The Great Flowing River Read online

  Zhou Enlai was also a graduate of Nankai Middle School and often visited Principal Zhang Boling on campus; since he was an alumnus, he spoke many times at Monday assemblies. Everyone really enjoyed it when Zhang Boling, filled with warmth for this outstanding alum, introduced him with his Tianjin accent, “Now I’ll ask Neng (En) to talk.”

  Caring only for the old principal’s position, Zhou limited his remarks to strengthening the nation, throwing off the Japanese yoke, and becoming one of the great nations of the world, and never once did he engage in Communist propaganda. Actually, his own charisma was the best propaganda. His gentle and cultivated style and his erudition brought many people into the fold of the Communist Party. Young people didn’t understand how, when the regular troops of the legitimate government were entirely focused on fighting the Japanese, the Communists were using every means to infiltrate the rear so that after victory, they would deprive the government, which was exhausted and had suffered casualties, of state power. Then later, through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and other totalitarian measures, they dominated and consolidated state power.

  In 1943, when I was a senior in middle school, the bombings were at their height. Fu Qizhen transferred to the College of Natural Sciences, and she was always friendly to me in school. She was big and tall, pretty, optimistic, and always smiling; she was a good student and got along well with others. Later she tested into National Central University and remained in Shapingba, while I left for Leshan in Sichuan Province. When I returned home for the summer break, we met and talked; later I heard that she and Chen Chunming and four others as well as some male classmates from Central University went to Yan’an. I was shocked and saddened by this at the time. I always thought she was a close friend, as we often spent time together, reading books outside class, writing for the wall newspaper, and organizing activities. She took such a huge step without giving me the slightest hint of her intentions, and she never said good-bye before leaving. It wasn’t until I encountered the reading group at Wuhan University that I gradually came to understand how unlikely it was that Fu Qizhen could have told me what she was planning. Perhaps she had early on attended an activity like a reading group and had been recruited by leftists, becoming a “progressive element,” while I, an “immature” and infatuated student of literature, had ceased to be a “fellow traveler.” Of course, the same could be said of my relationship with my new acquaintance Zhao Xiaolan.

  At that time, the president announced the Ministry of Education’s order that we had to be prepared in the event of an emergency to evacuate to Leibo, Mabian, Pingshan, Ebian at a moment’s notice, everyone in the girls’ dorm was alarmed. Fortunately, the teachers were a source of stability. They all had family and said that everyone was in the same boat and we shouldn’t be afraid. Several of our Sichuan classmates asked for leave to go home (the school permitted classes and exams to be made up). The third floor of the dorm, owing to the slope of the roof, had two garret rooms in which two beds and two desks could be placed. Only one side of each room had a window, but there was a skylight. Classmates who preferred things a little more lively couldn’t stand living in those rooms, and lowerclassmen couldn’t move up. Those on the third floor shared the same stairway. One day I ran into Li Xiuying from the history department, who told me that her roommate had been taken home by her fiancée, perhaps for good, saying that marriage was more important in wartime. As a result, there was an empty bed in the garret room. She knew that I really liked less crowded rooms and asked if I’d like to share the room. I practically ran to the dorm supervisor’s office and applied for and got the bed. That small plank bed, small wooden desk, and foot-and-a-half-square skylight were like a beautiful palace to me.

  As I was packing my bags and gathering together my books, Elder Sister Hou, in her usual loud voice, without indicating who she was referring to, said, “Someone whose father has been in Chongqing for a while as a high official is receiving public funds and living off the fruits of the people’s toil. She has no shame! All day long she does nothing but mumble about skylarks and nightingales without understanding how the people suffer. It’s as if she has no soul.” Everyone kept their heads down, pretending to read, without saying a word. I didn’t know how to respond, so I just said good-bye to Zhao Xiaolan, grabbed my things, and moved up to the garret room.

