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 too 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.
We argued with him tenaciously. Neither side could persuade the other. Gradually Mr. Fang lost his temper, and his face turned the color of pork liver. His voice grew more nasal. He declared with his hand chopping the air, “No, the continuity of instruction must never be disrupted. If we changed the top group constantly, who could teach such a class? Impossible!”