When Red is Black

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.
     
    “Love might have come late, but its arrival made all the difference.
     
    “The cadre school was located in a marshland in Qingpu. There was no library nor any movie theaters nearby. Instead of staying in the dorm room, they started to walk out, openly, arm in arm. For lovers, to be is to be with each other.
     
    “Yang was in his mid-fifties. Except for a pair of broken eyeglasses, he looked like an old farmer, weather-beaten, white-haired like an owl, and with a pronounced suggestion of a stoop. As for Yin, she was still in her early thirties. Though not a beauty, she was animated