When Red is Black by Qiu Xiaolong

English study program started. It was no longer politically incorrect for people to learn English, although it was rather unusual for students in a cadre school where people were supposed to keep washing their brains as their top priority.
     
    “Yin’s visits to Yang gave rise to gossip. She visited him frequently, to the great inconvenience of his roommates. Their dorm room was small and cramped, with three bunk beds in it. When she sat talking with Yang, the other five roommates felt obliged to leave, to walk around outside in the cold. It did not take long for people to see that their ‘English study’ was a pretext. They talked about much more than her English problems. While looking at an English book on the table, it was noticed, they held hands under the table.
     
    “She may have started with a vague notion that knowledge of English might come in handy some day, even for a downtrodden man like Yang, but in her studies with him, she soon started to see a new prospect.
     
    “They covered not only language, but literature as well, for there were no textbooks available in the cadre school. Yang had to use novels and poems as teaching materials. Yin had filled her college years with political activities; she had learned little in the classroom. From him, she now absorbed the knowledge she had not gotten previously. Reading an English novel, Random Harvest, she picked out one sentence, ‘My life began with you, and my future goes on with you—there’s nothing else.’ She repeated it to Yang with tears trembling in her eyes.
     
    “On the epigraph page of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which Yang had translated, she read a passage, ‘No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind. And therefore never need to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’ Yang told her that it was a quote from John Donne, who had compared separated lovers to the two points of a compass in a celebrated love poem. Having read ‘A River Merchant’s Wife,’ she understood the Chinese poem ‘Changgan Song’ for the first time. In a short story by O. Henry, she found the significance of life in a solitary leaf painted on the wall, and when Yang compared himself to that leaf, she stopped him with her hand over his mouth.
     
    “That was the point of no return for her: she found all the meanings unknown to her before, with him—it was him. This was a passion she had never experienced before, a passion that gave a new meaning to her existence.
     
    “And for him, the affair came as a vindication of humanity despite all the political calamities that had befallen him. In his bookish way, he fought for love as one of those ideals he had striven for all these years. At one point of his life, he had been disillusioned but now he was filled with conviction.
     
    “Love might have come late, but its arrival made all the difference.
     
    “The cadre school was located in a marshland in Qingpu. There was no library nor any movie theaters nearby. Instead of staying in the dorm room, they started to walk out, openly, arm in arm. For lovers, to be is to be with each other.
     
    “Yang was in his mid-fifties. Except for a pair of broken eyeglasses, he looked like an old farmer, weather-beaten, white-haired like an owl, and with a pronounced suggestion of a stoop. As for Yin, she was still in her early thirties. Though not a beauty, she was animated with passion, blossoming beside him. To people’s confusion, it was she who clung to him with abandon.
     
    “ His white hair shone against her rosy cheeks, just as described in a well-known proverb. But that proverb was commonly considered to be negative, with an implication that such a couple was unsuitable. What the lovers saw in each other was, of course, a matter of opinion. They were both single. There was nothing legally against them being together, but that was the