Peter looked at Chang Shan. He was a tall very thin young man of twenty-two. Anyone could see that he had tuberculosis, as most of the students had. His head was large and the bones of his skull protruded. A big slightly arched nose, full pale lips and solid white teeth were nothing uncommon in his looks, but these, combined as they were with fiery eyes, gave his head nobility. Everybody secretly admired Chang Shan, but few dared to be his friends. In these times when life depended upon many things besides food, friends could be more dangerous than enemies. Peter and Chang Shan were friends.
“You will not believe me when I tell you that the place where my father lives is warmed in every corner by pipes carrying hot water,” Peter said.
“It is a pity you do not return to your father,” Chang Shan said. He was reading a badly printed book and he did not look up.
“I do not know why I cannot return,” Peter replied. They spoke in Chinese because Chang did not speak English. Peter had learned to speak the Peking Mandarin, partly that he might talk with Chang Shan. Yet he had never taken Chang Shan to the city house. James and Mary, he had felt, would not like this friend. Chang Shan was an absolutist. When anything was not good, he believed in its total destruction. Thus he believed now in the destruction of the old family system, of the president of the university, of all capitalists, of the Chinese written language, of inflation, of the high cost of living, of the gold standard, of Confucianism, the classics, and the government. It was only a matter of time until Chang Shan would be caught by the secret police and killed. He knew it and for this reason he did not allow himself to fall in love with a girl who loved him. He refused even to see her and the only way she could comfort herself was to come to the room when he was away and leave small packages of food. Chang Shan tried not to eat these but sometimes his hunger compelled him to do so. The girl, Fengying, was a plain ugly female student, and she waylaid Peter as often as she could to ask if Chang Shan had eaten the food and to beg Peter to persuade him to do so. She did not hide her adoration. She declared to Peter, “Chang Shan will be a great revolutionary leader. It is our duty to keep him alive.” In her heart she hoped Peter did not consume her gifts, but she did not say so, fearing he might be angry and so refuse to answer her questions about Chang Shan.
“Yes, yes—” Peter had agreed. She was so ugly, her bulging eyes so pathetic behind her steel-rimmed spectacles, that he escaped from her as soon as he could.
“I do not know why I do not return to my father,” Peter said now to Chang Shan. He, too, was trying to study but he had found it impossible to read the assignment for the next day. It mattered little enough whether he read it or not. The professor would doubtless not come to his class through the snow. His shoes, like those of his students, were only of cotton cloth, and the snow would soon wet them and he had not another pair. He had long ago sold his leather shoes for money to buy rice and so could buy no more leather shoes.
“You are weakening again,” Chang Shan said scornfully. “You have been wet-nursed on Confucianism. You are, I suppose, the superior man.”
“You are very unjust,” Peter said bitterly.
“I am not unjust, then, to myself,” Chang Shan said gravely. All this time he had not lifted his eyes from the book. Now suddenly he looked at the window. When he saw the reflection of the light upon the falling snowflakes, he got up quickly and went out.
Peter did not ask where he went. Chang Shan might have gone out for any reason. Since there were no indoor toilets, he might merely have stepped outside in the street to relieve himself. Or he might have decided that this was a good night to go to the marble bridge.
He came back in a few minutes. “The night is dark and even the police will not be out in the snow,” he announced. “I am going to the bridge.”
Chang Shan never asked anyone to go with him to the bridge. He merely told a few other students that he was going. Then he went off alone. Usually before he reached the bridge two or three others would follow him. At the bridge they would work in silence, digging into the yellow clay, making a hole big enough for dynamite. Did they have the pure dynamite that Americans used it would not have taken them so long. But they had only the poor stuff left by the Japanese in a warehouse — lucky at that, for the students had found it first. The bridge was huge. Built centuries ago of marble with granite foundations, it was as strong as the day it had been finished. The only signs of time were the hollows worn by the feet of generations upon its surface. Since these were even now only an inch or so deep, the bridge could exist for thousands of years longer. But the students were planning to blow it up for the very reason that it was so old and huge and because its size and permanence made them angry. It signified the glory of an age that was gone, and it was a bridge not only over the water beneath it, but also from the present into the past. The past was what the students wanted to forget because they could not share its glory, and dead glory did them no good now. It was the present which they wanted to build, and they craved hope for the future. Yet the people, those who lived in villages and upon the land, remained on the other side of the bridge, separated from the students in the university. These people still lived in the past, they were content with themselves, they trusted the land, which is eternal. Therefore the students wanted to destroy the bridge in protest.
In protest against what? They said, against the government. But actually it was in protest against their tuberculosis and their poverty and the miserable teaching they were given when they were hungry for true knowledge; in protest, too, against their wretched childhoods and against their own ambitions, never to be fulfilled, and most of all in protest against their broken pride and the hopelessness of their future. But the students did not know all this. They blamed only their rulers, who they insisted, had sold the country to Western imperialists.
Alone now in Chang Shan’s room Peter determined that he would not follow his friend. Yet he felt so lonely that he was terrified. He knew that he could never return to his father. If he went home he would quarrel with his father. Sooner or later he would tell his father that he was a liar and had cheated his own children. His mother had become a fool in Peter’s eyes. He did not want to see his parents again as long as he lived. Neither did he want to see his American friends. He could not tell them about China. There were no more dreams to be made, now that he knew the truth. Yet he was more impatient with James and Mary than with any of them. The paltriness of what they planned, the folly of finding satisfaction in it! There was something splendid in Chang Shan’s determination to destroy. Chang Shan was not a Communist. He did not believe that the Communists were any better than others. They, too, Chang Shan said, should be destroyed. A clean country, the old gone, the selfish swept away by the storm — this was the only hope. “Even if I destroy myself in the storm,” Chang Shan argued, “I leave cleanness behind me.”