The preacher had delivered this diatribe while balancing on one foot and trying to buckle a Uniroyal-soled sandal on the other; now he seemed to give up. He stood barefoot, the sandal dangling and his face downcast, strangely weary.
"Anyway, nobody has heard from the old teacher in more than fifteen years. Nary publication nor postcard. Foof. Not even an obituary. Foof and nada. Intriguing, huh?"
"Does anybody suppose he's still alive?"
"Nobody in the philosophy department of Cal, I can assure you! They've already got him comfortably catalogued and shelved away in the minor-league stacks along with all the other nearly-made-it-bigs. He was probably offed ages ago, everybody supposes, and even if he wasn't rubbed out by that first big purge of intellectuals - I mean big like millions, we're just now finding out; maybe not more than Hitler but right up there with the likes of old Joe Stalin - they maintain that the chances of a man his age surviving that time of turmoil are slim and nil."
"How old would he be?"
"I don't know." He raised his foot and slipped on the sandal. "Old. There must be a bio in the book."
I found it in the introduction. "Born in Canton, during the Chino-Japanese war, in 1894. That would make him... eighty-seven! Slim, nil, and none my supposition, in a country with the shortest life expectancy in the world."
"Oh, no, not anymore! For whatever misery he caused, Papa Mao's reforms have practically doubled the lifetime of the Chinese citizen. So Doc Fung could still be around somewhere, still waffling, still trying to reconcile the undeniable logic of Marxist dialecticables with the un-pin-able-downness of the free spirit."
"Still in Dutch in China?"
"Almost certainly still in Dutch in China. By now he'd probably be branded a booklicking toady by the new gang, see?"
"I see," I said, beginning to get yet a clearer picture of this old oriental fox. "Yeah, it is intriguing, but I don't see how I could work it into my sportswriting trip. Where's the pertinence? What's the meaning? The moral?"
"Hey, I don't know," the minister answered from inside the black turtleneck he was pulling over his head. His face emerged from the frayed collar shadowed by that look of weariness and defeat again. He heaved a heavy sigh. "Maybe it means that He Who Waffles East and West Waffles Best. Maybe that's the moral. But, shit, shipmate, I don't know what it all means. That's why I want you to find old Fung. Then you can ask him. Answering questions like that is what he's trained at."
He headed for the door, his face down.
"C'mon, let's hit the streets. I need a beer. And I know a couple bibliophiles around the Telegraph scene that might have information more recent than mine."
Trying to cheer him out of his downcast mood, I complimented his pretty new church as we passed. He wouldn't even turn to look at it.
"I hate the prissy pile of shit," he said. "It looks like some kind of chapel boutique. No spirit, no spirit at all. The woolen mill maybe didn't have a fancy fucking spire but it did have some spirit. Remember? We used to get some fierce stuff spinning in that old mill. Marches. Sit-ins. But no more. No more." He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked faster. "I liked it the way it was - funky but fierce."
"Why'd you get it refurbished then?"
"I didn't! It was my bosses, the California Ecumenical Council and so forth! Did you happen to see a couple years ago when I got awarded the Presidential Commendation? For our Runaway Ranger Program? That's what started it. The AP ran a shot of our kids on the back porch. When the diocese daddies saw what an eyesore they had representing their faith in Berkeley, they all shit bricks. I think they used some of those very bricks on that facade back there. If my backhouse hadn't been hid by all those morning glories they'd have shit another pile and bricked it over too. It's all part of the city council's integrated policy for the beautification of Berkeley - brick those eyesores over. It might not heal the sore but at least it hides the pus, is the policy. You'll see what I mean."
I did, as soon as we reached Telegraph district. There were as many patch-pantsed street people as ever, but the pants were cleaner, and the patches seemed more a product of fashion than necessity. Coffeehouses that once seethed with protest songs as black and bitter as their espresso now offered sweet herbal teas and classical guitar. I saw panhandlers buying Perrier water and Hari Krishnas wearing pantsuits and wigs to aid them in their pitch for donations. Nondescript doorways where spectral dealers with hooded eyes once hissed secret questions - "Assid? Sspeed? Hashisssh?" - now were openly decorated with displays of every kind of absurd apparatus, and the dealers sung out their wares like carny barkers: "Bongs bongs bongs! Freebase without fuss when you buy from us! Our paraphernalia will never fail ya!"
