The Great Flowing River Page 11

  Huaiyuan was a beautiful place, and just like Yongfeng in Xiangxiang, it glows brilliantly in my memory.

  There is a river (a tributary to the Yi River) at Huaiyuan that at the time I believed to be the clearest in the world. The river flowed past the entrance to the town, and a lovely pavilion stood there, where I sat for a time each day, reading one of the few books I had or watching the small flat-bottomed boats crossing the river.

  The boats ferried in the vivid outside world. Sun Yat-sen Middle School stayed at Huaiyuan for about three months with classes officially resumed, and after the New Year in 1939, finals were rigorously conducted.

  TWISTS AND TURNS DOWN INTO SICHUAN

  The situation in Guangxi was growing tense, so we followed the school along the Sichuan–Guizhou Road to Sichuan, seeking the shelter of Chongqing, the capital during the War of Resistance.

  The teachers’ families rode in military trucks and students rode in buses if there were buses, and walked if there were none. From Guilin to Guizhou and then the switchbacks of Oumuping into Sichuan, I saw precipitous peaks and the difficulties of the people who used their two humble feet to surmount them.

  General Sun Yuanliang, who had graduated from the first Whampoa class, a commander in the regular army during the Northern Expedition and the War of Resistance and now the commander of an even larger military unit, had fought throughout China for half his life. Before his death he was interviewed by Hu Zhiwei and recalled the situation of refugees during the War of Resistance. In the interview, he gave accounts of the big events and examined the mistakes of our own side:

  At the beginning of the War of Resistance, we implemented a scorched-earth policy, encouraging retreat and dispersal, but failed to make appropriate arrangements for our loyal compatriots; nor did we extend a helping hand to those who became refugees, just letting them run helter-skelter as they might and abandoning them to their fate. This was perhaps when we started to lose the hearts and minds of the people on the mainland. When I returned to Guizhou after a long military march from Hanzhong, I saw that the mountain wilds were filled with an army of refugees—railroad and highway workers and their families, wandering teachers and students, industrial workers and miners and their families, and nearly a million military families; defeated and dispersed soldiers, hot-blooded young people unwilling to become slaves, men and women, young and old, all became a surging flood of humanity, growing larger as more territory was lost. They lacked the capacity to fight the enemy troops, but they got in the way of our own forces. The tail end of this flood was just ahead of the enemy, but its head was always blocking the advance of our army. All sorts of vehicles, from wheelbarrows to cars and everything else, clogged the roads; the agricultural fields along the way were crowded with people, trampling everything underfoot until there was nothing left, save for long stretches of mud. Vehicles either broke down or got stuck behind those that did. Wherever the army of refugees went, the food would immediately run out, and the locals would panic and soon join the column of refugees. On cold nights, people would light fires to stay warm and the moans of the old, the weak, and the sick could be heard amid the many fires, along with the sad cries of cold and hungry children. Along the way were bloated corpses of those who had fallen and died, and there wasn’t a house left intact as far as the eye could see. What sort of world was this? One couldn’t help feeling sad and frightened, and soon despondent, and the effect on the hearts and minds of the troops can’t be underestimated.

  It took an entire year to travel from Nanjing to the Jingning Temple in Ziliujing, Sichuan. That life on the road was filled with untold hardships, but whenever a place could be found for a few dozen people, indoors or outdoors, that was where the teachers would hold class. The school always carried enough textbooks in all subjects, lab instruments, and basic school equipment along.

  Today, when I think about how our teachers could hold class at any time, I deeply feel the hopes and faith of China’s intellectuals that they represented. They genuinely believed that “though Chu has only three families, it will be Chu that destroys Qin”; in addition to the courses in various subjects, they also taught sacrifice and love, but especially dignity and self-confidence.

  After Sun Yat-sen Middle School arrived in Sichuan, the proportion of graduating students who tested into university put the school among the top ten nationwide (after the school arrived in Hankou, several hundred students were admitted from Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, and Sichuan). Most of the graduates who entered the workforce went into the military, government, or cultural circles.

