Wei Xiangdong took swift and decisive action. Eleven minutes later, Gao Honghai, alias Chu Tian, was standing in Wei’s duty office, where he was told to take the “three-against” position—pressing his nose, his belly, and his toes against the wall. While he was flattened up against the wall, he was told to trace the shameful course of his inner journey as a means of “exposing” his problems. Think, and think hard. The three-against punishment lasted forty-five minutes, which meant that Gao told on himself for three quarters of an hour, after which he was ordered to turn around. Wei then switched on all the lights in the office and brought over a desk lamp to shine in Gao’s face; a round patch of lime on his nose made him look like a Peking Opera clown.
“Have you thought through everything?” Wei asked. Gao kept quiet and began to wet himself, drenching his shoes and making a puddle on the floor.
“Have you thought through everything?” Wei repeated.
“Yes,” Gao responded softly.
“Then talk.”
So Gao talked, telling a shocking story. Stripped of the façade of a poet, he exposed his filthy and sordid inner world, for he was “in love” with eight girls at the same time: Wang Qin, Li Dongmei, Gao Zijuan, Cong Zhongxiao, Chan Xia, Tong Zhen, Lin Aifen, and Qu Meixi. Every night after lights-out, he confessed, he began to think about them one by one.
He even had poetry as proof.
This one was dedicated to Li Dongmei. With his eyes fixed on Gao, Wei breathed hard, but that went unnoticed by Gao, who was drunk on his own poetry. His eyes grew misty as he worked himself up to give another example, a poem to Qu Meixi.
Gao recited another poem and then another, clearly self-satisfied and completely unaware of the menacing look on Wei’s face. With his eyes fixed on Gao, Wei felt his anger mount until he slammed his fist on the desk and shouted, “No more rhymes. Stop it. Just talk.”
Gao’s recital came to an abrupt end as he hunched his shoulders. Then he slowly relaxed and wordlessly looked at Wei, as if in a daze.
The following morning Gao did something utterly shocking in his classical essay class when the teacher was explicating Su Dongpo’s “Red Cliff Lament.” The teacher, a man in his fifties, spoke with a southern accent that made his “n” indistinguishable from his “l,” and his “zh,” “ch,” and “sh” indistinguishable from his “z,” “c,” and “s.”
He had a high-pitched voice that tended to turn shrill when he was excited, giving it a soaring quality and himself a self-indulgent air. His eyes emitted searing heat from behind his glasses. In order to explicate the line “When he first married the younger sister Qiao, he showed a resounding air of gallantry,” he began to cite allusions that would involve the phrase “If the east wind brought Zhou Yu no aid.”
He turned around to write “The two Qiao sisters would be locked up in Tongque Terrace in late spring” on the blackboard when Gao Honghai stood up and commanded in a severe voice, “No rhymes.”
The teacher spun around and asked cautiously, “What did you say?”
To everyone’s surprise, Gao slammed his fist on the desk and shouted in a voice that seemed to have the power to swallow the world, “No rhymes!”
Taken by surprise, the teacher suppressed his anger and said patiently, “Comrade Chu Tian, you write free verse, so you don’t have to rhyme, but classical poetry is different. This is not a question of whether you can or cannot; it’s a matter of the formulaic structure and rules of classical prosody. Understand? You have to rhyme.”
Enraged, Gao Honghai insisted stubbornly, “No rhymes!”
Unreasonable, disrespectful, disruptive. The aggrieved teacher froze. Fortunately, the bell rang, which gave him a chance to voice his anger in the way he announced “Class dismissed.” He picked up his notes, but Gao would not give up. Growing fixated on the teacher, Gao repeated the command over and over.
“No rhymes!”
His patience exhausted, the teacher grabbed Gao with his bony hand and dragged him to the student affairs office, where he screamed at the director, “It was Su Dongpo who rhymed, not me! How could I avoid it? This is ridiculous!” He was visibly agitated, but the student affairs director had no idea what had caused the teacher’s outburst.
“What happened?” the director asked calmly.
The classics teacher was so hot under the collar his face had turned purple. “If I don’t teach well and you’re unhappy, just tell me. But you can’t do it this way. It’s Su Dongpo who rhymed. I repeat: it wasn’t me!”
Still confused, the student affairs director shifted his questioning eyes from the classics teacher to Chu Tian just as the principal walked by. The classics teacher pulled the principal over and continued even more shrilly, “He can complain if I’m not doing a good job teaching the class, but not like this!”
By now a crowd of students and teachers had gathered. The principal raised his chin.
“Calm down and tell me what happened,” he said.
The teacher dragged Gao over and pushed him up to the principal. “Let him tell you.”
The steam had left Gao by then, but he refused to give his mouth a rest.
“Ridiculous!” the teacher mumbled to himself.
“No rhymes!” Gao said, catching his second wind.
“Ridiculous!”
“No rhymes!”
“Ridiculous!”
“No rhymes!”
The teacher sputtered and began to tremble. “You… you… cra… zy… lu… na… tic.” With that, he spun around and stormed off.
The teacher’s outburst had given the principal a sense of what had happened, so he leaned over and, with one hand behind his back, reached out to touch Gao’s forehead.
With astonishing arrogance, Gao knocked the principal’s hand away and intoned a poem with a sad and gloomy look.
The principal smiled, intending to smooth things over. “Didn’t you just rhyme?” he asked.
“No rhymes!” Gao said.
The principal turned and whispered in the director’s ear, “Call for an ambulance.”
Gao tried to escape when the ambulance arrived, but five male students from the school security team pounced on him. Shouting angrily, he fought to break free, but the team wrestled him to the ground and restrained him. A doctor in a white smock came up and promptly gave Gao an injection, a wonderfully useful shot; this created a lively, comical scene that was witnessed by everyone in sight. The hardworking crystal liquid quietly did its job, and Gao slowly crumpled before their eyes. His belly heaved a few times with increasingly less force each time, and that was his body’s last attempt to struggle. His eyes glazed over as if he were blind, and his mouth hung slack like a beached fish’s; a long stream of drool oozed from it. The students were convinced that Chu Tian would never again be Chu Tian; he could only go on as Gao Honghai.