Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  And Ms. Emecheta’s prose, like Amos Tutuola’s though to a much smaller degree, has a shimmer of originality, of English being reinvented. At an early meeting with Nko, Ete Kamba “stood there slouching around, somehow refusing to sit down, and noticing that people around him were leaving him completely alone and not bothering to pressurise him to sit down. He followed Nko’s busyness with the corners of his eyes.…” Contemplating taking her virginity, he yearns to inflict “a pain that would uninnocent her.” And the confusions of crowded traffic are conveyed: “Impatient taxis in their yellow colouring with a splash of blue in the middle would meander in between the cars in a hurry to get on first.” Such pleasant expressionism brings us close, perhaps, to the spoken Nigerian English that, while the main characters speak with ungainly and unlikely correctitude, is transcribed from the mouth of a cleaning girl, accused of not cleaning a toilet: “Watin’ you wan make we do, when we no geti water, whey we go use for flush, abi you wan make ago geti water from me mama well?” This accent is imitated, in foolery, by the male students, as they discuss love. “A no de for disi una sweety belle stuff,” one says, and another answers, “Na so for me ooo. One women be like anoder. Why ago go kill myself for one chick, that wan pass me.” To this reviewer’s previous knowledge that a Lagos traffic jam is called a “go-slow” he was delighted to add the information that a “been-to” is a Nigerian who has been to England and that female sexual charm can be called “bottom power”—“It is easier to get a good degree,” one female undergraduate assures another, “using one’s brain power than bottom power. They may try to tell you that your bottom power is easier and surer, don’t believe them.”

  The fellowship of women, wherein confession and counsel can be given, is the home base of Double Yoke, as it was for The Joys of Motherhood, whose heroine, Nnu Ego, after a lifetime given to serving her patriarchal society with child-bearing, realizes that “she would have been better off had she had time to cultivate those women who had offered her hands of friendship.” The female students at Calabar—some of them middle-aged—have mothers who had gone into “fattening rooms” to become suitably plump brides; now they gossip about anorexia nervosa. The sense of relief, of escape from misunderstanding and harm, that accompanies Ms. Emecheta’s scenes of women together is like fresh air after prison. In the crucial scene of Nko’s submission to Professor Ikot, the author in her distaste can scarcely bear to describe the event:

  They ate and the professor drank spirits. She made do with Pepsi, and like a wooden doll, she let the man have what he wanted. He thundered and pushed her around and promised heaven and earth, but Nko was very still.

  That marvellous “He thundered and pushed her around and promised heaven and earth” would deflate even Don Juan. However, absolute feminist fury, the wish to do away with men altogether and make a female Utopia, is never expressed by Ms. Emecheta or her characters, and the phrase “double yoke” is extended to describe not just Nko’s plight (“I want to be an academician and I want to be a quiet nice and obedient wife”) but that of Ete Kamba and his fellow young Nigerian males. At the end Miss Bulewao tells her class that “many of you are bearing your double burdens or yokes or whatever heroically,” and spells out “the community burden … and yet the burden of individualism.” In a Third World country like Nigeria, a matter like sexual harassment is even more serious than in the West. Female virginity has a higher value, and so does education. The dropout of the educated elite back into the villages is precipitous; the options to “the system” are few, and the rungs on the ladder of success—constructed by the departed colonial power—are rigidly set. Nko, Professor Ikot tells Ete Kamba, is “made for the Commissioner or the Professorial class, you know those on salary level sixteen and over. You’ll be lucky to get level seven when you finish here.” Monsters and peril still rule in the new Africa, though they take the form of lascivious professors and loss of status. Buchi Emecheta does not have to manufacture suspense and seriousness; issues of survival lie inherent in her material, and give her tales weight even when, as in this case, they are relatively light and occasional. Africans still have something exciting to tell each other, which is that the path of safety is narrow.

