The Bridegroom: Stories

An Official Reply

Professor Pan Chendong, Party Secretary

English Department

Beijing Humanities University

Dear Professor Pan:

Please allow me to express my deep admiration for your paper on Theodore Dreiser’s novels, which you presented at the Shanghai conference three years ago. My name is Zhao Ningshen, and I have chaired the Foreign Language Department at Muji Teachers College for two years. You may still remember me: a man in his mid-thirties, bespectacled, of slender build and medium height, with slightly hirsute arms and a head of luxuriant hair. After your talk at Splendor Hotel, we conversed for a few minutes in its lobby, and you gave me your card. Later I wrote you a letter and mailed you under separate cover a paper of mine on Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March. I assume you received them.

In response to your inquiry about Professor Fang Baichen of my department, I shall refrain from dwelling too much on his character, because he was once my teacher and I can hardly be impartial. Although you may have heard anecdotes and depictions of him — he is a fool, a megalomaniac, an incorrigible lecher, a braggart, a charlatan, an opportunist, and so forth — none of those terms can adequately describe this unusual man. In the following pages, let me provide you with some facts, from which you may draw your own conclusion.

I came to Muji Teachers College as a freshman in the winter of 1977 and met Mr. Fang on the very day of my arrival. At that time he was a lecturer, in charge of the instruction of the freshmen. I had been disappointed by being made to major in English, for I was not interested in any foreign tongue. I had applied for philosophy and Chinese literature in hopes of becoming a scholar of classics. To this day I am still unclear how the hand of fate steered me into the field of English studies. Probably because I was among the few applicants bold enough to tackle the English examination — I mean the written part — some people on the Provincial College Admission Committee had decided to make me specialize in this language. In my heart I resented their decision, though there was no way to express my indignation. On our first evening on campus, all the freshmen were given a listening comprehension test in a lecture hall. Mr. Fang dictated the test.

He read slowly in a vibrant voice: “In the old days, my grandfather was a farmhand hired by a cruel landlord. Day and night he worked like a beast of burden, but still his family did not have enough food and clothes. . ”

I was impressed by his clear pronunciation, never having met anyone who read English better than this dapper man. But I felt miserable because I couldn’t write down a complete sentence and had to turn in my test sheet almost blank. More disappointing was that the result of this test determined our placements in the classes, which were immediately divided into four levels. The freshmen of our year were the first group to take the entrance examinations after the Cultural Revolution. During the previous ten years, colleges had partly or mostly shut down and young talents had accumulated in society, so the student pool now was replete with all kinds of creatures. In our English program, three or four freshmen could read Jane Eyre, The Gadfly, and A Tale of Two Cities in the original, and they even scored higher than the graduating seniors in a test. On the other hand, many freshmen, like myself, knew only a couple of English words and had been assigned to study the language mainly on the strength of our high scores in the other subjects. A few boys and girls from Inner Mongolia, who had excelled in mathematics and physics, didn’t even know a single English word; nonetheless, they had been sent here too, to learn the language because their region needed English teachers.

Naturally I was placed in the lowest class. I was so upset that I began to play truant. Mr. Fang’s class was from 7:30 to 9:30 in the morning, so I often skipped it. He was a good teacher, amiable and conscientious, and I bore him no grudge. In truth, I liked his way of running the class — he tried to make every one of us speak loudly, however shy or slow of comprehension we were. He loved the word “apple” because its vowel could force our mouths open. He would drop his roundish jaw and bare his even teeth, saying, “Open your mouth for a big apple.” That was his way of building our confidence as English speakers. Later I came to learn that he had been labeled a rightist and banished to the countryside for three years in the late fifties. I also could tell that his English pronunciation was not as impeccable as I had thought. The tip of his tongue often missed the edge of his teeth when he pronounced the interdental th, which Chinese does not have. Once in a while he would say “dick” for “thick” or “tree” for “three.” In addition, he spoke English with a stiff accent, perhaps because he had studied Russian originally. In the early sixties, when the relationship between China and Russia was deteriorating, Mr. Fang, like thousands of college teachers who responded to the Party’s call, had changed his field from Russian to English. (I always wonder who among our national leaders at the time had the foresight to discern the drift of history. How could he, or they, foresee that within twenty years English would replace Russian as the most powerful linguistic instrument for our country?)