  After I made my new bed, I sat down and, quite upset, thought about what had just transpired. I recalled how when I had just moved in, she insisted that we address her as Elder Sister, and she especially looked after me, even saving a stall for me when we bathed and always saving a spot for me at the dinner table. How could she come to attack me so viciously in less than two months? That evening as I lay in bed, I looked at the stars filling the sky; it was the first time I thought that perhaps God was sending me a message. Was he telling me to look up at the dome of heaven and forgive those who had trespassed against me? But my young heart was unwilling to swallow such a heartless attack.

  The following day when I went to class at the Confucius Temple, I paid a visit to the student affairs office and asked, “Which students are receiving a government stipend?” That work-study student replied impatiently, “All students attending public high schools and universities in war zones are receiving public stipends.” I asked, “If the parent of a student in a war zone works for the government on a fixed salary, does that student also receive a stipend?” He scrutinized me before replying, “No one has ever asked that before. What’s your name? What department are you in?” He wrote down my name, pulled a long face and said, “You go back and write a memo saying you’d like to give up your stipend, and the school will submit it to the Ministry of Education for you.” Then he closed his information window.

  Within three days, the students of the College of Arts, Letters, and Law were all saying that I had applied to give up my public stipend. Lu Qiaozhen asked me what was going on, so I told her that I had simply gone to inquire about the qualifications for a public stipend and hadn’t said anything else. She said that the progressive (leftist) students wanted to use this to attack the Ministry of Education. After dinner that evening, as I went upstairs past my old room, that “elder sister” surnamed Hou said in a loud voice, “Some people are afraid that others don’t know what a no-good bigwig they are, so they go around showing off! Daughter of a corrupt official, get the heck out of here! Don’t get the idea that you are anything special!” This was the first time in my life that I understood how frightening politics and its lies can be. In my family, one would have braved untold dangers for revolution and patriotism, as a matter of love and honor, and what we most detested was heartlessness and the betrayal of one’s friends.

  In the sixty years since then, I’ve never gotten involved in politics, nor ever gotten involved even in school politics when I was a teacher.

  AT THE CONFLUENCE OF THREE RIVERS

  Living in that small garret room for one year and three months was a true delight of the sort seldom encountered in life, and my mood was brighter than the room. Li Xiuying had a steady boyfriend, who found a job in town while waiting for her to graduate. Every day after dinner, he’d come to the dorm to take her out. Every night the dorm super would come to take roll, and Xiuying would often come flying back around 9 p.m., just before the dorm was locked. So, every night I had three hours of peace and quiet to myself. It was the first time I felt free and unrestrained to read or sort out my concerns, a happiness I had not previously experienced. The small skylight opened toward the banks of the Dadu River, and in the quiet of the night I could hear the water flowing by, not a purling brook but the mighty and eternal surge of a large river. Gradually, above the sound of flowing water, I could hear a bird calling on the opposite bank and an echo beneath my window. Those two notes were so pure, clear, and pleasing to the ear, but nothing like the joy of the skylark or the melancholy of the nightingale in the poems. After singing briefly, the bird would fly off, to sing a little of its monotonous two notes fa
rther in the distance. The first time I heard it I didn’t sleep half the night, waiting for it to return. How was it possible? Although I was young but living in a troubled world, I unexpectedly heard a real bird singing to the sound of the river outside my window at night!

  When day came, I asked my classmates if the bird singing on the opposite bank was a cuckoo. They said it was a bugu and you could hear it call “Bu-gu! Bu-gu!” urging the farmers to plant the rice sprouts. Lines such as, “Late spring in the third month, the grass south of the river grows tall, the various trees and bushes flower, flocks of warblers fly” were insufficient to describe the beauty of this river’s banks. During the day, I pushed the window ajar and the songs of various birds flowed in with the sunlight, making me fidgety and anxious to get out of the small room and go in search of the sources of those songs. On the days when I had only half a day of classes, I would pick up my book of poems waiting to be memorized, go through Shuixi Gate and then down the stone stairs where the water carriers walked up and down, and set off to the right along the riverbank. On the riverbank overgrown with wild grass, there was a barely discernible path that led off below a ruined brick wall. If you had the courage to cross over, you’d find yourself in a small meadow facing the river. A small wood stood behind the meadow, behind which stood the dormitory, with my small garret room jutting out between the third and fourth floors. The little skylight shone in the sunlight, as if reflecting my pleasant surprise. If you continued on another twenty feet, a bend in the river occurred along which there was no path. It was my own private paradise that no one else knew about. Like the rocky lair on the cliff by the Jialing River, it was a pure land from which to escape the world.