  Chinese Disharmonies

  THE QUESTION OF HU, by Jonathan D. Spence. 187 pp. Knopf, 1988.

  HALF OF MAN IS WOMAN, by Zhang Xianliang, translated from the Chinese by Martha Avery. 285 pp. Norton, 1988.

  Jonathan D. Spence, born in England in 1936 and since 1966 a member of the Yale History Department, takes an arcane delight in resurrecting personalities out of the depths of Sinological archives. A long-lived monarch in Emperor of China (1974), a laborer’s doomed wife in The Death of the Woman Wang (1978), a polymathic Jesuit missionary in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984): these diverse individuals have all been hauntingly brought to life through scrupulous fidelity to details in the copious yet generally impersonal historical records of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. John Hu, the nominal hero of The Question of Hu, would be quite lost to history had he not been hastily recruited as an assistant by a fifty-six-year-old Jesuit, Jean-François Foucquet, who in 1722 returned from Canton to France, with eighteen precious crates of books, after over two decades of scholarly and missionary activity in China. Foucquet believed, fervently and perhaps foolishly, that he could show, by careful textual analysis, that “the ancient Chinese religious texts, such as The Book of Changes,” had been “handed to the Chinese by the true God,” and that the Way—the Tao—preached by these texts led to the God of the Bible. If this could have been demonstrated, the conversion of the Chinese multitudes would have been greatly eased, and obdurate official resistance to the Christian mission wonderfully softened, but Foucquet’s own superiors resisted an idea that bordered on the heretical. Further, his extraction of Christian glimmers from the Chinese classics required enormous efforts of transcription and translation. Even though, as Foucquet wrote, “In such an enterprise the act of labor becomes sweet, and even the harshest pains become in some way delicious,” he needed help, and had at times employed Chinese clerical assistants. His superiors, however, claimed that his vow of poverty forbade him to employ anyone. One superior, in particular, Father Pierre de Goville, the procurator of the French mission in Canton, frowned upon Foucquet’s enterprise, with its considerable expenditures for quantities of books, and upon Foucquet’s plan to take a Chinese assistant with him back to Europe. So Foucquet was not disposed to be picky when one John Hu, the keeper of the gate at the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, volunteered to accompany the Jesuit to France. The two men quickly signed a five-year contract, even though Foucquet found Hu “physically ugly” and observed as well that he was “none too clean” and had “a despairing look to him.” Foucquet wrote later, “It was either this Chinese or none at all.”

  Hu at the time was forty, a widower with a mother and one son. He had become a Christian in 1700, when he was nineteen. Foucquet judged a sample of his Chinese calligraphy “serviceable, if inelegant.” Hu had his own agenda: he wanted to travel to the West in order to visit the Pope, as had Louis Fan, a Chinese recently returned from ten years in Europe, and Hu wanted to write a travel book, a book that would “make him famous among his countrymen” when he returned from Europe. The only trouble was that—it developed soon after they embarked, with the many crates of books, on the long ocean voyage—Hu was crazy. Or, at the least, his behavior is (to adopt the present tense of Professor Spence’s narrative) highly erratic. He seems unable to learn the French language or French table manners, grabbing all the food he wants as soon as it appears on the table; his shipboard dining mates “try to explain the idea of portions to him,” and, that failing, “use a measure of force to restrain him.” Upon recovering from a long bout of seasickness, Hu becomes violently censorious of “the loud ways and uncouth manners of the soldiers and sailors aboard,” and gets into a fight with a sailor. During an encounter with a Portuguese vessel off Brazil,
he seizes a cutlass and, “waving it in the air with menacing gestures, he marches proudly round the upper deck.” In mid-Atlantic, Hu has a vision in which angels tell him his task is “to seek out the Emperor of China and introduce him to the truths of the Christian religion.” When their ship is delayed outside the Spanish harbor of La Coruña, Hu demands a lifeboat and insists to Foucquet, “I will persuade the governor to listen to our needs. I will make him grant us permission to come ashore.”

