The Great Flowing River Page 12

  From 1904, when there were only seventy-five students, until his death in 1951, Principal Zhang delivered fervent speeches all over the country, promoting the idea of “With me, China shall not perish” and popularizing the ideal of saving the nation through education. So he spoke for over half a century! In those fifty years, disasters in China took on a variety of novel forms, foreign aggression and internal strife in equal measure. Returning home to Tianjin from Chongqing after Japan was defeated, and despite his old age and frail health, he continued to call for peace and cooperation in building China as the Communists and Nationalists fought each other. At seventy-five, as he approached the end of his life, the thing that gave him the greatest comfort was seeing Nankai Middle School and Nankai University reestablished in their old locales in Tianjin.

  The figure of Principal Zhang will remain forever in the hearts of the students. In his eight years at Shapingba, he lived in a dorm, and every morning, cane in hand, he would go out for a walk and inspect the campus. Seeing a student studying by the road, he would walk over and pat him on the shoulder, rub his head, and ask if he had enough to wear and to eat. The students at Nankai were all required to live on campus, and he felt that their parents had entrusted them to him, so he had to take good care of them. He had no way of knowing it at the time, but his struggles were not in vain. All of the tens of thousands of students remembered his words regardless of where we ended up in the world, and in our own fields transmitted that undying flame he had ignited.

  RECOLLECTIONS OF CARING TEACHERS

  I am most grateful for the schoolwork I did while at Nankai, as those six years helped lay the foundation for furthering my studies later in life. In addition to the academic standards it always possessed, Nankai was able to attract quite a few outstanding faculty who had come to Chongqing from Beiping and Tianjin. They heeded Principal Zhang’s call and took up residence in Jinnan Village on the Shapingba campus. In the eight years until victory over Japan, very few people left.

  Jinnan Village was the first faculty housing I ever saw. Living in those rows of small detached concrete dwellings were many legendary personages the people of Nankai relished talking about, such as my unforgettable Chinese teacher Meng Zhisun, memories of whom I have cherished for decades, and Zhang Yali, the stunning but aloof math teacher who struck fear in the students’ hearts. There were also the two daughters of Yu Chuanjian, the head of the school administration. They both had studied abroad in the United States and taught at Nankai after returning to China. “Yu the elder” taught English and “Yu the younger” taught science.

  Nankai always emphasized its internationality, and therefore the English-language teaching materials were very advanced. The school was also strong in physics and chemistry, and the students who went on to study those subjects in the university were in a class of their own. The teaching of mathematics was also very solid, and it were probably the first middle school at that time to teach calculus. My schoolwork was pretty good in those days, with the exception of mathematics, especially geometry. For the life of me, I couldn’t grasp why some lines were imaginary and some real. For me, there were only real lines, no imaginary ones.

  Old Zheng, who taught chemistry, was an oddball. Very few people called him by his name, Zheng Xinting. He didn’t teach the middle-school girl students, but every time we heard the boys mimic his Shandong accent when reciting chemical formulas or how, after a few drinks in the dorm, he would tell the boys stories from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, we were all very envious. In addition, he also had many heroic words to encourage the “real men.”

  Geography teacher Wu Zhenzhi taught junior high Chinese history. In mentioning Taiwan, she told us to remember Ji (chicken) Dan (egg) Gao (cake) (Jilong, Danshui, Gaoxiong). We called her “chicken egg cake” behind her back. In senior high, she taught world geography and often lugged around several large, thick foreign tomes from which she would show us pictures of various places in the world, expanding our perspective. One year at the beginning of summer, her fiancé was on a small steam launch on the Jialing River when the boat capsized. When the terrible news reached us, several of us girls went to her room in the singles dorm and slid a letter under her door in which we had written, “Miss, we weep with you.…” After that, no one ever referred to her by the nickname again. Early in 1948, I ran into her on the stairway at the College of Liberal Arts of National Taiwan University as she was on her way to see the dean, Shen Gangbo. We stayed in touch until she retired from the College of Liberal Arts at National Cheng Kung University. I also went to see her one last time in the hospital at the end of her life.

