“You’ve forgotten who you are,” I said deliberately.
“I’m a born official.”
“No, you’re just a crazy bookworm.”
“I’m destined to govern.”
“You can’t even govern yourself.”
He paused for a few seconds, then blustered, “Oh, how dare you talk to me like this! If you were not my son, I would have you hauled out and beheaded. Heavens, how can I have sired such an unfilial thing?” He began wailing, tears trickling down his fleshy cheeks.
That frightened me. No matter how furious I was, I shouldn’t have disturbed him so much. I sat down on the bed and put my hand on his shoulder. I said, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Mr. Yang. I just hate to see you make a fool of yourself. Don’t be so heartbroken. See, I’m here to take care of you.”
“Am I still an official?”
“Sure, you hold the fifth rank, the same as the provincial governor’s.”
“Do I have a chauffeur and a chef?”
“Yes, a dozen servants.”
“And a personal doctor?”
“Of course, a complete staff.”
“Including four armed bodyguards?”
“Sure, you have a squad of them.”
“Also a Red Flag sedan?”
“Yes.”
“No, I like a Mercedes-Benz better.”
“All right, you can have that.”
He calmed down, but was still sniveling. Again with a spoon I slowly ground a sleeping pill in a cup, poured some orangeade into it, and fed the concoction to him. He obeyed me like a child exhausted by crying. After that, I put him back into bed.
As he sank into sleep, I picked up the newspaper from the floor and looked through it. I was not interested in the old news, but a photo on an inner page caught my attention and gave me the creeps. It showed a young woman, eyes shut and crying with her mouth wide open as if she were laughing. She had jumped off a smuggling sampan, swimming toward Hong Kong, but a shark had attacked her and ripped a large piece of flesh off her thigh. Her femur showed, whitish like a debarked tree branch and dripping blood. A police boat had rescued her and carried her to a hospital nearby. Later she was returned, together with a pair of crutches, to her hometown in Hubei Province. Evidently the picture was intended to deter people from sneaking across the water into Hong Kong. There were other photos on the same page. One of them showed the fossil of a dinosaur egg found in the Mongolian Plain by a team of American paleontologists.
I dropped the newspaper on the red floor and thought about Mr. Yang’s speech. Not until just now had it ever entered my mind that he might desire to become an official. He had often told me that he hated bureaucrats. If he really meant what he said, why did he yearn to be one of them? Probably he used to be able to quench this hankering, but now he was too ill to suppress it anymore. Or maybe this longing had been dormant in him all the time and even he himself wasn’t aware of it; now when he lost his mind, it manifested itself.
On the other hand, I shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Yang. Empleomania was commonplace among the intellectuals I knew. A case in point was the provost of our university, Shengtan Bai, a renowned mathematician, who was now dying of cancer. Four months ago when he heard that he was being considered for the provostship, without delay he began to bike through the campus once every other day to demonstrate that he was in adequate health, though in reality he was suffering from rectal cancer. He was a stalwart man, weighing at least two hundred pounds. It was said that after every bicycle ride he’d lie in bed at home groaning in pain for hours on end. Eventually he did get the promotion and stopped teaching and doing research. Unfortunately, he couldn’t enjoy the high post for long because his cancer had spread. He sat on the leather swivel chair in his new office only a few times, having to stay home two weeks after his appointment. Now he couldn’t even attend official banquets, unable to sit anymore.
To be fair, when Mr. Yang was in his right mind, he had never appeared keen about any official position. Many times he told me to be detached and disinterested, which he believed was the only proper way of pursuing scholarship. He would say, “I’d talk of poetics only with those who have an unpolluted mind.” How often he expressed to me his contempt for some pseudo-intellectuals, whose sole ambition was to enter officialdom and whose main function was to write editorials for the Party’s publications, to prepare speeches for their superiors, and to attack the people the authorities disliked. In Mr. Yang’s own words, “A scholar must not be a clerk or a mouthpiece of others.”
The previous winter when he returned from Canada, he had told me excitedly that scholars in the West lived more like intellectuals. He and I were sitting in his living room, which also served as a dining room. He explained to me over Dragon Well tea, “My friend at UC-Berkeley said that in his department nobody coveted the chair, because they all wanted more time for research. Contrary to this darned place”—he knocked the dining table with his knuckles as if it were the desk in his office. “Here to become a departmental chair is the pinnacle of a professor’s career. But scholars abroad are more detached and don’t have to be involved in politics directly, so they can take up long-term research projects, which are much more valuable and more significant. Oh, you should have seen the libraries at Berkeley, absolutely magnificent. You can go to the stacks directly, see what’s on them, and can even check out some rare books. Frankly, I would die happy if I could work as a librarian in a place like that all my life.”
True, he might have romanticized the academia in the West, but he was genuinely moved. Later he advised me to consider attending graduate school in the United States, saying, “You can live a real intellectual’s life there after you earn a Ph.D. from an American college.”
His advice surprised me, because I had never imagined living in a foreign country. Although it was fashionable among graduate students to study abroad, I hadn’t thought about this matter for myself. How could Mr. Yang talk of emigrating from our homeland like moving to another province? Did he make this suggestion also for the sake of his daughter? In other words, he might have figured that it was impossible for Meimei to go abroad on a scholarship in medicine, whereas I might receive some financial aid in the humanities, so only through me could she get to America. But I soon dismissed my misgivings and was convinced that he mainly had my interest in mind. Despite lacking confidence in my English, I decided to contact some schools in the United States. I applied to Yale, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and UC-Berkeley. Mr. Yang wrote a stunning recommendation for me, saying I was a rising scholar in poetic studies in mainland China. I was somewhat embarrassed by his excessive praise, though he meant what he said. He even offered to pay the twenty-nine-dollar TOEFL fee for me, since I couldn’t come by any foreign currency myself.
A month later I sat for the test, in which I didn’t do well. The written part went all right now that I had a solid grasp of English vocabulary, idioms, collocations, and syntax, but the part on listening comprehension dragged my scores down. I left many questions unanswered, not able to follow a meteorologist’s forecast and the conversation between a postman and a woman customer. So my total score was merely 570, below the 600 standard most Ph.D. programs in the humanities required. To my amazement, the University of Wisconsin accepted me, though it wouldn’t offer me any financial aid. Without a penny I couldn’t possibly go to the United States. To be honest, I wasn’t disappointed at all, because I still could not see the point of studying Chinese poetry in a foreign country. What’s more, I was unsure if I could survive in America. A former graduate student of our department, an excellent calligrapher, had gone to New York to study toward a master’s degree in journalism, and ever since he arrived there he had slaved as a busboy in a Cantonese restaurant in Manhattan. His parents were terribly worried that he might lose his mind, as he often complained in his letters that he had become an educated coolie, working more than fifty hours a week to earn his tuition, and might never graduate — he was too exhausted to study.