  With victory over Japan in 1945, most students went back to the homes they had been separated from for a decade, no longer willing to live a wandering life. During the fight between the Kuomintang and the Communists, most decided to stay in their battered homeland to rid it of the residual poison of Manchukuo and reestablish national confidence and education, but they never ever forgot the love, which went beyond blood relations, that they experienced in adversity at Sun Yat-sen Middle School.

  The 1990s saw the reestablishment of Sun Yat-sen Middle School in Shenyang, the principal impetus for which came from the students who had returned home after years away, including the provincial governor of Jilin, the secretary of the Liaoning Provincial Party Committee, and the mayor of Shenyang. In those days, they all trudged along the Hunan–Guangxi and Sichuan–Guizhou roads, singing with tears in their eyes, “My home is on the Songhua River.…”

  In 1984, the Taiwan Sun Yat-sen alumni club published a National Northeast Sun Yat-sen Middle School Golden Anniversary Commemorative Album. It was written and compiled by an editorial committee composed of Li Xingtang, then principal of the Police Academy; Liu Shaotang, founder of Biographical Literature; and Zhang Linde, executive director of China Airlines; along with Xie Zhonglian, Chen Mingren, Jin Shiguang, Ling Guangwu, Long Shiguang, Shi Shengjiu, Li Guangbi, and Zhao Shumin. The book consisted of sixty recollections of blood and tears, and whoever read it couldn’t help but be moved.

  Among the pieces, “Fifty Difficult Years” by Zheng Peigao provides a detailed narrative of that rootless decade. It opens:

  The National Northeast Sun Yat-sen Middle School was born amid suffering, and its closing was particularly heartbreaking. From its founding to today, fifty years have passed; in all that time, has there been one day we could be happy about ourselves? The local worthies surmounted hardship, tasted all kinds of bitterness, busied themselves appealing for the cause of education, and abandoned their personal happiness in order to bring our school into being. Most of them, as far as I know, have left us, and their great ideals have, as of today, still not been fully realized; knowing this, their souls cannot help but feel deep regret. Prior to the school moving south, the upperclassmen from Tianjin and Beiping received less than a month’s military training before the Japanese demanded that the Chinese Army remove to south of the Yellow River and cease all anti-Japanese and resistance activities; they also demanded that all student military training cease, among other unreasonable requests. The following morning after raising the flag, General Guan Linzheng, the commander of the Twenty-ninth Army, stepped up to the flag-raising platform and with tears in his eyes announced that training was disbanded, adding, “Our country has been brought to the point that it no longer resembles a country. This anger and hatred must be avenged; otherwise, can we call ourselves men? Can we call ourselves the children of China and descendants of the Emperors Yan and Huang?” Everyone was immediately moved and choked with tears, all anxious to finish off the enemy immediately, even to die the cruelest death without regret. After they were dismissed the ground was covered with tears, clearly visible in rows and columns.… The northeast fell; many students and teachers were captured and killed; those who fled to Taiwan had escaped death by a hair’s breadth. Recalling the past, who cannot help but feel caught up in the ceaseless quaking of the world?

  Zheng Peigao appended a note at the end:

  Written on the eve of the fifty-se
cond anniversary of the Mukden Incident. Writing this, I seemed to feel the artillery fire of the Japanese passing overhead while the Northern Military Camp was in a sea of fire.

  In addition, whenever anyone mentions Sun Yat-sen Middle School, my clearest impression from that long course of flight is of my father, who, after seeing us safely on the road, would hurry to the next stop to meet the garrisoned troops and arrange for room and board for the students.

  Stop after stop, he would rush past my sick mother and my baby sister. By then, I had been “promoted” to riding on the baggage truck, careful at all times not to be jolted off, while my brother joined the troops on foot. Sometimes we would see our father from afar as he rode on a military truck hurrying to the next stop. He seemed not to notice us, as at that time, his mind was filled with those thousand or so students, who were all his children and all had to be taken to a safe place of hope.

