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Panic
- University of Hawai'i Press
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Panic [35.172.193.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:32 GMT) Part One Mondays—so difficult to categorize. For people of wealth and leisure, Monday is Sunday’s bonus. For others, who may be biding their time, Monday is the periscope of the armed submarine probing the calm ocean’s surface. Some people start their week like a ferocious watchdog stepping out of its kennel; they focus their very reason for being upon the tasks at hand and accomplish half the week’s work on Monday alone. You could say that Monday is their best friend. However, for some—specifically , those tragic individuals who are not cut out for exacting work but find it thrust upon them anyway, and the ones who loathe their supervisor, and let’s also include the ones who simply were born under an unlucky star—for them, Monday is interrogation day. For all practical purposes, they may as well be newly paroled convicts who have completed their “education through labor” but must still appear at the police station for interrogation every Monday. Yao Chun-gang despised Mondays. Actually, it was worse than that: he positively hated the day. “Hey . . . You still sleeping?” Yao’s wife gave him a nudge. He didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes. He wanted to sleep some more. Well, no; actually, he had slept well and long 3 enough and had even been awake for some time. He hadn’t made love last night, even though his wife had dropped an unmistakable hint about her interest and hoped to kindle the same in him by snuggling up. He kissed her, fondled her, and the moment passed. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do it. At one time, if the truth be known, Yao Chun-gang had possessed a robust sexual prowess. He could have serviced three wives; well, everybody carries around a few cherished memories. Last night, though, Yao had satisfied neither his wife nor himself. At first things were starting to happen, but then he remembered that the next morning would be Monday. Just the thought of the small, gray, two-story building where he worked—the place always looked to him like a tired, prematurely withered widow—or the thought of Executive Director Zhao Jing-yu with his potbelly and self-satisfied air and, well, Yao’s manly virtues shrank to a lifeless vestige. Ai, Monday! How he hated Mondays. “Hey . . . It’s already past seven.” His wife pushed him again. Discipline had recently tightened at Yao’s institute. For example, a carpenter had put up a card rack, and everyone was given a card with his or her name printed on one side. From that day on, the first task every morning was to flip one’s card over, leaving it name side out. The face-out position indicated that the worker was on the job. A timekeeper checked the rack at the stroke of the hour to determine whether all had completed this task on time. Late arrivals had to file a statement in the personnel office, indicating the number of seconds or minutes they were late. The directors were no exception. Yao was the second of the two directors. The new rules of discipline had been promulgated by the 4 l i a n g x i a o s h e n g management; or more specifically, they had been thought up in Fat Zhao’s brain and then announced by Yao to one and all. Fat Zhao liked to decide things. A third of his decisions were right; a third, wrong. The other third of the time he was an idiot. Some of Zhao’s decisions were so irrelevant to everything on earth that Yao Chun-gang could not classify them. Nevertheless, Fat Zhao thought highly of his decisions, including the ones that were still under development. After Fat Zhao had made the initial declarations about tightening up discipline at the work unit, it fell to Yao Chun-gang to inform the workers of the details of the executive director’s decisions. That seemed to be the extent of Yao’s managerial responsibilities, although Fat Zhao had never said as much to him. Nevertheless, the very idea humiliated and depressed Yao. This world is so unfair, he observed; it always bows before power. Yao asked himself why couldn’t he do some of the deciding— and let Fat Zhao announce the details to...