The Crazed [Paperback]

Jian Wan himself is desperately trying to hold it all together-caring for his professor while his PhD qualifying exams loom around the corner. The fate of these exams will determine whether or not he can make it to Beijing to be with his ambitious fiancée, Meimei (Yang's daughter). At first, Jian Wan assumes he has no other choice than follow the scholarly course that has been charted for him. However, Yang's endless rants about the meaningless existence of a scholar, along with a transformative trip to the countryside, point him in another way. "As a human being, I should spend my life in such a way that at the final hour I could feel fulfillment and contentment, as if I had completed a task or a journey." Jian Wan says. He no longer wants to pretend to be a scholar, but live instead, a truly productive life. As Jian Wan tries to find a way out, he realizes he is powerless in a society that crushes all dissent. The final pages of The Crazed find Wan in the midst of the cathartic events of Tiananmen Square.

Ha Jin's sparse writing style, which was on wonderful display in "Waiting", is as effective as ever. His words are as clinical and precise as the hospital room in which much of the novel is set. The pace moves forward rapidly and well. Sometimes, I found that the professor's rants covered a lot of space in the text prolonging the suspense a bit too much. These sections set in the hospital with an almost unrelenting focus on the professor were a little claustrophobic.

Despite these small distractions, the main story comes through loud and clear in Ha Jin's wonderful book. The machinations of a government that can manipulate the smallest events in its citizens' lives are on awful display here. Jian Wan in the novel sees an image of China: "in the form of an old hag so decrepit and brainsick that she would devour her children to sustain herself."

In such a society, one wonders, who cannot help but be "crazed".

The book opens calmly, even placidly, as the narrator, graduate student Jian Wan, explains that his mentor, Professor Yang, has suffered a stroke. Yang has been helping him prepare for the Ph. D entrance exams for classical literature at Beijing University, the foundation of Jian's meticulously planned future. He will pass the exams and join his fiancée, Professor Yang's daughter Meimei, in the city, "where we planned to build our nest." He will become a teacher himself and spend his life in scholarly pursuits, a spiritual aristocrat, rich in heart, as his teacher has counseled. Now, as the closest thing to a family member available, Jian has been assigned to nurse Yang, which he is glad to do, though uneasy about the lost time. "I was anxious - without thorough preparation I couldn't possibly do well in the exams."

A sober, conventional, conscientious young man, Jian's settled outlook is soon disrupted by more than inadequate study time. The professor is suffering a kind of dementia that at first seems nonsensical. But as the days pass, Yang focuses on events which seem to come from his past. An intellectual, Yang was a "target of the struggle" during the Cultural Revolution. He had been denounced, humiliated, his books burned. Once he had told Jian that during difficult times he would quote Dante to himself. " `They could hurt me physically, but they could not subdue my soul.' " But now, his mind wandering, Yang's lofty sentiments have deserted him. One morning he belts out a rousing political rhyme. "His singing made my scalp itch as I remembered hearing Red Guards chant it in my hometown. By so doing, those big boys and girls had contributed their little share to the revolution; but that had been two decades before, and now the song was no more than an embarrassing joke." Additionally, Yang "would not have been entitled to sing such a progressive song together with the masses." How, Jian wonders, did he learn it?

Listening to his professor's ravings, Jian is unsure how much is real, how much made up. Yang bounces from oddly skewed parables to blissful descriptions of an adulterous affair. His moods swing from joy to savage recrimination. He makes bitter pronouncements on family and scholarly life, the political hypocrisy and expediency of communism and academic backbiting. He is sarcastic, angry, blubbering and regretful. Jian is often "shocked," sometimes repelled, but intrigued too. Could he have understood so little of his teacher's life? As he comprehends his professor's vast store of disappointment, he begins to question his own assumptions. Things have been kept from him - university maneuverings, petty jealousies and passions, a welter of unspoken thought. From Yang's dementia emerges a hopeless prospect, the uselessness of opposing political force; the shame of sacrificing personal integrity. Naturally this hopeless prospect dismays young Jian. He must act to prevent it.

Meanwhile the events at Tiananmen Square are building. Jian and his friends, far away, listen to the Voice of America, with mixed feelings. Meimei, in Beijing, never mentions the demonstrations, but exhorts Jian to study and concentrate on getting ahead. Jian, tossed one way and another, struggles to find his way through his doubts and the events conspiring against him. Eventually he goes to Beijing to take part in the demonstrations. And we all know how that turned out.

But rather than despair over the state's crushing fist, Jian's insight is personal. He did not go to Beijing for some great ideal, but to impress Meimei. Most revolutionaries, he reflects, joined the struggle to "escape an arranged marriage or to avoid debts or just to have enough food and clothes. It's personal interests that motivate the individual and therefore generate the dynamics of history."

Ha Jin's novels are multi-layered, deceptively simple stories with an undercurrent of tension and unease. The State looms over the individual with the powers of catastrophe and reward and the individual maneuvers within it as best he can. Though the bulk of "The Crazed" takes place in Yang's hospital room, Ha also takes us to Jian's Spartan dormitory quarters, meals with his friends and even a trip to the rural countryside, which contains more shocks for Jian. The struggles of daily life continually challenge the individual to small rebellions and betrayals, balanced against risk and integrity. Finally, Jian comes of age, a man less blinkered, but not without hope and plans for his future.