Exploring the love that flourishes crookedly in communist China

His new novel is narrated by a graduate student at a Chinese university in 1989. It opens in spring, and the student's professor lies in hospital recuperating from a stroke. The student, who is engaged to the professor's daughter, visits him daily. But something strange has happened to the professor's mind. Rather than suffering memory loss or an inability to focus for long on one subject, he rants unstoppably on a wide range of topics. The apparently demented, but possibly inspired, professor, you assume, is the crazed person of the novel's title.

Ha Jin is these days very much the successful American immigrant. Having gone to the US from China in 1985 to study at Brandeis University, he quickly established himself as an author writing in English, became a professor of literature, achieved international fame with his novel Waiting, and followed that up with seven other books including three volumes of poetry. He is now a professor of English at Boston University, the affluent institution with a history of collecting eminent authors onto its faculty staff. Saul Bellow went there in 1993 at a salary of US$155,000 a year for teaching just two classes (he found his baronial university apartment "almost too grand"), and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott currently teaches a creative writing course. Now Ha Jin has joined this privileged group.

The university the novel describes, however, is in the provincial Chinese city of Shannang. The graduate student, Jian Wan, is studying Japanese in addition to Chinese literature, and his professor, named Yang, is an expert on all aspects of classical poetry. The professor's wife is out of contact in Tibet where she's gone as a member of a veterinary team.

Professor Yang continues to rave. He sings excerpts from Red Guard songs and snatches from Beijing opera, upbraids his wife and another, initially unidentified, woman, makes speeches about the flooding of the Yangtze River, and quotes the poetry of Dante and the Duino Elegies of the poet Rilke. He also tells parables involving conversations with God. Jian Wan -- and the reader -- wonder what is going on.

An early clue surfaces when it's revealed that during the Cultural Revolution the professor had been condemned as a reactionary intellectual.

His wife had nevertheless stayed by him, rather than applying for a divorce and marrying someone politically more acceptable as many other women did at the time. The professor's political chants are thus likely to be ironic assaults on Chinese society in its most crazed epoch. Comparisons with King Lear's intensely poetic and evocative fantasies during his mad scenes inevitably come to mind.

Meanwhile the student protests in Tiananmen Square are getting under way. Jian Wan's fiancee is studying in Beijing and sends him back details, adding that she doesn't think she ought to get involved. He also hears radio reports on Voice of America.

Jian Wan himself is portrayed as someone devoted to literature rather than politics on the one hand, or amassing wealth through business on the other.

Two years before the action of novel takes place he turned down the chance to work in marketing in Hong Kong on a salary ten times what anyone in a comparable job could earn in China. Professor Yang had praised him highly for his decision.

Within the university, conflicts seethe. Prominent is the issue of whether Yang should repay US$1,800 he had been allotted to attend an academic conference in Canada and which he'd used in part to extend his visit to include a sightseeing trip to California. Meanwhile in the cafeteria Little Owl, a radical activist, harangues his fellow students with the sayings of Chairman Mao.