The Great Flowing River Read online

  Every month or two, I would go into town to see a movie, such as Camille, The Thief of Bagdad, Bathing Beauty, The Wings of Morning, Heaven Can Wait, and others. One time we were discussing Robert Taylor, Greta Garbo’s boyfriend in Camille. I said he was nothing but a pretty face, which made all his fans angry. They asked me, “Well, who do you think is the most handsome?” I replied Henry Fonda, whom they later referred to as “your not-so-pretty face.” Years later in Taiwan, I saw him in On Golden Pond playing an old man, which saddened me greatly. On account of him, I have always liked his daughter Jane Fonda, who has brains.

  One time, as I told them the story of Heaven Can Wait, I had them in tears. More than fifty years later, when we got together again during a trip of mine to Beiping, some brought it up again. After half a century, and having endured the joys and sorrows of this world, they still recalled that dreamed-of love from high school. I never dared ask the details of how the young girls from the dark dormitory of those days endured all the political tempests and managed to survive the Cultural Revolution.

  Just at that time, when we would spend nights talking with the person in the neighboring bed, Yu Yuzhi and I would alternately recite the lines of the poems and lyrics from Mr. Meng’s course. Occasionally I would add the lines from He Qifang’s famous poem “Wreath”: “The most fragrant flowers are those that blossom and fall in a deep valley, the brightest morning dew is that not remembered by a soul. I say you are fortunate, Little Lingling, the clearest stream is the one that has never seen a reflection.” Sometimes I would recite Bian Zhilin’s “Fragment”: “You stand on the bridge looking at the scenery, a person upstairs looking at the scenery watches you. The bright moon adorns your window; you adorn another’s dream.” From the moment I knew He Qifang was a philosophy graduate from Peking University and that Bian Zhilin was a foreign language and literature graduate from the same university, I was even more fascinated by their verses.

  Thinking about it today, I realize that those lines, like the words of an otherworldly divinity that so pleasantly surprised several of us seventeen- and eighteen-year-old students, such as this line written about a young girl’s tears, “flowing with an unnamed sadness,” had perhaps been inspired by the first line of Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears”: “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.” Chinese poetry, of course, contains such conceptualizations, but modern poetry expresses them in pure and fresh language and in an uncommon fashion, which in those difficult times was like the music of heaven to us.

  During my senior year, preparations for the National Joint College Entrance Exams intensified, as did the gradual feeling of imminent departure. Countless are the memories I cherish from Nankai, especially of my classmates and teachers. Having lived on campus, we all had feelings for one another, and I don’t know how many days I cried when I thought about leaving.

  Just before graduation, my teacher asked me to write a class song. I wrote: “The blossoming plum trees and the morning sun; the western pool and the evening clouds … the wind of 1943 is now far away; farewell, alma mater, we know not when we’ll return.” It was a sentimental, childlike poem, the outpouring of a high school girl who had devoted herself to the study of classical poetry for the preceding two years. Our music teacher wrote music to accompany it, which was tasteful and pleasant to listen to, so it was soon sung by all the girls and liked by all, and I was widely looked upon as some sort of hero. No one foresaw that since there were more teachers in the boy’s section they would choose a song written by one of the boys instead: “Several years of studying and reciting will now end, we’ll be like birds flying in different directions.… We cut though the wind and waves on our ways ahead and shall spare no effort.” When it came time to sing the class song at graduation, many girls refused to sing it, and a few of my sworn followers even cried. At the time only we were aware that our mood was only half sullen, and the other half was sorrow due to our imminent parting. After half a lifetime spent teaching, I am well aware that a class song at those times had to be grave and sedate, because graduating from Nankai was such a serious event. Fifty years after graduating, I never expected to see in the Newsletter of the Class of 43 that a student by the name of Wang Shize still remembered everything and wrote a recollection titled “On the Class Song.”