  3

  WITH ME, CHINA SHALL NOT PERISH

  Nankai Middle School

  ZHANG BOLING, PRINCIPAL OF NANKAI MIDDLE SCHOOL

  From the time I left my home on Little Western Hill while still a child, I was often ill, changing schools, or subject to misfortune. Although we passed happy days by the Nanjing fireside, those blissful moments, the birth of my sister and the contentment of my parents, were fleeting and things changed all too quickly. My family followed the displaced students, suffering hardships as we drifted our way over half of China. We arrived in Chongqing via the mountain roads of the southwest and had only just entered the city when five Sun Yat-sen Middle School teachers and students died in the Japanese bombings. The threats of war and death followed us like shadows. In the following seven years, the bombings never ceased and seemed to come with the sunrise and the moonset. But Chongqing was the end of our peregrinations. Sun Yat-sen Middle School had moved five hundred li and settled at Jingning Temple near Ziliujing, where school recommenced. Not only did the teaching go on uninterrupted but also new students from Hunan, Guangxi, Guizhou, and locally in Sichuan were taken in.

  My father rented a house in Sideli in Chongqing and restarted the Northeast China Association (financed by the government and responsible for training the anti-Japanese underground in northeast China, and disbanded in 1946 after the northeast was returned to China). Shortly after we settled in, however, the house was destroyed by a bomb. My father entrusted someone to find two bungalows outside Shapingba Town—one to live in and one to house the association office. Later the editorial office of Time and Tide was also housed there.

  Early one morning in November 1938, after making our way across half of China in the year since leaving Nanjing, my father put me in a car, set off from Shangqing Temple, and took me to school.

  We drove along the Jialing River, heading upstream for about fifteen miles, and soon after passing Xiaolongkan we saw off in the distance on a yellow earth embankment a group of large reddish buildings. Set amid scattered trees and shrubs, the buildings looked quite imposing. That was Nankai Middle School at Shapingba. In the six years I was there, I matured into a healthy young person, broadened my mind, and developed my lifelong character of positive thinking and aspiration.

  After the Japanese occupied northeast China, they used the foreign concession in Tianjin as a base to aggressively extend their evil clutches into north China. For several years, students and teachers at Nankai Middle School and Nankao University engaged in protest marches and called for self-strengthening, patriotism, and fighting the Japanese. Zhang Boling (1876–1951), the principal, knew that the situation was desperate and it was only a matter of time before war would break out. Therefore, as early as 1936, he went to Sichuan to find a place to set up a branch campus. The local gentry of Shapingba contributed the land while all sectors contributed money to build the school. The first year, 160 students were admitted. After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the start of war, Nankai Middle School was the first school to be bombed by the Japanese as well as the first school reestablished in the rear with a conviction to maintain a long-term resistance against the Japanese. In 1937, after Shanghai fell, the Nationalist government moved to the wartime capital of Chongqing on December 1. In the eight difficult years of the War of Resistance, Nankai Middle School educated tens of thousands of young people, nearly all of whom continued in the spirit of Zhang Boling.

  Principal Zhang’s pioneering work was entirely based on his unswerving patriotism. He was the embodiment of “imposing is our Nankai spirit” in our school song, and he left an indelible impression of warmth during those years as I grew up. He was very tall—over six feet—large and robust, but not fat, and broad shouldered. All year round, he wore a long gown and tinted glasses. Almost every day we saw him striding across campus, tall and strong, his shoulders squared. Regardless of how distressing the reports from the front lines or how fierce the Japanese bombings, under Principal Zhang’s leadership, we all firmly believed that China would not perish.

  Imagine how difficult his life must have been 120 years ago, when he was still young and following his father, who traveled extensively to teach in various old-style private schools while he would study in community-run schools along the way. Because of this, he early on understood the importance of education.

