The Great Flowing River Read online

  That year I had plenty of time to think about my situation and frame of mind. I seemed to float around without direction the whole year, and my space seemed limited to the upper bunk and a small wooden desk. On the second floor of the dorm was a study room that was made bright by a big window, and at night there was plenty of lamplight. The thirty or so seats were always occupied by the upperclassmen since the light in the dorm rooms was particularly dim and during the day there was no sunlight. After the lights were turned off at nine o’clock, people with homework to do would light their own small oil lamps (the primitive, shallow indented porcelain ones filled with paulownia oil and two or three rush stalks lit with a match). Before an exam, one would splurge and light a small candle by which to study.

  In winter when it was cold, the one door to the room had to be kept closed, so the air would grow stuffy. Eight of us lived that way seven days a week, and all we hoped for was the coming of summer break when we could go home and eat our fill and sleep a little better. Later we’d exaggerate and say that we survived that year and returned home because next to the dorm there was a little building with Mr. Zhan’s home-style cakes and breads, which I still think had the best bread ever made. In the dorm, Old Yao sold peanuts for five yuan a bag—small paper tubes holding a handful of peanuts, fragrant and crisp, with which to stave off hunger and keep up one’s health. Fifty years later, every female classmate recalled it fondly in writing.

  Shortly after arriving at Leshan, I slavishly imitated Lu Qiaozhen and Yu Xianyi and became familiar with that small town. The first extracurricular activity I attended was the Nankai Alumni Association, whose activities for new students included not only food and drink but also a number of outings: twenty- and thirty-li walks to scenic spots to go to teahouses such as Nanmulin, a high-class, private garden, which I was even more reluctant to leave than the famous Wuyou Temple or Lingyun Temple.

  To this day I admire teahouse culture, probably because it was a male student monopoly. The “White Palace,” as it was referred to by the boys, was more comfortable than the six boys’ dorms scattered throughout the city, or so it was said. Most of the boys’ dorms were located in temples that didn’t have many worshipers, and most consisted of a few wide beds for several people. The names of the temples were actually quite imaginative—Dragon Spirit Temple, Dingdong Street, Dew Benefits Temple, and Speckled Bamboo Bay, among others. The self-study rooms were too small, but there were teahouses nearby and you could get a pot of tea and sit there half the day. The teahouses hosted homework, theses, friendships, chess games, mahjong, and political debates, the sort of life that was more than a girl could hope for. In those days, no girl would dare go out on the street alone, or go to a teahouse. Among one thousand students, the male students outnumbered the female students ten to one, which naturally meant two distinct worlds. Many years later I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and learned that women all over the world encountered the same problems in the pursuit of knowledge. Different times had different expectations, different difficulties, but seldom was there equality between men and women.

  PALE BLUE AIRMAIL LETTERS

  Under the guidance of an elder classmate from Nankai, I joined the Luojia Christian Fellowship the following semester.

  The night we stopped in Yibin during the boat trip from Chongqing to Leshan, we met Chen Renkuan, the son of Pastor Chen, a missionary with the Inland Mission, at Feng Jialu’s house. He was a senior in the law department at Wuhan University and boarded the ship with us the following day. He wasn’t handsome, nor was he tall, but he possessed a youthful intelligence and self-confidence that made him stand out in a crowd. Someone must have told him that I cried on the ship all the way to Yibin, and like a missionary, he came and sat down next to me and tried to comfort me by saying that when he had gone to Chongqing to study at Nankai, he had really missed his family in Yibin. I took out the copy of the Bible I always carried with me and showed it to him. I don’t know what he said at the time, but it almost brought me to tears and made me tell him that I not only missed my family but also missed and worried about the person who had given me the Bible, because he was in the air day and night in pursuit of enemy warplanes. No doubt fate works to make you spill the innermost secrets of your heart to someone you have just met. After the start of classes, he introduced me to Gui Zhiting, the advisor of the Luojia Christian Fellowship and the dean of the College of Natural Sciences at Wuhan University, who took me to join the fellowship and made sure that I was warmly looked after. In the four years at school, I played the part of Maria in the silent play The Birth of Jesus during the Christmas celebrations. All my friends in the fellowship said I was tall and thin and had a melancholy air about me, which made me suited for the part.

