The Great Flowing River Read online

  Li Xin’e enrolled late, joining our class two months after the second year began. Refugees were pouring into Chongqing from all the provinces of China in those days, and owing to wartime needs, Nankai allowed qualified students to enroll late and enter at any time. I myself took the exam and was admitted to my first year in November.

  However, in order to maintain teaching standards, the school mandated that if at the end of the semester, a student failed one third of his or her classes, they would be held back, and if they failed one half, they would be expelled, regardless of who their parents were. After summer break, grades for the entire school were posted publicly at the administration center in the Fansun Building, and those with more red marks were held back. This was the infamous “Red Roll” that made everyone tremble. I remember one year everyone was so squeezed together to get a glimpse that the floor gave way.

  The day Li Xin’e joined our class, the teacher in charge brought her to the door and said loudly, “This is Li Xin’e, a new student.” She was very small and was given the seat to my left. I, too, was skinny and short back then and sat in the first row. She looked both shy and frightened standing there in the doorway, the way I must have looked the six times I enrolled late and entered a strange new class before coming to Nankai. Since she was seated next to me in class, she also stood beside me at flag raising and morning calisthenics. I tried to help familiarize her with everything at school, especially where we were in the coursework and what homework had to be handed in the following day, and so on. She didn’t say much of anything but just smiled and listened with gratitude. Then just before the New Year on a Saturday afternoon, when the dormitory was nearly empty, I saw her sitting on the edge of her bed, crying.

  That afternoon, it was my turn to be the student on duty. After sweeping out the classroom, I returned to the dorm to get my small bag before returning home. Passing through the neighboring room, I saw her all alone, and in all earnestness I took her home with me.

  Ever since we lived on Ninghai Road in Nanjing, where my parents entertained the Whampoa students from northeast China, they had always entertained guests with the simple but abundant food and drink of the northeast; they did this for nearly a half century until they passed away. After arriving in Shapingba, my brother tested into the Medical School of National Central University, but all he really wanted to do was be a diplomat, so he tested again and got into the Foreign Affairs Department at the National Political Academy. My mother encouraged him to bring his classmates who had no home of their own to have dinner with us. She couldn’t stand for a child to be homeless or to go hungry.

  Li Xin’e was the first guest I ever brought home. She was puny and weak like me, which only made my mother all the more concerned about her. All we knew was that she was from Yunnan and that her father was a soldier garrisoned at Chongqing. He brought her with him to attended Nankai, but her mother hadn’t come. From then on I invited her home almost every weekend. After learning that she was stunted because she had suffered from malaria, my mother showered her with affectionate concern, providing her with extra nourishment and treating her like her own daughter.

  After the spring of 1939, the Japanese intensified their bombing of Chongqing. They came every day except when it rained; they even came on moonlit nights. The air-raid shelters hastily built by the people were sufficient to protect against shrapnel but not against a direct hit. Air defense observation posts were located on the high mountains all around Chongqing, and when there was an air raid, a red lantern would be hung from a tall pole in front of the observation post accompanied by a siren, which sounded alternately long and short. When the enemy aircraft advanced a certain distance, another red lantern was hung, which was followed by the siren resounding within and without the city. That shrill, woeful sound pierced our hearts and souls, resembling a harbinger of death. That was particularly the case when you were awakened with a start in the middle of a moonlit night and had to immediately jump out of bed, fasten your belt, put on your shoes, and run for your life. The confusion and anger, together with the air-raid sirens that kept howling for many years, etched a deep wound on my heart that has never healed.

  Nankai couldn’t build air-raid shelters on level ground. The only thing we could do when the air-raid siren blared was to scatter. At every weekly meeting, the students were led in reciting the following mantra: “One air-raid sounds; two pairs of clothes, three people make their way together, four sides all checked.…”

  Behind the girls’ classrooms were lots of little sand dunes like countless foxholes, and when fleeing, three people would run together and crouch against a sand dune. When the sky was clear, you could see the red suns on the wings of the Japanese bombers; once the wings tilted a string of cone-shaped silver bombs would fall from their bellies. Sometimes we would see our pursuit planes arrive from the opposite direction to engage them in battle with machine guns blazing loudly in midair. Other times we’d see black smoke pour from a plane as it fell, a fireball, to earth. Our hearts burned with hatred for the Japanese, a feeling built on my own flesh-and-blood experience through the years of my growing up and impossible to erase. Eight long years spent wandering over my country with no feeling of security, with even the blue sky violent. How can it be forgotten?

  In June of that year, the government ordered that after July all students, the old, the infirm, women, and children should disperse to the suburbs where there were more trees, so as to lessen the casualties. One day Li Xin’e came and told my parents that her father had invited us to come and take shelter at his garrison in a place called Huangjueya and that we could return when classes resumed after the summer break. My father asked her father’s name and military region and learned he was a division commander of the Yunnan Army by the name of General Li Mi.

