A Case of Two Cities

empty. So was the bottle. He looked out with an apologetic smile. Customers still came in at this late hour. There was only one waitress bustling around with platters overlapped on her bare arms. The chef must have been too busy to come back to them. The dishes on the desk turned cold. Bao contemplated, digging into a fish head.
     
    Hong seemed to be growing sentimental as he got further in his cups, his face flushing like a coxswain’s. “Did I have a choice when I left China? The state-run factory was losing money, unable to pay its employees. I could not make a living writing poetry. So I came out. Not easy for me to start all over. All these years, I’ve written only a couple of lines: ‘Washing possible recollection / from a greasy mop, I’m ladling / my fantasies out of the wok.’”
     
    “That’s really not bad, Hong.”
     
    “I remember the lines because I have come up with nothing else, because it’s a true picture of my life, day in and day out,” Hong said, draining the last drop before he produced an envelope. “Don’t look down on me, Master. Here is five hundred dollars. I am not rich, but that’s a token of my respect to you.”
     
    “No, I cannot accept it.”
     
    “It’s nothing. As our old saying goes, you can be poor at home, but not poor on the road. So give me an opportunity to pay respect to my respected working-class master.”
     
    “I don’t know what to say, Hong.”
     
    “And here is a prepaid cell phone. Call me when you want me to do anything—or when you want to tell me something about Chen.”
     
    “That’s expensive. Chen alone has such a cell phone in the delegation.”
     
    “You are the Party secretary. Of course you should have one too. If we workers don’t help each other, who will?” Hong said. “Oh, by the way, do you know the name of Chen’s friend?”
     
    “No, I don’t, but he has a hi-tech company, I think, like those upstarts in China.”
     
    “It is so unfair.”
     
    “Yes, even in the hotel, Chen alone is given a suite.”
     
    “I have read that he shared the suite with somebody else—two men on the same bed. Some Americans must have made a joke about it.”
     
    “Oh, Dai, that capitalist poet. He’s not a member of our delegation. So he touched Chen for the night. But it was my idea.”
     
    Hong really knew a lot about Chen. Was Chen reported so much here? Bao felt uncomfortable. It was time for him to stop drinking, he knew. He did not want to go back to being a drunkard. It was against a working-class poet’s image, which he had cherished for years.
     
    * * * *
     

17
     
     
    T
    HE CONFERENCE WENT ON as before, though not without a few skirmishes between the writers from the two countries. In spite of his earlier, pacifist intentions, Chen could not help getting into heated discussions.
     
    One particular topic that came up upset the Chinese. In the contemporary Chinese literature sessions, the Americans kept talking about a handful of dissident writers, making it seem as if they were the only worthy ones. Bonnie Grant, a senior sinologist with an exclusive translation contract with Gong Ku, a leading Misty poet who had killed his wife and then committed suicide, praised him at the expense of other Chinese poets.
     
    “Those Misty may not be bad,” Chen responded, “but that does not mean they are the only good poets. Their introduction to the Western world could have been done in a more objective way.”
     
    Bonnie hastened to defend her choice, concluding with a sarcastic note, “Gong wrote under a lot of political pressure. For instance, the last two lines in his poem ‘After Rain,’ ‘A world of colorful poisonous mushrooms / after a sudden rain.’ Why poisonous? It’s not about mushrooms, but about new ideas. New ideas that are poisonous to the official ideology. As a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association, you were probably not aware of any political pressure.”
     
    That rattled Chen. It was so ironically untrue. Some Chinese orthodox critics had condemned his own work as being “modernist decadent” too. Chen had intended to argue that the Misty poets had courted Western attention through their political gestures. Instead, he checked the notes and counterargued by pointing out her erroneous rendition, particularly with regard to the image of poisonous mushrooms.
     
    “Your interpretation about ‘poisonous mushrooms,’ I have to say, is farfetched, though you are certainly entitled to