One evening I was lying in bed with a pair of earphones on my head, listening to an opera. Someone knocked at the door, but I did not bother to answer. To my surprise, the door opened and Mr. Fang’s face emerged. He was panting slightly, with his sheepskin hat under his arm; his left hand held a pale-blue tape recorder that weighed at least thirty pounds (at that time a cassette player was as rare as a unicorn here). On his steaming forehead a large snowflake was still melting, right beside a giant mole. His neck was muffled with a gray woolen scarf, which made him appear shorter than he was. I got up from my bed.

He sat down on a decrepit chair and said to me, “Young Zhao, why didn’t you come to class this morning?”

“I’m ill.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Stomachache.”

“You can’t walk?”

“Just barely.”

“All right, since you still can speak and hear, I’m going to teach you here and now.”

I was too shocked to respond. He moved the chair closer, took a mimeographed textbook out of his jacket pocket, and said, “Let’s begin with Lesson Four.”

Reluctantly I pulled out my textbook from the single-shelf bookcase above the head of my bed.

“Turn to page thirty-one,” he said.

I found the lesson. He went on, “Repeat after me, please: This is a bee.” The tip of his tongue moistened his heavy upper lip.

I read out the sentence beneath the drawing of the insect, which looked more like a horsefly.

“That is a cabbage,” he intoned.

I read out the line under the vegetable. Together we practiced the variation of some simple syntactic patterns — changing statements into questions and vice versa. The whole time I was nervous and couldn’t resist wondering why he was so determined to keep me abreast of the class.

After the reading practice, he plugged in the recorder and turned it on to let me hear how a British man pronounced those sentences. As we waited for the machine to produce the genuine English voice, he sighed and said to me, “All your classmates repeat the text after the recording for at least two hours a day, while you don’t do a thing. If you continue to be like this, you’ll have to drop out soon. You’re wasting your talent.”

“I’ve no talent for English,” I said.

He raised his long eyebrows and told me calmly, “In fact you don’t need talent for learning a foreign language. What you need is endurance and diligence. The more time and effort you put into it, the better your English will be. There’s no shortcut.”

When the British man’s voice finally emerged, I was made to follow it, repeating every sentence in the long pause after it. Meanwhile Mr. Fang was chain-smoking, which soon turned the room foggy. I read out the lesson along with the recording several times. He stayed almost two hours, until one of my roommates came back for bed. How relieved I was after he left. We kept the transom open for a long while.

I did not expect he would come again the next evening. His second appearance disturbed me, because obviously he knew I was not ill. Why did my truancy bother him so much? Despite not showing any temper, he must be exasperated at heart. Was he going to flunk me if I missed more classes? Indeed it was not his fault that I got trapped in the Foreign Language Department. He must take me for a major troublemaker. Burdened with all these worrisome thoughts, I could hardly concentrate on the reading practice.

To my amazement, we ended an hour earlier this time. But before he left, with his hand on the doorknob, he said to me, “I know you don’t like English, but think about this: What subject taught in our college can promise you a better career? Last year two of our best students passed the exams and went to Africa to serve as interpreters. They travel between Europe and Africa a lot and eat beef and cheese every day. Another graduate of our department is working as an English editor at China Times in Beijing. Every year we’ll send some students to the Provincial Administration, where they manage international trade, cultural exchanges, and foreign affairs — all hold important positions. You’re still young. All kinds of opportunities may turn up in your life. If you don’t get yourself ready, you won’t be able to seize any of them. Now, to master English is the only way to prepare yourself, don’t you think?”

I didn’t answer.

“Think about it. See you tomorrow,” he said and went out with the bulky recorder, whose weight bent his legs a little.

His words heartened me to some degree. I had never heard that graduates from this department could enter diplomatic service. That was a wonderful profession and would enable one to travel abroad. I would love to visit some foreign countries in the future. By and by a ray of hope emerged in my mind. There was no way to change my major, so probably I had better not laze around too much. It was not too late to catch up with the class.

