still refuse responsibility for the slander against Chairman Deng? Then how could I let you go? Your attitude is not right.”

  “Heavens!” the short peasant wailed. “This is a misunderstanding. Comrade Policeman, please—”

  “That’s irrelevant,” the chief said. “Look at it this way. Say that a sentence in a book can be read in different ways and some people get a reactionary meaning out of it. Now, who should be responsible for the reading—the writer or the reader?”

  “Mmm . . . probably the writer,” said the tall man.

  “Correct. All the evidence shows you two coauthored the slander, so you have to answer for all the consequences.”

  “Does this mean you won’t let us go home?” asked the short man.

  “Correct.”

  “How long are you going to jail us?”

  “It depends—a month, maybe life.”

  “What?” the tall peasant shouted. “I haven’t thatched my house for the winter yet. My kids will freeze to death if you keep me in—”

  “You still don’t get it!” Chairman Lou bellowed and slapped the tabletop with his fleshy hand. “You both should feel lucky that you’re still alive. How many people were executed because they spread counterrevolutionary rumors? Keep your butts in prison here, and remold yourselves into new men. I’ll have your families informed of where to send your underwear, if you have any.”

  In amazement, all eyes turned to look at the little man standing on an upholstered chair. Unshod, his large feet were in violet woolen socks.

  The chief ordered the guards, “Send them to the City Prison and put them among the political criminals.” He took off his glasses, smirking and wiping the lenses on the sleeve of his shirt. True, he couldn’t pass a definite sentence on the jokers, because the length of their imprisonment would depend on how long the Provincial Administration was interested in this case.

  “Chairman Lou, have mercy, please,” begged the tall man.

  Lou said, “It serves you right. See if you dare to be so creative again.”

  “I do it to your little ancestors, Dwarf Lou!” the short peasant yelled, stamping his feet. Four policemen walked up, grabbed the prisoners, and hauled them away.

  An Official Reply

  Professor Pan Chendong, Party Secretary

  English Department

  Beijing Humanities University

  Dear Professor Pan:

  Please allow me to express my deep admiration for your paper on Theodore Dreiser’s novels, which you presented at the Shanghai conference three years ago. My name is Zhao Ningshen, and I have chaired the Foreign Language Department at Muji Teachers College for two years. You may still remember me: a man in his mid-thirties, bespectacled, of slender build and medium height, with slightly hirsute arms and a head of luxuriant hair. After your talk at Splendor Hotel, we conversed for a few minutes in its lobby, and you gave me your card. Later I wrote you a letter and mailed you under separate cover a paper of mine on Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March. I assume you received them.

  In response to your inquiry about Professor Fang Baichen of my department, I shall refrain from dwelling too much on his character, because he was once my teacher and I can hardly be impartial. Although you may have heard anecdotes and depictions of him—he is a fool, a megalomaniac, an incorrigible lecher, a braggart, a charlatan, an opportunist, and so forth—none of those terms can adequately describe this unusual man. In the following pages, let me provide you with some facts, from which you may draw your own conclusion.

  I came to Muji Teachers College as a freshman in the winter of 1977 and met Mr. Fang on the very day of my arrival. At that time he was a lecturer, in charge of the instruction of the freshmen. I had been disappointed by being made to major in English, for I was not interested in any foreign tongue. I had applied for philosophy and Chinese literature in hopes of becoming a scholar of classics. To this day I am still unclear how the hand of fate steered me into the field of English studies. Probably because I was among the
few applicants bold enough to tackle the English examination—I mean the written part—some people on the Provincial College Admission Committee had decided to make me specialize in this language. In my heart I resented their decision, though there was no way to express my indignation. On our first evening on campus, all the freshmen were given a listening comprehension test in a lecture hall. Mr. Fang dictated the test.

  He read slowly in a vibrant voice: “In the old days, my grandfather was a farmhand hired by a cruel landlord. Day and night he worked like a beast of burden, but still his family did not have enough food and clothes. . . .”

