The Great Flowing River Read online

  Returning to English poetry class, Professor Zhu lectured on the special features of English Romantic poetry. He had us copy out eight poems by Shelley. All young readers of Shelley are roused by his unbridled passion, and the premonition of love and death frequently appears in a line of verse with three exclamations. That sort of pure and candid outcry is something I never encountered in Chinese poetry. In his “The Indian Serenade,” we read: “I die! I faint! I fail!” The most resonant line to my young dejected mood was the opening of his poem “A Lament”: “O World! O Life! O Time!” (later editions omit the exclamation points), which were the very pent-up emotions I was unable to utter. Not only did I dwell on the life and death of the solitary individual, but also I felt that a person’s life and death were inextricably yoked with the world, life, and time that stops for no one. We were so young, but we were drawn into a vast war, one seemingly without end. Professor Zhu said that the poem wasn’t that good, but it did reveal Shelley’s true colors. Young people are troubled by feelings and wish to break free and shout aloud, but poems written purely to vent feelings always tend to be a little shallow and can’t withstand the test of time. Since I first read this poem in February 1945, my country and I have faced tremendous changes; decades of “O World! O Life! O Time!” have left my heart in continuous turmoil, a state of confusion that cannot be more suitably or succinctly expressed.

  At seventy-five, Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher, completed Fact and Fiction, in which he recounts the growth of his mind from age fifteen to twenty-one, and the books that most influenced him. In a chapter titled “The Importance of Shelley” he describes how deeply obsessed he was when as a young person he read Shelley’s poetry, in which the real seemed unreal. Later in life, with more experience, he did encounter deeply tranquil states of mind and have similar sensations. He was thoroughly familiar with Shelley’s short lyric poems and hoped to produce the same kind of infatuated, though bitter love—“I liked the beauty of despair, the isolated and illusory scenes”—that became the fountainhead of feeling and the power of his imagination. It is said that Marx and Engels liked nothing better than to talk about Shelley and how they admired the antitraditional spirit of this brilliant and elegant poet who was born a nobleman.

  Professor Zhu insisted that all good poems ought to be memorized, and every poem we studied with him, we had to memorize. Fewer than twenty people attended the English poetry class, and memorizing poems was an activity for which there was no escape, like in an old tutorial school. In the process from “memorizing” to “teaching,” each poem went from being new to being familiar. With a few words of guidance from our teacher, we got at the true meaning of the poems. After studying a few short poems by Shelley, we turned to his “Stanzas Written in Dejection—December, Near Naples,” a poem filled with regret in which he blames and censures himself. In this poem he was also fairly accurate in prophesying his own death by drowning, so it has been treasured by later generations.

  One freezing morning in February 1945, three of my classmates and I set out down White Pagoda Street, passing wet Shuixi Gate, which was already covered by a thin coat of water. Each of us carried our hand-copied English poetry textbook, trying to memorize “One Word Is Too Often Profaned” along with “Stanzas Written in Dejection,” the first line of the third stanza of which aptly expressed my state of mind, for which we could not find the words: “nor peace within nor calm around.”

  The four of us recited the verses, sometimes picking up where another left off. We turned into Confucius Temple Square from the county government office and went up the broad stone steps through the Confucius Temple gate. Before us, on the stone column beside the Lingxing gate, was pasted a large brush-written announcement, the ink of which still seemed wet:

  On the morning of February 25th, 1,800 large American planes bombed Tokyo, turning the city into a sea of fire. Filled with trepidation, the Japanese prime minister entered the palace to apologize.

  The several hundred university students standing around the notice had experienced eight years of war and survived through state expense; their clothes in tatters, their dark faces thin and lean, they stood in silence on the flagstones in front of the main hall of the Confucius Temple, reading the news of revenge, their hearts surging with complex feelings of joy.

  Finally the Japanese, who had violently bombed us for eight years, got a taste of the suffering of their country being destroyed and knew the terror of destruction falling from the skies. Since invading and occupying Manchuria, they had found glory in conquering others and had grown self-satisfied and self-confident. The cherry blossoms and fall leaves in their homeland were always resplendent, but as a people they drove others into the abyss of wandering for years on end!

  I too was silent, standing there before that stone column, filled with a mixture of joy and pain, visualizing those 1,800 bombers approaching and blotting out the sun. I could almost hear the sharp whistle of a thousand bombs just before they hit the ground, the red-hot gust just prior to explosion, buildings toppling and burning, the cratered ground with earth and stones thrown up all around.… Ah, the unforgettable time of youth! Death circled in the light of the sun and in bright moonlit skies, and then it fell. There was no place to hide.

  How could those men, who were arrogantly self-conscious on account of the chrysanthemum and the sword, protect those women with their swept-up hairdos, their faces covered with a thick layer of white powder, their flowery kimonos tied up with an even more flowery obi, fleeing on high wooden clogs? Some of these women strapped the ashes of their boyfriends or husbands who had died in battle in China on their backs, only for them to be incinerated a second time.

  The class bell brought us back to reality. From the stone column we walked to the second classroom in the right-side hall of the temple and continued with that beautiful “Stanzas Written in Dejection,” written in a peaceful world so different from our own. All of us knew how beautiful it would be to die amid the sounds of lapping waves.

