Demon Box

“Then, right in the middle of volume four, the Japs take over Beijing. Naturally a wise old fox teaching Mencius and listening to Glenn Miller is soon seen as a potential thorn in the rump of the Rising Sun. One night after class Fung gets wind that he’s in Dutch again, this time with the Japanese. He hurries out of his office. Bootsteps approaching down the front hall. Sentries posted at the rear. Trapped! So, thinking faster than Mr. Moto, Fung borrows a charwoman’s babushka and broom and sweeps right past the Nip dragnet sent to snare him. He sweeps on off the campus and right on up to the hills, where he joins Chiang Kai-shek and his band of Chinese resistance fighters.

“By the end of World War Two he is so highly esteemed by Generalissimo Chiang and the Nationalists that he is made chairman of the Philosophy Department at the U of Beijing—permanent. At last, he thinks, he is in harmony with the mighty song of state! Then, out of nowhere, up to the conductor’s podium comes Mao Tse-tung and down goes Chiang’s band, and Fung realizes he’s out of step again and marching right back toward that old doghouse. Not only has he been tight with the Nationalists, he’s also published essays that seem to praise China’s feudalistic past. In the eyes of the new regime this is a big strike against him. Worse, he hails from a ‘landlord background’ and has an ‘elitist Mandarin education.’ Strikes two and probably three. He’s already seen a lot of his colleagues sent to the Shensi cabbage collectives for less. So, thinking fast again, Fung decides to make a move before he’s cornered. He writes to Mao personally. He confesses his bourgeois background, sops on the self-criticism, and begs the Honorable Chairman to accept his resignation—‘I feel it is in the best interests of our great country and your mighty revolution et cetera that I resign my chair here at the university and go to work on a rural commune, to better acquaint myself with the glorious roots of socialism.’ Didn’t I tell you he was—oops, watch it—foxy?”

I looked up from the book almost in time to catch the card table he had knocked over trying to hop into his too-tight Levi’s. Pens and pencils and paper clips scattered among the peanut shells and paper cups on the floor. He kept right on hopping and rapping. “As you might imagine, with that kind of hat-in-hand approach, it wasn’t long before Fung was back at his position at the university—simultaneously teaching his new works and at the same time denouncing his older efforts as mere maunderings of a misled mind. Mainly trying to keep his profile low and that doghouse distant, if you get the picture.”

I nodded again. I actually was beginning to get a picture of the man behind all this fancy scrimshaw of history, an image faint but fascinating.

“Then the old maestro, Papa Mao, begins to lose his grip on the podium, not all at once but enough that Mama Mao and her quartet can grab the baton. And, merciful God, the tune that they strike up! It’s so erratic and discordant and downright heartlessly juggernaut cruel that even old Fung the Fox can’t figure how to stay out of its way. It’s like a thundercloud of noise and confusion blasting out in all directions, a poisonous black cloud, boiling with terrible bolts of power and gouts of gore and shrieks of agony, rolling bigger and blacker until it closes over all China, over art and music and the modern sciences, over the poor nation’s history as well as its future, and over Dr. Fung Yu-lan.”

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.”