Ha Jin - The Crazed

After everybody was seated, Yuman Tan lifted a bamboo-cased thermos and refilled the secretary’s glass teacup with scalding water. The water went on roiling the soggy tea leaves for a good while in the cup, which was a jam jar. He sat down and his rabbity face began to turn right and left. He seemed to be checking to see if every one of us had shown up. What a snob. Holding no official position whatsoever, why should he assume such a responsibility? Probably Secretary Peng had told him to count heads for her. He looked quite happy today, smirking continually.

Sitting at the head of a long table formed by six desks grouped together, Ying Peng wore a yellow pongee shirt with two baggy breast pockets. Her hooded eyes made her look sleepy. Strange to say, though this meeting seemed ominous, she had no written speech in her hands. She waved us to quiet down, then started to speak in her abrasive voice.

“Comrades, you’ve all heard some students are making big scenes in Beijing. We just received orders from the Municipal Administration that says no demonstration will be tolerated here in Shanning City. Two weeks ago, the People’s Daily brought out an important editorial that defined the nature of the disturbance in Beijing as ‘a plotted conspiracy — a riot.’ You all understand the full weight of those words. Without doubt some people are conspiring to overthrow the Communist Party’s leadership, to sabotage the unity of our country, and to rattle the security of our socialist system. I know that some undergrads on campus are restless, planning to take to the streets, but you graduate students, older and more mature, must keep your heads cool and must discourage every undergrad from making trouble. Let me remind you that thirty years ago lots of intellectuals were sent to jail and labor camps just because they yammered a few words against the Party leaders of their work units. Some of them were merely college kids, still wet behind the ears, but they lost their youthful years in no-man’s-land. All was due to a few rash words they let out. Comrades, please learn from the historical lesson and don’t repeat the same silly mistake. Behave yourselves and tuck your tails between your legs — like a modest creature. Bear in mind that our Communist Party has never been forgetful. As long as our Party’s in power, we won’t let you get away with your wrongdoing. So don’t go to the streets. Don’t take part in any reactionary activities. Mark my words, I won’t make any effort to protect you this time if you get into trouble. Even if you go down on your knees calling me Grandma, I won’t. Even if you treat me to a sixteen-course dinner, I won’t. Even if you present me with an eighteen-inch color TV, I won’t. Even if you open a savings account for me in the bank, I won’t!”

Laughter rang out. She looked amused, though her face remained tight. She went on: “Comrades, if you get arrested and become a counterrevolutionary, your whole family will suffer. Your siblings won’t be able to go to college no matter how smart they are. Also, nobody will marry you, and you’ll have to live as a bachelor or an old maid for the rest of your lives. Just imagine the lonesome years you’ll have to go through. So think twice before you join in anything. If you can’t help but poop and pee, come to my office or Chairman Song’s office, and let your stuff out within our department. That’ll be better than to make a big fuss on the streets, where the police will definitely whip your asses.”

A few people tittered at the foot of the table. The secretary turned to order Banping to read out the brief document that had just arrived.

With his elbows on the desktop splotched with blue ink, Banping began reading earnestly with a rustic accent: “All Party branches in the local schools must propagate this document among the faculty, staff, and students. From now on, every school must strengthen its disciplines and regulations, and must educate its students to abide by the law. Every Party member must act as a model for maintaining unity and stability, and must vigorously fight against any activities that instigate disorder and undermine the Party’s leadership. . ”

Weiya Su was seated across the table from me. Since the dinner at Banping’s place a week before, I had run into her only once. Today she seemed under the weather, her eyes red, rather watery, and an anemic pallor was on her cheeks. Her youthful outfit, an apple-green ruffled skirt and a white shirt with ladybugs printed on it and with a shawl collar, didn’t add much life to her. I noticed she glanced at me from time to time. When Ying Peng bent down to sneeze, Weiya tossed a tiny paper ball toward me — it landed on the table. Immediately I put my palm over it, but Yuman Tan’s small round eyes caught my hand and glowered at me. Disregarding him, I undid the paper ball below the table and saw these words: “Can we talk after the meeting?” I nodded yes to her.

During the rest of the meeting she looked preoccupied. We, the eighteen graduate students, were asked to promise the Party branch that we’d stay clear of any political activities against the government. One by one we vowed not to be involved. When it was Weiya’s turn to pledge her word, she spoke rather absently.

The meeting lasted just fifty minutes, uncharacteristically short. After it, Weiya and I went behind the classroom building, where a footpath stretched along the back wall and led to the swimming pool, whose water shimmered faintly beyond the high, pointed paling. Two female undergraduates were strolling back and forth along the path, chatting in low voices and giggling intermittently. So Weiya and I chose to stand under a streetlamp whose lightbulb had burned out. A dog yapped from the yard of the school’s guesthouse, about two hundred feet away in the north. The roof of that ranch-style house was partly obscured by young sycamores and a bamboo grove, and some rows of the ceramic tiles, still wet with rainwater, glistened in the moonlight.

“What’s happened?” I asked Weiya.

“What do you think of Yuman Tan?” Her voice was slightly hesitant.

“As a colleague?”

“No, as a man.”

I frowned. To me that dapper fellow was merely a truckler, “an anus-licker,” as some people called him behind his back. “Well,” I said, “I don’t think he’s impotent, though he never impregnated his ex-wife.”

“Come on, I’m serious.”

“Why are you so interested in him?”

“Secretary Peng has introduced him to me.”

“She wants you to date him?”

The angry edge in my voice must have startled her; she lifted her face, her eyes flickering. She answered, “More than that, she asked me to be his fiancée.”

“What? Do you like him?”

“I don’t dislike him, to be honest.”

“Can you imagine yourself loving him?”

“That’s an irrelevant question. It doesn’t matter if I can love him or not. Most marriages aren’t based on love anyway. As long as a couple are compatible, their marriage may work.”

I was nonplussed. Never had I thought she could be so practical.

“To be honest,” she said after a feeble sigh, “I’ve already outgrown love. When I was a teenager, I believed I was born to love and would die for love. Romantic, wasn’t I? Some years later, on the rubber farm, I fell in love with a man who taught me how to paint propaganda posters on billboards. But after he went to college, he stopped writing to me. He was a clever fellow, too clever to be serious about a girl’s heart. He thought I got stuck in the wilderness forever.”

“All right, but do you think you’re compatible with Yuman Tan?” I asked. She had told me before about her life on a rubber plantation in Yunnan Province, where she had worked for several years, so there was no need for me to hear the story again.