The Great Flowing River Page 24

The student movement spread to universities all over China. From 1946 to 1948, university campuses were filled with political unrest and shouting. In the forty years after the Communists occupied the country, university education became a political tool and professional academic standards were eliminated.

  In the student movement as I experienced it, Wen Yiduo (1899–1946), a professor at National Southwestern Associated University, was extremely influential. He was a famous poet, and the literary youth of the day could all recite his “Dead Water,” a signature work with a sense of the times, and “Perhaps,” his elegy on the death of his young daughter. To this very day, I can still remember the sixteen lines of the poem and continue to find them moving:

  Perhaps you have wept till you can weep no more.

  Perhaps, perhaps you want to go to sleep.

  Then tell the nightingale not to cough,

  the frog not to croak, and the bat not to fly.

  Do not let the sun stir your sight,

  nor the cool breeze brush your eyebrows.

  Let no one startle you.

  I’ll hold a umbrella of shading pine to protect you as you sleep.

  Perhaps you hear the worm turn the soil,

  hear the grass roots absorb the water.

  Perhaps you hear the music,

  more beautiful than man’s curses.

  First close your eyes tight,

  then I’ll let you sleep, I’ll let you sleep.

  I’ll cover you gently with the yellow earth,

  have the spirit money slowly take flight.

  Very early on, Wen Yiduo had a genius for literature; at thirteen he tested into Qinghua School, the precursor of Qinghua University, where he finished the middle school and university curricula and also laid a foundation of Western learning. He was very patriotic and took part in the May Fourth Movement, and while studying art in the United States, he and his classmates organized the Great River Association to promote nationalism in Chinese culture. After he returned to China, he taught art and actively participated in cultural activities, becoming famous for his poetry.

  At the beginning of the War of Resistance, he trudged with students from Qinghua, Beiping University, and Nankai from Hunan to the newly established National Southwestern Associated University in Yunnan, where he taught in the Department of Literature, with noteworthy studies of the Songs of the South. Teachers had a difficult time in Kunming during the war, and Wen Yiduo had five children. He supplemented his income by carving seals. The Japanese bombings coupled with the difficult lives of the people and the active courting of intellectuals by the Communists encouraged Wen Yiduo to study the communist system after reading Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China. His friends in the party underground encouraged him to participate in the Chinese Democratic Alliance, as being more advantageous to the democracy movement. The book Wen Yiduo, by Wen Lipeng and Zhang Tongxia, his son and daughter-in-law, mentions that he adopted the spirit of “If I don’t enter hell, who will?” to meet the demands of his new life of struggle. His old friend Luo Longji said, “Yiduo was very changeable, and changed quickly and suddenly.”

  Wen Yiduo began to write and lecture, sharply criticizing and attacking the government and all conservative traditions. For example, he called conservative Qian Mu stupid and stubborn. On the afternoon of July 15, 1946, after a ceremony memorializing the murdered Li Gongpu, Wen Yiduo was assassinated, leaving behind his five small children.

  Wen Yiduo’s death triggered the student movement across the country. For the Communists in Yan’an, it was more effective than thousands of troops and horses, and it had a far-reaching impact on the fate of the country. His impact on the attitude of intellectuals toward politics is worth studying by scholars of cultural history, but in the academic community on both sides of the strait, seldom does looking forward and back rise above the personal.

  I recall my father saying that any intellectual under the age of twenty who is not enamored of Communism lacks passion, and anyone who becomes a Communist after the age of twenty is immature. I frequently wonder how Wen Yiduo could have believed that China could be saved by toppling the Nationalists and replacing them with the Communists after reading about the Communist system (not communism) when he was forty-five. Did those two years of sharp calls for regime change arise from the dispassionate judgment of a middle-aged scholar? And my generation, after eight years of suffering and with the cities still in shambles, responded to his passionate call by marching in protest, not going to class, not allowing for freedom of thought, and neglecting their studies, with most falling for all sorts of hateful movements, ending in the Cultural Revolution. Did he, who was an idol to the youth, ever think about the consequences of impulsive passions?

  The book Wen Yiduo records that among his possessions was an unfinished seal carving that said, “His foolishness knows no limits.” Regardless of how you explain it—as the juncture between life and death or the “darkest moment before the dawn”—this “badge of self-encouragement” explains his final decision to solemnly follow in the footsteps of Qu Yuan and Byron. Thoughts of regret and self-recrimination will come to most readers; after all, he did write many sensitive and wonderful poems, deeply studied the essence of Chinese characters, and was in the process of carving a stone seal with five characters, so he should have already been clear as to what he was about. Although in those two fanatical years he couldn’t have foreseen that his death would not bring happiness to his beloved country and family.

  If in 1945 the central government had been able to catch its breath, and the people regain their livelihood and rebuild China with an attitude of protecting the country, could China have risen up earlier, avoiding millions of deaths due to class struggle and a protracted period of suffering for several generations?

  These have been among my greatest perplexities, laments, and resentments over the years as I have thought about the times I was forced to participate in protest marches in Sichuan and Wuhan.

