The Great Flowing River Read online

  Shortly after returning home, I received a letter from Brother Dafei. He was firmly opposed to me switching schools to Kunming, since he moved from base to base at any time and couldn’t be there to look after me. Given the current situation of the war, he didn’t even have three days off, nor did he have time to go to Sichuan to see me. He hoped that I would return with peace of mind to study at Leshan. The only way out was victory. His tone was that of an older brother speaking to a little sister.

  During that time, I also sought the advice of Professor Sun Jinsan, chief editor of Time and Tide Literature and Art, regarding Professor Zhu Guangqian’s recommendation. Sun Jinsan was a well-known professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Central University and was greatly respected by my father. Under his direction, Time and Tide Literature and Art had published works by Shen Congwen, Ba Jin, Hong Shen, Wu Zuxiang, Mao Dun, Zhu Guangqian, Wen Yiduo, Zhu Ziqing, Wang Xiyan, Bi Ye, Zang Kejia, and Xu Yu, writers who not only were widely popular among readers but also became important authors in the history of modern Chinese literature. Time and Tidealso published the classics of many countries translated by Liu Wuji, Li Jiye, Fang Chong, Li Changzhi, Xu Zhongnian, Yu Gengyu, Fan Cunzhong, Chen Shouzhu, Dai Liuling, Yu Dayin, and Ye Junjian. The high level of attainment of the men of letters in those days is clear. Each issue contained information on literary trends and on art and literature in China and around the world, an extremely valuable record for the years 1942–1945. Unfortunately, soon after victory, the war between the Nationalists and the Communists started, and my father couldn’t sustain the magazine for more than three issues, so Time and Tide Literature and Art ceased publication in 1945.

  Professor Sun said, “Zhu Guangqian has an article entitled ‘Bad Taste in Literature’ in the May 1944 issue. It was written from the perspective of someone who teaches literature, and it is very clear and very pertinent. One would be very fortunate to take classes with Professor Zhu at Wuhan University. What’s more, he himself urged you to switch departments and volunteered to be your advisor, which is more than anyone could hope for. The value of an education in literature is in the stimulation of the intelligence or the root of wisdom. Fang Chong, Chen Yuan (Xi Ying), Yuan Changying, and Chen Yanke all teach in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Wuhan University, and the foundation is quite substantial. The foreign languages department at National Southwestern Associated University isn’t necessarily better, and they don’t have someone like Zhu Guangqian, who has taken notice of you.”

  Mr. Sun’s analysis helped me decide to return to Wuhan University. For some reason, that river town several hundred li upstream also attracted me like a secluded paradise.

  At the end of summer break, I returned to Leshan a week early in order to do the paperwork to change departments. I had also arranged to meet Zhao Xiaolan to register early for a dorm room—the second-year students were advanced to a row of new wooden rooms above the cafeteria, and I hoped to get a desk by the window.

  My father had arranged for me and a classmate to take an express mail truck to Leshan. For the convenience of civil servants and college students during wartime, every mail truck could sell passage for two people. An ID had to be produced to guarantee the safety of the mail. The two of us and a postal employee took turns riding in front with the driver or sitting among the dozens of bags of mail. We began to feel very important. Napping on the tightly bound bags, I imagined the innermost feelings contained in each letter and the joy of the recipient. Arriving at each stop, the postal employee would shout the name of the place and elegantly toss down a bag, while someone down below would pitch up another bag. Later I read a history of the Qing dynasty that said that the post office was the earliest modern government system and the postal employees were of the highest possible caliber. After the government arrived in Taiwan, the post office was still one of the stabilizing strengths. Over thousands of years letters had gone from being delivered by horse to being distributed by green mail trucks, and everywhere had inspired our rich imagination. I now had the good fortune to be taken like a parcel from eastern Sichuan to western Sichuan. Such a special experience deserves to be recorded.

  The first night we spent in Chengdu at the dorm of a Nankai alum. During the war, Yanjing University, Nanjing Jinling Men’s College and Jinling Women’s College, and Shandong Jilu University, along with the local Huaxi University, moved to Huaxiba Station in Chengdu and made it a lively place. The following morning we again boarded the truck, which never broke down, securely making its way along the safe and reliable roads. Passing Meishan, mailbags were loaded and unloaded, but then all that could be seen were the trees going by as we sped along. We didn’t stop the entire day and drove directly to the door of the Leshan post office. This time, I knew in advance what life was like and how I would face it. In Chengdu, I saw the true style and features of Sichuan’s old capital, and I found myself in a far more relaxed mood than the year before.

  PROFESSOR ZHU GUANGQIAN’S ENGLISH POETRY CLASS

  Entering the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures in my second year, I had Professor Zhu’s English poetry class for one year. Although I was nervous facing the challenge, it did have the effect of calming me, so I immediately dived in and worked hard. Professor Zhu used Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the standard international anthology then. But after moving, the Wuhan University library only had six copies of the book, three copies for the female students and three for the male students, which were passed around in turn based on class progress and then copied before class. I went to the Jiale Paper Factory and bought three large notebooks of the finest quality Jiale paper, a dreamy blue inside and out. I filled them with lines of poetry under the dim lamp, along with my teacher’s comments. A whole year of notes made while studying are still with me today on that now fragile paper.

