Passion of Clouds and Rain

Passion of Clouds & Rain

A China-to-America Journey

Edna Wu

This is a fictional memoir first published by Evanston Press in 1994 and has been revised for the 2016 edition. Its characters, places, and incidents are either fictional or used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental. Any references to historical events, to real people, living or dead, or to real locales are intended only to give the work a sense of reality and authenticity.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 1994 by Edna Wu; copyright © 2016 by Lin Jin

Except for appropriate use in critical reviews or works of scholarship, this book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

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ISBN 9781370960033

Praises for the Book

By focusing on the narrator’s self-absorbed quest for erotic and intellectual fulfillment, Edna Wu’s Memoir offers a new slant to the currently urgent question of how the latest generation of Chinese immigrants can find home in America. One can read this breathless work as a modern-day update of Ding Ling’s celebrated Diary of Miss Sophie.

—Jonathan Spence, Yale University

In both form and content, what an unusual combination of prose and poetry, eros and logos, America and China, Edna Wu has given us!

—Michelle Yeh, University of California, Davis

A short modern version of The Tale of Genji, Edna Wu’s Clouds and Rain has done more than the Heian classic of Japan did on the subject of sex and passion.

—Fatima Wu, from World Literature Today

To Love

A Skyscraper

On the debris of the guttural ruins

rises the modern Babel

boasts of dribbling the ball of meta-reality

in a labial model

but scrapes from the sky

nothing but air

in the sunlight

remains indeed

a Block

with a phoenix trail of

shadow

--

=

。

In the new life, a cloud is better than the bright sun.

The rain, akin to self-knowledge, appears perpetual.

— Joseph Brodsky

At dawn you are morning clouds;

At dusk you turn into moving rain.

— Song Yu

Contents

Praises for the book / 2

A Skyscraper (A Dedication Poem) / 3

Acknowledgements / 6

Foreword: A Short Modern Version of The Tale of Genji

by Fatima Wu / 7

Novel: Passion of Clouds and Rain

Part I. On the Wings / 9

Part II. An Ugly Duckling’s Swan Song / 72

Part III. Sex ≠ Love? / 122

Part IV. Searching for the Music of the Soul / 169

Part V. A Separate Utopia / 219

The Wings of Imagination, a drawing by Edna Wu /273

Afterward / 274

About the Author / 275

Acknowledgements

Joseph Brodsky’s poem New Life, from which I quoted two lines, was translated by David MacFadyen and the author and first published in The New Yorker, April 26, 1993. The poems Freedom is Individuality, Dusk, and The Family Tree were written by my daughter Lin Jin. Among my own poems, Chinese Love, At Clarion Cemetery, Birch appeared in The Pen (The PBC, Newport News); Follow Me in Lines and Ribbons (Lavender Letter); and Nothing but a Kite in Collages and Bricolages (Clarion). Several of my other poems, which first appeared in anthologies or other poetic collections, have been used in this novel in their revised form. I thank the world renowned historian Jonathan Spence and famous scholar in Chinese poetry Michelle Yeh for their insightful comments. I also thank Fatima Wu and World Literature Today for permitting the use of Fatima Wu’s book review for the Preface. The front cover image is from the famous painting by Fu Baoshi in 1954, titled Nine Songs: Goddess of Clouds.

PASSION OF CLOUDS AND RAIN

Part I. On the Wings

1

Welcome to America, pretty lady! The customs officer greeted me aloud.

Pretty? Am I really pretty? All my life, I thought that I was ugly and plain. Fortunately, I had been born in China at a time when women could surpass men through brain power and leadership. Many men nowadays learned to look up to women because of their qualities rather than their appearance alone. A pretty face on a woman showed bourgeois traits. A pretty face on a man was definitely disastrous, betraying sissiness and superficiality. Nevertheless, the customs officer’s compliment titillated me. I felt a magical transformation from an ugly duckling into a swan. My wings started fluttering in my heart. Perhaps I am not that ugly.

I saw the flashing figures on the overhead monitor: August 13, 1985.

Susan and Jim were waving to me and calling Yun! Yun! as I passed the customs officer. Plain sailing, indeed.

Can you guess what that officer called me?

A Chinese lady?

A pretty lady!

Why not? You are quite pretty. Both Susan and Jim assured me with sincere smiles. Perhaps the American criteria for beauty are different than in China. Perhaps, as Mencken perceived, the Americans have a libido for the ugly. I was amused.