  In the year before graduation, Chen Renkuan, who met me at the fellowship meetings but never once came to the girls’ dorm, always maintained the attitude of a protective older brother. Upon graduation he set off immediately to study abroad in Europe and frequently wrote to me, encouraging me to maturely take part in university activities, and often wrote about his studies and ideas, and how Europe, like China, was in the earthshaking throes of a heated and divisive battle, and with a concern more mature than his age. Many years later he returned to Communist China and we lost touch, but about ten years ago, Luojia, the alumni newsletter, had an article by Yang Jingyuan that stated that in 1980 she had got together with Chen Renkuan, who had changed his name to Gong Chao, and that he worked in a translation company and foreign policy institute, so I assumed everything was going smoothly for him.

  That year, my inner life was focused on writing letters to my Nankai classmates, writing about our different lives at different schools. The one thing we had in common was that we all missed Shapingba.

  When I first entered the girls’ dormitory and reported to Old Yao, the doorman, he saw my name and reached over to the sideboard on the left, took out a letter for me, and said, “This letter got here ahead of you.” Then he looked at me as if making a special note. The handwriting on the envelope was Zhang Dafei’s and the return address was a military box in Mengzi, Yunnan. It was again a light blue airmail letter. What was new was the heavy and oppressive concern it contained; he said nothing about it, but the letter was full of yearning. He had been worried about my trip on the Yangtze River, worried about my life after leaving home. “What kind of university student are you? I’m enclosing my contact address behind the lines. I’ll wait to hear from you after you get to Leshan. Every day I take off and land waiting for your letter.” My understanding over many years was that “landing” meant returning safely from battle.

  Almost all his letters were written in the war room, in the hot, humid borderland in Yunnan, looking at the runway hastily constructed for the Flying Tigers. A twenty-five-year-old who had been through numerous battles, he wrote with the frame of mind of one writing a letter home to comfort a homesick nineteen-year-old girl, telling her not to cry, that in war-racked China, being able to go to the university was the beginning of a glorious future.

  Every Monday afternoon when I returned from the Confucius Temple, Old Yao would grin and hand me a letter from Yunnan. In addition to remembering with longing, the letters contained even more encouragement. One also included a photograph of three fully armed fighter planes with shark mouths, with three handsome men full of self-confidence in their cockpits, which had been snapped just prior to takeoff. It was hard to imagine that “life is but a smile on the lips of death.” Flying Tiger pilots were heroes of legend in those days. Chennault said, “I’ve never understood how the Chinese people of Kunming gave the name Flying Tigers to those P-40s with shark faces.” After the United States entered the war, the Flying Tigers formally became part of the larger Sino-U.S. air corps.

  He had received my wan and feeble letters, and probably not having much to say, we shared a fond remembrance of the poems from Nankai. Each time he took off to do battle in the sky, the wind whistling in his ears, the clouds rolli
ng all around him, he had to be entirely focused because the enemy planes were around and he could have no other thoughts. But everything would pass and he would return and land his plane, and all his concerns would immediately come back to mind. At the base, the newspapers were three days old and the war had entered a period of difficult struggle. The western part of Sichuan was far from the war, so there was no news. He said, “I can’t fly to that mountain city at the confluence of three rivers at the foot of the Giant Buddha to see you, but I love you so much and think of you constantly!”

  Once I didn’t receive any airmail letters for two straight weeks. During the day we were squeezed into that little room and at night the moonlight shone in, putting me in the mood to pace back and forth and worry about him. Stuck in a city among mountains and rivers, cut off from the world, the only thing that remained was thinking wild thoughts and suffering from nightmares.