  Although Professor Zhu used Palgrave’s Golden Treasury as textbook, he didn’t follow the editor’s order of chronological division: William Shakespeare, 1564–1616; John Milton, 1608–1674; Thomas Gray, 1716–1771; and the Romantic period. The poems for the first semester were chosen for their pedagogic value, to teach us what makes a good poem good. The first section was Wordsworth’s sparkling Lucy poems.

  Two hundred years after the fact, the identity of Lucy, the young girl of chaste and elegant beauty, is unknown, but those five short poems that attempt to recall that eighteen-year-old sweetheart who died young are gems in the history of English literature. Few have surpassed the depth of emotion with such simplicity. The last poem, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” has been my best medicine for alleviating suffering over the last sixty years. When I recite it in a lecture or quote it in writing, I hope to show the efficacy of poetry in life. In those days, Professor Zhu certainly must have hoped to use this to indoctrinate us in Western literature. In the third poem in the group, “I Traveled Among Unknown Men,” the poet says he will never again leave England, because the last thing Lucy saw was the wild green of England. For me, who put patriotism above all else at the time, this was the most beautiful and the most powerful poem about love of country.

  Professor Zhu selected more than ten of Wordsworth’s short poems, pointing out the directness of the language and the cohesiveness of scene. When he got to “The Solitary Reaper,” the sound of her song as it diminished with distance reminded me of the excess of rhyme in Tang poet Qian Qi’s verse: “the song is ended, no one is seen, / several green peaks above the river.”

  Another day, Professor Zhu taught “The Affliction of Margaret,” one of Wordsworth’s longer poems, which is about a woman whose only son left to make his way in the world; there has been no news of him for seven years. Every night, from the other side of a marsh, the poet hears the woman calling her son: “Where art thou, my beloved son.…” When she runs into someone, she asks if they have seen him, imagining all sorts of reasons for his absence.

  Reading “the fowls of heaven have wings, … Chains tie us down by
land and sea,” Professor Zhu said that classical Chinese poetry contains similar ideas, for example: “Birds have roads in the wind and clouds, / the Yangtze and Han rivers, barriers without ferries.” His voice caught at this point, and he paused before continuing to read to the last two lines: “If any chance to heave a sigh / They pity me, and not my grief.”

  Professor Zhu took off his glasses; tears rolled down his cheeks. He suddenly closed the book and quickly left the classroom, leaving everyone in the room astonished, but no one said a word.

  Perhaps in such difficult times, the display of emotion was frankly a luxury. In the eyes of a university sophomore who still worshiped idols, this was something unexpected and difficult to discuss, and even something of an honor to see the tears of emotion shed by a famous scholar of literature.

  Over twenty years later, when I was teaching the history of English literature, Palgrave’s anthology had long been replaced by other anthologies, few of which included this poem. Different tears for different ages. However, most of the poems selected by Professor Zhu are still found in anthologies today.

  The second part of the English poetry class emphasized the intellect. Reading some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, we discussed transience and eternity. We also read Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” with the awe-inspiring visage of the Egyptian king half buried in the sand, “boundless and bare, the lone and level sand, stretched far away.”

  Professor Zhu commented that the poem was about how a thousand years of human history is no more than a moment to heaven, and that Chinese literature had countless similar lines, but we should listen to the stress on the words “boundless” and “bare” and the lack of stress on “lone and level.” This is another sort of language, one different from the feeling of beauty.

  As for “Ode to the West Wind,” Professor Zhu commented that since the inception of vernacular literature in China, many people had intoned the famous line, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” to the point of making it tiresomely superficial. Shelley’s odes sing the praise of a wild spirit, the inspiration of youth, the awesome power to overturn the old and corrupt. The entire work is composed of five linked sonnets, all seventy lines of which must be read at one go in order to appreciate the magnificent power of Romantic poetry through the cyclical process of the seasons and the palpitation of the human heart within. In that small room in a wing of the Confucius Temple, Professor Zhu usually lectured with a serious expression and seldom gestured, but on this occasion, he made large sweeping gestures as he read, and taught us to use “the mind’s eye” to imagine the image of the west wind’s roar. This was the first time I truly observed the imagery in a Western poem, the benefit of which I have enjoyed ever since.

  BRIGHT MOONLIT NIGHT IN MEISHAN

  Winter break began. Some of my classmates and I participated in a winter camp organized by the activity center of Wutongqiao Bridge District. After dinner on the first night, a Nankai upperclassman, then in the school of engineering, suddenly came looking for me. More than twenty of the students had been drafted to assist with a professional engineering project in Chongqing. The trucks would drive directly to Chongqing and I could get a ride home, and when school resumed, they would bring me back to Leshan.

  What great news! Since there was no direct transportation between Leshan and Chongqing, I grabbed a small bag and went to join them on the truck, but I was so dizzy with excitement that I nearly fell into a pit by the roadside. Four upperclassmen from Nankai were on the truck, so it was very “safe.” The plan was to arrive in Chengdu before midnight and drive straight to Chongqing the following day. Who could have foreseen that after ninety li the truck would develop engine trouble just outside of Meishan? Not one of the expert engineers on board could fix it, so we had no choice but to split up and look for lodging for the night.

