The Crazed

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 The chairman was outraged and told everyone that he had withdrawn it by choice.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.

There could be another cause of his stroke, which was probably more ruinous than those I have described but which I was reluctant to reveal to my fellow graduate students, namely that his marriage might have been floundering. I couldn’t put my finger on the problem, but was certain that Mrs. Yang had gone to Tibet not just for professional reasons. Last May, three months before she left, I had happened to witness a scene. I went to his home to return his volume of Book of Songs, an anthology compiled by Confucius 2,600 years ago. Mr. Yang’s copy of the book was filled with comments in his cursive handwriting at the tops, margins, and bottoms of the pages. I was the first person he had ever allowed to read his marginalia. At the door of his apartment I heard Mrs. Yang yell from inside, “Leave! Get out of here!”

Mr. Yang countered, “This is my home. Why don’t you go?”

“All right, if you don’t, I’m leaving.”

As I wondered whether I should turn back, the door opened slowly and Mrs. Yang walked out. She was a small angular woman with deep-socketed eyes. Seeing me, she paused, her face contorted and sprinkled with tears. She lowered her head and hurried past without a word, leaving behind the rancid smell of her bedraggled hair. Her black silk skirt almost covered her slender calves; she had bony ankles and narrow feet, wearing red plastic flip-flops.

Mr. Yang saw me and waved me in. On the concrete floor were scattered a brass pen pot and dozens of books, most of which were opened and several with their spines loosened from their sutures. He grimaced, then sighed, shaking his head.

Silently I handed him his book. Though I didn’t know why they had fought, the scene unnerved me as I replayed it in my mind later on. Whenever I was with the Yangs I could sense an emotional chasm between my teacher and his wife. I was positive they had become estranged from one another. For some time I couldn’t help but wonder whether my fiancée had inherited her mother’s fiery disposition, or whether her parents’ fights had disturbed her emotionally. But my misgivings didn’t last long, as I was soon convinced that by nature Meimei was a cheerful girl, even more rational than myself.

A locomotive blew its steam whistle in the south like a mooing cow. The night had grown deeper and quieter. Having considered these happenings in Mr. Yang’s life, I felt none of them alone could have triggered his collapse. Perhaps they had joined forces to bring him down.