Early in the afternoon he went to Dick's workshop. He found the Creative Writing Program easily, in a white wooden colonial on North Clinton Street, its shutters, windows, doors, and eaves all blackish green. Before its front entrance stood a young oak and around the house were maples, their leaves showing their pale undersides whenever a wind ruffled them. The interior of the house was much nicer than its exterior, with fine woodwork and a few stained-glass windows. The seminar room was in the back of the first floor, and Nan went in without saying a word to anyone. Sitting against a wall, he quietly observed the students seated around two large tables pushed together. At the other side of the room stood a tall metal cabinet. Dick didn't introduce Nan to the class and just mentioned they had a visitor today, then he went ahead to conduct the workshop. Behind him two chalkboards hung on the wall; one of them still bore three lines left by a past class illustrating the metrical pattern, marked with alliterative ticks. Nan liked the ambience of the seminar, which was cozy and informal. Most of the aspiring poets were smart and articulate, full of nervous energy, but he wasn't impressed by the poems being discussed, which were too light and too arty to him. One piece addressed the speaker's own breasts as a pair of little friends, and another was about the palatal sensations produced by mint chocolate.

These beginning writers seemed quite fragile and seemed to be writing poetry mainly for themselves or for an elite readership. True, they argued heatedly with reddened cheeks, flashing eyes, and sly smirks, but the passion seemed to have originated more from personal feelings and the obsession with linguistic devices than from the love for ideas and deep emotions. To a degree, poetry had become an esoteric art here, somewhat deprived of its vitality and earnestness. It was hard for Nan to imagine fitting in such a group. He was afraid they might laugh at his ineptitude for English and attack him where he was weak.

A passionate exchange broke out between a Latino man and a myopic blonde over whether it was music or meaning that gave poetry the power to captivate the audience. The man, wearing a crew cut and an earring, emphasized that genuine poetry must sing, like the blues, and that meaning must come secondarily, whereas the woman argued that melodic sounds without meaning would be empty and valueless, so semantics ought to take priority in poetic composition. While she was speaking, she kept glancing at Nan over the top of her rimless glasses as if she expected him to disagree with her. Dick intervened and talked about "the auditory understanding," saying that sometimes even though we didn't get the meaning of a poem, we could still be moved just by listening to it, so there must be some inherent connection between the sound and the meaning. Ideally speaking, the sound should echo the sense, as Alexander Pope said three centuries ago. Despite the teacher's explication, the two students didn't seem reconciled, staring at each other from time to time. Nan wondered whether there had been some personal friction between them. Dick announced a ten-minute break, and Nan left without returning to the second half of the workshop.

Late in the afternoon, over a glass of Merlot, Dick asked Nan, "What do you think of my students?"

"Very impressive, especially zer nearsighted blonde."

"You mean Samantha, the tall one?"

"Yes. She's smart."

"Samantha knows more than the rest of the class. Actually, she's published a chapbook. Don't you want to come and join us here?"

"I cannot decide now. I have to be very careful about zis. You know I have a family and a business to take care of."

"As I told you before, you should try to become a professional poet eventually." Dick's voice then turned solemn. " 'The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work.' "

Nan knew he quoted some poet, but whom he couldn't say. He asked, "Why does it have to be one way or zee other? Why can't one have a middle way?"

"Like how?"

"Do you have to live a literary life to produce literary work?"

"Well, poetry has its own logic. If you want to be a poet, you may not have perfection of both the work and the life. It all depends on how much you're willing to sacrifice."

"Is zat why you don't have a family?"

"To some extent, yes."

"Zis is too much for me. Let me think about it, okay? I will let you know my decision soon, very soon."

"All right. Keep in mind that you have talent, but you need to give up a lot in order to develop your talent."

"I can see your lawgic, but I cannot rush to a decision."

"I understand. Some of our students had good jobs before they enrolled in our program. Remember the black guy with a mustache?"

"Yes. He's smart too."

"He used to be a physician in Milwaukee, with an M.D. from Duke. He came to the workshop because he wants to be the next Langston Hughes."

"Well, he would be better awff if he worked as a sailor or waiter."

Dick didn't seem to catch the irony. Yet at his own word "sailor" Nan 's lungs constricted. Before he met Pingping and after Beina had jilted him, he had dreamed of joining the merchant marine and sailing around the world, just as Langston Hughes had once worked on freighters. As a sailor he could have had a lot of time to read and write, which would have been a good way of becoming a writer. He sent query letters, together with his one-page vita, to several marine shipping companies, but none of them bothered to write back. People must have thought he was a freak, since they never expected applications for jobs, which were all assigned by the state regardless of personal preferences.

Dick offered to take Nan to a French place that evening, but Nan preferred not to dine out. He was tired of restaurant food and wanted to have something simple and wholesome. There was some long-grain rice in Dick's cupboard, so Nan boiled porridge and scrambled four eggs with diced tomatoes and panfried a pack of Polish sausages. Dick enjoyed Nan's cooking, which he said was the only thing he missed about Atlanta. They drank two bottles of wine between them and talked deep into the night.

17

DRIVING back by I-74, Nan got off at Red Cedars, Illinois, where Beina was living. On entering the town, he stopped at a food mart and bought a bag of beef jerky for Taotao. He asked a saleswoman for directions, and she said Huron Road was in the north, about half a mile away and close to a cemetery. Without further delay he drove into Red Cedars. It was almost midmorning, yet the town, more like a big village, seemed still asleep, white clapboard houses wet with rainwater and some partly obscured by gray bushes. After Nan passed a traffic light, a cafe appeared, but it looked empty inside despite four cars parked before the yellowish cottage. In some front yards of the homes along the streetside, apples and pears were strewn under trees, half eaten by birds and animals, and yellow jackets buzzed into or exited from the holes in the fruit the birds had made. With little difficulty Nan found Beina's place, a pinkish house with peeling paint and an overhanging second story. It sat on a slope at the end of the narrow street. His heart was thumping. Would she be in there? It was Thursday and she was probably out at work. He went up to the front door and rang the doorbell, but it was either broken or disconnected, no sound coming from inside. So he clanked the brass knocker shaped like a horseshoe, hoping her husband wouldn't be the one to come out.

An old Chinese woman in a powder blue housedress appeared, holding the door ajar. "Who are you looking for?" She sized Nan up, her eyes glassy and shrewd.

"Does Beina Su live here?" asked Nan.