“At the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Yang turned overnight into a target of revolutionary mass criticism. He was forced to denounce himself. His college years in the States were described as years of espionage training, and his translations of English and American literature as attacks on proletarian literature and art in socialist China. In the early seventies, with more and more new class enemies being discovered in the course of the unprecedented revolution, Yang became a ‘dead tiger’-it was no longer so much fun for revolutionary people to beat him up. Like other ‘bourgeois intellectuals,’ he was then sent to a cadre school in the countryside. It was there that he met Yin.
“They were both cadre students, but there was a marked difference in their political status. Yang, a Rightist with serious problems in his past, was at the bottom. Yin, a Red Guard who was charged with ‘minor mistakes’ in the Great Revolution, was made a group leader, responsible for supervising members of the group to which Yang belonged.
“At this time, some still believed in everything Chairman Mao said, even there at the cadre school. A well-known poet wrote in ecstasy about the cure of his insomnia through physical labor in the fields, as a result of following Chairman Mao’s instruction. Some were disillusioned, however, in spite of Mao’s ‘newest and highest directions’ set forth in those endless Party documents. After a day’s hard labor, a few of them started thinking. Theoretically, after having successfully reformed themselves through hard physical labor and political studies, the cadre students should have been able to ‘graduate’ and have new jobs assigned to them. After a couple of years, however, they knew they had been pretty much forgotten. It seemed they were never going to be allowed to go back to the city, even though they were no longer at the center of the revolution.
“Yin, too, found reason to reflect. No longer so sure about the correctness of her actions as a Red Guard, she realized that she had been used by Mao. She tried to think about her future. As an ex-Red Guard, her prospects were bleak, she admitted to herself. If she were ever to return to her college, it would not be as a political instructor. She was no longer in any position to give political talks.
“Then she began to notice Yang. He worked as a kitchen helper. It was not considered a burdensome job; he gathered firewood, prepared rice and vegetables, and washed dishes. There was a local peasant chef responsible for the cooking. So between meals, Yang had time to read books in the kitchen-English books-and to write, too.
“The cadre students were not supposed to read anything except Chairman Mao’s work or political pamphlets. But there had been an unusual event the previous year: Chairman Mao had published two new poems in the People’s Daily, and an English translation was required. Mao’s Poetry Translation Office under the Central Party Committee in Beijing, or someone in the office, remembered Yang and consulted him with respect to a few words. There was one especially difficult phrase-’Don’t fart.’ That was exactly what Mao had written, but the official translators were worried about its vulgarity. Yang was able to find some reference to that word in Shakespeare, which put their minds at ease. Thereafter, Yang was allowed as a special case to read English books, for the school authorities anticipated that there might be other important political assignments in the future.
“Yang suddenly fell sick. Due to ill nourishment and hard work, not to mention the effects of the persecution he had suffered for many years, what began as flu soon turned into acute pneumonia.
“Most people in the group were old and weak. They were experts on physics or philosophy, but were hardly able to take care of themselves. There was no hospital nearby, only a clinic with a ‘barefoot doctor.’ Her class status was that of a full-time farmer working in the rice paddy, still barefoot, with no medical training in ‘bourgeois colleges.’ So, as the group leader, Yin took it upon herself to take care of him. She worked in his place in the kitchen, made food for everybody, and prepared special meals for him. She managed to have antibiotics sent from Beijing. As he gradually recovered, she continued to help him in every way possible, exercising the little power she still possessed in the cadre school on his behalf.
“In the meantime, she started to study English on her own, and to consult him with questions from time to time. President Nixon’s visit to China had already taken place. On one of the official radio stations, an English study program started. It was no longer politically incorrect for people to learn English, although it was rather unusual for students in a cadre school where people were supposed to keep washing their brains as their top priority.
“Yin’s visits to Yang gave rise to gossip. She visited him frequently, to the great inconvenience of his roommates. Their dorm room was small and cramped, with three bunk beds in it. When she sat talking with Yang, the other five roommates felt obliged to leave, to walk around outside in the cold. It did not take long for people to see that their ‘English study’ was a pretext. They talked about much more than her English problems. While looking at an English book on the table, it was noticed, they held hands under the table.
“She may have started with a vague notion that knowledge of English might come in handy some day, even for a downtrodden man like Yang, but in her studies with him, she soon started to see a new prospect.
“They covered not only language, but literature as well, for there were no textbooks available in the cadre school. Yang had to use novels and poems as teaching materials. Yin had filled her college years with political activities; she had learned little in the classroom. From him, she now absorbed the knowledge she had not gotten previously. Reading an English novel, Random Harvest, she picked out one sentence, ‘My life began with you, and my future goes on with you-there’s nothing else.’ She repeated it to Yang with tears trembling in her eyes.
“On the epigraph page of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which Yang had translated, she read a passage, ‘No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind. And therefore never need to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’ Yang told her that it was a quote from John Donne, who had compared separated lovers to the two points of a compass in a celebrated love poem. Having read ‘A River Merchant’s Wife,’ she understood the Chinese poem ‘Changgan Song’ for the first time. In a short story by O. Henry, she found the significance of life in a solitary leaf painted on the wall, and when Yang compared himself to that leaf, she stopped him with her hand over his mouth.
“That was the point of no return for her: she found all the meanings unknown to her before, with him-it was him. This was a passion she had never experienced before, a passion that gave a new meaning to her existence.
“And for him, the affair came as a vindication of humanity despite all the political calamities that had befallen him. In his bookish way, he fought for love as one of those ideals he had striven for all these years. At one point of his life, he had been disillusioned but now he was filled with conviction.