The Great Flowing River Read online

  To effectively facilitate administration, the national government established the Northeast Military Headquarters of the Military Council and divided the three provinces of the northeast into nine: Liaoning, Andong, Liaobei, Jilin, Songjiang, Hejiang, Heilongjiang, Nenjiang, and Xing’an (after the Communists took over, the original three provinces were restored). The people who excitedly went to “take over” the nine provinces never dreamed that three and a half years later, after being defeated by the Chinese Communists, they would flee to Taiwan, a province one thirty-fifth the size of the northeast, and never return home.

  Shortly after victory, when all schools were about to recommence, the Ministry of Education announced that the majority of schools in war zones had been damaged or requisitioned by the Japanese army and needed to be repaired, and those schools that had moved behind the lines would have to remain where they were until the following summer, when they would return to their original locations. Classes that year would start on schedule and students should keep their minds on their studies while the plans for moving the schools were drawn up.

  My brother had graduated from the foreign affairs department of National Zhengzhi University and was awaiting a posting to an embassy abroad. His first posting was to be at the embassy in Uruguay, where he would serve as a third-level secretary (he was teased by his friends on account of the country’s name, which, when pronounced in Chinese, sounded like “turtle”). He regretted never having been able to join in the revolution—his participation in the “100,000 young people for 100,000 troops” the year before had been blocked, and he had taken it to heart. He decided he didn’t want to go to Uruguay, so he applied to the Central News to be a military correspondent; after passing the exam, he asked to be sent to the war zone in the northeast to experience the life of the soldiers there.

  My younger sister Ningyuan had graduated from elementary school and was in her first year at Nankai, and loved to play softball. My youngest sister Xingyuan was in the third grade at the elementary school attached to Nankai. My parents decided to stay in Sichuan and wait until my summer break the following year before moving back to Beiping. The first thing that had to be done was to bury my grandmother, whose coffin had been housed in a temple outside of Beiping since her death in 1937.

  REACQUAINTED WITH FAMOUS TEACHERS

  Jiading is a hundred li from Emei Mountain, and the landscape has long been famous. Down through the ages, famous literati such as Su Dongpo from Meisan and Guo Moruo from Leshan have resided along the banks of the Dadu River, the Qingyi River, and the Min River. During the War of Resistance, those who taught at Wuhan University in Leshan included writers such as Zhu Guangqian, Dong Xiying, Ling Shuhua, Yuan Changying, and Su Xuelin. In 1941, Wuhan University engaged famous historian Qian Mu to lecture on Chinese political history. As the lectures were intended for the whole school, they were held from 6 to 8 a.m. in order to avoid being interrupted by air raids. (The previous year the Japanese had conducted massive bombings of Leshan, with half the city destroyed and an enormous number of casualties, which were followed by the rampant spread of Kashin-Beck disease and typhoid. The dead from Wuhan University were buried in a place known as Dormitory 8.) At the time, electricity had not been fully restored to the city, so the students from the various dormitories had to carry torches to illumine the way to the classroom to listen to Qian Mu’s lectures. The torchbearers occupied all the seats by the first light of dawn. For those who came late, there were no seats. Few of the new students in the girls’ dorm chose to go. When I entered my third year, the War of Resistance had ended in victory and Qian Mu returned to Chongqing. Listening to the boys talk about those grand events, I was envious. I never expected that thirty years later in Taiwan, I would have to call on Qian Mu on business for the National Translation and Compilation Center, and also have the honor of visiting him over the following twenty years, often seeking his advice and conversing with him.

  Ma Yifu, a master of the Chinese classics, set up the Fuxing Academy across the Min River at a place called Wuyoushan that year. Xiong Shili stayed and lectured there; Qian Mu also lectured there. There were a hundred students. Late in life, Qian Mu wrote a piece titled “Talks We Both Benefited From” in which he recalled having lunch and dinner with Zhu Guangqian.

  At the beginning of September 1945, I returned to Leshan and found the atmosphere of the university entirely changed, for that which had originally bound us together through our sufferings had now disappeared. The students brought together by the National Joint College Entrance Exams would be returning home to all parts of the country with high career hopes (in those days there were very few university graduates relative to the rest of the population), and politics had permeated all extracurricular activities. Wall newspapers, stage plays, and even literary works and journals were either left or right. Even purely scholarly lectures were attributed political positions based on the degree of “progressiveness.” Twenty years later, the Chinese Communists would utilize this drawing of lines as the basis for struggle. The fragmentary information we received across the strait in Taiwan and the news from behind the iron curtain we read overseas all seemed familiar to me.

  Starting in my third year at university, Zhu Guangqian stepped down as dean to devote himself to teaching and running the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. He invited those of us who were his advisees to his house for tea.

