Ha Jin - Ocean of Words

If not for the help of Director Liang Ming of the Divisional Logistics Department, Zhou’s last year in the army would have been disastrous. Liang and his family lived in a grand church built by nineteenth-century Russian missionaries, which was at the southern corner of the Divisional Headquarters compound. A large red star stood atop the steeple. Within the church many walls had been knocked down to create a large auditorium, which served as the division’s conference hall, movie house, and theater. All the fancy bourgeois pews had been pulled out and replaced by long proletarian benches, and Chairman Mao’s majestic portrait had driven off the superstitious altarpiece.

The Liangs lived in the back of the church, as did the soldiers of the Radio-telegram Station. Because the antennas needed height, the radiomen occupied the attic, while the director’s family had for themselves the three floors underneath. Whenever there was a movie on, the men at the station would steal into the auditorium through the rear door and sit against the wall, watching the screen from the back stage. They never bothered to get tickets. But except for those evenings when there were movies shown or plays performed, the back door would be locked. Very often Zhou dreamed of studying alone in the spacious front hall. Unable to enter it, he had to go outside to read in the open air.

One evening in October he was reading under a road lamp near the church. It was cloudy and a snow was gathering, just as the loudspeaker had announced that morning. Zhou was so engrossed he didn’t notice somebody approaching until a deep voice startled him. “What are you doing here, little comrade?” Director Liang stood in front of Zhou, smiling kindly. His left sleeve, without an arm inside, hung listlessly from his shoulder, the cuff lodged in his pocket. His baggy eyes were fixed on Zhou’s face.

“Reading,” Zhou managed to say, closing the book and reluctantly showing him the title. He tried to smile but only twitched his lips, his eyes dim with fear.

“The Three Kingdoms!” Liang cried. He pointed at the other book under Zhou’s arm. “How about this one?”

“ Ocean of Words , a dictionary.” Zhou regretted having taken the big book out with him.

“Can I have a look?”

Zhou handed it to the old man, who began flicking through the pages between the green covers. “It looks like a good book,” Liang said and gave it back to Zhou. “Tell me, what’s your name?”

“Zhou Wen.”

“You’re in the Radio Station upstairs, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you often read old books?”

“Yes.” Zhou was afraid the officer would confiscate the novel, which he had borrowed from a friend in the Telephone Company.

“Why don’t you read inside?” Liang asked.

“It’s noisy upstairs. They won’t let me read in peace.”

“Tickle their grandmothers!” Liang shook his gray head. “Follow me.”

Unsure what was going on, Zhou didn’t follow him. Instead he watched Liang’s stout back moving away.

“I order you to come in,” the director said loudly, opening the door to his home.

Zhou followed Liang to the second floor. The home was so spacious that the first floor alone had five or six rooms. Down the hall the red floor was shiny under the chandelier; the brown windowsill at the stairway was large enough to be a bed. Liang opened a door and said, “You use this room. Whenever you want to study, come here and study inside.”

“This, this —”

“I order you to use it. We have lots of rooms. From now on, if I see you reading outside again, I will kick all of you out of this building.”

“No, no, they may want me at any time. What should I say if they can’t find me?”

“Tell them I want you. I want you to study and work for me here.” Liang closed the door, and his leather boots thumped away downstairs.

Outside, snowflakes suddenly began fluttering to the ground. Through the window Zhou saw the backyard of the small grocery that was run by some officers’ wives. A few naked branches were tossing, almost touching the panes. Inside, green curtains covered the corners of the large window. Though bright and clean, the room seemed to be used as a repository for old furniture. On the floor was a large desk, a stool, a chair, a wooden bed standing on its head against the wall, and a rickety sofa. But for Zhou this was heaven. Full of joy, he read three chapters that evening.

Soon the downstairs room became Zhou’s haven. In the Radio Company he could hardly get along with anybody; there was a lot of ill feeling between him and his leaders and comrades. He tried forgetting all the unhappy things by making himself study hard downstairs, but that didn’t always help. His biggest headache was his imminent discharge from the army: not the demobilization itself so much as his non-Party status. It was obvious that without Communist Party membership he wouldn’t be assigned a good job once he returned home. Thinking him bookish, the Party members in the Radio Company were reluctant to consider his application seriously. Chief Huang would never help him; neither would Party Secretary Si Ma Lin. Zhou had once been on good terms with the secretary; he had from time to time helped Si Ma write articles on current political topics and chalked up slogans and short poems on the large blackboard in front of the Company Headquarters. That broad piece of wood was the company’s face, because it was the first thing a visitor would see and what was on it displayed the men’s sincere political attitudes and lofty aspirations. The secretary had praised Zhou three times for the poems and calligraphy on the blackboard, but things had gone bad between Zhou and Si Ma because of Ocean of Words .

The dictionary was a rare book, which Zhou’s father had bought in the early 1950s. It was compiled in 1929, was seven by thirteen inches in size and over three thousand pages thick, and had Chinese, Latin, and English indexes. Its original price was eighty silver dollars, but Zhou’s father had paid a mere one yuan for it at a salvage station, where all things were sold by weight. The book weighed almost three jin . Having grown up with the small New China Dictionary , which had only a few thousand entries, Secretary Si Ma had never imagined there was such a big book in the world. When he saw it for the first time, he browsed through the pages for two hours, pacing up and down in his office with the book in his arms as if cradling a baby. He told Zhou, “I love this book. What a treasure. It’s a gold mine, an armory!”

One day at the Company Headquarters the secretary asked Zhou, “Can I have that great book, Young Zhou?”

“It’s my family’s heirloom. I can’t give it to anybody.” Zhou regretted having shown him the dictionary and having even told him that his father had spent only one yuan for it.

“I won’t take it for free. Give me a price. I’ll pay you a good sum.”

“Secretary Si Ma, I can’t sell it. It’s my father’s book.”

“How about fifty yuan ?”

“If it were mine I would give it to you free.”

“A hundred?”

“No, I won’t sell.”

“Two hundred?”

“No.”

“You are a stubborn, Young Zhou, you know.” The secretary looked at Zhou with a meaningful smile.

From that moment on, Zhou knew that as long as Si Ma was the Party secretary in the company, there would be no hope of his joining the Party. Sometimes he did think of giving him the dictionary, but he could not bear to part with it. After he had refused Si Ma’s request for the second time, his mind could no longer remain at ease; he was afraid somebody would steal the book the moment he didn’t have it with him. There was no safe place to hide it at the station; his comrades might make off with it if they knew the secretary would pay a quarter of his yearly salary for it. Fortunately, Zhou had his own room now, so he kept the dictionary downstairs in a drawer of the desk.