The Crazed by Ha Jin Page A

of the White Crane Hotel. To see the paintings might ease my mind, so I decided to go. The gallery was not far from my school, just fifteen minutes by bicycle. In a way I wished it were farther away, because I wanted to pedal longer on a breezy morning like this one.
    On the way I noticed there were more police in town today. Their green vans and motorcycles with sidecars perched at the mouths of alleys and at street corners. One man held a walkie-talkie, though none of them seemed armed. The word was that some students at Shanning Teachers College planned to demonstrate downtown, so the police were stepping up security.
    The exhibition differed from what I had expected. The hall couldn’t serve properly as a gallery, not providing enough wall space for all the paintings. And dozens of screens were set up in the middle of the hall for some smaller pieces, which, hung on the green or sky-blue silk, looked strange, even sloppy—the colors of the backdrop interfered with those in the paintings. Though three of the artists in this group were famous as master painters of animals, there were fewer visitors than working staff members at the show.
    Facing the entrance was a piece over thirty feet long horizontally, entitled
A Thousand Chickens,
which presented a scene on a poultry farm. Hundreds of chicks with yellow, fluffy down had been arranged to welcome visitors. I was not impressed by it because all the chickens looked identical, as if printed with the same mold. Moving counterclockwise, I went through paintings of country life: peasants, animals, vegetables, tractors, plows drawn by buffaloes, fields of crops, waterwheels, a pond of ducks, boats laden with splashing bass, even peacocks and peahens. Then came landscapes and seascapes, some of which were so coated with indigo and brown that they appeared muddy.
    I was more interested in people than in scenery and animals, so I stayed longer in front of the human figures. I stood for a good while before a painting of a Uigur girl, who couldn’t have lived in the South. The artist must have done this piece on a copying-from-life trip to the Northwest. In it the girl in a tight vest danced wildly with her numerous braids flying. Her movement and her supple limbs were well unified, pivoting from her slender but sturdy waist, below which a saffron skirt was swirling into a canopy. One of her heels kicked backward knee-high. Her lovely calves were slightly pink, gleaming with a soft sheen. I liked her long lashes best, which almost shaded her naughty eyes. There was a kind of fervent loveliness that illuminated this girl, who made me think of my fiancée. Meimei usually seemed carefree, and her insouciance gave her a peculiar charm; yet beneath her casual appearance was the fire fueled by her determination to achieve. What’s more, she always liked to have things her way, right or wrong, but that was all right with me. Ever since we got engaged, whenever I saw a pretty woman, I couldn’t help comparing her with my fiancée. The habit was weird, but too ingrained for me to outgrow.
    I lingered in front of the Uigur girl for ten minutes solid, until I stepped closer and murmured with my nose almost touching her knee, “I love you.”
    “Don’t touch it!” shouted a sharp female voice. I spun around and saw a fiftyish woman, her fat rump resting against a metal-legged desk, pointing her forefinger at my face. Several people paused to look at me.
    I grasped the front of my shirt and gasped, “Goodness, what a fright you gave me!”
    “You want to pay a fine?”
    “No, no, I didn’t touch anything, just wanted to study it closely.” Hot-faced, I raised both hands with the palms toward her and backed away.
    Absently I passed through the next three sections. Then in the corner of two screens I came on a piece called
A Poet,
with the subtitle
No, Not in the Presence of Others.
This painting fazed me. Viewed from a distance of ten feet, the human figure in it resembled a scarlet