Even those pitchy clots of young bloods you used to see playing bongos back in alleyways had been cleared up. Now the clots coursed right along with everybody else in the mainstream, carrying big chrome-trimmed ghetto blasters that played tapes of bongos, I had to shake my head.
"I see what you mean, yep."
The minister gave me a wry grin. "Fruits and berries, brutes and fairies," he sang in a sad voice. "Hot and hysterical and hopin' for a miracle. Did you hear that Cleaver is Born Again? Did you hear that they are trying to change the name of Earth People's Park to Gay People's Gardens? Oh, what has become of our Brave New Berserkeley of Yesterday, comrade?"
I couldn't even guess; and the Telegraph bibliophiles had no more information about what had become of Fung the Philosopher than I had about Berkeley the Brave. And these citizens here in Beijing have been just as little help. Since landing in China more than a week ago I have hit on every English speaker I could collar, but the name hasn't struck the slightest spark. Our smiling guide, the very faithful and conscientious and ominous Mr. Mude, even denied having ever heard of any Chinese citizen with such a ridiculous name.
Then, ironically, this same Mr. Mude furnished the first ray of hope that the old man still lived. Exasperated by my continued inquiries after the missing teacher, Mude had stood in the door of our little tour bus before allowing us to get off at the main gate of the University of Beijing, where we were going to check out their athletic department. Frowning darkly, he had advised that it would be better if such questioning were curtailed during the remainder of our sojourn through the People's Republic. Better for all concerned. Then, smiling again, had added -
"Because Dr. Fung Yu-lan is not for anyone beneficent to meet with - ah? - even if such a personage is."
- indicating that such a personage must still be in disfavor somewhere. But in what doghouse, in what province? Mude probably knew, for all the good that did; he had driven off to other inscrutable duties before I could pursue the point. Yet if he knew, others must. Who else? It was after we had left the shabby little gymnasium and were following Bling back across the campus that an obvious possibility suddenly occurred to me.
"Hey, Bling. What say you we swing by the philosophy department?";
"To ask after your fossilized egghead?" Bling laughed at me. "Man, I've spent weeks trying to track down profs I know live on this crazy campus, asking everybody. These Beijing bureaucrats don't know, don't want to know, and wouldn't tell you if they did."
Yet the first woman behind the first desk we came upon in the stark old building had lit up with delight at Bling's translation of my question. After listening to her chatter a moment, Bling turned to the rest of us, his eyes unslanted by surprise.
"She says yes, by golly, that he's very much alive, still on the faculty, lives about two blocks away, practically next door to the gym we just left! Furthermore, she wants to know if we'd like her to phone and see if he is amenable to a visit from some foreign pilgrims?"
So, at last, I was standing with my three companions before a small cottage hunched back under a grove of looming gum trees, waiting for a little girl in pigtails to go tell her great-grandfather that his visitors had arrived. We all stood in a foolish row, our Yankee banter hushed by the neatness of the small swept yard and the nearness of a
man we had barely believed in and were yet to see. Beijing's afternoon pollution was still. The only sound coming through this undersea murk was a scratchy tune being played on a phonograph somewhere, faint and vaguely familiar.
"Say, isn't that a Goodman solo?" the photographer wondered in a whisper. "Benny Goodman and the Dorsey orchestra?"
Before anyone could wonder further, the screen swung wide and was held back by the girl. For a long moment there was nothing; then the old man was standing there in the gray Sun Yat-sen Maoutfit and gray felt bedroom slippers, as spectral and dim as last month's mildew.
Except for the eyes and the smile. The eyes came slicing out of a pair of wire-rimmed lenses, sharp as two chips of jade. And there was a gleam in the smile both mysterious and madcap - something between Mona Lisa and Mork from Ork. The old man let this expression play across the four of us for an amused pause without speaking, then held a liver-spotted hand toward me, standing nearest. One might have expected to see a pebble in the palm and hear him say, "So, Grasshopper... you have come at last."