  I was impressed by his clear pronunciation, never having met anyone who read English better than this dapper man. But I felt miserable because I couldn’t write down a complete sentence and had to turn in my test sheet almost blank. More disappointing was that the result of this test determined our placements in the classes, which were immediately divided into four levels. The freshmen of our year were the first group to take the entrance examinations after the Cultural Revolution. During the previous ten years, colleges had partly or mostly shut down and young talents had accumulated in society, so the student pool now was replete with all kinds of creatures. In our English program, three or four freshmen could read Jane Eyre, The Gadfly, and A Tale of Two Cities in the original, and they even scored higher than the graduating seniors in a test. On the other hand, many freshmen, like myself, knew only a couple of English words and had been assigned to study the language mainly on the strength of our high scores in the other subjects. A few boys and girls from Inner Mongolia, who had excelled in mathematics and physics, didn’t even know a single English word; nonetheless, they had been sent here too, to learn the language because their region needed English teachers.

  Naturally I was placed in the lowest class. I was so upset that I began to play truant. Mr. Fang’s class was from 7:30 to 9:30 in the morning, so I often skipped it. He was a good teacher, amiable and conscientious, and I bore him no grudge. In truth, I liked his way of running the class—he tried to make every one of us speak loudly, however shy or slow of comprehension we were. He loved the word “apple” because its vowel could force our mouths open. He would drop his roundish jaw and bare his even teeth, saying, “Open your mouth for a big apple.” That was his way of building our confidence as English speakers. Later I came to learn that he had been labeled a rightist and banished to the countryside for three years in the late fifties. I also could tell that his English pronunciation was not as impeccable as I had thought. The tip of his tongue often missed the edge of his teeth when he pronounced the interdental th, which Chinese does not have. Once in a while he would say “dick” for “thick” or “tree” for “three.” In addition, he spoke English with a stiff accent, perhaps because he had studied Russian originally. In the early sixties, when the relationship between China and Russia was deteriorating, Mr. Fang, like thousands of college teachers who responded to the Party’s call, had changed his field from Russian to English. (I always wonder who among our national leaders at the time had the foresight to discern the drift of history. How could he, or they, foresee that within twenty years English would replace Russian as the most powerful linguistic instrument for our country?)

  One evening I was lying in bed with a pair of earphones on my head, listening to an opera. Someone knocked at the door, but I did not bother to answer. To my surprise, the door opened and Mr. Fang’s face emerged. He was panting slightly, with his sheepskin hat under his arm; his left hand held a pale-blue tape recorder that weighed at least thirty pounds (at that time a cassette player was as rare as a unicorn here). On his steaming forehead a large snowflake was still melting, right beside a giant mole. His neck was muffled with a gray woolen scarf, which made him appear shorter than he was. I got up from my bed.

  He sat down on a decrepit chair and said to me, “Young Zhao, why didn’t you come to class this morning?”

  “I’m ill.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Stomachache.”

  “You can’t walk?”

  “Just barely.”

  “All right, since you still can speak and hear, I’m going to teach you here and now.”

  I was too shocked to respond. He moved the chair closer, took a mimeographed textbook out of his jacket pocket, and said, “Let’s begin with Lesson Four.”

  Reluctantly I pulled out my textbook from the single-shelf bookcase above the head of my bed.

  “Turn to page thirty-one,” he said.

  I found the lesson. He went on, “Repeat after me, please: This is a bee.” The tip of his tongue moistened his heavy upper lip.

  I read out the sentence beneath the drawing of the insect, which looked more like a horsefly.

  “That is a cabbage,” he intoned.

  I read out the line under the vegetable. Together we practiced the variation of some simple syntactic patterns—changing statements into questions and vice versa. The whole time I was nervous and couldn’t resist wondering why he was so determined to keep me abreast of the class.

  After the reading practice, he plugged in the recorder and turned it on to let me hear how a British man pronounced those sentences. As we waited for the machine to produce the genuine English voice, he sighed and said to me, “All your classmates repeat the text after the recording for at least two hours a day, while you don’t do a thing. If you continue to be like this, you’ll have to drop out soon. You’re wasting your talent.”

  “I’ve no talent for English,” I said.

  He raised his long eyebrows and told me calmly, “In fact you don’t need talent for learning a foreign language. What you need is endurance and diligence. The more time and effort you put into it, the better your English will be. There’s no shortcut.”

