The Bridegroom (14 page)

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.