So on Mr. Fang’s third visit to our dormitory, I told him that I was well enough to go to class the next day.

Gradually I became a diligent student. In the morning I would rise at 4:30, pacing back and forth in corridors and lobbies (it was too cold to stay outside), reading out lessons, and memorizing vocabulary, idioms, expressions, and sentence patterns. Some freshmen got up even earlier than I did. To save time, a few would stay in the classrooms at night and just sleep three or four hours, fully clothed, on the long platforms beneath the blackboards. They would return to the dormitory every other night. On the face of it, we studied feverishly because we cherished the opportunity for a college education, which the majority of our generation dared not dream about; and the department commended us for our dedication. But at bottom there was a stiff competition among us, since better grades might help one get a better job assignment on graduation. I overused my throat so much in practicing English pronunciation that I had to swallow painkillers every day.

Soon Mr. Fang was promoted to professorship. To our dismay, he stopped teaching us. The department at the time had only two associate professors in English, and Mr. Fang was one of them. He was highly respected by the students and the young faculty members, whom he often taught how to waltz or tango. Every Thursday afternoon some teachers would hold a dance party, which we students could only peep at through a keyhole or a door left ajar. By far Mr. Fang was the best male dancer. He didn’t have a paunch, but when dancing, he would stick out his belly and make himself somewhat resemble a paunchy businessman, and in this way he also got physically closer to his female partner. We were impressed and thought he was something, truly a man of parts. At our annual conference on foreign literature, he presented a lengthy paper on For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was an eye-opener for most of us and was later published in Modern Literature. Before that, I had never heard of Hemingway.

I was unhappy during my undergraduate years because I remained in the lowest class all the time. This stung my pride. Twice the students of the lower classes staged a strike, demanding new class placements based on merit. After two years’ study, many of us in the lower classes had caught up and knew English as well as some of those in the top class, which had always been taught by a British or Canadian expert. Whereas we had never had a native speaker to teach us. As a result, our spoken English was deplorable. The department refused to consider our demand seriously, but to forestall another strike, Professor Fang, who had been appointed its vice chairman lately, agreed to have a dialogue with us. So we all gathered in a classroom and listened to him explain why the hierarchical order of the classes should remain unchanged. His reason was that we could hire only one foreign expert at a time, and that this person should teach the best students. He mentioned the saying “Give the hardest steel to the blade.” We did not disagree about that. What we contended against was the permanency of the top group.

We argued with him tenaciously. Neither side could persuade the other. Gradually Mr. Fang lost his temper, and his face turned the color of pork liver. His voice grew more nasal. He declared with his hand chopping the air, “No, the continuity of instruction must never be disrupted. If we changed the top group constantly, who could teach such a class? Impossible!”

Zhang Mingchen, a willowy fellow with curved eyes and caterpillar brows, who was the monitor of Class Three, stood up and said smilingly, “Professor Fang, this is ludicrous. You’ve made us feel as if we were all retarded. Why do we have to remain always the same? Why can’t we develop? Even you — haven’t you added some stature and weight to yourself?”

We exploded into laughter. Glowering at Mingchen, Mr. Fang thumped the lectern and bellowed, “Stop pretending you’re Mark Twain! You should know who you’re talking to.” He turned his head slowly, glaring at us.

More laughter rose from the students. Abruptly Professor Fang wrapped up the meeting and stalked out of the room with a white cotton thread dangling from the hem of his black herringbone blazer. I had not expected he would take so much umbrage. He seemed to have become a different man, no longer the humble, conscientious teacher, as though he had been a high-ranking official all his life. In fact, besides his brand-new vice chairmanship, he had held only one official title — as president of the Regional Bridge Association, which consisted of about two dozen members, mostly old intellectuals.

The next spring Mr. Fang joined the Communist Party. I had some reservations about his induction, but I only represented the students’ voice and was among the minority in the Party branch. I couldn’t stop wondering whether he had been helpful and considerate to me because I was one of the few student Party members, and so could speak for or against him at Party meetings. In other words, by going to the dormitory to teach me, he might deliberately have curried favor with me so as to earn my support for his Party membership in the future. What a calculating man! But that was just a conjecture without any proof, so I couldn’t communicate my doubts to the other Party members.