  Finally I received a letter from him, mailed from Kunming, in which he said he had been slightly wounded and would be well enough to rejoin his group the following week. From then on I never again wrote about my own vexations living in peace, nor did I dare bring up my own worries; I did my best to find interesting things to write about such as the debate over white horses and black horses in logic class, as well as the conflicting theories among schools of economics or how in the local Leshan dialect all measure words were replaced with one word, kuai (lump), for all objects—a lump of a week, a lump of a house, a lump of a notebook … or how two years before, the number 8 boys’ dorm became a cemetery after it was flattened by bombs, for the students who suffered from prostration and died. The most romantic thing I told him was how I located the hollow tree on Dingdong Street that produced the dingdong dripping sound. Ignorant as I was, I finally, in a terror, began to become acutely conscious, precisely because I had grown up, that it didn’t matter how deep his love was: I couldn’t touch his blood-soaked reality.

  After he returned to his group, once again the postmarks on his letters were from places like Mengzi, Gujiu, Yunnan Station, and Tengchong, all of which I located on the map. I read about the war in the newspaper and knew that the Flying Tigers had been helping to protect the Burma Road with all their strength so as to maintain the lifeline of supplies for the Allied fight against Japan.

  After he recovered from his wounds, he seemed on more familiar terms with death and never again mentioned his feelings in his letters. He just said that I was already twenty and that all the new things I had learned were useful and could help me make mature decisions.

  I hadn’t played my part well just after entering the university. All I had done over the last year was think about home and the past and complain about being isolated far away, with my head in a complete muddle.

  IN THE MAIN HALL OF THE CONFUCIUS TEMPLE: MY FIRST MEETING WITH PROFESSOR ZHU GUANGQIAN

  My feeling of being adrift underwent a rapid change near the end of my first year.

  The exams for Chinese and English were the first given for all freshmen, and classes were based on scores rather than schools or departments. At the end, all freshmen were again tested and the results determined advancement or the criteria for changing departments. Wuhan University didn’t have a medical school, and the most popular departments had always been foreign languages and literatures, economics, law, and electrical engineering, but they also had the highest failure rates. One day shortly after the exams, a classmate returned to the dorm and said she had seen an announcement posted at the Confucius Temple, and that I had the highest score on the freshman English exam. Hearing this, I wasn’t especially excited, because I was thinking about how I was going to tell my parents that I wanted their permission to switch to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming. My mind was no longer on Leshan. I didn’t know what to say and knew that permission wouldn’t be readily forthcoming, which kept me awake much of the night. Everyone in the dorm was packing, because summer break would begin in a couple of weeks and we all would go home. I was facing the first really big hurdle in my life.

  The following afternoon, Old Yao gave me a note handwritten with a writing brush from the office of the dean of studies, telling me to meet with the dean, Mr. Zhu Guangqian.

  Professor Zhu was at that time already a world-famous scholar. Before he was fifteen, he had studied at home in Tong City in Anhui, and had spent ten years memorizing the classics and classical prose before entering Tong City Middle School. At twenty-one he earned a scholarship to study at Hong Kong University. After graduating he went to Shanghai to teach and along with Kuang Husheng, Zhu Ziqing, Feng Zikai, Ye Shengtao, Liu Dabai, and Xia Yan, founded and edited a magazine, Daxueyuan, and established the Kaiming Bookstore. At twenty-eight, with government funding, he attended Edinburgh University for advanced studies in English literature, and also studied philosophy, psychology, ancient European history, and art history. He also went to France to study literary psychology at the University of Paris, and in Germany he improved his German at the University of Strasbourg on the Rhine and penned his thesis, “The Psychology of Tragedy.” During his eight years in Europe, he frequented the museums and libraries of Great Britain. He read and he wrote; his government stipend was often cut off, and for money he wrote for the periodicals In General and Middle School Student published by Kaiming Bookstore, articles later collected in a volume entitled Twelve Letters to the Youth. This book and his On Beauty were two “eye-opening” books that were required reading for any student beyond middle school.