  That was in the middle of autumn, so his courtyard was covered with a thick carpet of leaves that rustled as you walked. One of the male students took a broom from a small room by the door and said he would sweep up the fallen leaves for him. Professor Zhu stopped him immediately and said, “I’ve waited so long for such a thick layer of leaves. At night as I read, I can hear the patter of the rain and the blowing of the wind. This memory is more vivid and profound than reading many poems about autumn.” As that was the same year we studied Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” my memory of this courtyard is inextricably linked with the poem. After my father passed away, I read “To Autumn” by Keats, through which I deeply felt the beauty in the passing of time and recalled with gratitude how my father and my teacher awakened me to the savor of life.

  Academic work in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures only really began in the third year, by Professor Zhu’s standards. The faculty lineup had been great, but unfortunately, important and famous teachers such as Chen Xiying and Fang Chong, who taught the history of English literature, had already left the school for England in 1943. Professor Sun Jiaxiu, newly hired to teach our class, had just returned from England and was certainly qualified. After teaching for a short time, she placed instructional emphasis on the Middle English of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

  She was a big woman who read medieval English in a vigorous voice, which she did for about two weeks, leaving us in awe. To use a contemporary Taiwanese phrase, it was like “a duck listening to thunder.” It was difficult going for us with Langland’s Piers Plowman and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. From the fifteenth century to Thomas More’s Utopia in the sixteenth, we hurriedly looked over some early sonnets and breezed through Spenser, the poet of poets, and then winter break arrived. The following semester we were introduced to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, read a few of Shakespeare’s representative sonnets and the outlines of some of the famous plays, and looked at the relationship between Milton’s Paradise Lost and the book of Genesis, and then at John Dryden. After a couple of classes, she took sick leave and we never resumed our class on the history of English literature. Later, we were all “demobilized” and went back downriver (the people of Sichuan call people from other provinces “people from downriver”).

  When I graduated, I had studied the history of English literature only up to 1700 and was completely ignorant of the subsequent two hundred fifty years after Dryden, which left me chagrined for many years. The second time I went to Indiana University for advanced study, I spent an entire year working very hard, taking four courses on the histor
ical periods of English literature: the fifteenth century and before, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century. When I taught the history of English literature (it was a two-year course at National Taiwan University and was required in the second and third years), I arranged everything so that I would have enough time to get to the mid-twentieth century, so that my students wouldn’t feel the same sense of chagrin that I had experienced.

  Two other classes were a bit more stable, like the class on fiction taught by Professor Dai Liuling, who was a typical man of letters. He was a regular contributor to Time and Tide, and though he wasn’t a great speaker, his classes were rich in content with a high level of analysis. In discussing A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, he told us to pay close attention to how the English perceived the mobocracy during the French Revolution. To this day I can still recall the descriptions of the housewives sitting at the plaza of execution, knitting while counting the heads as they were lopped off by the guillotine. The scene of knitting the number into a warm sweater still sends shivers through me. Stammering, he asserted that having that English lawyer stand upon the guillotine out of love and still see a beautiful future was simply writing fiction that was not of this world (I thought that was the way love ought to be). He was the first teacher to teach us how to read fiction from different perspectives. The reading list he gave us was very helpful later.

  The first time I met Professor Miao Langshan was in a class on modern literature. He was perhaps the most charismatic teacher, whose specialty was Russian literature. Almost all works of Russian literature were representative modern works.

  The students liked his course, and with the cooperation of the Nationalists and Communists during the War of Resistance, it was far more useful than any sort of Communist propaganda. Professor Miao was a big man with a resonant voice. He was very learned on the subject of Russian literature, his lectures being a mine of information, and his teaching was more like a stage performance, as he moved briskly but never paced. His face was expressive and his talk humorous. One male student described him as “big and small pearls falling on a metal plate.” He gave a fervent introduction to Gorky’s Mother, Sholokhov’s The Silent Don, and Goncharov’s Oblamov, which is a brilliant book about a lazy man. The lazy nobleman’s servant is so lazy that his hands are described as being as dirty as the soles of his shoes. Professor Miao actually took off his beat-up shoe and held it next to his hand. We never encountered such an enthusiastic teacher, before or after.

  PLAYING THE WRONG MUSIC

  A huge change in my life at Leshan took place in my third year—someone came and “stood guard” over me at the dorm.

  In my first and second years, the only extracurricular activities I participated in were the Nankai Alumni Association and the Christian Fellowship, a small circle in which everyone knew that there was someone in my heart, and in that serious period of “single-minded love,” no one could ever get me to go out.

  Shortly after victory and after I had returned to school from Chongqing, just before classes began, I received a letter containing a musical composition with my name on it. The composer was Mr. Huang, a recent graduate; in his letter he claimed to have adored me for more than a year, and seeing the disdainful attitude I had toward others, he hadn’t had the courage to approach me. Not many people on campus recognized him anymore, so if I didn’t object, he would quietly come to Leshan to see me before going to work, trying to build up a rapport between us.

  In addition to several choirs at Wuhan University, there was one other musical group that had attained a quasi-professional level (or at least had received professional training). It was a small musical group of three to five members, who were much sought after and respected in that period without music. There were two violins and a male alto; Mr. Huang had played second violin. Onstage, he was tall and elegant, and many of the girls were crazy about him.