My suspicion of him was deepened by another occurrence, which unsettled me greatly. At our graduation the next year, Mingchen, an archtroublemaker in Mr. Fang’s eyes, was assigned to a coal-mining company in Luomei County; that was the worst job assignment in our department that year. Mingchen got drunk at the graduation banquet and declared he would stab Mr. Fang to death. Lifting the bottom of his jacket, he showed us a bone-handled knife in his belt, which he had bought from an itinerant tinker for fifteen yuan. I turned to look at the table where the departmental leaders were dining. Lucky for Mr. Fang, he was not there, or he would definitely have seen his own blood that evening. When Mingchen collapsed in a stupor, I took the large knife from him. Surely he would have created a disturbance if he had kept the weapon handy. Two days ago his girlfriend, assigned to teach English at a military college in Shenyang City, had insinuated that they should split up. He believed her change of heart was another consequence of Mr. Fang’s vengeance.

Fortunately I had done well in the examinations for graduate studies and enrolled in the English Department at Harbin University; it meant I did not have to seek employment upon graduation, so that Mr. Fang could not punish me with a bad job assignment. Otherwise I might have ended in a situation as grim as Mingchen’s, for I was positive that Mr. Fang knew I had voted against his admission to the Party. Besides, he must have believed I had masterminded the strikes.

During my three years’ graduate work in Harbin, I was well informed about the happenings in this department, because my fiancée, after her graduation, remained here as an instructor in Japanese.

Mr. Fang went on prospering in the meantime. He founded a journal entitled Narrative Techniques, which you may have seen, since for several years it maintained a circulation of 90,000 and was quite popular among young people, especially among would-be writers. He lectured at colleges throughout the Northeast, mainly about stream of consciousness as the most advanced narrative technique in the West. He even tried his hand at fiction writing. One of his short stories, “Beyond the Raining Mountain,” about a tragic love triangle, won the first prize in a provincial contest. It has been anthologized several times. To be fair, he is a capable fiction writer. In his stories, you often can perceive a kind of primitive passion and peasant cunning that you rarely find in fiction written by academics. In truth, sometimes I cannot help thinking that he might have become an accomplished novelist had he concentrated solely on fiction writing. He spent a great deal of time editing the journal. His energy was dissipated, and he could not sustain the momentum generated by the initial success of his short fiction. Perhaps he has suffered from the absence of an artistic vision, or having misplaced his ambition, satisfied merely with getting ahead of his peers and with temporary fame. He has never planned to follow the masters’ way — writing a hefty novel, a monumental chef d’oeuvre, something intended to revise and rejuvenate the genre. Apparently he no longer has the strength for such a book. He always worked on small, minor pieces. In brief, although he was a promising late bloomer, he has not blossomed fully.

My relationship with him began to improve as I contributed to his journal regularly. He treated me well and always published my papers and reviews, often giving me top-rate contribution fees. Besides translations and criticism on foreign literature, Narrative Techniques also carried a section of short stories and poems by Chinese authors. I was baffled by this format. Why would such an academic journal publish original poems? Never had Mr. Fang studied poetics. Why did he include a dozen pages of poetry in each issue? No doubt he was aware of the incongruity. He must have been up to something.

