Gao Huan

When the teacher assigned this topic, he undoubtedly assumed that there ARE pleasures (and more than one at that!) for college students. But seemingly unexpectedly, he encountered a chorus of disapproval.

��What! Another paper!�� ��No pleasure at all!��

The teacher apparently didn��t believe our claim though he knew that the students today were extremely hard to please. But ��no pleasure at all!�� was saying it too much. Why don��t we, pleasure-less, just all quit school? Thus we all look very insincere for remaining at Fudan University, while professing it to be a funless place.

My stream of consciousness suddenly comes to modernistic literature, which elaborates on all aspects of the modern human condition. Discontented with the present yet unable to find a truly satisfactory way out to the future, people cannot but stay where they are.

We keenly feel the college pressures teachers put on us, parents put on us, peers put on us and we ourselves put on us. In my case, carefree as I may look, I sometimes can��t help uttering 4-letter words (which sound less dirty than their Chinese equivalents) to get a psychological release.

What the hell are we laboring this much for? A so-called rosy future? The future makes us see the excessive pressure as magic drive and ties us down to the status quo.

Thank God that we haven��t been so pressured as to forget what pleasure is. We still have the capability of making fun out of funlessness.

Fun and pain in one, c��est la vie. Life is at least a catch-11, if not catch-22 altogether. Cruelly absurd as it may be, it is hilarious. Once you plug yourself in life, you have to play in it, just like the PnP computer devices. (The teacher, I��m afraid, is no exception to the rule. He complains about meetings that deprive him of his wont nap while he enjoys his teaching job.)

If the teacher wants to know about the fun made out of funlessness, it is not impossible. Here comes some of it in my case:

During the classes which take most of the time we spend on campus, the biggest fun is to hear and talk jokes. I even measure my liking for courses according to their joke-density as well as information intake value. (I dislike teachers who make us tend to doze off but still keep us half-awake.) It feels wonderful to laugh like crazy. The first supper of every weekend at home is my press conference to the family: all the jokes, the whole jokes, nothing but the jokes.

Another beauty about living on campus is freedom. Despite the blackout in the dorm after 10:30 PM, a lot of hustle and bustle still goes on. Even if we are all abed, we can have a hot discussion, in the darkness, on every issue but study. Roars of laughter burst now and then till it is, say 1:30AM. Here, mama can��t drive you to bed or hush you up.

Maybe it feels nice to indulge myself in the library for a whole afternoon, unless I am forced to be there looking for materials needed for research papers. I don��t like difficult stuff. But I love distressing works, like Dostoevsky��s Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov, Kafka��s Metamorphosis. They give me a painful pleasure. Strange that neither of them wrote in English.

It is even perversely funny to be scolded or punished for some MINOR lapses. I remember being ��condemned�� by the demanding P.E. teacher when I was a freshman. I was scared at that time although I now reminisce of it with gusto. How very naive I was! Now apparently I have grown much more callous. Once I remarked, ��The only difference between freshmen and seniors is that the latter are more thick-skinned. (meaning: cheeky)�� My friends nodded with a hearty laughter. Freud says that guilty conscience is inborn. Maybe he is right. When people are blamed, the guilty conscience is appeased, so it is even pleasant to be scolded. This explains why many important persons are fond of talking about their lapses in their memoirs.

Speaking of Freud, I have become very interested in psychology. I like to talk about his theory of id, ego and superego, his interpretation of dreams and his psychoanalysis. All these have fundamentally influenced modern literature, such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In a literature exam, I approached Bronte��s underlying motivation to write Jane Eyre from a Freudian angle. Though I finally got a disastrous ��B��, I still regard it as a demonstration of my understanding and application of a difficult approach. How could this happen to a middle-school student? It would have been too embarrassing to talk about Freud. So this is also a kind of pleasure only to be found in college.

The feeling of independence is strangely good. Sometimes it is hard to decide for myself. But I know it is at least better than no choice at all. When I am ��favored�� by the goddess of ill luck, there is nothing I can do to change that. Only after I have gone through all that and in an afterthought, I would appreciate myself for being so level-headed. (But I wish the fewer such things happen, the better.)

I was also one of those who shouted ��No pleasure at all��. But I have written so much in a somewhat modified stream of consciousness. Is it a paradox? Is it split personality? Maybe I am exaggerating things. But so what? If the freedom of expression what is on my mind is denied in the university, the pleasure of self-satisfaction is lost, too.

After all, college pressures haven��t suffocated all the college pleasures yet.

October, 1998

Although I enjoy reading your essay, I would fain scold some more in order to appease an inborn guilty conscience:

1) Why did you allow such lapses as are marked out by an ��eye�� to happen to mar an otherwise very good piece of writing?

2) Avoid looseness, and a certain amount of grammatical inaccuracy. (e.g. modern literature or the modern lit?)

3) Be wary of overusing the all-purpose verb ��to make��.

But you certainly can write. To gauge your stylistic calibre, show me the first assignment of a research paper.