  I recall there was a math teacher with the surname of Kang, who was the son of Kang Nairu, one of the founders of the school. He was a good teacher and well known among the girl students. I forget his first name, but everyone called him Kang the Junior. He was tall and single, and all the girls thought he was handsome, except me. During the war, everyone wore cotton-padded jackets and straw sandals, but he was unique in that he often wore a white Western-style suit.

  At the time, he was fond of one of the girl students in our class, who was also the class belle. She sat only a seat away from me. We frequently had quizzes, at which time Teacher Kang would walk between our seats, pacing back and forth while proctoring. Occasionally he would bend over to see if the student knew what to write or had any questions. Each time he bent over that one girl, the entire class would make faces, giving each other a nudge and a wink. We wrote with brushes in those days, and we each had an inkstone. One classmate was really angry and found it annoying that he only looked at her, so she rubbed a good deal of ink in her inkstone and put it on the edge of her desk so that it hung over a bit. When Teacher Kang passed by, he bumped against it and the ink spilled all over his white suit. Angry, he blurted out in his Tianjin Mandarin: “What’s the meaning of this?” The girls played such pranks on their male teachers, and sometimes it could get pretty nasty.

  The teacher who had the greatest influence on me was my Chinese teacher, Meng Zhisun. The celebrated Nankai Chinese textbooks—twelve volumes for six years from the first year of junior high to the last grade of senior high—were edited by Mr. Meng. The texts selected for the junior high years went from the easy to the difficult, with an equal emphasis on both the vernacular and classical language. Excellent works from the May Fourth period and after inspired us to the creation of new literature. The textbooks for the senior high years were a veritable anthology of the history of Chinese literature, beginning with the Book of Poetry and continuing up to the Republican period. The developments in each period were elucidated and the selections were all the choicest.

  During my second year of high school, Mr. Meng not only taught my Chinese course but also introduced a set of elective courses rarely seen in middle school curriculums, which included a junior-year class on poetry offered to all levels, both boys and girls, and a senior-year song-lyric class. I was all grown up, and in addition to the other required classes and preparing for the National Joint College Entrance Exams, I spent my time, day and night, memorizing poems. Calmly recollecting it today, I realize I must have memorized most of the important works of Chinese literature in those two years.

  In addition to teaching classes, Teacher Meng was like a father to me. He loaned me all the books he felt I would be able to read, and sometimes he would say, “Today we’re having fried bean sauce noodles at our house, why don’t you come and join us?” That was one of the tastiest things I remember eating.

  Nankai teachers, regardless of what period they are judged against, were all knowledgeable and sought to inspire creativity, just like so many of the teachers at Sun Yat-sen Middle School fondly remembered by their students. Amid the flames of war, they fled from the north to Sichuan, heeding Principal Zhang’s call for education, sharing both the bitter and the sweet.

  In 2004 in the fiftieth anniversary souvenir book of the class of 1943, the most memories were about Teacher Meng and Teacher Zheng (the
boys said that 40 percent of the graduates chose chemistry and related fields because of Old Zheng). One piece titled “Calling for the Education of Man” by a classmate named Fu Guoyong tells the story of the famous physics teacher, Wei Rongjue: Xie Bangmin, who was in the class of 1941 and one of Mr. Meng’s prize pupils, handed in a blank exam, on which he instead composed a poem recounting his aspirations, but assumed that he wouldn’t be able to graduate. When Mr. Wei evaluated the exam, he wrote four lines: “A blank paper it is, but the poem is good. Each has his own ambitions—so a bare pass for you too.” Xie tested into the Law Department at National Southwestern Associated University and later taught at Peking University. Many such stories circulated on campus, and it comes as no surprise that Nankai teachers are so fondly remembered.