The first night in America, I suffered from jet lag. Despite heavy and swollen eyelids, I was unable to fall asleep. My memories were jammed. I thought of myself as a traveling angel: Yesterday I was still in China. Now, I am already lying on a comfortable bed a thousand miles away in the western hemisphere. Wow, I can’t believe it. This is the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

2

About thirty-six hours ago, I arrived in Beijing. When I was waiting for a bus to Qinghua Yuan in the hot afternoon sun, a young man crossing the street kept looking at me. Is he an acquaintance? No. I frowned and looked in a different direction. I squeezed into the bus only to find the young man right by my side. One stop, another stop, another. . . .

Qinghua Yuan. Get off! The conductor was rather rude.

I got off the bus. He did, too.

Hi, my name is Du Ming. I’m a graduate of Qinghua University.

Oh good. I am from Wuhan. My sister is living on the Qinghua campus.

I see. You are visiting your sister. Shall we take a walk along the lake this evening?

Why?

Well, I just want to get to know you, to understand you.

I knew young men’s tricks and always liked to cool them off at once. Isn’t being chased for being a woman an insult? To want me as a woman, you must first know my substance.

You know, I am well over thirty, already the mother of a child.

He did not show the disappointment I had expected. Instead he offered to carry my suitcase to the foot of my sister’s building. Of course, if I had let him do it, he would have carried it all the way to the sixth floor. But I carried it myself, step by step, on the endless long stairs. At each landing, I stopped for a gasp of air. When I finally panted to the sixth floor and knocked at door No. 601, my hair was caked with sweat and dust. Fortunately, my sister was already at home, cooking supper.

Ah ya, why didn’t you phone me from the train station? Look at you, like a beggar from the street. My sister greeted me loudly, with both hands kneading dough like a machine. ‘Take a shower first. Look, this is my new apartment. After having waited for four years, I finally got it."

Shower? Do you even have a shower in the bathroom?

Yes. I made the shower myself. It is pretty neat and simple. Just have a huge pot of hot water hanging on that hook overhead. Then with the spray nozzle for watering plants, I created the perfect shower. When you go to America, you can try my device. No patent right. My colleague abroad said you must take a shower every day; otherwise you will smell like Chinese food. . .

My sister spat words out fast like a machine gun, and she never wasted a minute while she was speaking. Her hands moved faster than her words. When I was out from the shower, several dishes were already on the table, with steam rising up, merging into a mushroom cloud under the shoddy crystal chandelier that Sister must have made herself from glass beads.

Dinner was over. It was getting dark. I was wondering how to pass my last evening in China when someone knocked at the door. Sister opened it and I saw it was Du Ming.

Can we take a walk along the lake? He looked straight at me.

Do you know him? Sister asked me sternly.

No, I said without hesitation.

Sister gave him an ugly look and slammed the door.

You’ll never get tricked by a man if you don’t fool around. Sister was good at churning out her own proverbs. "Listen, Yun. America is a free world and men don’t have any moral principles, luan gao (fucking around). Watch yourself, eh!"

I met Du Ming again at the Capital Airport.

Ah, it’s you.

Where are you going?

America.

I am going to study psychology at Princeton University. Du Ming gave a buoyant shrug. Oh, I see. He put free love into practice even before getting on the plane.

3

Everything in America looked fresh and new to me. The sky seemed bluer, the sun brighter, and even the apples redder and bigger. Too excited to sleep, I had to frequent the bathroom. The flushing of the toilet sounded the same; but the shower worked magically just like the ones in London. The hot water ran endlessly, unlike Sister’s big pot that emptied before I could have a good rinse of my hair. My head was still congested with memories of my life in China.

For the past year, I had attended a Fulbright Workshop on American Literature in Shanghai. I lived with three other college teachers in the same dorm. They were Li Jie, Song Ling, and Lan Yu. Singing, laughing, chatting, dining, and window shopping, we hung out together like a gang of carefree teenagers. But a month before the workshop ended, I rushed back to Wuda (Wuhan University) due to a family emergency. Two weeks later, I received a letter from Li Jie saying that Song Ling’s parents came and made a big fuss by dragging their daughter away from Shanghai. It was all because Lan Yu got pregnant by Lin Shan, a cool guy from the workshop rather than by her husband.