In the summer of 1984, I finished my graduate work and returned to my alma mater, where my bride was teaching as a lecturer. I heard that Professor Fang’s journal had been suspended because a number of young women, both students and faculty, had accused him of sexual improprieties. A few said he had published their writings in exchange for their favors, while some claimed he had turned their works down because they had resisted his advances. To be frank, I suspect that some of the women might have entered into a relationship with him of their own accord. Of course this is not to deny that he must have taken the initiative. His wife had been ill for years, and sex was out of the question in their marriage. He must have been lonesome and quite concupiscent. Yet one of these affairs was absolutely beyond forgiveness, to wit: he had gotten a student pregnant, which was technically due to the substandard quality of a condom. An old nurse, who had been present at the abortion, spread the scandal, and within a week the student’s pregnancy had become a household topic. I knew the girl, who was a fledgling poet and a gracious person, I must say. I had been her older brother’s friend for years. She was two grades below me. One of her poems, which she had once recited in our auditorium, had moved me almost to tears and instantly made her the object of numerous young fellows’ attentions. It was entitled “The Love I Have Is All You Can Have,” such a wonderful poem that our school’s radio station broadcast it twice a day for a whole week. In appearance she was demure and blushed easily, with dimmed eyes like a lamb’s. I couldn’t imagine that such a fine girl would allow an old man like Mr. Fang to explore her carnally, while there were many young men who would be happy to serve her in any way she desired. Later I learned from her brother that Professor Fang had published many of her poems under the pen name Sea Maiden and had promised her that he would help her get accepted, with a scholarship, by the Comparative Literature Department at Indiana University — Bloomington, with which Mr. Fang had claimed to have powerful connections. Oh, a young girl’s heart so easily overflowed.

Although Mr. Fang was in disgrace — having received a disciplinary action from the Party Committee and lost his vice chairmanship — I did not shun him. One day I invited him to a simple dinner in my apartment. My bride had left to teach summer school in an oil field south of Tsitsihar. I had just made some money from translating a play by Eugene O’Neill, so I bought a braised chicken, two pounds of beef sausages, tomatoes, a packet of white sugar, salted duck eggs, and ten liters of draft beer. I did not invite anyone else, because other faculty members were reluctant to mix with Mr. Fang at the time. As he and I were drinking and eating, he turned loquacious. He told me that his wife suffered from a cardiovascular disease and that his son had just graduated from Nanjing University, specializing in international trade, and was going to work for a German auto company in Shanghai. His wife was upset by their son’s lucrative but faraway job, for she had expected him to come back to Muji City, to marry and settle down near home.

I noticed Mr. Fang had not aged much. His hair was still dark and bushy, and his facial muscles looked quite elastic. Behind the front of his white short-sleeved shirt, his belly seemed firm and flat. You could easily take him to be in his early forties. Half jokingly I asked him how come he was so well preserved. To my amazement, he replied in earnest, pressing his hand on his chest, “First, you must have a large heart and never be depressed by anything, eat well, and sleep well. Second, you must exercise every morning in any kind of weather, hot or cold.” He smiled with a shrewd twinkle in his eye. He knew I was a night owl and always went to bed in the wee hours, never bothering about morning exercises. Again I expressed my admiration for his good health.

Soon he was inebriated, and his tongue went unbridled. He sighed and said, “I’m fifty-three already. My life has come to a dead end.”

“Don’t be so down,” I said.

“I’m going to die soon. Ah, to die without achieving any-anything. How sad!”

“Come on, have a larger heart.”

He looked tearful and pathetic. I tried to comfort him by pointing out that he was a reputable scholar, at the peak of his powers, and still had a long, bright journey ahead. But the more I said, the more heartbroken he was. “After I graduated from college,” he declared as though to a roomful of listeners, “I dreamed about going to Russia to study esthetics. Then Russia became our enemy, and I was made — made to study damned English, which I didn’t like until I could read D. H. Lawrence in the original. Now our country is finally o-open, but I’m too old to go abroad to do gra-graduate work. I’m no match for you young people, too old.” He dissolved into tears, wiping his cheeks with the back of his short-fingered hand. “Oh I should’ve had a Ph.D., or at least an M.A., like you!” He patted my forearm.

That was inane. He was already an associate professor. To sidetrack him, I said, lightheartedly, “Stop crying, all right? You’ve been a lucky old man here, so many girls were around you. Who ever had such luck as you?” I was being slightly ironic, but he took my words as a compliment, or a cue. He grinned and poured another glass of beer.

Then he began talking about the young women he was involved with in recent years. I was surprised that one of my former classmates, who used to be seeded number two in badminton in our province, was among them. She had married an officer, a dog handler, who was often away from home. How could Mr. Fang match that amazon in bed? It made me giddy just to think it. I felt embarrassed by his disordered talk, yet I was fascinated and eager to hear more. What amazed me most was that one of the women had even been willing to marry him, provided he divorced his wife, which he would not do. He explained to me, “I’m not heartless, Young Zhao. I can’t abandon my sick wife. When I was in the countryside, she came to see me every two months. Another woman would have divorced me under the circumstances. She alone suffered with me and never complained. Now our son’s far away from home, and I’m the only family she has here.” His eyes, misty with tears, gazed at me.