  Physical education at Nankai was also famous throughout the country. Every day at 3:30 p.m., all classrooms were locked and everyone had to go to the playing field and join in some ball game. Sports practice and competition were mandatory except on rainy days; there was no evading it.

  At first, I thought softball (there was little baseball in those days) was less rough and suitable for me because I was so thin and not very strong. Who knew that running the bases required great speed? After much ridicule, I discovered that, in actual fact, I could run very fast. My friend Cheng Keyong was not very tall, but she ran surprisingly fast and was thus nicknamed “Jeep Car.” With practice, I went from being a reserve player standing on the sidelines to first baseman in six months, and in my third year of junior high, I actually became a member of the girls’ track and field team and competed in sprinting, high jump, and long jump. One teacher praised my high and long jumps, saying they appeared so effortless, I seemed to float through the air.

  My parents were incredulous with regard to my athletic performance. One day my mother worked up enough courage to come and watch me compete, probably a one-hundred-yard dash. Worried as she could be, she was prepared to pick me up and take me home when I collapsed. Sixty years later, I still remember the wind whistling through my short hair as I made the long jump and landed in the sand pit. It was the first time that a spindly fifteen-year-old girl felt that life was great and was confident of her existence.

  But in fact, physical education did entail one nightmare—tap dancing.

  Teacher Gao was my physical education instructor for several years. She was of upright posture and had a graceful figure. Tap dancing was required, and all the students all danced according to the instructions, but I could never keep up. The teacher held a little baton and often struck my ankles and said, “Your schoolwork is so good, but how come your feet are so clumsy?” Later she came to Taiwan and my classmates went to see her. Not me, because I had been struck by her so many times. I really couldn’t dance and didn’t know why I was so incompetent. I just couldn’t tap dance, and she really did hit me with the baton and in all sincerity called me stupid. I was ashamed of myself, but in no way did I ever blame her.

  A ROOM WITH EIGHTEEN BEDS

  Throughout our years in middle school, we all earnestly looked forward to going home each Saturday at 3:30. Decades later, I always wait for something good to happen on that day at that hour.

  All students were required to reside on campus because Nankai was located in the suburbs. Althouh my family lived some two li from school, I too had to live on campus. In those days transportation by car was virtually impossible. The wartime slogan was: “A drop of petrol, a drop of blood.” I never heard of any family having a private car.

  Every room in the girls’ dormitory had eighteen plank beds, three rows of six beds each, between which there was only enough space for one person to walk. Beneath each bed was a small wooden trunk for each girl to store her clothes. Self-study time morning and evening was regulated the same way as regular classes. Every Saturday at 3:30 p.m. you could go home, but you had to be back by 6 p.m. on Sunday.

  I lived in the dormitory for six years, and it was like growing up in a huge family, filled with memories of conflicts between group discipline and individual interest. The most interesting times were in the morning and in the evening after the lights went out.

  During the war, in large organizations and schools, bugle calls announced the time for rising and retiring and the start and end of class. This was because we could not afford large clocks while we moved around, and electric clocks were beyond our wildest dreams. Every morning at six o’clock, before it was fully light, the shrill and persistent bugle call indicated it was time to rise and shine. We would struggle to climb out of our bedbug-ridden plank beds, which was especially hard on winter days. When we would line up on the playing field, often the mist would be so thick that you couldn’t make out the faces of the next class. The time preceding morning calisthenics was devoted to a lecture by Wang Wentian, the director of the middle school girls’ section. For the rest of our lives, few of us would forget what she said to us, “Your minds grow grass and your heads emit smoke!” For some reason, many years later when recalling this, everyone would laugh happily.

