Demon Box

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.

Run into Great Wall