  Why would such a great scholar wish to see me, a first-year student? To tell the truth, it was with trepidation more than honor that I entered his profound and awe-inspiring office in the Confucius Temple. And the old gentleman, who was in no way large and robust, sat in a huge wooden chair (Professor Zhu was forty-seven that year; in my eyes at the time, anyone over forty was old) and did not smile in a kindly fashion.

  He looked at me and said, “Your university entrance exam score got you into the philosophy department, but your English is very good—you are number one for the entire school. Why don’t you change to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures?”

  I said the reason was that my first choice was philosophy and that I hadn’t applied for foreign languages and literatures at this university, not that I didn’t have a sufficient exam score. When I graduated from high school, both my father and Mr. Meng had hoped I would study Chinese literature.

  He asked me why I wanted to study philosophy and what sorts of philosophical works I had read. My reply must have seemed childish and ignorant to his ears (my father had already tactfully said as much to me). He thought for a moment and said, “Now that Wuhan University has moved to this remote location, it is very difficult to get teachers, and a number of the philosophy classes cannot be offered. Your Chinese teacher let me see your Chinese compositions, and they are too sadly sentimental, as if you had never penetrated the root of philosophical wisdom in your studies. You can sit in on the Chinese classes, or you can study on your own your whole life. But the foreign languages curriculum requires the guidance of a teacher as well as a solid base, if one is to make her way. You can think about it during the summer break and then make a decision. If you switch to foreign languages, I can be your advisor, and if you have any questions, you can feel free to ask whenever you wish.”

  That last sentence lingers in my mind to this day.

  THE FIRMAMENT OF THE DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

  At summer break, my companions and I joyfully boarded the Min River steamer at Wutong Bridge for Yibin and then went down the Yangtze River, home to Chongqing, which had a more beautiful significance to me than ever. My middle school friends, who had been dispersed after the National Joint College Entrance Exams, were all home, and we had so many experiences to talk about since we had departed. The previous year, I had been the only one to go to far-off Sichuan; now, returning to Shapingba, I was like a solitary goose retu
rning to roost with the flock, and there was no end to my happiness. As for the war, the Japanese had lost so many planes since the United States entered that they could no longer bomb Chongqing with any frequency and their main force had been shifted to the Burma Road. Each time they attacked, they were shot down in great numbers by the Sino-American 14th Air Force. Although Chongqing was as hot as ever that summer, there was a new atmosphere of rebuilding and repairing and, because we weren’t fleeing for cover every day due to air-raid sirens, it was perfect for our group of first-year university girls to get together in each other’s homes to chat. On moonlit nights we would go the banks of the Jialing River to sing and have heart-to-heart talks. That was probably the happiest summer of my life, and it was genuinely a carefree break.

  Returning home, I naturally wanted to discuss switching departments with my parents. My father never came out and said, “I knew from the start that you wouldn’t study philosophy,” but he did say that my feelings were stronger than my reason, which made me better suited to study literature. Then, with a forced nonchalance, I mentioned that after posting the exam scores the previous year, National Southwestern Associated University had suggested that I join their Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, that there were many Nankai students there, and that I hoped to go there too. If we were victorious in the war, I could go to Beiping University, Qinghua University, or Nankai University.… His expression hardening, he said that since the United States had entered the war the situation had changed significantly, but the battle lines in China were repeatedly changing due to setbacks. Hunan had fallen, Guangxi was threatened, and Guizhou couldn’t be defended. “If you go to Yunnan, you’ll be even farther from home. Although Leshan is far away, it’s still in Sichuan. I can look after you if you are closer. Given your health, it would be a good idea for you to transfer to National Central University and stay in Shapingba. That way I wouldn’t have to worry so much. If the situation worsens, at least the whole family can be together.”