  In those days, the girls were not the only ones afraid of her; the boys were very much afraid of her too. While they were in school, the more timid of the boys never dared enter the gate of the girls’ section. To this day it remains a mystery to me how such a serious woman (we called her the Sphinx behind her back) like her, who graduated from the first girls’ class and studied overseas in Germany, could marry after the age of forty (she married famous scholar Li Shuhua after his first wife died). Some years later, when I was past forty, I went to see her in New York. When she opened the door I asked her, “Do you still remember me?” She replied with tears rolling from her eyes, “Oh my, why wouldn’t I remember you and that class of mischievous imps?” In those years, as soon as she spoke through the morning fog, we’d immediately forget our dreams from the previous night. Her voice was like a small cannon, and in her Tianjin Mandarin she would berate us for being beyond hope. How could she now have such a warm image of us as mischievous imps?

  An even more interesting part of dorm life came after the lackluster bugle call for lights out. Sleep did not necessarily follow upon darkness. On moonless nights we knew there would be no air-raid sirens, and it was the only time the girls in the eighteen beds could have heart-to-heart talks. Naturally seventeen- and eighteen-year-old girls had a yearning for love. They were able to find hints of love in the words and between the lines (such things wouldn’t have been expressed clearly in those days) in all books, whether textbooks or casual reading. All poems were filled with the fever of spring and the melancholy of autumn. But in the middle school of those days, no one would bill and coo, much less admit to having fallen in love. If anyone did admit to being in a relationship, she probably would have been expelled.

  The worst thing about dorm life was the bedbugs, and they were particularly active in the Nankai dorms. When we went home we were not permitted to take our luggage indoors but had to first put it out in the courtyard under the sun. Our duvet had to be opened and washed and if a bedbug was found, it had to be thrown away. Sometimes bedbugs were even found in our books. Zhang Zhongmei’s autobiography also mentions the bedbugs at Nankai Middle School and the student protests about them to the school administration.

  In order to deal with the bedbugs, every few weeks three or four of us girls would carry the plank beds to the steam room next to the boys’ dorm and steam them, managing to get rid of some of the vermin at least. Later we discovered it was relatively ineffective because the bedbugs would secret themselves in the floor or the ceiling, and there was no way to scald the whole room. On nights before exams, the lights would stay on an extra hour or two. Battling the books at night, we’d see a frightening scene of a column of bedbugs descending the electric wire from which a naked bulb without a shade hung. Even from the floor countless bedbugs could be seen crawling beside our feet. We could do nothing but scratch the itch of the bedbugs as they climbed on us while we tried to sleep. None of us would forget this for
as long as we lived.

  Nothing could be done about the bedbugs. The school couldn’t solve the problem because there was no system of sterilization. DDT didn’t exist during the war; if it had, it would have been something magical. Only after we graduated and left school did we escape the menace. As for the mosquitoes and the flies, they hardly require mention. Despite this, Nankai was considered quite hygiene conscious—the cafeteria windows did have screens. But regardless of how conscious it was, it was impossible to resolve all the hygiene issues in those difficult surroundings. Thinking back on our younger days, all of us were badly bitten, and it really wasn’t easy. The bedbugs, as hateful as the Japanese planes, engulfed and plagued us in the same way as yet one more nightmare. If I start writing about them, I will never stop. In those years we resisted with our young flesh and blood.

  GENERAL LI MI’S WAR HORSE

  I was skinny and not very robust the first two years of junior high. I even became the butt of jokes for my classmates because I sometimes fainted during the long morning flag raising and speech. When it was too hot or too cold and we had to stand for any length of time, someone would say, “Watch, Chi Pang-yuan is going to faint any minute.” I was often a disappointment to myself and really did faint.

  Toward the end of the first semester of the second year, it suddenly became extremely cold and most of us developed chilblains on our fingers and heels. Having stood for a time at a weekly meeting in the fog on the playing field, I grew faint and was about to collapse when I heard Li Xin’e, a classmate standing to my left, quietly say, “Give me your hands and I’ll rub them, it will make you feel better.” She pressed my wrists a few times and then the left side of my forehead. It hurt a lot, but I did grow steady and my breathing became smoother. Back in the classroom, she took out a small bottle from her desk, poured out a few pills, and told me to take them. I actually went against my father’s warning never to casually take medicine, and I felt quite well all day after taking her pills.