  After graduating at the beginning of summer, most students remained on campus to make the final preparations for the National Joint College Entrance Exams. The school didn’t provide any tutoring, as the teachers were off for the summer. We lived in the dorm and abided by the same rules, and getting up with the bugle and lights out at night no longer posed any difficulties. By the sixth year of the war, only Guizhou, Sichuan, Xikang, Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Yunnan had not fallen into enemy hands. Every day, the battlefield reports spoke of territory lost and the obstinate seesaw of the battle. We had no other hope but to get into a university, and the minuscule dreams of high school girls contained no scene of “cutting through the wind and waves.” At night after lights out, we lay on our wood-plank beds and talked about our reluctance to leave, but uttered not one word of encouragement to each other about the future.

  I woke one night and was unable to go back to sleep. I went and stood by a window in the dorm hallway and suddenly heard singing drifting over from the music classroom: “The moon hangs high in the sky, its light shining in all directions … deep is this silent night, I think of my home.” It was so sad that I wept as I listened. After half a century, the sadness brought on by that song, the suffering of the country and countless families, and the uncertainty of my own future are still indelibly scored on my heart. Later, when I studied, engaged in advanced studies, taught, and wrote criticism, the sadness of that song on a moonlit night would still faintly shine through.

  THE NATIONAL JOINT COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMS

  During my final year, I decided to choose only three colleges of preference for the National Joint College Entrance Exams: my first choice was philosophy at Southwestern Associated University; my second was philosophy at Wuhan University; and my third was foreign languages and literatures at Southwestern Associated University. National Central University was at my doorstep, so I didn’t choose it, because for college, I hoped to live far away from home and be independent. It was said that some boys at school even listed only one choice, as in those days the Nankai spirit gave people excessive self-confidence but seldom led to failure. I chose philosophy because I childishly wanted to challenge my father: you studied in Germany; I can at least study in Kunming, Yunnan, and explore the profound meaning of life. After I made up my mind, I put all my heart into preparation for studying philosophy, and even when Mr. Meng Zhisun, whom I most respected, tried to persuade me to study Chinese, I would not be dissuaded—I even tried hard to justify my superficial views.

  Our preparations for the exam were just as arduous as those of students today. Some Nankai students were worse off, because their homes were not in Sichuan or Chongqing and they had to make the school their home. Every day the study rooms were open until 9 p.m., and those who wanted to could remain at school until after the exam. My home was at Shapingba, but I also went to school to study. That year the National Joint College Entrance Exams were held in July, and Chongqing, being one of China’s three furnaces, was extremely hot. I remember that the backs of the metal chairs were hot enough to burn, but still we sat in them and studied strenuously, sometimes even wanting to doze off.

  With English and Chinese scores to compensate for my appalling math score (it was only 48), I was qualified for my second choice—philosophy at National Wuhan University. However, not long after the results were posted, my third choice, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Southwestern Associated University, sent me a letter saying that given my high English score, I would be welcome to study there. But I was not well informed at the time and, bent on “the pursuit of truth and the contemplation of life,” I opted for philosophy. Who could have foreseen that a year later, after receiv
ing advice from Professor Zhu Guangqian, I would switch to foreign languages and literatures anyway? It is as if my path had been decided by fate. Throughout my life, matters concerning life and truth have seemed forever beyond my grasp.

  The alumni of Nankai are the ones who have made her famous. Nankai alums, starting with Mei Yiqi and Yu Chuanjian (who was in charge of school administration for decades) in the first class of 1908 and later alums such as Zhou Enlai, Wu Dayou, Cao Yu (Wan Jiabao), Wu Nesun (Lu Qiao), and others, compose a mile-long roster. In 1949, the year the Nationalist government moved to Taiwan, more than ten ambassadors and four or five ministers had all graduated from Nankai. In recent years Zhang Zhongmou and Premier Wen Jiabao of mainland China have both commented on how Nankai Middle School influenced their lives. The alums of Nankai University and National Southwestern Associated University are even more numerous, but this is beyond the scope of my feelings as I recall my growing up and education.