I couldn’t help wondering what had contributed to his apotheosis in those young women’s eyes. His knowledge? His power? His vitality? His pen? His tricks? His optimism? What was the magic wand with which he had held so many of them in thrall? I thought of my friend’s younger sister, the lamb-eyed girl, who had been banished to a county town to teach middle school. Before departing for the countryside, she was so distraught that she had almost defenestrated herself, pulled back just in time by her parents. Had Mr. Fang ever felt guilty about her ruin?

“Ah, how I adore those girl poets!” he confessed, rubbing his broad nose.

“Why poets?” I asked.

“You don’t know how sweet and innocent girl poets can be. They all have a te-tender heart. Just give them a few words they want to hear, you-you can sweep them off their feet and set their hearts flying like ca-catkins.” He giggled.

“So, no fiction writers, only girl poets, eh?”

He grinned. “Yeah. If I come back to this life again, I’ll try to be a poet myself. Young Zhao, one of these days you should get to know a girl poet.”

“No, I want a nymphet,” I said. He reminded me of Nabokov’s lecherous Humbert.

“Okay, a nymphet poet then.” He burst into laughter.

You see, Professor Pan, that was the advice he gave to me, his former student. I would not try to know a girl poet. My wife is good enough for me, although she is not an extraordinary beauty. Besides, I am in poor health and ought to save my energy and time for completing my book on the Oriental myths in Eugene O’Neill’s plays. After that dinner, whenever I ran into Mr. Fang, he seemed evasive and often hurried away as though I were carrying hepatitis, which had broken out in our city that summer. Apparently he regretted having divulged his secrets to me. But I never held that talk against him. Even three years later, when I became the chairman of this department, I wouldn’t allude to that talk. No, I did not change my feelings about him because of the secrets he had let slip.

After the suspension of Narrative Techniques, our department was pestered by thousands of letters from its subscribers. They demanded a refund. Because the money had been shared out by the faculty as a holiday bonus long ago, all we could do was promise the subscribers that a new issue of the journal would reach them soon. Nobody here was able to edit the journal at the time except for Mr. Fang. So in the fall, Narrative Techniques was reinstated, with him as the editor-in-chief again, but now he was ordered to eliminate the section of creative writing. This time the journal turned out to be more focused and more impressive, each issue having a glossy cover and a photograph of a modern master novelist on its back. Gradually, Mr. Fang’s fame rose once again. He worked hard and even published a volume of short fiction, At the Blossoming Bridge, which he dedicated to Ernest Hemingway as if the American writer were still alive and in correspondence with him. Probably he meant that Hemingway had been a source of inspiration. The book garnered a good deal of critical acclaim and got him ranked among the better contemporary authors for a while. He was promoted to full professor the following year, the first one in our department. He seemed destined to become a minor man of letters, but few people can remain coolheaded on the merry-go-round of success.

His fall occurred on our trip to the United States, in the early summer of 1987. He and I were both chosen for the provincial cultural delegation that was to visit four American cities. I was selected because I could speak English fairly well and was somewhat knowledgeable about American literature. Mr. Fang joined the group as a fiction writer and literary scholar. The trip was partly sponsored by Wellington University in Connecticut, which was eager to become our sister school. That was why half the delegates were from our college.

