“We don’t have any in stock. We can order one from Europe. But I can’t tell you when it’ll arrive, because a war’s going on there.”
Put down his name and wait for months to see if it would arrive? No, he wasn’t interested.
The obliging bookseller gave him a tip:
“If you don’t want to wait, there’s a student group around here. They ordered a few copies through me. Try going to them and asking – maybe one of them will loan you theirs.”
He wrote down the address on a scrap of paper.
P’an hurried there with a new spring in his step. It was nearby. He ran up to the third floor, taking the steps two at a time. It was opened by a scraggy young man in glasses. P’an told him why he’d come, mentioning the bookseller. He was ushered in.
A lamp gave off a dull glow in a small, modestly furnished room. His host was affable and polite, and asked about this and that: where he studied, which year he was in, what the conditions were like in the school, if the Chinese there were oppressed, were there many white people? They chatted a bit.
He went to a shelf and pulled down a book.
“Marx should not come right away. It’s not easy. You won’t keep up. Read this book first. It’s easier. Get to know the subject. The time will come to tackle Marx.”
He didn’t want any money.
“We don’t sell things here. Give it a read. When you’ve read it, come back and I’ll give you another.”
“The Fathers won’t be mentioning this in their lectures,” he smiled.
P’an thanked him and gave him a firm handshake, feeling abashed. He really liked the scraggy guy. He’d never been able to talk so frankly to anyone before. He raced home fast as a bullet – if only no one had noticed his absence!
He devoured the book in one gulp. The unfamiliar economics terms stuck in his throat like fish bones. He read it a second time. It seemed easier and clearer.
If the book could be believed, it wasn’t just in China that oppression and poverty were rampant. In Europe, the same tens of thousands of white people were oppressing and robbing tens and hundreds of millions of their own white workers and peasants. The root was not the color of the skin or the crisscrossed state borderlines, but the strata of class, joined by their common interests and goals, in spite of their differences in language and custom. The workers and exploited around the world were one big family. Both the white and the yellow-skinned were fighting and suffering for the same thing. Likewise for the bourgeoisie. It wasn’t by accident that the rich Chinese were always walking arm-in-arm with the white invaders.
All of this was unexpected and astonishing, the newness of it made his head spin. His cheeks burned from the thoughts bursting his skull; his were eyes wide open, as if armed with new glasses. They saw the world differently, boring right through things, like drills.
Having read the book from cover to cover, he ran back to the scraggy guy to ask for the next one. They talked about what he’d read. The scraggy guy explained the words he hadn’t understood. He gave examples to illustrate the more difficult passages. All of a sudden they were talking about current events. About the war, imperialism and so on. Why would it be better for China if Germany won? One way or another, the imperialists’ colonial appetite would surely taper off after a while. Yet another danger lay in wait: a Japanese invasion. They were ousting the white people on all fronts. They couldn’t wait to get their paws on China. In no way were they better than the others, maybe even worse. They were shamelessly exploiting the workers in the factories and paying them pennies, much less than the British.
He gave P’an another book and invited him to drop by more often.
He exchanged one book for another, and the more he read, the more he understood. He read in secret, during the night – the nights were clear and bright. In the morning, the dawn woke him lying on an open book. His eyelids drooped in his daytime classes. He even started neglecting his studies. The Lazarist fathers asked about his health. They shook their heads knowingly.
When he finished the book, he was itching to bolt off to the scraggy guy. He met other people at the scraggy guy’s apartment. Students. Educating themselves. Long, heated, nighttime discussions. Courses, lectures, gatherings. He envied them. He wanted to dive into this new and alluring world as soon as he could.
After a few months they got used to him, they’d sized him up and had visibly started to trust him. One day, the scraggy guy made a suggestion:
“Would you like to prepare a lecture on the role of the Christian missionaries as tools of American-European capitalism in the process of yoking colonial peoples? The topic should be familiar to you and in line with your interests. You can speak at the next gathering.”
P’an leapt for joy. He wrote a lecture that was lengthy and exhaustive. Unfortunately, he had no opportunity to read it out. Father Paphnutius had noticed his mysterious excursions. He worked out what he was up to. One day he groped around under P’an’s straw mattress and found a dog-eared copy of The Communist Manifesto with notes scribbled in the margins and the lecture on the missionaries. Crimson juices flushed his face. Panting heavily, he trotted off to see Father Dominic.
P’an was called out of his lessons. Father Dominic, by now a purplish-blue, was sitting in his office with the unfortunate lecture in his hands. In his rage he forgot what he was going to say, and could only give an inarticulate hiss:
“Begone, you wayward lamb!”
P’an said calmly, “Please return my book! Don’t you dare rip it!”
“I’ll show you, you delinquent! Down with his pants!”
Two guards grabbed P’an by the arms. A third promptly yanked down his pants. They threw him onto a bench. He scratched one of them in the face. They called in a janitor to help. They beat him alternately with two canes. Father Dominic screeched:
“I’ll teach you some gratitude, you yellow devil!”
The flogged boy was thrown to the floor.
“Take off his shirt! And all the rest of it! The shoes! It’s all ours! Our benevolence! The long underwear! Take it all off!”
So they did. They left him lying naked on the floor. The guard named Vincent rummaged out – who knows where from – a torn, ragged Chinese gabardine.
“Put ’em on!”
So he did. Everything inside him seethed. They grabbed him by the arms.
“Scram!”
P’an struggled. He wanted to lash out. His hands were twisted until the joints cracked. In his powerless frenzy he spit so vigorously into Father Dominic’s face that the holy father squealed and stamped his feet, wiping his face and soiling his entire cassock.
They clambered down the stairs, through the garden, threw the gates wide open, and tossed him brusquely into the street. He landed in the middle of the road. The gate clattered shut.
A policeman appeared:
“And what might you be doing here?”
P’an picked himself up and, shamefully covering the holes in his rags, made his way down side streets to the scraggy guy’s home.
The scraggy guy washed his bloody welts with the edge of a towel. He dug a few pairs of underwear out of a drawer and some old, worn clothing out of a corner. He helped P’an get dressed and let him stay the night.
A few days later P’an was set up at an English cotton mill. From eight till eight. Pay: two maces a day. You couldn’t live off plain rice for that amount. They found him a room. After that, he was on his own.
He came to work spry, filled with enthusiasm. Now he’d finally come face to face with the real workforce, with ennobling physical labor. He’d go chipping underground tunnels of organization into that airtight, faceless human mass with the pickaxe of exertion.