"That doesn't mean you have to toe their line every step of the way, does it?" he demanded. "You can work it into your story. A little extracurricular shouldn't give them any gripe. If it does, tell the capitalistic shoemongers to go bite their tongues. Tell them to look to their soles. Tracking down Fung is more important than some bourgeois bunion derby. And this isn't just any old fossil, this is a rare old fossil! He, he's a – wait! I'll show you what he is."
The minister released my hand and stepped back up into his waterbed. He waded through the swell to the bedside wall of orange crates he had nailed up for shelves and bookcases. He began pawing among the books, hundreds of books, checking titles, tossing them aside, all the while keeping up a running rap over his shoulder as he searched.
"Sixty-some years ago the youthful scholar Fung observed that all of his philosophical peers seemed to be either stubbornly stuck in the Eastern camp or obstinately in the Western. The twain of which are never to meet, right? The Transcendental versus the Existential? The bodhisatva digging his belly button under the bo tree as opposed to the bolshevik building bombs in his basement? These opposing camps have been at each other for centuries, like two hardheaded old stags with horns locked, draining each other's energy toward an eventual, and mutual, starvation. Our hero decided that this was not his cup of orange pekoe. Or oolong, either. Yet what other alternatives were being served? It was either go West, young Fung, or go East. Then, one bright day, he caught a fleeting flash of a third possibility, a radically new possibility, perhaps, for the mental mariner to try. Radical enough that even back then Fung knew better than to go blabbing it around established academia, East or West. He would continue to honor those two classic ways of thought, but he resolved that he would never join either camp. Instead, he would dedicate himself to what I term 'The Way of the Bridge.' He would construct an empirical concept that would span those opposite shores of outlook! Some complicated job of construction, right? This dude was Frank Lloyd Wright, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Marco Polo all in one -- get the picture?"
Not very well but I nodded, always impressed by the extent of my friend's rambling expertise.
"From that day on he has labored at this colossal bridgework. And get this: Fung's family name means 'power to cross a wild stream' – a mythical river of the barbarian tribes of Manchu, to be precise – and his given names mean 'elite friend.' So this bridge-builder's complete monicker means 'Stream-crossing Elite Friend.' Get it? He lived up to the name, too. For nearly half a century this stream-crosser traveled around our globe, lecturing and publishing and teaching. And learning. In the late thirties he guest-chaired a year at Harvard without pay, claiming all he wanted was the chance to learn about our modern Yankee music. The only reward he took back to China was a footlocker full of swing band seventy-eights his students gave him. Ah! Here he is…"
He had found the volume he was seeking. He waded out of the waterbed's welter, blowing dust from a black leather cover. Back on the floor he opened the book and bent over a random page in reverent silence for a few moments, as oblivious of the ludicrous picture he presented as one of those nude bronze statues of Rodin's. Then he closed the book with a sigh and raised his eyes to mine.
"It is so goddamn important to me, old buddy, to enlist you wholeheartedly in this cause, that I am going to break one of my most cardinal rules – I am going to loan a hardbound."
He let his fingers trail across the worn cover a final time, then handed me the book. I carried it to the orange crate nearest a dirty window so I could make out what was left of the gold letters on the spine: The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy. Inside the musty cover I read that the work had been translated by E. R. Hughes of Oxford University and published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., of London, England, in 1947. The front flyleaf had an embossing that said the book was the Property of the University of California Library Rare Book Room and the date slip at the back indicated it was nearly sixteen years overdue. While I leafed through the yellowing pages, my friend searched the room for his scattered clothes, talking all the while.
"You're holding volume three of his four-volume History of Chinese Philosophy, a work that is still considered out there in the forefront of the field. Way out. Revolutionary. Because instead of couching the prose in the customary Mandarin idiom of the elite, Fung wrote in common street vernacular, thereby availing the loftiest thinking in China's incredibly long history of cerebral pursuit to the common coolie! An impertinence that continually had him in Dutch with the Manchu feudalist powers-that-were. But, with what must have been some pretty foxy footwork, Fung was able to keep a step ahead of the ax and maintain his position at the university, and to keep on writing his opus.
"Then, right in the middle of volume four, the Japs take over Beijing. Naturally a wise old fox teaching Mencius and listening to Glenn Miller is soon seen as a potential thorn in the rump of the Rising Sun. One night after class Fung gets wind that he's in Dutch again, this time with the Japanese. He hurries out of his office. Bootsteps approaching down the front hall. Sentries posted at the rear. Trapped! So, thinking faster than Mr. Moto, Fung borrows a charwoman's babushka and broom and sweeps right past the Nip dragnet sent to snare him. He sweeps on off the campus and right on up to the hills, where he joins Chiang Kai-shek and his band of Chinese resistance fighters.
"By the end of World War Two he is so highly esteemed by Generalissimo Chiang and the Nationalists that he is made chairman of the Philosophy Department at the U of Beijing – permanent. At last, he thinks, he is in harmony with the mighty song of state! Then, out of nowhere, up to the conductor's podium comes Mao Tse-tung and down goes Chiang's band, and Fung realizes he's out of step again and marching right back toward that old doghouse. Not only has he been tight with the Nationalists, he's also published essays that seem to praise China's feudalistic past. In the eyes of the new regime this is a big strike against him. Worse, he hails from a 'landlord background' and has an 'elitist Mandarin education.' Strikes two and probably three. He's already seen a lot of his colleagues sent to the Shensi cabbage collectives for less. So, thinking fast again, Fung decides to make a move before he's cornered. He writes to Mao personally. He confesses his bourgeois background, sops on the self-criticism, and begs the Honorable Chairman to accept his resignation – 'I feel it is in the best interests of our great country and your mighty revolution et cetera that I resign my chair here at the university and go to work on a rural commune, to better acquaint myself with the glorious roots of socialism.' Didn't I tell you he was – oops, watch it – foxy?"
I looked up from the book almost in time to catch the card table he had knocked over trying to hop into his too-tight Levi's. Pens and pencils and paper clips scattered among the peanut shells and paper cups on the floor. He kept right on hopping and rapping. "As you might imagine, with that kind of hat-in-hand approach, it wasn't long before Fung was back at his position at the university – simultaneously teaching his new works and at the same time denouncing his older efforts as mere maunderings of a misled mind. Mainly trying to keep his profile low and that doghouse distant, if you get the picture."
I nodded again. I actually was beginning to get a picture of the man behind all this fancy scrimshaw of history, an image faint but fascinating.
"Then the old maestro, Papa Mao, begins to lose his grip on the podium, not all at once but enough that Mama Mao and her quartet can grab the baton. And, merciful God, the tune that they strike up! It's so erratic and discordant and downright heartlessly juggernaut cruel that even old Fung the Fox can't figure how to stay out of its way. It's like a thundercloud of noise and confusion blasting out in all directions, a poisonous black cloud, boiling with terrible bolts of power and gouts of gore and shrieks of agony, rolling bigger and blacker until it closes over all China, over art and music and the modern sciences, over the poor nation's history as well as its future, and over Dr. Fung Yu-lan."