On this trip, I discovered another aspect of Mr. Fang’s character which I had not noticed before, namely parsimony. When we had lunch together, he would, if possible, avoid sharing the cost. Twice I paid for him. Despite having a bedridden wife, he was by no means destitute; his son sent him a handsome sum of money every month. Unlike us, he even had a foreign-currency account at the bank. It was less problematic if he took the gratis treatment for granted only among ourselves, the Chinese. What angered me most was that he played the same trick on some Americans, often waiting for them to pay for his coffee or tea or drink, as though everyone in the world owed him a favor or a debt. I could not understand why he acted like a mendicant. Our country had given each of us twenty-two dollars a day for pocket money, which was indeed not much, but a man ought to have his dignity. I could not imagine how a skinflint like Mr. Fang could be a lady-killer. Once, he even wanted an American woman novelist to pay for a cheese strudel he had ordered; he told her, in all insouciance, “I have no money on me.” The tall redhead wore a sky-blue bolero and a pair of large Ching Dynasty coins as earrings, apparently for meeting with us. She had an irksome habit: after every sentence, she would add, “See my point?” She was so shocked by Mr. Fang’s pointed words that she gave a smile which changed into a sour grimace; then she turned to me, as if questioning me with her green, deep-set eyes to determine whether he was in his right mind. Outraged, I pulled a ten-dollar note out of my pocket and said to him in Chinese, “Take this, but I want my money back tomorrow morning.” That, for once, made him open his wallet.

Probably he acted that way because he had misunderstood the capitalist culture and the so-called American spirit, having confused selfhood with selfishness. A few months before the trip, we had invited an American professor, Alan Redstone, to our college to lecture on Faulkner. That florid-faced man from Kentucky was truly a turkey; he wore a ponytail and a flowered shirt and played the banjo. He said that in America the self was absolutely essential, that one had to make every effort to assert one’s own selfhood, that a large ego was fundamental for any individual success, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of flatus. He even declared that self-interest was the dynamo of American culture and economy, and that if you were an American, the center of your life would have to be yourself. I swear, if he were a Chinese I would have had him hauled out of the lecture hall before he was done. But Mr. Fang told me afterwards that he was deeply impressed by Redstone’s talk, which apparently had set his mind spinning. Now, in Hartford, Mr. Fang asserted himself so aggressively in front of the American woman that he would not mind smirching our country’s face. It was as though he were altogether immune to shame. How could he, a well-learned man, be such a credulous ignoramus? This is still beyond me.

Our American host informed us that there would be a writers’ conference at the university on Saturday. The organizers would love to arrange a special panel for the Chinese writers, meaning those in our delegation. We agreed to participate, quite moved by such a friendly invitation. I was asked to talk about American literature in contemporary China, while the six writers wouldn’t have to speak, just be prepared to answer questions about their writings and experiences. We were all excited and put on our best suits or dresses for the occasion. To fortify my spoken English, I read out articles in The New York Review of Books for a solid hour before we set off.

The university was in a small town, which lay in a wooded valley. It was clean and eerily quiet, perhaps on account of the summer break. The roads on the campus were lined with enormous tamaracks and maples. A cream-colored minivan dropped us before a low brick building, wherein several talks were to take place at the same time. Because our panel had not been advertised like the others, most of the conference participants didn’t know about it and were heading toward the other rooms. I was nervous, whispering to my comrades, “If we just have a dozen people, that will be good enough.”

How we were worried! Ganlan, the woman playwright, kept wringing her fingers and said we should not have agreed to take part in such an ad hoc thing.

Suddenly Mr. Fang shouted in his broken English to the people in the lobby, “Attention, please, ladies and gentlemen, I am Professor Fang Baichen, a great contemporary Chinese fiction writer. Please come to my lecture!” He pointed his index finger at the entrance to our room while his other hand was beckoning every American around us.

People looked puzzled, then some started chortling. We were astounded and had no idea what he was up to. I thought perhaps this was just a last-ditch attempt to fetch an audience. Mr. Fang went on shouting, “Room Elefen. Please. A great writer is going to speak.”

If possible, I would have fled through the roof. We stepped aside to make ourselves less conspicuous. But Mr. Fang’s performance did attract a sizable audience — about thirty people came to our panel. I made an effort to keep calm so as to talk.

To our astonishment, after the woman moderator introduced us, Mr. Fang grabbed the microphone from me and began delivering a lecture. He was reading loudly from a paper he had written in advance. His voice sounded as domineering as if he were a government official delivering an admonitory speech. My head was tingling and my mouth went numb.

“What’s he doing?” whispered Ganlan.

Another writer said, “This is a blitzkrieg.”