  At the start of summer break, my mother and I and my two younger sisters crossed the Yangtze River. Crossing, a crewman shouted, “They’ve hung a warning! Pull harder, come on! Pull to the shore.” On shore, we boarded a military car and drove about thirty li to a temporary military base outside a village surrounded by mountains. Li Xin’e’s father came out in military dress to meet us. I never expected that someone as puny as she would have such a handsome and imposing father. Three days later, he left for another defense zone and didn’t return until the end of August, by which time we had returned to Shapingba.

  At the Huangjueya military area, I had another experience to make me proud. Three days after settling in, Li Xin’e took me horseback riding in the morning. During my childhood days in the northeast, my grandfather had horses, and most men rode horses between villages, but for me it was an unattainable dream! That morning, the orderly led out two huge horses. We didn’t even reach the height of the horses’ backs. The horse soldier said that the horses had to be taken out for a run each morning and if he put us two “dolls” on their backs, they “wouldn’t even know it!”

  Leaping onto her horse with ease, Li Xin’e clearly knew how to ride. But I stood beside my horse—they were giving me the commander’s horse as a special treat—simply at my wits’ end and only thinking to escape. But the horse soldier just smiled and placed my left foot in the stirrup, then helped me onto the horse. Then he told me to just straddle it and put my right foot in the stirrup. Sitting securely astride the tall horse, I tightly grasped the reins in both hands. From a trot to a canter, the horse soldier never took his hand off the bridle. Several days later, surprisingly, I dared to let the horse gallop. Thirty li away, Chongqing was still undergoing the bombardment of vicious Japanese planes as the sirens wailed day and night. But living at the base, I finally got to enjoy some temporary security. Every morning as I galloped the horse on the dirt road among the trees, I felt the cool wind blowing through my short hair.

  I couldn’t have imagined that feeling even in my wildest dreams. On horseback, Li Xin’e was self-confident, steady, a completely different person from at school. She said that at home in Yunnan, if she accompanied her father for redepl
oyment, being able to ride was a must. And there I was, through some predestined chance to ride General Li Mi’s war horse! Her description of the lofty and precipitous peaks on the Yunnan–Burma border and the rapid waters through narrow gorges roused my boundless imagination. In those years, I often wished I was a boy so that I could join the army when I grew up and be in the cavalry, like the broadsword group in the Twenty-ninth Army who went from Xifengkou on the Great Wall to Nantian Gate, or like the Mongolian ancestors of my maternal grandmother, who would leap on a horse and travel thousands of li. There was no way I would cower beside a sand dune and let the Japs, those dwarf pirates, bomb me right over my head. Two girls, one from the extreme north and one from the extreme southwest of China, became good friends under the enemy bombings. The affection gained by sharing adversity together is something those who grow up in peacetime can never imagine. This was especially true during nighttime attacks, when we were halfway to the shelter and, urged on by the air-raid sirens, tried to find a sheltering sand dune by the light of the moon, holding and pulling each other along, calling each other’s names, and then after sitting down, listening to the bombs near and far and seeing the light of fires thirty li away in the city. Two fifteen-year-old girls huddled together, shouldering the same incomprehensible terror. When the sirens ceased it was generally two or three in the morning. The slow, extended all-clear siren sounded, as if it were a prolonged sigh of relief rejoicing in the fact that we were still alive. Several hundred people who fled in the night and didn’t get a wink of sleep staggered back to the dorms, and very few had any interest in looking up at the skies that had just brought the threat of death. The moon was setting, the stars twinkling, but I did not find the starry sky at all beautiful.

  After graduating from junior high, Li Xin’e returned to Yunnan with her father. The war had pressed close to the southwestern provinces and the newly constructed Burma Road along the border needed strong defense. The last time she visited my house, she brought a jade bangle wrapped in brocade and asked my mother to keep it for her, saying it was a souvenir of her mother, who was no longer “around.” To this day I am not really sure what she meant by that, as she hardly ever brought up her family life in Yunnan. Save for one letter she wrote just after returning there, we lost touch after she left Chongqing and the War of Resistance ended. Ten years later, my family once again having fled a few years before, this time to Taiwan, and amid the call to counterattack mainland China, the newspapers printed a major story about how the last holdout on the Yunnan–Vietnam border, the Nationalist general Li Mi, had been ordered to retreat to Taiwan. After fighting in one place after another for ten thousand li, he had rejoined his unit to a hero’s welcome. When he appeared before the Legislative Yuan to make his report, my father arranged to meet with him and asked that he give the bangle to Li Xin’e. It was only then that we learned she had married and was living abroad. General Li was surprised to see the bangle. The two of them talked about Chongqing as the center of the War of Resistance, their confidence and fighting spirit in those days, and the current situation in which they had retreated to a remote corner of the ocean. Filled with so much emotion, all they could do was sigh.

  THE GIRL SCOUT DREAM OF DOING ONE GOOD DEED A DAY

  One of my happiest memories of my three years in junior high is of scout training. In wartime, young people are more courageous because they really are innocent, and in matters of patriotism they never lag behind.

