“She’s not very smart either,” her husband said flatly.
We all laughed, including Anling. She pinched the leathery back of his hand.
Having taken leave of Banping and Anling, I walked Weiya back to her dormitory. We didn’t talk much on the way; we were both deep in thought. The traffic was still throbbing in the west; now and then an automobile honked. The sidewalk was almost covered by broad sycamore leaves. Here and there moonlight filtered through the trees, casting dappled patches on the asphalt. Scabby-barked poplar trunks shimmered in the damp air while insects chirred. As we reached the eastern part of the campus, our shadows, mine almost twice as large as hers, collided time and again on the ground.
I glanced at her. She looked pale in the moonlight, but her face glowed with a soft shine. Her footsteps were springy and vigorous. For some reason I was suddenly gripped by the desire to touch her, my right hand, so close to her waist, trembling a little. I thrust it into my pants pocket and focused on watching our shadows mingling on the ground. Probably it was the grief and madness jammed into my chest during the afternoon that drew me closer to her. Walking with her made me feel less lonely. To me, she was quite attractive, but I liked her also because she was reliable and well read and had her own opinions. She could paint almost like a professional, and was especially good at portraiture. I was glad she would remain in the department as an instructor in classical fiction.
We said good night at the ilex bushes about fifty yards away from her dormitory building. I turned back without waiting for her to disappear from the dimly lighted doorway as most men would do for their female friends. It was safe on campus.
4
It was well past midnight, and my roommates were sleeping soundly. Outside, the drizzle rustled through the leaves of trees. The room was dank and fusty. A mouse scuttled across the ceiling; there were at least a dozen mice in the roof. Mantao murmured something and let out a curse in his sleep. He went on grinding his teeth, which, according to folk medicine, indicated that he might have roundworms in his stomach. I envied the way he slept — day or night, the moment his head touched a pillow, he’d begin to snore loudly. Sometimes my other roommate, Huran, would shout at him and beg him to roll on his side so that he would stop snoring for a while. Tonight I couldn’t sleep, missing my fiancée and puzzling over the possible causes of my teacher’s stroke.
According to Banping, it was Professor Song, the chairman of the Literature Department, who had crushed our teacher. Indeed, Mr. Yang and Professor Song had often locked horns. The animosity between them culminated in a quarrel over the birthplace of the great poet Li Po a year ago. In his paper on Tang poetry, Professor Song had adopted a recent claim that the poet was born in Kazakhstan, somewhere south of Lake Balkhash. In fact, this “biographical discovery” might have been intended to validate the patriotic view that China’s map in the Tang Dynasty was much vaster than today, so as to refute the Russian assertion that the Great Wall used to be China’s borderline. Mr. Yang believed this was pseudo-scholarship, so he insisted that Professor Song change the poet’s birthplace to Szechwan if the paper was to be included in Studies in Classical Literature, a journal he was editing. Professor Song refused and asserted that nobody was really clear about this issue. Separately the two scholars looked it up in a number of books, which gave at least seven places as Li Po’s birthplace, including Shandong Province and Nanjing City, both in eastern China, probably because the poet was peripatetic all his life. “I wouldn’t even alter a dot,” Professor Song declared to others. So Mr. Yang turned down his paper. The chairman was outraged and told everyone that he had withdrawn it by choice. A few days later the altercation resumed. This time they both lost their temper, calling each other names and banging their fists on the pinewood desktop in Mr. Song’s office. They pointed at each other’s faces, as if each was trying to thrust his own idea into his opponent’s head. There might have been a scuffle if their colleagues hadn’t separated them.
Eager to retaliate, Professor Song prevented Mr. Yang from being promoted to full professor and even said he’d get the journal transferred to “reliable hands.” In recent months he seized every opportunity to criticize Mr. Yang. For this reason, Banping believed it was the pressure from Professor Song that had crushed our teacher.
I didn’t take this to be the main cause. Though the two professors disliked each other, their enmity had originated from their common interest — literary scholarship. The chief obstacle to their reconciliation might be that Professor Song was the chairman and that if Mr. Yang had apologized first, he’d have appeared to stoop to power. Even if their falling-out were irreconcilable, Professor Song could hardly have destroyed my teacher. During the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Yang had been paraded through campus as a Demon-Monster once a week for more than half a year; if he had survived that kind of torment, a few skirmishes with a colleague shouldn’t have driven him out of his mind.
But what Weiya had said at the dinner might be a matter of ugly consequences. A year ago Mr. Yang had received an invitation to speak at a conference in Vancouver. For a long time he couldn’t get funding for the trip. The Canadian side assumed he might never make it, so they replaced his talk with another one. Meanwhile, Mr. Yang wrote letters to our school leaders and even to officials at the Provincial Administration, begging for dollars. To be fair, our college did take the invitation seriously, because this was the first time a faculty member in the humanities here had been invited to lecture abroad. To Mr. Yang, this must have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; never having gone abroad, he was naturally eager to visit Canada. Yet not until a month before the conference did he obtain enough funding from our school. Despite the tardiness, he set out anyway, probably knowing he was no longer on the panel. He didn’t give his talk in Vancouver, but met some foreign sinologists there.
On his way back he stopped at San Francisco for two days to see a friend of his, a philosophy professor at UC-Berkeley. He returned unhappy and slightly fatter, but with a two-door refrigerator, which kindled a great deal of envy among the faculty and staff here. Soon people began to whisper that he had gone to North America just for sight-seeing and so that he could pocket the foreign currency (he had been given an allowance of thirty-four dollars a day, which he saved for the refrigerator of Chinese make). He couldn’t exonerate himself from such an accusation. If the school now demanded the $1,800 back, Mr. Yang couldn’t possibly pay up such a debt.
Although I could accept Weiya’s explanation, I wouldn’t exclude overwork as a major cause of his stroke. Since the previous year he had been compiling a textbook of Tang poetry for graduate students. It was a critical edition, so he needed to supply comments and notes on the poems. Every night he stayed up late at his tiny desk, with books spread on his bed and on the floor, working until three or four in the morning. During the day he had to teach, meet students, and attend meetings. How could he hold out for long if he worked like a camel, sleeping only four or five hours a night? The publisher in Shanghai had pressed him several times, and Mr. Yang had promised to deliver the manuscript by the end of May. I often said to him, “When can you slow down a little?” He would answer with a smile, “I’m a harnessed horse. As long as I’m on my feet, I have to pull the cart.” He slapped his belly to show he was strong.
Besides working and writing, he had to take care of himself, since his wife and daughter were not around. He ate lunch in the school’s dining hall, but cooked a simple dinner for himself in the evening, always cornmeal porridge or dough-drop soup mixed with vegetables. He hand-laundered his clothes himself. I helped him clean his apartment twice. Three weeks ago he and I together planted a dozen sunflower seedlings in his small backyard.