  I believe that in the hundred years of Nankai Middle School history, the roster of famous student parents is perhaps even more illustrious and would constitute a veritable modern history of China. The earliest include: Liang Qiqiao, Yuan Shikai, Li Yuanhong, Duan Qirui, Hu Shi, Zhang Xueliang, Zhang Zizhong, Weng Wenhao, and Wang Jingwei. During the War of Resistance, Ma Yanchu’s youngest daughter, Ma Yangfeng, and I were classmates for three years, and more than half the famous generals (most in their forties and fifties) during the War of Resistance sent their sons and daughters to Nankai. Since they lived on campus, their fathers didn’t need to worry about leaving them behind. No one really paid much attention to anyone else’s family background because we were all pretty much the same. I still remember discussing literature in the dorm with Fu Dongju (she was one year ahead of me), the daughter of Fu Zuoyi, the famous general from north China. After victory in the War of Resistance, the turning point in the war between the Nationalists and the Communists was that Fu Zuoyi, who had been in Beiping resisting the Communists, supported their call for “an end to the civil war and peaceful unification” in January 1949. Later, I was shocked to read that his daughter was one of those who had urged his capitulation. Back in those years, when I was crazy about poetry and literature and had little conception of politics other than resistance against Japan and patriotism, another storm was already brewing.

  LETTERS FROM THE CLOUDS

  In that age when letter writing was the only means of communication, Zhang Dafei became my steadiest pen pal during the six years I lived at Shapingba.

  When I entered junior high, he was already flying pursuit aircraft, and over the two previous years he had been flying out of Chongqing and probably visited our house five or six times. Ningyuan, my younger sister, was already attending Nankai Primary School and Ningxing, my youngest sister, would accompany her every day for “fun” (she could recite all her sister’s textbooks from memory). In those days, I was the only member of the family who really loved to write letters, and when Fourth Brother Dafei (he was the fourth child in his family) was away from the base in Chongqing, he’d send me a letter on light blue airmail stationery every week. He had not been able to get in touch with his family and said that we were the only family he could send a message to and tell that he was fine. He wrote as if he were writing home, and I was so touched that I would always respond. If those letters were around today, they would constitute the precious history of two young people coming of age during the war.

  We were like two parallel lines that could never intersect in the simple and pure way in which we shared our experiences growing up. He grew up at the edge of the clouds, in a life-and-death struggle amid a net of machine-gun and antiaircraft fire, while all I did was run for cover at the sound of an air-raid siren, cry over the catastrophe, or join in the chorus singing “China shall not perish.” Perhaps the one thing we shared in common was that we wanted with all our might to drive the Japanese out of China.

  His life was so glorious, while I was just a junior high school girl living in my own little world. In junior high, I often copied essays of concern for our country from our Chinese textbook for him, works such as Li Ling’s Letter in Reply to Su Wu, Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An, Han Yu’s Funerary Message to Nephew No. 12, Yuan Mei’s In Memory of My Sister, and Shi Kefa’s Letter in Reply to Duoergun. Gradually I came to write about the things I was reading outside of class, works that enchanted every girl, such as Pierre Loti’s An Iceland Fisherman, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and the very sentimental poetic prose of Lamartine’s Graziella. Dafei always seemed interested in discussing these things with me, but would always end his letters by telling me to look after my health, not to worry my mother, and similar exhortations.

  By the time I entered senior high, he had already fought numerous battles, and the content of our letters was much broader than the junior high school world of before. I wrote about all of the meaningful activities at school—famous speakers at the weekly assembly, the wall newspaper I edited, writing letters to comfort the soldiers on the front line, and fund-raising activities for rebuilding after the bombings, among other things. He was interested in it all. Sometimes I would send him a book or two from Time and Tide Bookstore. My letters, he said, were his only letters from home and the greatest comfort to him.