  At thirteen, he was awarded government funding to attend the Beiyang Naval Academy. He understood the ideals of enlightened thinkers for founding schools. In those days, reformers in the Qing court like Yan Fu and Wu Jiandeng, as well as a number of young military officers who had studied in England, introduced Western ideas and new thinking in the hope of establishing a strong, modern navy to wipe out the country’s humiliation. This will to rejuvenate the nation through hard work made a lasting impression on him.

  When Principal Zhang attended the Beiyang Academy, he was the same age as I was when I attended Nankai. I was there for six years and heard him tell many stories at our weekly assemblies, all of which were indelibly etched in my memory.

  He graduated from the Beiyang Academy in 1894, just in time for the First Sino-Japanese War. The Beiyang Navy was utterly wiped out—there wasn’t even a ship left for the students to use for training. A year later, he had a chance to train on board the Tongji steamship and saw with his own eyes the battleground of Weihaiwei in Shandong turned over by the victorious Japanese to the English for them to occupy. He watched from the territorial waters of his own country as the national flag was changed three times: first down came the Qing banner and up went the Japanese flag, and on the following day it was replaced by the English flag.

  Later in life, he would recall, “My breast was filled with anger and sadness and I was deeply pained. Thinking of how feeble the country had become, was there any other choice to survive but self-strengthening? And the means to self-strengthening, after all, came down to education” (A Look Back at Forty Years at Nankai, 1944). With anger, he recalled, “The soldiers wore vests, on the front of which was written ‘soldier’ and on the back of which was written ‘brave.’ Their clothes were either too big or too small, nothing fit. Their faces were sallow and they were thin and listless. They held large knives in their hands and opium pipes at their waists. They slowly walked out and lowered the dragon banner of the Qing court. Shortly thereafter, the English troops marched out in strict formation and in grand spirit. With one look you could tell the victors from the losers.”

  He was deeply pained by the shame, and even more so by the lazy and ignorant masses. Without discipline or dedication, they had no idea the country was in imminent peril. He thus believed that the only thing that could bestir the people was education and the teaching of modern knowledge and patriotism. He left the navy resolved to put all his energy into education and establishing schools. In 1908, the Yan family school was expanded into Tianjin Nankai Middle School (the donated land, known as Nankai Hollow, was located in the southwest corner of Tianjin). Before establishing the school he made two trips to Japan to observe various sorts of schools, especially private ones. He was not yet thirty and, full
of patriotic fervor, he vowed to dedicate himself to the education of the youth of a new China.

  Even more unexpected was that in 1917, at the age of forty-one, he decided to go to Columbia University in the United States to study Western theories of education. Many people tried to dissuade him: “You are already successful and famous. What’s the point of going to study with those foreign kids?” Others even said, “Even if you don’t mind losing face, we do.” But leave he did, studying diligently and working as an intern, engaging in many exchange activities. James Dewey, the father of pragmatism, was his teacher. Upon returning home, he set up Nankai University.

  At the start of the War of Resistance, he was loathed by the Japanese for all the patriotic activities he initiated, so they destroyed Nankai. At the time, Chairman Chiang Kai-shek announced, “Nankai sacrificed itself for China; as long as there is a China, there will be a Nankai.” And thus Nankai University joined Peking University and Tsinghua University to form National Southwestern Associated University, located in Kunming, which became the most outstanding university during the War of Resistance.

  After the victory over Japan, Columbia University awarded Principal Zhang an honorary doctorate in 1946. In 1948, Hu Shi and eleven American scholars jointly authored There Is Another China, celebrating his accomplishments at age seventy. The book was compiled and edited by John Leighton Stuart, the president of Yanching University, and published by Columbia’s Crown Press. The book was translated into Chinese, with the title meant to point out that, amid the political and military chaos, the Nankai spirit represented a different China, progressing daily and filled with the highest ideals.