A SMALL INCIDENT
(From the "Call to Arms" collection)
translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang)

Six years have slipped by since I came from the country to the
capital. During that time the number of so-called affairs of state I
have witnessed or heard about is far from small, but none of them made
much impression. If asked to define their influence on me, I can only
say they made my bad temper worse. Frankly speaking, they taught me
to take a poorer view of people every day.
One small incident, however, which struck me as significant and
jolted me out of my irritability, remains fixed even now in my memory.
It was the winter of 1917, a strong north wind was blustering,
but the exigencies of earning my living forced me to be up and out
early. I met scarcely a soul on the road, but eventually managed to
hire a rickshaw to take me to S-Gate. Presently the wind dropped a
little, having blown away the drifts of dust on the road to leave a
clean broad highway, and the rickshaw man quickened his pace. We were
just approaching S-Gate when we knocked into someone who slowly
toppled over.
It was a grey-haired woman in ragged clothes. She had stepped
out abruptly from the roadside in front of us, and although the rick-
shaw man had swerved, her tattered padded waistcoat, unbuttoned and
billowing in the wind, had caught on the shaft. Luckily the rickshaw
man had slowed down, otherwise she would certainly have had a bad fall
and it might have been a serious accident.
She huddled there on the ground, and the rickshaw man stopped.
As I did not believe the old woman was hurt and as no one else had
seen us, I thought this halt of his uncalled for, liable to land him
trouble and hold me up.
"It's all right," I said. "Go on."
He paid no attention - he may not have heard - but set down the
shafts, took the old woman's arm and gently helped her up.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"I hurt myself falling."
I thought: I saw how slowly you fell, how could you be hurt?
Putting on an act like this is simply disgusting. The rickshaw man
asked for trouble, and now he's got it. He'll have to find his own
way out.
But the rickshaw man did not hesitate for a minute after hearing
the old woman's answer. Still holding her arm, he helped her slowly
forward. Rather puzzled by his I looked ahead and saw a police-
station. Because of the high wind, there was no one outside. It was
there that the rickshaw man was taking the old woman.
Suddenly I had the strange sensation that his dusty retreating
figure had in that instant grown larger. Indeed, the further he
walked the larger he loomed, until I had to look up to him. At the
same time he seemed gradually to be exerting a pressure on me which
threatened to overpower the small self hidden under my fur-lined gown.
Almost paralysed at that juncture I sat there motionless, my mind
a blank, until a policeman came out. Then I got down from the rick-
shaw.
The policeman came up to me and said, "Get another rickshaw. He
can't take you any further."
On the spur of the moment I pulled a handful of coppers from my
coat pocket and handed them to the policeman. "Please give him this,"
I said.
The wind had dropped completely, but the road was still quiet.
As I walked along thinking, I hardly dared to think about myself.
Quite apart from what had happened earlier, what had I meant by that
handful of coppers? Was it a reward? Who was I to judge the rickshaw
man? I could give myself no answer.
Even now, this incident keeps coming back to me. It keeps dis-
tressing me and makes me try to think about myself. The politics and
the fighting of those years have slipped my mind as completely as the
classics I read as a child. Yet this small incident keeps coming back
to me, often more vivid than in actual life, teaching me shame, spur-
ring me on to reform, and imbuing me with fresh courage and fresh
hope.