  Professor Zhu always started class on time. He stood behind a small rostrum, about two feet from the first row of students. After he entered, the small stone-paved room inside the hall of the temple was no longer a classroom, but rather a secret room between the blue sky and me. In addition to the unvarnished desks and chairs, there was just a small blackboard and four bare walls making for a solemn environment, like some modern or postmodern studio. Resonant of the soul, music seemed to flow from the walls, accompanying Professor Zhu’s British English with an Anhui accent, carrying us into a magical realm. Perhaps for me, whose imagination is first piqued through sound via the ears, in turn leading the eyes to the mirage of the floating clouds outside the window, my lifelong love for the rhythms of English poetry, like mountains rising and falling or the surge of waves going on and on without end, began at that time. For me, English and Chinese poetry are both a kind of emotional utopia, and even the most despairing of poems possesses a vigorous life force. This is a fate of sorts—at some point in life, a few sounds are heard, a few images seen, all of which take hold of one’s heart, binding one inextricably for life.

  Of course, the strongest reason for this is that I first read Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” then Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” I didn’t notice Professor Zhu’s Anhui accent, I just saw the infinite differences in human life. Reading these poems again years later, standing at the rostrum teaching, reading them through till they reverberate, I deeply feel that all the differences in life arise from the joy of “To a Skylark” and the melancholy of “Ode to a Nightingale.” Fate, character, talent, and the reality of life go round and round, linked together. Shelley’s unrestrained soul soared and sang, like silver starlight and the splendor of the bright moon, like the seasonable rain, like a firefly, like a vernal downpour moistening the earth. And we mortals are forever cautious, and even our sincerest laughter hides some pain. The poet says, “If I could sing with but one half of your joy, the world would surely listen!”r />
  LEIBO, MABIAN, PINGSHAN, AND EBIAN

  As we were reading and reciting “To a Skylark,” school president Wang Xinggong appeared in the square in front of the Confucius Temple and had the teachers and students assemble to hear an important announcement: defeat might allow the Japanese army to invade Sichuan. The Ministry of Education had ordered that when things became critical, all schools should be prepared to retreat to safe areas. The Headquarters of the Jiading Division Regional Command was assigned to protect Wuhan University, and if necessary, we were to retreat to the Yi Autonomous Region of Leimaping’e in the Liangshan area on the border between Sichuan and Xikang. We were told that as adults we should not be alarmed, but we should be mentally prepared.

  In the university we seldom saw the president, and even more seldom heard him give a pep talk. I remember President Wang, one of China’s first chemists and one of the founders of Wuhan University, standing in the square on that cold windy day in early spring, in his old scholar’s robe, his face lean and his voice sad. His brief conclusion was, “We’ve hung on through eight difficult years, and we won’t give up for one day. Everyone has to do their utmost. The Ministry of Education has ordered that until the very last day it will be business as usual at every institution.”

  Sixty years later, having traversed the entire country, I still hear the four words Lei-Ma-Ping-E with a tragic ring in my heart; they signify a sort of final safety. In life there is always a way out under any circumstances, and the belief that schooling must go on without interruption has always kept me alive.

  I wrote to my parents and asked if Chongqing fell, how would I find my home if I had to go to Leimaping’e? Ten days later, my father replied by express mail. Simply and forcefully, he said, “The battle lines in China are spread too far, and truly great efforts are needed in the present situation. However, the situation for the allies in the Pacific and Europe is improving by the day. My child, your safety will be ensured by staying with the school. Regardless of the changes in the tide of war, I will find you as long as I have a breath of life left in me.”

  Those were truly terrifying days. Nights on my wood-plank bed were spent thinking about how difficult it would be to trudge 300 li. Among the upperclass girls in the dorm it was rumored that the soldiers in the Jiading Division Regional Command said the female students were all so proud, but where would their pride be if they had to follow the troops into the mountains? Others said that it was just a divisive rumor spread by the advance elements of the left. A number of the male students among the upperclassmen suggested to the school that two hundred male and female students should accompany the troops into the mountains.

  At the beginning of April 1945, in those fearful, uneasy days, at the Confucius Temple where schooling went on without interruption, I read Keats’s “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” for the first time. It is probably the first poem by him that everyone reads. It is a sonnet, a formal verse form likened to dancing in chains, which he wrote upon first reading the epic in a new translation and feeling a joy not unlike that of an explorer discovering a new mountain peak.

  But I didn’t understand his rapture. Bombs were falling around me. The scream of the bombs and the sea of fire that followed, going from near to far and far to near, surrounded me there in that mountain city at the confluence of three rivers in western Sichuan. Even there I didn’t have a feeling of security, so I couldn’t understand how he and his friends had “discovered” a new poetic form. Reading from nightfall till the sky grew light at dawn, he walked three miles under the starlight back to the cotttage where he was staying, and then, dashing off this sonnet of immortal joy, he sent it posthaste to his friend to read. After penning that poem, he would expend his life’s genius over the next five years, dying at twenty-six, coughing up blood and dying.

