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    Ai Qing in Talk of The Town

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    of 2
    THE TALK OF THE TOWN Notes and Comment FRIEND who lives ina one- room apartment off Columbus ‘One of the appealing features of my apartment—perhaps the appealing fea- ture—is a fireplace (with a handsome wooden mantel), although my land- lord instructed me never to make a fre in it, lest I ignite the upper West Side. T have obeyed. One day last winter when it was very cold in my apart- ment, it occurred to me that Con Edison’s expensive electric heat was perhaps moving in an uninterrupted thermal pattern from private ownership up the chimney to the public sector, so T got down on all fours on the hearth and peered up in search of a damper I might close. I didn’t see any. I did see alittle gray sky. I crumpled up a lot of old newspapers and stuffed them into the chimney to seal it. Getting to my feet, I began to dust myself off, and found that the grime and soot on my face, hands, arms, shirt, pants, and shoes would not dust off Te clung, as if ive. It had lumps in it, and webby some of it was cinders, and some of it was blobs of oil. All’ of it was black, Its main characteristic was the way it adhered. I washed my hands and face with soap, then Comet cleans er, then Mr. Clean. The hands and face came out O.K., but the sink tured black, I tried scrubbing the sink, but the gunk stuck to the serub brush, except when I tried to scrub something else, and then a lot of it came off and stuck to that. A modicum of cleanliness was finally achieved— clothes went to the cleaners and the Taundromat—and I forgot about the fireplace until yesterday afternoon, when T entered the apartment to find that the crumpled newspapers that had been in the chimney were now in var~ ious corners of the room and on the bed. From the fireplace itself was extruding what appeared to be a low mountain of black voleanic ash, burying the hearth, an adjacent rug, and most of the floor beyond. AA thin layer of fallout had set~ ted on chairs, desk, bed, clothes, tables, television, books, and lamp shades. The black stuff contained small chunks of brick and cement as well as the familiar petrochemicals. I spent an hour trying to clean up, using broom, brush, dustpan, water, ‘sponge, mop, Cornet, Me, Clean, bath towel, paper towels, and an old shirt; results were slim. (‘The mopping, for example, was basically unsuccessful because once the swabbed area dried there appeared on the periphery a heavy black outline, Tike a high-tide mark, Scrubbing at that only moved the tide Tine some- where else.) I gave up, went out, and ran into the landlord on the stairs. He was wild-eyed and covered with soot, and was clutching a camera. All the apartments were in the same condition as mine, he explained in a trembling voice. Men working on the tenement next door—transforming it from a flea- bag into fancy condominium—hadde- rmolished not only the tenement’s chim- nneys but our building’s chimneys as well. The brick and concrete had de- scended, like Santa Claus, thoroughly cleaning all the chimneys on the way down. “Pm going to sue!” he ex= claimed. “D’m taking pictures of every thing? L wished him well, and went to the hardware store to check on late developments in heavy-duty cleansers. Visitors WW Eni the honor of bing visited the other day by Ai Qing, Wang Meng, and Feng Yidai, of the Peo- ple’s Republic of China. Ai Qing, aged seventy, is one of China’s preémi= nent poets and the vice-chairman of the Chinese Writers? Association. Wang Meng, forty-six, is a renowned novelist and short-story writer and the vice-chairman of the Peking branch of the Writers? Association, Feng Yidai, sixty-seven, is one of his country’s lead ranslators of English-language ure and the editor of the journal Reading. All had recently arrived in the United States for the first time, to lec~ ture here and there under the auspices of this country’s International Com- munication Agency, the International Writing Program at the University of Towa, and the Translation Center at Columbia University. Feng Yidai is 28 fient in English, naturally, and he volunteered to interpret for his cony triots. Ai Qing speaks French, having spent two years in Paris as a young man, but no English. Wang Meng had known no English until his arrival in this country, a couple of months before four get-together, but had become surprisingly well acquainted with our tongue. He has a way with languages. During the late Bfties, when he began twenty years of exile in the northwest- ern region of Xinjiang, at times work- ing as_a peasant in the fields, he mas- tered Uighur and translated Uighur writings into Han. Wang Meng told te, in English, that when he ge tothe Towa campus, his first stop here, the only English he had command of was “Bye-bye” and “O.K.” He added, “Tt you ty, God will help you.” Feng Yidai laughed, and told Ai Qing what Wang Meng had said, and then Ai Qing laughed. “Don’t make fun with me,” said Wang Meng, smiling. ‘Wang Meng and Feng Yidai were in Western clothes. Ai Qing, every inch the Oriental elder, was wearing, Chinese cloth shoes and 2 Chinese suit. We asked the poet what the ac- ceptable term was these days, with the Gang of Four on trial, for a jacket like his—what we Americans had got used ‘a Mao jacket. All smiles vanished. “This was never a Mao jacket,” Ai Qing said after a reflective pause. “Tam wearing. what has always been a Dr. Sun Yate sen jacket.” Leaving that for revisionist histo- rians to grapple with, we inguired into the state of Western letters in China today. “helped translate Herman Wouk’s

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