  After the fire resulting from the worst bombing of Chongqing, we selected a group of representative scouts to walk into the city to contribute to the effort to save the country. We had gone more than halfway, and all we encountered was countless charred corpses removed from the still burning city by the soldiers. With a Sichuan accent, the commanding officer asked the teacher leading us, “What are these little girls here for? Hurry up and take them back.”

  We stood by the roadside crying our eyes out and singing, “We, we are the little soldiers of the Chinese people; though small, our aspirations are high.…” It was said that upon returning to the school, the teacher was given a major demerit. But that ten-li stream of blackened corpses remained a nightmare for the better part of my life.

  To this day I still remember going to the foot of Gele Mountain and practicing with signal flags. I diligently transmitted information on the enemy situation and felt myself more than useful. And because a scout was expected to perform one good deed a day, I always hoped to chance upon someone in need of assistance each time I passed through Shapingba on my way home. But Shapingba was already well known as a town of culture because of the tens of thousands of students and teachers there at Central University, Chongqing University, and Nankai Middle School. There wasn’t much chance for a scout to do a daily good deed, which made us feel there was no way to show ourselves off.

  Not long after the start of my third year in junior high, some foreigners paid a visit with Nankai as their first stop. A classmate and I were sent to the main gate to stand as sentries. I had just been promoted to junior squad leader and thought I was performing some really important function as I stood there in my scout uniform with an epaulette that resembled a braid on my shoulder, baton in hand, and a scarf sporting the purple and white of Nankai.

  By coincidence, Zhang Dafei arrived at our house from Chongqing that very day—he had started flying pursuit to fight with the Japanese planes. He had passed the front gate of Nankai and, after arriving at our house, said to my mother, “I just saw Pang-yuan standing sentry outside the school gate, and her arm is as thin as the baton she was carrying.”

  I didn’t think anything about it because everyone said I was too skinny. I, on the other hand, said that fat people were tacky. In those days, I had no awareness of my appearance, pretty or ugly. My hair was cut like a boy’s and I never looked in the mirror, never really paying any attention to the differences between boys and girls. My cousin Bao Gang was the exact opposite. She was very pretty and in her junior year at Sun Yat-sen Middle School, it was said that she was the belle of the school. When she came home during summer break, she spent all day in front of the mirror and, displeased with my carelessness about my appearance, she said, “Why are you still such a child?”

  In point of fact, my years in junior high did feel like an extension of my childhood. I, who had changed schools all over the place from an early age, now entered a period of steady growth. In the fine atmosphere for study at Nankai and under the salutary influence of my teachers, I established the basis for a lifetime of study and good conduct.

  Before the start of school that year, my mother had several light blue long-gown uniforms made of indanthrene (a material you could wash over a lifetime and it wouldn’t fade; I never saw the material after I got to Taiwan) made for me in the town, because I was going to start senior high and a scout uniform was no longer acceptable. One morning, wearing a short-sleeved, light blue uniform, I walked up the slope in front of our door, following the ridge separating the fields. You had to be nimble and have good balance to walk the narrow ridges covered in tall grass. The fields on either side of the path were full of water due to the recent rains, and looking down for a moment, I caught sight of a girl’s reflection in the water—it was me in my long gown! I extended both arms to keep my balance, and my face was filled with concentration and radiant with happiness. The sky above was so high, so blue, with the white clouds that never stopped changing floating overhead. At sixteen, I for the first time had used that huge mirror between the heavens and the earth.

  The signal fires burned intensely and the sound of bombs accompanied our studies. When we weren’t fleeing on account of the air-raid sirens, we buried ourselves in our studies; when the air-raid siren sounded, we carried our textbooks with us to prepare for the following day’s test. Children who grow up in such an environment are more conscious of potential threats even in times of peace and mature more quickly than those who grow up in today’s happy surroundings, but their souls age more quickly as well.
In such difficult conditions, we ate poorly, dressed poorly, were eaten alive by bedbugs at night, and had to flee air raids by day and were not spared on moonlit nights. But precisely because of this, what little time remained was even more precious. Our teacher said, “If you don’t make an effort to be a good person, you’ll just end up being put aside.” It had the same admonitory and frightening effect as not taking proper cover during an air raid and being blown to bits. At flag raising each morning, the teachers would always give us a pep talk, and this “percussive education” provided by Nankai influenced us deeply. As the flames of war burned over time, our teachers joined hands to protect this pure land of learning, and with perservance and diligence lifted us from being immature children to becoming sensible young people. We grew up properly in adverse circumstances; just as Principal Zhang Boling said, “Even if you don’t wear the school badge outside, you must still let people see that you are from Nankai.”

  A LITERARY YOUTH UNDER FALLING BOMBS

  In the summer break of 1940, looking at the publicly posted roll of students, I knew that I had successfully graduated from junior high and had been admitted to senior high, which gave me temporary relief from the pressure of schoolwork. During the long days of summer, I frequently cut across the Central University campus on my way to the Jialing River, where I’d sit on the corner of a rock beside the water and read. That place, to which no path led, was suspended above the river where the water ran very clear.