Instead he said, in English as musty and precise as the pages of that old book back in my hotel room, "Gentlemen, please... won't you come in?"
I took the hand. One might have hoped I'd have the wit to reply, "Dr. Fung, I presume?" Instead I stammered, "Yeah yes we'd be happy to, Mister You Lawn... proud."
The child held wide the door and bowed slightly to each of us as we followed her great-grandfather into his home. We passed through a small foyer and into the room that was obviously his study and parlor. The windows were nearly covered by the drooping gray-green foliage of the gum trees, yet the room was by no means dim. The air in fact seemed brighter than it had outside. Light appeared to glow out of the ancient furnishings like foxfire from humus. It shimmered along the old troweled plasterwork and glistened between the tiny network of cracks on the leather upholstery. Even the dark wood of the kitchen door and the bookcases shined, rubbed to a rich luster by years of dusting.
No decorations adorned the walls save for a long calendar, hand-penned, and a framed photograph of students posing in a black-and-white past. Nothing obstructed the polished floor except one floor lamp, one empty urn, and three pieces of furniture - a leather divan, a two-person loveseat, and a stuffed chair that would have looked at home in any living room in middle America in the twenties. This was clearly the Doctor's chair. He stood beside it, smiling, nodding the editor and little Bling onto the divan and the beefy photographer into the wide loveseat. To me, as to a student called to his professor's office for a little tete-a-tete, he assigned the ceramic urn.
When we were finally situated to his satisfaction, Fung Yu-lan lowered himself into the stuffed chair, folded his hands in his lap, and waited, smiling at me. I could feel the blood rush to my cheeks and my head go empty. I began gibbering awkward introductions and explanations and stuff. Babble. I don't think I would have recalled a word of what was said in that room if I hadn't happened to nervously thrust my hands into the pockets of my bulky safari jacket and come upon filing's cassette machine. I still had enough journalistic presence of mind to surreptitiously fidget it on.
And now, weeks later and thousands of miles away, as I try to type up a transcript of the taped encounter in the privacy of my own study - to have some little sample of the wisdom of the Orient to send down to my minister friend in backsliding Berkeley - I still find the exchange almost too embarrassing to abide:
FUNG MEETING - BEIJING CAMPUS -
DAY BEFORE MARATHON
DR. FUNG: May I request you gentlemen some tea?
AMERICANS: Oh, yeah. Yes. Of course. Please.
FUNG: I shall do so. Pardon me.
An order is given in Chinese. There is the sound of the little girl's clog sandals on the floor, and the kitchen door spring creaking. For a moment, as the door swings, a big band can clearly be heard swinging through the jazz classic Sing Sing Sing.
FUNG: So please tell me: what brings you all to China?
BLING: Sir, me, I live here... a student at this very institution.
F: Ah? Studying what, may I ask?
B: Chinese Law and Track and Field.
F: Very good. And the rest of you?
DEBOREE: Sir, the rest of us are journalists.
F: Please. The years have made me somewhat deaf.
D: The rest of us are journalists! Here covering the big race! The Beijing Invitational Marathon? It happens tomorrow. Paul there is the editor of our periodical; Brian is the photographer. I am the writer.
F: Ah. A sportswriter...
D: Not really. Fiction, usually. Stories, novels. Actually, back home, I'm quite a big-time writer.
This evokes muffled Yankee snorts: Oh boy, will ya listen to that? Big-time Writer back home.
D: Also, I am a very big fan of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. I have been consulting the Ching oracle religiously for more than ten years, throwing it every day.
More snorts, low and inside: My, my, him also Big-time Ching Thrower, too.
D: But what I essentially came to China for, actually, was to find out what has become of you, Doctor. Perhaps you are not aware of it but for many years in our country, scholars of philosophy have been wondering, "What has become of Dr. Fung Yu-lan? What is Dr. Fung Yu-lan doing now?" I mean, those of us who have been seriously influenced by your work... have been wondering -
This is mercifully interrupted by the sound of the door swinging back open and the tinkle of the tea service.
AMERICANS: Thank you. This is very nice. You bet. Just what we needed...