Lan Yu was a spirited woman who was always different from the others. I remembered how her provocative daily dresses drew stares from the crowds. She got up early and played tennis with that handsome Lin Shan before breakfast. Then, they went to the cafeteria together. They even went to the theater together in the evenings. Rumors swept right into her ears; but Lan Yu said, Who cares! What I care for is my own life. Lan Yu seemed to be a threat to others, but an eye-opening friend to me. In fact, it was Lan Yu and Lin Shan who helped squeeze my luggage into the train.

Then my thoughts drifted to my department and colleagues in Wuda. What my colleague Li Hua told me faded in and out like film scenes.

Li Hua was interrogated again and again about her illicit affair with her colleague Ma Jun in the English Department.

A small room with three men and one woman….

Say exactly when and where?

It was about 8:45 on Thursday night. We went to the construction site to the west of the campus. We did it in a half-finished room.

More details. How did you do it? You or he did it first?

He pushed me against the wall…

(Er, hey, hey…insuppressible low giggles from a male interrogator)

More details. Who took off your pants, he or yourself?

…

How many times? Confess, how many times?

It happened many, many times between them in the past two years. In the sand pits, abandoned air-raid shelters, ghost buildings, and mosquito-infested woods. For love, they went everywhere possible in their small world. Li Hua had two abortions before her nerdy husband sensed something wrong about their marriage. Each time, after an interrogation, Li Hua would tell me how happy she felt about the days and moments when she was with him, not her husband. Even a thread of the same color in his clothing matching her dress would thrill her to ecstasy.

The year-long Shanghai workshop seemed to have turned me into a semi-stranger to my own campus of Wuda. When I was approved by the authorities to go to America, I practically became an extra-terrestrial to the others. Li Hua, the campus-known scarlet letter A colleague, could tell me the secrets of her adultery, perhaps because she trusted me as an ET who posed no harm to her in this world. Li Hua was ostracized on campus and needed an escape from the boundaries of China. Yet it was lucky me who got the chance.

Lucky indeed. In 1972, I was among the first of the worker-peasant-soldier students to enter college. An old peasant had laughed, Study English? What’s that to do with planting rice? You’d better go abroad. His words earned me the nickname "Liuyangde" (going-abroader). By and by, nobody remembered my real name any more. Then in 1976, I was recommended to study English abroad, not because I was wise enough to volunteer to be a peasant again after graduation, but because of my fortune in being a fisherman while Wuhan and Zhengzhou universities had fought fiercely for the opportunity like two oysters. What could the Bureau of Education do? They gave the opportunity to that country bumpkin who would never dream of going abroad. That was when Chinese leaders loved to create wonders. A peasant studying English abroad was the eighth wonder of the world, wasn’t it?

After two years in Britain, I taught English at Wuda for almost eight years. Then, Susan and Jim came to teach for a year at Wuda when I happened to attend the workshop in Shanghai. They explored Shanghai for fun on weekends like most foreigners did. When they invited me for dinner with them at the Peace Hotel, I said casually that I had been to Britain and wished to see America. As luck would have it, Jim’s department chairman heard that a brilliant Chinese lady longed to see America and offered me a teaching assistantship. Others lost twenty pounds while studying to pass the TOEFL or GREs to get to America, but I breezed into a master’s program in English Literature at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.

During my last night in China, I did not sleep well either. The cicadas were screaming into the dense heat of an Indian summer night. I turned over and over on the bamboo mat. I was conscious of my decision to go to America as a desire to escape. But to escape from what and why, I was unclear. Like a madman being chased by his own shadow, I was perhaps trying to escape from myself or something hidden in myself. Being a Chinese meant being attached to a working unit where co-workers were so close to you that they even knew what you ate and shit. Now I touched my belly button, feeling a sudden umbilical cut from the mother’s body. I released a long sigh of freedom.

4

The next day, Susan and Jim gave me a tour of San Francisco. When we walked around Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus, I encountered a bizarre scene. People with bald heads were chanting; a gypsy-like woman was blowing bubbles. Jim said the woman was a famous poet. A batch of young men spreading pamphlets reminded me of Red Guards. A middle-aged man was giving a partisan speech vehemently. I was not shocked because I had been to Hyde Park in London.

When I saw a few black kids on Pier 39 moving like aluminum robots for money, I immediately tightened my vigilance — begging, a common scene in a capitalist country? No. I giggled to myself. I was not going to repeat the same mistake I had made in London; when a blond lady took a plastic spoon away with her food, I thought she was pilfering.