  Eight male classmates and I spent the night in the best hotel, which was, in fact, a teahouse with a few plank beds, mainly for travelers who had trouble on the road. On a winter’s night, with no streetlights, the room was large and cavernous, gloomy, cold, and clammy. The owner arranged for me to stay in a room next to the one used by the owner and his wife. Just as we were making up the plank beds, someone shouted from outside: “Hurry! Hurry up and get packed!”

  Alarmed, he told us that since the end of the year things had been difficult because a group of bandits in the mountains came down at night to rob and loot. They had already been there several times and giving them a little money would probably pacify them, but with a female student present, things might be a little dicier. What was to be done?

  The wife suddenly hit upon a way out of the predicament. She dragged a huge old wooden cabinet out from behind the counter and said to me, “Hide in our cashbox!” She had me lie down inside at once and closed the huge wooden lid. She then had a short, fat student unroll his bedroll on top of it and lie down to sleep. Most of us were undernourished in those days and pretty skinny, so I remember him, a handsome, broad-minded, and outspoken young man.

  Fortunately, there was a hole under the handle on each end of the cabinet, so I could breath while inside. I heard shouting and confused noises, tables and chairs being pushed aside and turned over, which almost made my heart stop but also didn’t give me any time to think about being afraid of sleeping in a box. Finally things quieted down and I heard the sound of the heavy door closing; then an elder classmate by the name of Yu opened the cabinet and said, “It’s over. You can come out.”

  When I stepped out of the cabinet, I saw that all the bedded-down students had several books under their heads, because they knew bandits in Sichuan wouldn’t steal books: the word for “book” was homophonous with “lose” in the local dialect. Moreover, the respect for culture ran deep in Sichuan, and even thieves respected those with an education.

  Among the students in the group was one who had been with me on the boat from Chongqing to Leshan the previous year and had seen me crying all the way up the Yangtze to the Min River. He was surprised that I didn’t cry upon encountering such a frightful situation that night and even asked if any of them had been injured. Actually, after I grew up, I never again cried when I encountered danger or was threatened.

  The following day, we left as soon as it was light. We didn’t go to Chengdu but took a shortcut and drove straight to Chongqing. Someone was going to Shapingba, so they took me right to my door. As the truck drove across the Meishan County line, it suddenly occurred to me that Meishan was the home of Su Dongpo! It was none other than the Meishan in his poem “To River Town,” in which he mourns his wife: “Ten years have we been parted / the living and the dead—hearing no news, / Never tried to remember, / still hard to forget.” During the dramatic situation of the previous night, I had set foot in Su Dongpo’s beloved home, but I had no idea if it had been a bright moonlit night or not. I hadn’t even thought about Duansonggang, the burial place of Su’s wife, or if I was destined to see the Hall of the Three Sus. I thought at the time how easy it would be to visit those places if I were in school in the Min-E area. In truth, however, in those days, it would have been very difficult, because it would have been quite a luxury for a young woman to go traveling.

  Unexpectedly I had the good fortune to spend the winter break at home. My parents were concerned and my little sister amusing. Every day I dressed well and had enough to eat, and slept under a thick, warm quilt, my heart always filled with gratitude. This was to be the last New Year’s season I would spend at home with my parents. We would only be together again after arriving in Taiwan.

  WHEN THE FLAMES OF WAR PRESSED NEAR: READING KEATS FOR THE FIRST TIME

  Upon returning to school, I most looked forward to resuming my English poetry class.

  During the winter break, I sought Mr. Sun Jinsan’s advice on English Romantic poetry, especially that of Shelley (that was before I read Keats). From the books he loaned me, I copied out some secondary information, which kept me fully absorbed and blocked out the threat of war.

  T
hen slowly the tide began to turn in favor of the British and American allies in the Pacific and they went from the defensive to the offensive, and the United States recovered the Philippines (MacArthur had uttered those famous brave words of his when they retreated: “I shall return!”). After the allies landed on Iwo Jima, the bloody battles from island to island began. But the battle lines inside China were more worrisome. With no way back, the Japanese forced their way along China’s Guangzhou–Hankou Railway, and the educated youth of China heeded Chairman Chiang Kai-shek’s call for “100,000 young people for 100,000 troops.” Two hundred thousand young people joined the army. Nankai alum Wang Shirui, who was in the school of engineering while I was at Wuhan University, took the test for the air corps officer school. At a time when the army was suffering defeat in battle and the critical front gradually shifted from Guizhou to Sichuan, only the air corps showed glorious military success, but unfortunately their numbers were too few and losses had been great. The Chinese and Americans of the 14th Air Force became everyone’s heroes of hope.

  It had been quite some time since I last received a letter from Zhang Dafei. I couldn’t tell anyone that those light blue letters mailed from places with strange names were like a miracle that had vanished. Only old newspapers with battle news came from the world outside the three rivers.