  Five years was a long time for me and twenty-six still a long way off. If I lived through that day, who knew what tomorrow would bring? In his letter, my father had said that as long as he had a breath of life left in him, he would find me. He was forty-six that year. What did he mean by “breath of life”? I had a bad feeling.

  When we returned to class, Professor Zhu didn’t say a word about our situation, but began to lecture on “Ode to a Nightingale,” the second poem by Keats that we studied. He said that by reading “To a Skylark” by Shelley and then “Ode to a Nightingale” by Keats, one could see the two faces of Romanticism. The more you read, the less likely you were to apply simplistic terms such as “Romanticism.” When Keats was eight years old, his father fell from a horse and died; when he was fourteen, his mother died from tuberculosis; when he was twenty-four, he sat by his brother’s sickbed and watched his life ebb away. Inconsolable, he sought to escape the bitterness of life through art, and gradually conceived this poem. On a tender night listening to the song of the nightingale, he sank into a stupor as if he had drunk poison, grew intoxicated as if he had drunk good wine; the nightingale must not know the sufferings of men, “Here where men sit and hear each other groan.” The poet sat in an orchard and “still wouldst thou sing and I have ears in vain— / To thy high requiem become a sod.”

  The poem was difficult to read and recite. The poet’s mind moves between life and death, and the lines of verse are long and rich in imagery. Shelley’s “To a Skylark” seemed as lively as a nursery rhyme by contrast. We read three more short poems by Keats after this one: “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,” “Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell,” and “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.” In two short months, I experienced another realm of human life through a spiritual resonance with the poems of Keats.

  PROGRESSIVE READING GROUPS

  For the first two years, my life at Leshan seemed divided between two worlds, with Shuiximen as the dividing line. Coming out of Shuixi Gate and turning left, I headed toward the Confucius Temple for class, to look at the notices, read the wall newspapers, and view various exhibitions (the works of famous artists such as Xu Beihong, Guan Shanyue, Feng Zikai, and Ling Shuhua were displayed, but of course prominence was given to the works of local personages, teachers, and students); turning right onto White Pagoda Street took me back to the dormitory, which was the real world of daily life that I shared with others.

  Not long after Zhao Xiaolan and I moved to our new room, a law student in the same building invited the two of us to attend the “reading group” after dinner. I thought it would be wonderful to read some new books, so I set off with great enthusiasm.

  More than thirty people were there, with boys outnumbering girls. That day they were discussing Maxim Gorky’s Mother, which I had read when I was at Nankai Middle School and had found very moving. The book assigned for the next meeting was Mikhail Sholokov’s The Silent Don. We passed the book around and took turns reading it. My roommate, Elder Sister Hou (she had returned to school after taking some time off, and was two or three years older than me), was in charge of the book in the girls’ dorm. I attended three meetings with her, all of which were spirited, fiery, and politically charged. We also sang many songs, Russian folksongs and “The East Is Red,” among others.

  When I attended Nankai Middle School, we had no evening activities, and I returned home on weekends. I had never heard of reading groups, so this was quite novel to me, and I was very excited to write home about it. I soon received a letter from my father that said, “These days, all universities have reading groups. They are peripheral organizations of the Communist Party used to recruit intellectuals. Today the Nationalists and the Communists are cooperating for the sake of full-scale resistance against the Japanese, so all mass organizations are operating in the open. My child, you are naïve and interested in your studies. I suggest that you make full use of Wuhan University’s famous library and read things related to your coursework. There is no need to get involved in political activities. The situation in China is still at a low point and you could say that the Nationalist troops a
re spilling their blood to preserve our territory. My child, you are alone and away from home. You must look after yourself so that you can handle anything that arises.” (I still remember every word of such letters from those days.)

  From then on, I was no longer willing to attend the reading group with Elder Sister Hou, telling her that I was too busy with my studies. I even showed her my notebooks—Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” for example, was both long and difficult. I had just returned from the library where I had borrowed an academic book in English and was constantly flipping through my dictionary. After that she attended the meetings only with Zhao Xiaolan, and after returning from them, she would sing “Katyusha” and “The East Is Red” louder than ever. She no longer spoke with me, and when we met in the hall, she’d intentionally turn her head aside and not look at me. What saddened me the most, however, was that Zhao Xiaolan gradually began ignoring me too, and we ended up living like strangers in our small space.

  Looking back today, there is clear evidence that the Communist Party recruited intellectuals through reading groups.

  During the War of Resistance against Japan, the Nationalists and the Communists cooperated half the time, and both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai visited Chongqing. After Mao was elected to the National Political Council (Zhang Boling, Nankai principal, served as vice chairman, and Wang Jingwei, who served as speaker, concluded and signed a secret agreement with Japan betraying the country in 1940, and left shortly thereafter for Nanjing to set up a puppet government!), he went to Chongqing to show solidarity in the resistance against Japan. My father, who was also a member, met and spoke with him briefly.

  The Communist Party’s Xinhua News, after officially getting off the ground at Hankou in 1938, moved to Chongqing and only stopped being published when the war with Japan was nearly over. In an age when newspapers were the sole source of news, its position influenced many intellectuals and students.