  Spurts of uncontrollable officiousness continue to characterize his behavior in France; for instance, at an audience that Foucquet has obtained in Paris with the papal nuncio Hu grasps the offered armchairs and pushes them into what he has decided are more honorific positions. His spectacular and repeated kowtows to any crucifix he sees are unsettling, as is his insistence on sleeping on the floor, with the window wide open. Forced to dine with their host’s housekeeper, he “will not allow her near him. He makes faces at her, and gestures her away, or simply turns his back whenever she appears.” In Port Louis, though he has never before ridden a horse, he steals one and gallops around the town, winning the name “Don Quixote” from the townspeople. The French populace are inclined to be amused by the antics of their exotic visitor; in Paris, Hu collects a “large and attentive” crowd in front of the Church of St. Paul when, after beating on a drum he has made and waving a banner inscribed with the four Chinese characters “nan nü fen bie” (“Men and women should be kept in their separate spheres”), he preaches lengthily in Chinese. He becomes harder to control, disappearing for a day and then for a week and suddenly showing up at the Jesuit residence in Orléans. From there Father Léonard Gramain writes Foucquet’s friend Father Jean-Baptiste du Halde in Paris, “Neither with words nor signs can he make us understand why he left Paris and where he wants to go.… Since he often says the words ‘China’ and ‘Peking,’ and also the words ‘Rome’ and ‘Pope,’ we are assuming that he would like to go to Rome and from there to China.” Foucquet responds with a letter to Hu in phonetically spelled-out Chinese, admonishing him to behave better. “Jumping at Father Gramain, Hu snatches the letter out of the startled man’s hands. Before anyone can prevent him, he tears the letter to angry pieces.” And when Foucquet receives his long-awaited invitation to Rome, and invites Hu to accompany him, Hu refuses, though seeing the Pope has been his dream. He is under the impression that Foucquet “kills people,” and he hides in his bed: “If Foucquet or anyone comes to remonstrate with him, he pulls the covers over his head.” The exasperated Foucquet goes to Rome alone, having arranged to have Hu committed in his absence to the hospital for the insane at Charenton. There Hu languishes for two and a half years, living in one of the cells for pauper inmates, his unchanged clothes disintegrating as he wears them. When he is given a warm blanket, he rips it to shreds. When Father Goville, Foucquet’s old enemy in Canton, visits Charenton and talks to Hu in Chinese, Hu’s first question is “Why have I been locked up?” Some of the oddities of Hu’s behavior—his compulsive kowtowing to the cross, his rigid sense of caste, his abhorrence of female company, and his hopping about to avoid stepping on the maze of crosses he sees in a parquet floor—could be construed as marks of Oriental acculturation muddled with a Baroque Catholic faith. But a number of other Chinese, such as Louis Fan and “a well-educated and courteous young man” whom Foucquet discovered studying for the priesthood in Rome, visited Europe in this era without going berserk. Hu’s evident inability to learn even the rudiments of French, during five years of immersion in it, and his refusal to take lessons when they were offered him upon his release from Charenton, indicates an impaired mental balance, as do his failure to perform the work Foucquet hired him for, his unreal sense of lapsed time, his visions, his megalomania, his periods of depressed inactivity, his abrupt ventures into vagabondage and beggary, and his fitful posturing and clowning. Perhaps he suffered from manic depression, severe to the point of psychosis. Though the details of his case almost all come from Foucquet himself, in a “Récit Fidèle” he composed to clear his good name in the wake of rumors that he mistreated Hu, there is no reason to doubt their accuracy, or to deny Foucquet our sympathy as he attempts to cope with a deranged dependent whose “acts of folly”—he wrote despairingly to the lieutenant of the Paris police, Marc Pierre d’Argenson, who arranged for Hu’s commitment—“are accompanied by a malevolence and an obstinacy that can not be relieved by prayers, threats, or generosity.”