“Academic hysteria,” I added.

Why didn’t the moderator stop him? I wondered. Then I saw the woman’s oval brown face smiling at me understandingly; she must have assumed he and I had agreed to switch positions.

Mr. Fang was speaking about how he had successfully experimented with the most recent fiction techniques (which were, in fact, all outdated in the West) and how he had inspired the younger generation of Chinese writers to master the technique of stream of consciousness. At first, the audience seemed shocked by the immense volume of his booming voice. Then some of them began chuckling and snickering; many looked amused, as if they were watching a comedian performing a skit. How ashamed we were! He made a fool of all the Chinese in the room! We couldn’t help cursing him under our breath.

It took him more than half an hour to finish his lecture. The audience laughed and smirked when he finally stopped. A few young men, who must be students, whistled as Mr. Fang stood up to acknowledge the pitter-patter of applause, which was obviously meant to mock him.

I did not give the talk I had prepared. Completely flustered, I simply couldn’t do it. But meanwhile, Mr. Fang kept smiling at us, his compatriots sitting along two folding tables. His broad face was glazed with perspiration, and his eyes glowed complacently. He was engulfed in a rectangle of sunlight falling in through a high window. Again and again he looked at us with a sort of disdain on his face, as if challenging us, “Who among you could deliver a lecture like that in English?” Were I able to reach him, I would have pinched his thigh to restore his senses.

The audience asked us some dull questions. We managed to answer them perfunctorily. Every one of us was somewhat shaken. My English became incoherent, marred by grammatical mistakes, as I struggled to interpret the questions and answers. In fact, I couldn’t help stuttering, half throttled by scalding rage. My pulse went at 120 a minute at least.

Finally the whole thing was over, and every one of us felt relieved. Thank heaven, we survived it!

You can imagine how disgusted we were with Mr. Fang after that episode. Nobody would have anything to do with him. We wanted to let him wear the halo of “the great writer” alone. Ganlan even suggested we depart for San Francisco in secret, leaving him behind so that he would have trouble finding money for the return airfare. Of course we could not do that. Even if he had died, we would have had to bring his ashes back; because if he had remained in America, the authorities would have assumed he had defected, and would have criticized us for neglecting to anticipate his motives and, ergo, being the occasion of such an opportunity for him.

When we had returned to China, he was reprimanded by our college’s Party Committee, which ordered him to turn in a thorough self-criticism. He did that. Then the Provincial Writers’ Association revoked his membership. He became persona non grata again. Narrative Techniques was taken out of his hands, this time for good. He was returned to teaching as a regular faculty member and has been barred from attending conferences and giving talks.

Professor Pan, do not assume that this is his end. No, he is very much alive. There is one most remarkable quality in this man, namely that he is simply insuppressible, full of energy and resilience. Recently he has finished translating into English the autobiography of the late Marshal Fu; the book will be published by the International Friendship Press. He has made a tidy sum of money from the work. Rumor has it that he claims he is the best translator of Chinese into English in our country. Maybe that is true, especially after those master translators in Beijing and Shanghai either have passed away or are too old to embark on a large project. It seems Mr. Fang is rising again and will soon tip over. These days he brags that he has numerous connections in the capital, that he is going to teach translation and modern British fiction in your department next year, and that he will edit an English journal for your university.

Professor Pan, please forgive me for this long-winded reply. To be honest, I did not expect to write with such abandon. Actually this is the first time I am composing on a computer. It’s quite an experience. The machine has undoubtedly enhanced my eloquence, and perhaps some grandiloquence; I feel as if it could form sentences by itself. Now, I must not digress anymore. Let me conclude by summarizing my opinion of Mr. Fang, though I will withhold my moral judgment: he is a man of vitality, learning, and stratagems; although already in his late fifties, he is still vigorous and may have many years left; as long as you have a way to contain him, he can be very useful and may contribute a great deal to your department. In other words, he can be used but should never be trusted, not unlike the majority of intellectuals, who are no more than petty scoundrels.

My respectful salute!

Zhao Ningshen, Chairman

Department of Foreign Languages

Muji Teachers College

March 29