  I discovered that this place was destined only for one.

  One morning in the second semester of my first year, I left that ugly room a little late and as I walked to the main door, I saw that an old water carrier had fallen on the stone step by the cauldron. His head had struck the step and his face was covered in blood. The other water carriers had lifted him up but couldn’t stanch the blood. Immediately I ran back to my room and grabbed the first-aid kit I had brought from home. It contained cotton, iodine, gauze, and adhesive tape. Employing the first-aid training I had received as a scout in Chongqing, I managed to stop the bleeding and bandage him up. In the six years I was at Nankai, I was unable to apply my skills, but now I was able to do “one good deed a day” in this destitute state away from home. I was deeply moved.

  I gave the iodine and gauze to the injured man, and two of the others standing there said the man was their headman, who was over fifty and had to carry water because his wife was sick and his son unreliable. Every morning I checked to make sure his dressings had been changed until the wound healed. In those days, medical care was fairly basic, and my scout training was considered pretty advanced. That morning, as I stood outside Shuixi Gate looking around, I saw that the old water carrier was in the river filling his buckets with water. When he saw me with my book, he came over and whispered to me that I could find a nice place to read if I followed the little path and kept on going around the bend. “There are a lot of people here; I’ll tell them not to bother you,” he whispered.

  That was the best place! In my remaining two years at Leshan, I never told another soul about it. Like the rocky lair above the river, it was a sacred place for me. I was twenty that year and felt I could lose everything at any moment from life’s various threats, which made me feel alone and helpless. The only thing that would remain was my soul, this mind of mine urgently pursuing admirable knowledge, seeking beauty and goodness. In that little paradise on the riverbank I could concentrate on collecting my soul.

  When I first moved up to the garret and heard the cuckoo calling at night, it was really like Keats hearing the nightingale singing and building its nest in the garden of that cottage he rented. I wanted to find the tree and the bird’s nest and looked several times on the riverbank below my window, but of course never found it. Late in spring, not only did the trees and bushes flower, the warblers flew and grass grew tall! Sitting beside the river on a clear day, I watched as the boats sailed down the Qingyi River from afar, where river and sky were joined in boundlessness. To this day, the thought of the Qingyi River produces reverie in me. A thousand years ago, Li Bai passed Leshan and wrote a poem titled “Song of Emei Mountain Moon”: “Emei Mountain moon half-full in autumn / shines on the Pingjiang River with its current flows. / Setting out for the Three Gorges from Qingzi at night, / I think of you, but no longer seen, sailing down to Yuzhou.” The Pingjiang River is the Qingyi River. The Jiang and the Yi are indigenous people of western Sichuan. I don’t know in which dynasty they were “pacified” by the Han Chinese, but the name of the river was changed to commemorate the conquest, and down through the ages, people with hearts like the clear river continue to call it by its original name, the Qingyi River. The river came from the snowmelt in the Qionglai Mountains in the mysterious west of Xikang and after pouring into the turbid, roaring surge of the Dadu River at my feet, it bent to the left and flowed into the Min River, through the rapids at Shanjiajiao, and just beyond Shuixi Gate, where the city got its water, it became clear and flowed past the foot of the great Tang-dynasty Buddha standing 230 feet high at the foot of mountain, purling as it flowed and never muddy. On a clear day at noon you could faintly make out a dividing line of clear and muddy in the river.

