Yesterday, sitting in a car with a friend, we drifted somehow onto Wang Xiaobo. The more we talked, the more wistful we both got. A few days earlier, in Pittsburgh, I had gone to see the house where he once lived.
In 1984, Wang Xiaobo came to Pittsburgh to be with his wife, Li Yinhe, who was working on a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh. They lived at 314 Meyran Avenue, in Central Oakland, a short walk from campus. Li Yinhe confirmed the address in a 2009 email to a Pittsburgh blogger. The house is still there. There is no plaque by the door, and the houses on either side look much the same. I filmed the front of the house; the clip is below.
His older brother, Wang Xiaoping, visited them there and later described the place: a two-story house, six or seven rooms, every one rented by Chinese students, all sharing one kitchen. Xiaobo and Yinhe had a single room of a hundred-odd square feet, a mattress on the floor, two stereos, and classical music playing.
Genius at the Sink
His years in Pittsburgh were not happy ones. They were not even comfortable. The awkward status of the trailing spouse, poor English, one rejected application after another, never enough money: for a while he was deeply miserable. In letters to his friend Liu Xiaoyang he complained that he drifted off in class and "often can't follow even the simplest English." He wrote that he had contacted a whole list of schools; four had answered, three said no, and the one that said yes offered no funding.
He had in fact thought about switching to statistics. "I've half a mind to study statistics," he wrote. "Math is the real thing." And right after that: "What kills me is my English." Wang Xiaoping later recalled that his brother's math and statistics were stronger than most economics students', that he had wanted to study statistics at Tulane, and that Xiaoping had helped him find professors and send in his materials. In the end his English was too weak, and the funding never came.
In the car, the line we kept coming back to was simple: the man was brilliant.
After he returned to China, in the early nineties, DOS still ruled the world. He taught himself C and assembly and wrote his own Chinese input and editing software, which he called WK. You could type pinyin with tone marks, add characters to its dictionary yourself, and its phrase lookup ran on a B-tree. In one letter he walked a friend through compiling it: five C files, one assembly file, built with Turbo C. In a 1991 letter he wrote: "Since the start of this year I've been working on a novel. The first thing I did was write software just for writing novels. It's mostly debugged now, and I've started writing."
To write a novel, first write the software. Around the same time, Qiu Bojun wrote WPS, the word processor that would become China's answer to Word. What Wang Xiaobo built was for an audience of one, nothing like WPS in scale. Still, a novelist pulled it off, and every time I think about it I find it hard to believe. He himself was matter-of-fact: "Writing it myself means everything, from pagination to key bindings, works the way I like."
And this same man, in Pittsburgh, washed dishes in a restaurant. In March 1985 he wrote: "Worked a whole day today, made twenty dollars... I'd never been a waiter, so it was the dishes for me." The letter ends: "Today my wife passed her qualifying exam and is riding high. Back from the slop bucket, I'm gloomier than ever."
When I read that line I laughed first. Then I couldn't quite laugh anymore.
People of my generation, whether we are sending our kids abroad to study or just taking a trip ourselves, have a lot more room in the budget these days. In talent, most of us are not a step or two behind Wang Xiaobo; we are nowhere in sight of him. But we happened to arrive in an era when ordinary people can wander off and see the world, and he didn't. A mind like his, in Pittsburgh in 1985, stood beside a slop bucket for twenty dollars a day.
I don't much like saying someone was "born at the wrong time." It sounds like a eulogy. But when I think of that house on Meyran Avenue, I can't find a better phrase.
Wednesday Afternoons
Later, through Li Yinhe's introduction, he came under the guidance of the historian Cho-yun Hsu and took courses at Pitt as an independent study. Every Wednesday afternoon the two of them sat in Hsu's office and talked, from history and literature to ideas and freedom. Hsu later recalled that the rules called for two hours, but "neither of us really cared about the rules; sometimes it would stretch into the whole afternoon." Neither of them, he added, could sit up straight: "teacher and student sprawled every which way, and quite at ease."
I wrote about Cho-yun Hsu in my previous piece, after seeing his manuscripts in the Pitt archives, so I won't say more here.
His friend Ding Xueliang remembered that Wang smoked heavily back then, two packs a day, had a short temper, and swore a lot. He did wash dishes at a restaurant for a while, and quit after only a few days.
Still, a disappointing life did not get in the way of what he took in. Those years in Pittsburgh were when he met Western thought up close and gathered material for his fiction. According to the standard chronology, he was a graduate student at Pitt's Asian Studies Center and earned a master's degree in 1986. The stories built on Tang dynasty tales were begun in those years, and he kept revising The Golden Age the whole time.
There is an old photo of Wang Xiaobo in Pittsburgh that gets passed around online, the downtown towers rising behind him. This time I went up Mount Washington, found roughly the same angle, and stood there for a picture of my own. Call it an old geezer's cosplay, and a small act of remembrance.
What the Squeeze Leaves
That day in the car, my friend said something else: that era had its own good side.
I thought about it, and he's right. From the eighties to the early nineties, there wasn't much of anything, and money was tight, but the air was a little looser. In private, people dared to think anything and talk about anything. Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age, The Silver Age, and The Bronze Age were written, one after another, out of that air.
"That day I was twenty-one, in the golden age of my life. I had so many longings. I wanted to love, I wanted to eat, I wanted to turn in an instant into a cloud in the sky, half bright and half dark. Only later did I understand that life is a slow process of being hammered. People grow older day by day, their longings fade day by day, and in the end they become like an ox that has been hammered." — Wang Xiaobo, The Golden Age
Sometimes I think hardship and frustration are a raw material too. Like squeezing fruit by hand: it hurts the fruit, but the juice does come out. In his letters Wang cursed the Americans, cursed his jobs, cursed his own English, page after page of grumbling, and none of it went to waste. It turned into that bitter, funny thing his fiction is made of. He even defended restaurant work in one letter: call it "narrow observation," he said, but it still put you "two feet higher" than handing out toilet paper in a public restroom.
Things are much better now, of course. Most people live far easier lives than back then; I'm one example. But the other side is visible too. There seems to be less that can be said than before, and what can be written has narrowed. Meanwhile the tools keep getting cheaper. One sentence will get you an article, an image, a video. There is more stuff than anyone can look at, most of it filler, and English now has a word for it: slop. The same word for what gets scraped into a bucket in a restaurant kitchen.
I use these tools every day myself, and this is my line of work, so I'm in no position to lecture anyone. It's just that, writing this, I remember Wang Xiaobo really did stand beside that slop bucket. We don't have to wash the dishes anymore. Instead, every day, we each pour a little more into the bucket.
In the End
Looking at this ordinary American house today, it's hard to imagine that more than forty years ago, the Wang Xiaobo who would go on to write The Golden Age sat here worrying about his English, his tuition, and his future.
There's no plaque by the door, and passersby probably don't give it a second glance. I don't know who lives there now. Odds are they don't know who once lived there, or what happened inside.
Let's leave it there.