  At the beginning of June 1944, in order to celebrate the graduation of our classmates, the Nankai Alumni Drama Troupe gave a public performance of Everlasting and Unchanging, a well-known spoken drama from the War of Resistance derived from La Dame aux Camélias. That they dared to perform the piece, creating a sensation on campus, was because Lu Qiaozhen and several other alums from Shapingba had successfully performed it in the past. As a student drama troupe totally lacking sound equipment, they had to rely upon people’s assistance behind the curtain. When they performed Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm, several male classmates stood on ladders behind the stage and poured basins of water onto the stage while one strapping fellow held a sheet of metal and another struck it with a hammer with all his might, creating the sound of thunder. Mr. Huang wasn’t an alum, but he was quite amiable (the first violinist was not) and was asked to provide music from backstage. The student directing the play said to him, “I don’t know the names of the pieces you violinists play, just have a lively piece and a sad piece, and when the time comes, I’ll tell you which one to play.” That night, all of us alums were put to work—Wang Shirui, a first-year student, and I went on stage and sat on swings for two minutes, representing pure bliss, after which we went backstage to help with prompting. I don’t know if the director or the violinist got it wrong (backstage was narrow, dark, and dirty), but when the male and female leads were happily in love, someone told Mr. Huang to play the “sad one.” With a good deal of emotion, he played Schumann’s slow paced Traumerei, upon hearing which the actors could scarcely laugh.

  The following day, the local paper said the Nankai Alumni Drama Troupe had performed some nonsense—the male lead had no idea what love was and the show was stolen by Lu Qiaozhen, the female lead. Although Mr. Huang did not express anger, the Nankai alums could all see that he was a little embarrassed and felt somewhat at fault.

  Shortly after classes recommenced, he made the long trip from Chongqing to Leshan, especially to see me. That really made me feel glorious, and those who knew about it were moved; soon everyone in that small county town “knew” about it. Every afternoon he reported at Old Yao’s and Old Yao, with that voice of authority no one would ever forget, shouted up to the third floor: “Someone to see Ms. Chi Pang-yuan!” Old Yao addressed all the girls in the second year and above as “Ms.” He said that all the girls who went to the university should have something special about them, but he seldom used that form of address in the dorm, probably because he saw how the girls really were in their daily lives.

  It was in my third year that I sat alone with a boy on the rafts by the river for the first time. The mouth of the Min River at Leshan was the collection and dispersal place for timber, which was bound into rafts and pushed into rows, waiting for the river to swell to be floated down from the mountains to a port on the Yangtze River where it would be sold. After sunset, the students liked to clamber up on the rafts and sit, as it was an atmospheric place to sing and talk. National Day soon came, and he suddenly reappeared.

  Mr. Huang displayed his adoration in this earnest manner, but at the worst time.…

  Since June, my grief for Zhang Dafei had been too heavy and painful to talk about. I didn’t know how I should refer to him—he wasn’t my brother and he wasn’t a lover. We had been in love for years but had never declared our feelings. When I thought about him, the sadness I felt went beyond the individual to encompass all who had died in the war, but I also still harbored complex feelings of grief and loss that I couldn’t express. Anything frivolous said about him was blasphemy. My grief was like that Coleridge wrote about in “Dejection: An Ode”:

  A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

  A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

  Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,

  In word, or sigh, or tear—

  Under normal circumstances, any girl of my age and experience would have wanted an elegant young man writing songs for them or journeying three days upriver to see them, or would be moved to spill their heart for someone who had traveled five hundred li
to see them. But perhaps everything had already been determined by heaven. When Mr. Huang provided the musical accompaniment to Everlasting and Unchanging and mistakenly played a sad song during a happy scene, it had been an omen that we were not destined for each other.

  In my last year at Leshan, at least in the first semester, everyone studied hard. Wuhan University maintained high standards. In the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, for example, Professor Zhu taught English poetry, modern literary criticism, and translation, and as head of the department he had developed a strong curriculum that had produced strong graduates over the last six years. Unfortunately, in the second semester, many of the faculty had new jobs and would start in a matter of months, so they left early. At the same time, a student movement appeared with protest marches both large and small.

  THE STUDENT MOVEMENT

  Victory for China in the War of Resistance came after eight years of persistent tears and bloody struggle, but the sudden arrival of the atomic bomb left the government unprepared. The expectations implied by the word “victory” could not be realized immediately. The difficult days experienced in the rear were gone, never to return. Starting in northern China, the Communists, using common ownership of land and the power of propaganda in the rural areas, expanded rapidly in the rear, and were extremely attractive and convincing to the intellectuals who were dissatisfied with the status quo and passionate about reform. On November 29, three months after victory, progressive students from National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming and Yunnan University initiated a student movement opposed to civil war and American interference in domestic politics. An extremist threw a grenade, injuring thirteen students and killing four. The teachers decided to go on strike, and several dozen published a letter in which they sympathized with the students who opposed civil war. Classes did not resume until January 17.