“How’s Mr. Yang doing?” she asked a moment later, her voice full of concern.
“Crazy as ever.”
“How bad is he now?”
“He’s not himself anymore. Sometimes he blabbers like an imbecile, and sometimes he speaks like a sage. I wonder if he has some kind of dementia.”
“You think he’ll recover soon?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“I’ll come to see him.”
I wanted to say, Makes no difference, but I held my tongue. We walked to her dormitory, which was about three hundred yards away to the east, beyond a shallow pond overgrown with lotus flowers. From the murky water a lone frog croaked tentatively. All the way we remained silent. I was sulking, because it seemed to me she should never have considered Yuman Tan as a possibility. That man had divorced his wife the summer before; to be exact, she had run out on him. She used to be a singer in the Provincial Song and Dance Ensemble and always wore lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara. She left for the United States to join an American man, Alan Johnson, a widower from Chicago with muttonchop whiskers, who had taught linguistics in the Foreign Languages Department here. Alan Johnson had begun carrying on with her after a mutual acquaintance introduced them in a teahouse downtown. They often went to restaurants and the movies. Most of the time they had to meet off campus, because the old guards at the front entrance to the compound where the foreign experts lived would not let any Chinese visitor go in without official permission. One night last spring, the two of them were picked up by a police patrol in Golden Elephant Park while they were making out on a bench there. The affair was the first one in our school involving a foreigner, so a good number of officials got reprimanded for negligence, particularly those in the university’s Foreign Affairs Office and the heads of the song and dance ensemble. Later the Provincial Education Department revoked its two-year contract with Alan Johnson, and he had no choice but to return to the United States at the end of his first year here.
After his wife left him, Yuman Tan wept every night for a week. Then he filed for a divorce, which was granted him within five days, so that he could legally go about wife hunting. He soon began to dress foppishly — a three-piece suit, checkered ties, patent leather boots. He even wore a pocket watch with a gilt chain. He bought a Yellow River moped, which was so expensive that only two or three faculty members in our university owned one, and he rode that thing to school every day. On this account some people called him “Little Running Bug.” Rumor had it that his ex-wife had left him a tidy sum as a divorce settlement; this would explain why he had suddenly become rich.
To be fair, to many women he wasn’t a bad match. Dozens of them were introduced to him. One was just nineteen, a technician in a gasworks, healthy and normal and without any family burden. Yuman Tan bragged that he had once seen three women in a single night, though we remarked behind his back that he could meet them each just for a few minutes and only in the presence of their parents or friends, under “special chaperonage.” Unlike most marriage-oriented men, he had a two-bedroom apartment, which enhanced his worth considerably. Many newly married couples, without a place of their own, lived separately in their dormitories or at their parents’ homes. Recently the university Party Committee had promised to give every married couple at least a room, which was an urgent measure to prevent young faculty members from leaving for other schools that would offer them better housing. I couldn’t tell whether Weiya also had Yuman Tan’s apartment on her mind. She might, considering she loved painting and must have longed for a room as a studio, which she had never had in her life. In addition, she wanted a home, which a man without housing could hardly give her. Some of the young women who were interested in Yuman Tan might have been impressed by his lectureship and writing, just as conventionally a man’s learning amounted almost to a virtue, a virtue that would lead to a respectable position and yield more income. Besides his study of philology, Yuman Tan published personal essays regularly in reputable journals, so he had a name.
Yet to my mind, Weiya shouldn’t have degraded herself by being one of his choices. It must have been the she-fox Secretary Peng who had set this trap for her. Weiya was too smart not to see through it, but why would she throw herself into the trap?
Approaching her dormitory building, I broke the silence. “Weiya, Ying Peng just wants to destroy you. Please don’t play into her hands.”
“It’s not so simple,” she said thoughtfully.
“Why plunge into the trap she laid for you? You mustn’t do that.”
She looked at me steadily and said, “You’re a good-hearted man, Jian. Sometimes you’re a bit too emotional, perhaps because you’re not experienced in life yet. Meimei’s lucky to have a man like you who hasn’t lost his innocence. My situation is too complicated for me to explain in detail. Please don’t get involved, or you’ll only be hurt. Forget what I said about love just now. Keep in mind that whatever I did in my life, I’ve always been a virgin in my heart and I will always cherish our friendship. Good night.” She turned and strode away.
I was somewhat bewildered by the sentiment she had expressed, which contradicted the pragmatic way she coped with Yuman Tan’s interest. Why did she think me too green? What did this whole thing have to do with the virginity of her heart? Why was she so reluctant to tell me everything?
To be honest, I felt lucky that she had brushed aside my silly offer of myself as a potential man for her and hadn’t taken me to be a jerk. How foolishly I had acted! If she had accepted my self-recommendation, I’d have found myself in a dilemma — having to choose between her and Meimei, whom I couldn’t imagine jilting. Hotheadedness was my main problem; too often I was ruled by my impulses.
The wind was rising, tugging at the trees and the electric wires. It threatened rain, a peal of thunder rumbling in the northwest, followed by slashes of lightning, so I hastened back to my dormitory.
13
As I was reviewing my notes on political economics, Mr. Yang, sitting on the bed, broke out singing. He sang in a spirited falsetto:
Gallantly we are crossing the Yalu River.
To defend peace and guard our country
Is to protect our hometowns.
The good sons and daughters of China and Korea,
Let us unite closely — to defeat
The vicious American wolves!
To defeat the vicious American wolves!
He bellowed the whole thing out as if he were among a large crowd of people on a platform in a railroad station to see the Chinese People’s Volunteers off to Korea to fight the American army. I wasn’t interested in the song, which had become obsolete long ago. He might just want my attention, but I wouldn’t give him any. Instead, I kept perusing my notes. He seemed frustrated and lapsed into silence.
I had thought of wearing earphones during my shift, but decided not to, afraid of negligence when he really needed me. Besides, once in a while I wanted to listen to him, to glean secrets from his opened mind.
“What are you doing, Jian?” he asked calmly.
“Reading.”
“Good. Have you brought me my books?”