Jim stood in line for a large slice of pizza.

The pizza on this pier is very famous. Look at this cheese.

The cheese stretched from his mouth to his hand like Chinese noodles. The image of pizza was unspeakable. A couple of years later in America, I learned that pizza exemplifies vaginal power while the hot dog symbolizes phallic power, like the Washington Monument. My mouth was once assaulted by a masculine tongue in the office. Out of anger and comical sense, I scribbled a vulgar verse.

A living Hot Dog

wagging its large tail

in a fleshy vault.

Clouds were choked in the mid-air;

Saliva of rain hung upon the cheeks.

Could a yin and a yang ever talk

When Heaven was bitten by

a sleeping dog?!

5

The following morning, Susan, Jim, and I drove off for Pennsylvania, leaving eggs and meat in the refrigerator. I was concerned but Jim told me, Never mind—food is cheap in America. I remembered that the American teachers in Wuda were always complaining that they did not have enough food. But the cook said they left food almost untouched after each meal. I was then an interpreter. It took a while for me to convince the cook that Americans do not consider buns, rice, or any Chinese staple as food. For them, food means meat and greens. They eat rice like salt; a spoonful is quite enough for a day.

After breakfast in a country restaurant, the trip became more brisk.

Susan and I had lots of fun with students in China. You know Xue Ping. He told us he was making love with a girl on the playground every evening. What he really meant was talking or courting.

You gave us a good laugh too. During our first talk, you told us your hometown was at the foot of Ji-gong-shan, the Cock-crest Mountain, Susan added.

What is funny about that?

You know what ‘cock’ or ‘balls’ mean to Americans, don’t you?

I giggled. Although I had taught English in China for about eight years, I never knew the other meanings of those simple words.

One colleague in our department taught a year in Beijing. You will meet him soon. He told us some funny stories. Susan, you tell her.

"The one about the Ming Tombs? Okay. Two Americans had studied Chinese for a few months and were ready to try it in the street. When they lost their way during a visit to the Ming Tombs, they asked two peasants, ‘Qingwen, Shisan Ling zai nar?’

The two peasants looked at each other, stunned.

The two Americans thought their Chinese was not good enough. But as soon as they turned their backs, they heard the peasants say, ‘Isn’t that strange? Their foreign tongue sounds just like Chinese, as if they were asking where the Ming Tombs are.’"

Another tale is even funnier. One day an American was dining in a Beijing restaurant. He said something in English to the waiter. That waiter dropped a plate on the floor and fled. Can you guess what the matter was? The English words to that Chinese sounded like ‘How long is your penis?’ Yun, how do you say it in Chinese?

So embarrassing. To say any words in English, even four-letter words, sound natural; but it is too ugly to say them in Chinese. In a land congested with puritans, it was not surprising that when Americans teaching in China gathered, they resorted to entertaining themselves with sexy jokes. Chinese men love to entertain themselves by talking dirty sex. How about women? I did not know because I had never talked about that subject. But I heard the secretaries gossiping about Zhang San being a lord at home because her husband was impotent. In China, everybody knows it is taboo to talk about sex with the opposite sex. Talking is next to actually doing it.

Chinese men look lethargic. What the whole nation needs is a sexual drive. Jim sounded like he wanted to poke China awake with a huge Western penis.

It did happen almost daily. I knew that Professor Huang’s daughter married an American teacher. A shocking scandal in the province. A humiliation to all Chinese maidens, as he was not only a foreigner, but also a twice-divorced man. Another, another, another. . . .until the University simply did not allow female students to visit foreigners any more.

Do you know Xiao Dong?

Yes. The most brilliant student in my class.

He is here now.

I know. His relative in America sponsored him to study history in America.

That relative is Becky.

Who, she! The American graduate of my age? Xiao Dong is not quite twenty. Impossible.

Yes. Anything in the world is possible. We foreigners in Wuda all know. Xiao Dong often stole into Becky’s room.

Becky told me that Chinese men are unenlightened in sex. But once they learn, they are great. Susan sounded as though she had great admiration for Becky.

Becky came to China with the sole purpose of finding a Chinese man. She used to have a visiting scholar from Beijing as her lover in the States. But that man was married and returned to China about half a year ago.

But Becky has a husband and she asked for an early return because of her mother’s illness.

Susan and Jim laughed aloud over Chinese