  When the British man’s voice finally emerged, I was made to follow it, repeating every sentence in the long pause after it. Meanwhile Mr. Fang was chain-smoking, which soon turned the room foggy. I read out the lesson along with the recording several times. He stayed almost two hours, until one of my roommates came back for bed. How relieved I was after he left. We kept the transom open for a long while.

  I did not expect he would come again the next evening. His second appearance disturbed me, because obviously he knew I was not ill. Why did my truancy bother him so much? Despite not showing any temper, he must be exasperated at heart. Was he going to flunk me if I missed more classes? Indeed it was not his fault that I got trapped in the Foreign Language Department. He must take me for a major troublemaker. Burdened with all these worrisome thoughts, I could hardly concentrate on the reading practice.

  To my amazement, we ended an hour earlier this time. But before he left, with his hand on the doorknob, he said to me, “I know you don’t like English, but think about this: What subject taught in our college can promise you a better career? Last year two of our best students passed the exams and went to Africa to serve as interpreters. They travel between Europe and Africa a lot and eat beef and cheese every day. Another graduate of our department is working as an English editor at China Times in Beijing. Every year we’ll send some students to the Provincial Administration, where they manage international trade, cultural exchanges, and foreign affairs—all hold important positions. You’re still young. All kinds of opportunities may turn up in your life. If you don’t get yourself ready, you won’t be able to seize any of them. Now, to master English is the only way to prepare yourself, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Think about it. See you tomorrow,” he said and went out with the bulky recorder, whose weight bent his legs a little.

  His words heartened me to some degree. I had never heard that graduates from this department could enter diplomatic service. That was a wonderful profession and would enable one to travel abroad. I would love to visit some foreign countries in the future. By and by a ray of hope emerged in my mind. There was no way to change my major, so probably I had better not laze around too much. It was not t
oo late to catch up with the class.

  So on Mr. Fang’s third visit to our dormitory, I told him that I was well enough to go to class the next day.

  Gradually I became a diligent student. In the morning I would rise at 4:30, pacing back and forth in corridors and lobbies (it was too cold to stay outside), reading out lessons, and memorizing vocabulary, idioms, expressions, and sentence patterns. Some freshmen got up even earlier than I did. To save time, a few would stay in the classrooms at night and just sleep three or four hours, fully clothed, on the long platforms beneath the blackboards. They would return to the dormitory every other night. On the face of it, we studied feverishly because we cherished the opportunity for a college education, which the majority of our generation dared not dream about; and the department commended us for our dedication. But at bottom there was a stiff competition among us, since better grades might help one get a better job assignment on graduation. I overused my throat so much in practicing English pronunciation that I had to swallow painkillers every day.

  Soon Mr. Fang was promoted to professorship. To our dismay, he stopped teaching us. The department at the time had only two associate professors in English, and Mr. Fang was one of them. He was highly respected by the students and the young faculty members, whom he often taught how to waltz or tango. Every Thursday afternoon some teachers would hold a dance party, which we students could only peep at through a keyhole or a door left ajar. By far Mr. Fang was the best male dancer. He didn’t have a paunch, but when dancing, he would stick out his belly and make himself somewhat resemble a paunchy businessman, and in this way he also got physically closer to his female partner. We were impressed and thought he was something, truly a man of parts. At our annual conference on foreign literature, he presented a lengthy paper on For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was an eye-opener for most of us and was later published in Modern Literature. Before that, I had never heard of Hemingway.

  I was unhappy during my undergraduate years because I remained in the lowest class all the time. This stung my pride. Twice the students of the lower classes staged a strike, demanding new class placements based on merit. After two years’ study, many of us in the lower classes had caught up and knew English as well as some of those in the top class, which had always been taught by a British or Canadian expert. Whereas we had never had a native speaker to teach us. As a result, our spoken English was deplorable. The department refused to consider our demand seriously, but to forestall another strike, Professor Fang, who had been appointed its vice chairman lately, agreed to have a dialogue with us. So we all gathered in a classroom and listened to him explain why the hierarchical order of the classes should remain unchanged. His reason was that we could hire only one foreign expert at a time, and that this person should teach the best students. He mentioned the saying “Give the hardest steel to the blade.” We did not disagree about that. What we contended against was the permanency of the top group.