F: You are all welcome.
Fidgeting. Sipping. Clink of china on china. And a kind of patient, silent amusement.
D: So, ah, here we are. How are you then, Doctor? I mean, what have you been doing all this time?
F: I have been working.
D: Teaching?
F: No. I have been working on my book.
D: Very good. And what book have you been working on?
Again, that subtle moment of amused silence.
F: I have been working on my History of Chinese Philosophy. As always. On what else would I be working?
D: Oh. Of course. I guess what I meant was on what aspect. A revision? For a new edition?
F: No. Not a revision, a continuation. Volume five. It is an attempt to examine the Cultural Revolution, a task for which I fear I am woefully inadequate. But I feel that these last fifteen years must be examined and understood.
D: These last fifteen years? I should say! Boy, we will all be very interested in reading that. That's terrific. Isn't that terrific, you guys?
Much agreement, and more slurping of tea and rattling of cups on saucers. Then more silence.
D: This tea is very good. What kind of tea is it, anyway?
F: Chinese.
See? Embarrassing. Disquieting, even before this chance to review the tape. Back at the hotel that very evening the Big-time Writer couldn't get the humiliating encounter off his mind. Unable to sleep, he dug the borrowed book from the bottom of his luggage. He opened it beneath a bed lamp and found himself immediately captured by the clarity of the prose; it had been swept as clean as that bald yard...
Two hours later, the Big-time Writer lays the book down and bows his head, finally beginning to get some inkling of the stature of the mind he had found in this far-off keep.
He discerned that Philosopher Fung had arbitrarily fashioned four views of man, as a means of observing the gradations of evolving ethical human awareness. These four views, or "realms" as Fung calls them, are (1) The unself-conscious or "natural" realm, (2) The self-conscious or "utilitarian" realm, (3) The other-conscious or "moral" realm, and (4) The all-conscious or "universal" realm.
The first two realms, according to Dr. Fung's canon, are "gifts of nature," while the second two are realized only as "creations of the spirit." That these two conditions must sometimes necessarily be in conflict was taken for granted by the old Doctor; that either side should eve
r completely triumph over the other was considered the most dangerous of folly.
The writer looked up from the closed book, recalling the walk through blighted Berkeley and the question to the minister concerning the old man's pertinence. Here was how he pertained, this teak-jawed Chinaman, to the Telegraph of today as well as to last season's idealism. Wasn't he trying to light up the very dilemma the sixties had stumbled over? the problem of how to go with the holy flow and at the same time take care of basic biz? Sure, you can to thine own cells be true and liberate parking lots from the pigs, but how do you keep them free of future swine without turning into something of a cop yourself? There was the block that had stumbled a mighty movement, and Fung Yu-lan pertained because he had tried to light it with his intellect, without bias, from all sides. And is still trying, bright as ever. How does he manage it, in this dim comer? How does he keep the faith and keep ahead of the ax at the same time? And for so many years?
The Sharp Old Fox would have had answers to such pertinent questions, had the subjects ever been touched on, but all our Big-time Writer could think to ask were things like "What kind of tea?" Embarrassing...
It is only at the end of the tape, after the visitors have slurped their way to the meeting's end and are once again outside in the shifting Chinese twilight, that he asked a question that was remotely close:
D: One more thing, Doctor. There are some pretty grisly - I mean we've heard a lot of accounts, stories, about how quite a lot of teachers and intellectuals were... I mean how did you get through that dreadful time of turmoil?
F (shrugging): I have been a student of Chinese philosophy for more than three quarters of a century. Thus - (he shrugs again, flashing such a jaunty, devil-may-care grin that one might almost expect him to say, It was a piece of cake. Except for a sharpness that one senses beneath that jaunty flash, a carnivorous quality that suggests the toothy old smiler is not only capable of biting off and swallowing any time of turmoil -- any period of upheaval or downfall brought about by any single dictator or by any Gang of Force with their rinky-dink revolution whether cultural or dreadful -- but that he can thrive on it! As though the turmoil had not only been a piece of cake, easily downed and digested, it had been savored as well) -- I have become very broadminded.