  Facing the beautiful mountains and rivers, I couldn’t help but always recite lines from Zhang Ruoxu’s poem “Spring River, Flowers, Moonlit Night”: “Who by the riverside first saw the moon arise? / When did the moon first shine on men by the riverside?” I knew I was insignificant, ignorant, anxious, and helpless, but I was perhaps the first Chinese woman to memorize Keats poems beside this river. I paced back and forth on my little stretch of riverbank and memorized his “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn,” and the last few lines of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”:

  I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam

  With horrid warning gaped wide,

  And I awoke, and found me here

  On the cold hill’s side.

  I raced back to the dorm on account of the gloomy feeling I experienced while reciting these lines, but I went back to memorize another poem the following day. It was the first section of the long, difficult, and enchanting “The Eve of St. Agnes.” The memorization of the lines and the poetic inspiration that burst forth in my youth, along with the season and the environment, combined to form a feeling toward life that would never become indifferent. Laughed at by my classmates in those days as one who was absent-minded and not of this world, I later, in a long life, sometimes became an eccentric who was unable to explain her discomfort with the status quo.

  “To Autumn” is the only poem by Keats I like to share with others. It’s a warm, mature, and perfect poem about resignation. The stubble wheat fields manifest the season’s natural palpitations; the foolish bees in the last faded flowers of late summer think that summer will last forever, and the crickets sing softly and the swallows twitter as they fly through the sky. It’s late autumn and a time of completion.

  After reading a dozen poems by Keats, Professor Zhu returned to the first part of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, lecturing on a number of Shakespeare’s sonnets, allowing me to experience another form of lyricism.

  May was over by then and June beginning. On the days when we had English poetry class, three or four classmates and I would walk down White Pagoda Street past clammy Shuixi Gate, reciting poetry as we made our way to the Confucius Temple, but I knew that the world outside had changed completely.

  ZHANG DAFEI GIVES HIS LIFE FOR HIS COUNTRY

  The Allied forces occupied Berlin on May 2, 1945, and Japan was crumbling in the face of intensive American bombing. The kamikazes became Japan’s final and most savage weapon. China was gradually recovering lost territory in Guangxi Province, and reports from the battlefront on June 13 were that the Japanese mi
litary there was isolated and that in the massive fighting in western Hunan, Chinese troops had been victorious, killing over ten thousand of the enemy, and were then advancing on Guilin.…

  The dorm was filled with elation; everyone began unpacking the rucksacks they had made ready in the event we had to trudge off to Leibo, Mabian, Pingshan, Ebian, and began preparing for finals and the return home for summer vacation. Activities associated with the choir, concert, and farewell party heated up. Many of the students who had halted their studies came back with shamefaced expressions. On April 12, Roosevelt suddenly passed away, which came as a great shock to the Chinese. One day in English class, Professor Zhu read Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!”, in which the poet laments that the president had not lived to see the end of the war. Reading this poem at the time, I felt it had a resounding power, much like the beating of a funeral drum. But within the next one hundred days, I’d be called upon a second time to clearly remember that poem, which became permanently imprinted on my mind, heavy of heart and resigned to sadness as I was.

  The last time I went out past Shuixi Gate to my spot beside the river was in June. Spring was over, and the grass grew so tall on the riverbank that it gradually had covered the trail. I went there to read my brother’s letter, received two days before, of which I had already memorized every word, but I had to find a place to think.…

  My brother’s letter said that on the 18th of May, in the battle for Henan, Zhang Dafei, while covering a friendly plane, had perished in the skies over Xinyang, Henan. In Chongqing, my brother had read the news in a wartime report from the front lines. When I returned home on the weekend, there was a notification about him waiting from the 14th Air Force in Yunan, because our house was listed as one of Zhang Dafei’s mailing addresses. He had left behind a letter for my brother and a large package—probably letters—for me in an American military canvas mailbag. My brother said that before I finished up and returned home for the summer, I needed to be mentally prepared. Inside his letter was a letter to him from Zhang Dafei.