  Gradually, he wrote more about the Bible. He also liked the poems that I copied from my teacher Meng Zhisun’s textbook of selections of classical poetry and lyrics, saying they were one more comfort for his soul (in all those years, he was the only person who often spoke to me about the soul).

  He virtually studied my teacher’s textbook of classical poetry and lyrics along with me. Of course he liked Su Dongpo and Xin Qiji, praising their heroic, masculine spirit. He agreed with the great boldness of vision in the ending lines of Qin Shaoyou’s “Tune: Treading on Sedge”: “The Chen River should be meandering around Chen Mountain / Why does it flow into the Xiao and Xiang rivers?” But he disapproved of a girl my young age enjoying the bleak tone of Huang-Fu Song’s “Dreaming of the South of the Yangtze”: “The candle burns low / The banana leaves on the screen dark red / She idly dreams of the ripe plums in the south of the river / On a boat, a flute plays in the night as the rain sighs / Voices carry from the post station bridge.”

  His letters, from the very first one he sent from Hunan describing how his training toughened him up after joining the army to those written upon his return from the United States and his being selected to join the Flying Tigers, were often accompanied by photographs, from early ones in which he marched quickly in cotton-padded military garb to later ones of him standing in his airman’s uniform in front of a shark-faced Flying Tiger P-40. Over a period of seven or eight years, I ended up with quite a number of his photos.

  He grew up amid the flames of war and began his rich life (if it can be called a life) all as a result of his having been chosen to join Claire Lee Chennault’s Flying Tigers and serving alongside the American volunteers. In 1941, he met the American military chaplain at the base in Yunnan. For years he had suffered a psychological conflict between his religious beliefs and fighting in the war, but by talking with this Presbyterian chaplain he gained a modicum of relief. When he was in the States for training, he frequently met with the base chaplains, who believed that fighting in defense of the country was just and that it was the bound duty of a soldier to reduce the casualties of innocent people. This provided Dafei with an outlet that allowed him to attain a spiritual peace, caught as he was between killing and spiritual redemption.

  Gradually, he wrote less about the war and started talking more about how afterward he wanted to become a military chaplain, but the war had to be successfully fought first and the Japanese could not be allowed to win. His words were filled with a heroic spirit like that of Principal Zhang’s rousing speech, “With me, China shall not perish!”

  Chennault’s connection with China’s air force, it seems, could only be explained as predestined. Once when he was flying a stunt plane as part of a small performin
g U.S. Air Corps group, he attracted the attention of Mao Bang, a Chinese Air Force representative among the spectators. Chennault, who was forty-five in 1937 and did not have a particularly successful career, had retired from the military due to illness. In May, having accepted the invitation of employment as an advisor from Song Meiling, Secretary of the Air Force Committee of China, he arrived by steamship in Shanghai, one month before the war with Japan broke out.

  In China’s most difficult hour, he helped train the newly established air force. The group of American volunteers he put together attacked the Japanese from their muddy airfields in Kunming, becoming the world-renowned Flying Tigers (despite the fact that a shark head with its mouth open was painted on the nose of each plane). Their small numbers shot down large numbers of a vastly superior Japanese force, significantly reducing the casualties suffered by Chinese troops and civilians, and during the war years their marvelous story was widely known. Some called Chennault a daredevil, but he emphasized strategy, strict training, and living side by side with the pilots through thick and thin; in this way, they developed the superior skills needed to fight the enemy in the sky.

  Two years later, he returned to the States for leave, but sitting in front of the warm fireplace at home, he couldn’t help but think about the Chinese cities in flames as well as the old-fashioned fighter planes flown by the Chinese pilots and how they were being shot out of the sky. Looking at the table full of good food, he couldn’t help but think about the poor Chinese farmers who were barely eking out a miserable existence, and he started having trouble seeing eye to eye with his fortunate compatriots. Two months later, he returned to China and with the full confidence of Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese air force, he began to intensify the training of young Chinese pilots in order to increase their combat readiness.