  In its laconic, deadpan paragraphs and swift-moving chapters, The Question of Hu evokes the strangeness of human life altogether—the dubious claim of any of it to sanity. How sane is Foucquet, with his frenetic letter-writing and his strenuous conviction that “in the long-distant past the Chinese had worshipped the Christian God”? The French King’s librarian, the Abbé Bignon, comments of Foucquet’s theories, “Nothing in the world has ever been so ill-founded.” The King’s confessor, Father Linières, finds Foucquet “strident in his views, rash in his behavior, and over-critical of the former Jesuit colleagues with whom he is arguing about the rites.” As their correspondence grows heated, he writes Foucquet, “It seems to me that you might have done better to have learned a bit less Chinese, and to have spent the time instead studying the sciences of saintliness.” There is a touch of bewitchment in the Jesuit missionary’s descent into the musty ancient Chinese texts, his “intense desire of finding some way to get inside the written relics of that nation.” In the accents of Borgesian romanticism he writes to Abbé Bignon of the secrets “hidden by the holiest of the Patriarchs more than eighty centuries ago under the surface covering of these profound and mysterious hieroglyphs.”

  Jonathan Spence, in this book, as in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, dwells upon the description of systems (the rigorous way, for instance, in which the accommodations are arranged at the Jesuit retreat at Vannes, and at the asylum of Charenton) as if to suggest delusional systems that were erected in vain against the erosions of universal chaos. How sane, from our late-twentieth-century standpoint, was the effort of a few celibate clerics, armed mostly with zeal and quaint erudition, to induce the xenophobic, anciently self-satisfied subcontinent of China to make the Christian leap of faith? For that matter, is there not something peculiar in the author’s own zealous scholarship as it fanatically seeks out in the old scribbles of many languages the traces left by John Hu’s rather dismal, historically inconsequential life? Professor Spence includes in his grateful acknowledgments his pet dog, Daisy, who “climbed the narrow wooden steps to my summer study countless times a day, and lay across from me during every word, sighing gently in her sleep over my endless attempts to draw some meaning out of the constantly vanishing past.” What he has produced is, if not quite Dada history, history with a postmodern texture, minimalist and enigmatic—subtly fantastic history that in its very minutiae of research mocks our ability really to know another age or another person. We are disconcerted and charmed, rejoicing (not quite sanely) in the question of Hu as we rejoice in the face of all unanswerable but beautifully posed questions.

  Though some of the oldest literary works that can be called novels are Chinese, and the humanistic religions of Confucianism and Taoism conduce to an equable observation of society and psychology, the Communist Revolution and then the rampant Cultural Revolution offered little encouragement to realistic fiction. Half of Man Is Woman was, its jacket tells us, published in China in 1985 “to great popular enthusiasm, and much controversy because of its unaccustomed frankness about sex.” Less shocking, evidently, was its picture of the life political prisoners lead in labor camps, or laogai—the equivalent of Soviet gulags. Zhang Xianliang, like his narrator-hero, Zhang Yonglin, was condemned in 1957 for rightist tendencies displayed in his poetry, and remained in various labor camps for twenty years. He was “capped”—that is, made to wear a dunce cap—and thus launched with public humiliation upon the path of ideological correction. Martha Avery’s brief introduction explains how from 1966 to 1976, the years in which the novel tak
es place, the Cultural Revolution, precipitated when Mao lost control of the Party apparatus in 1965, raged chaotically throughout the vast nation, obliterating intellectual life and robbing personal life of intimacy and trust. “This is a book about survival in an insane world,” she tells us. “Zhang describes a country that went mad.” An agricultural labor camp was not such a bad place in which to wait out the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution—“In the labor camps you still get something to eat,” one character observes—and the novel curiously acquires the atmosphere of an idyll, of an austere and regulated Eden in which the primal mysteries of man-woman relations are reenacted with fresh passion, wonder, and dismay.