  THE END OF MY STAY AT LESHAN

  In that chaotic November, when joy and anxiety ran together, Pastor Ji Zhiwen, the preacher, was invited to Leshan by the Inland Mission of the Methodist Church. He advised me to be baptized to calm myself for the longer road and to preserve the soberness of my soul. The congregation to which he preached was largely composed of faculty and students from Wuhan University; his knowledge and the spirit of his talk were of a high order and did not provoke political mockery from either the left or the right. Over those few days, he led the singing of hymns in his Zhejiang accent; one with which I was less familiar had the refrain: “Wash me, make me pull grass breathing.” In those days, the church didn’t have the common hymnal for congregations, When I was at Nankai, I grew accustomed to hearing standard Mandarin spoken with a Tianjin accent (they used to laugh at my northeastern accent). I figured that it was probably like when I sat by the river and could hear the pulse of nature and its harmonious breathing. Only later, after I arrived in Shanghai and someone gave me a copy of Hymns of Universal Praise, did I learn that the original was “I shall be whiter than snow,” a metaphor meaning to be washed clean. However, that first impression of “pull grass breathing” was hard to forget.

  On Christmas Eve that year, Pastor Han from the United States invited a number of the students who attended church to his house to celebrate the holiday. Entertainment was arranged for after dinner. In one instance, the boys and girls had to draw lots, and those with the same numbers formed a pair who had to answer questions that had been written down, competing to see who could answer the most questions correctly. When writing the answers, the pair was covered with a choir robe so they could consult in secret. After the answer had been written down, it would be taken from beneath the robe. Mr. Yu, a fourth-year electrical engineering student, and I ended up together. When he approached me holding the robe, I felt more nervous and excited than I ever had before.

  I recall my first winter in Leshan just after I arrived, when I was ignorant of everything, watchi
ng from the dorm window of the room shared by Yu Xianyi, Zhai Yiwo, Feng Jialu, and Lu Qiaozhen as the male students in a torchlight procession walked down White Pagoda Street back to Dorm 6 of the Engineering School after a concert. Around a hundred people shouted and clamored happily. Halfway, a large group began singing songs from the evening’s performance. My elder classmates all pointed at a tall, handsome young man: “Oh, look, that’s Mr. Yu.”

  He was singing the “Drinking Song” from La Traviata. That confident tenor gradually rose above the other voices, passed under the window, and moved on its way. In the window I could clearly see the joy and adoration of my older female classmates. Two years later, his name resonated throughout the girls’ dorm.

  There I was, shoulder to shoulder with such a “stranger” under a choir robe, whispering in secret. It was so romantic, I could scarcely breathe! To make matters worse, I couldn’t answer the first question asking the names of the three greatest Western classical composers and the second question asking for the identity of the three greatest conductors. In the dark, he wrote out six names. Following that were questions about Bible stories and names from mythology, none of which I knew. My only contribution was to provide the name of the male protagonist in Jane Eyre. Although my shame was concealed in the darkness under the robe, it was still one of the ten worst moments in my life. That evening we ended up with the most correct answers, all of which he provided. In addition to the excitement, this opportunity of “putting our heads together” allowed me to see that there was a world beyond my life of twenty years.

  In those days, the musical education at Nankai Middle School was considered among the best, and our chorus was well known in the rear. Nearly half of the songs we performed were from the English One Hundred and One Songs; we sang in the original language, and songs of the War of Resistance were our forte. I never studied music history, either in class or on my own. The radios at Nankai and in the Time and Tide office broadcast only news of the war and political discussions; there were no systematic music programs. During the War of Resistance, Mr. Yu had been unwilling to receive a Japanese education, so he had transferred from Shanghai to the rear as a student from fallen areas. He was assigned to Wuhan University along with Yao Guanfu and Su Yuxi. When I graduated, Yao Guanfu sent me the complete works of Shakespeare from Shanghai as a gift. It’s still on my shelf today. Su Yuxi also later became a friend of mine, but he died in the political struggles shortly after victory. They both had received good educations in Shanghai and had a rich knowledge of Western culture and art, and both became dear friends. Mr. Yu had received voice training from a famous teacher. His father had been the head of the Episcopal Church in Shanghai, but he had already passed away.

  At dusk on New Year’s Day, he suddenly showed up at the girls’ dorm (it was said he’d never been there before). Old Yao’s shouted announcement brought me downstairs. Mr. Yu gave me a copy of Great Composers in English and wished me a happy new year. He also asked if it would be okay to come and visit after exams. As I nodded, he strode out the main door (later he said that with so many eyes on him he had grown nervous).

  During winter break, he invited me to walk around the grassy slope at the Baptist Church. For two twenty-year-olds, our lives couldn’t have been more different. He talked about the changes in Shanghai after it fell to the Japanese; I told him about the patriotic education at Nankai and running for shelter during the air raids in Chongqing. He said he was going to Chengdu to see his older sister, who had come with him to Sichuan after graduating from college, was working for the American military advisors in Chengdu, and really liked literature.

  At the end of February that year, just after classes recommenced, the students at Wuhan University, like those in the middle schools and universities throughout the country, began massive demonstrations to protest the “secret agreement at the Yalta Conference” and demanded that Russia withdraw from the northeast and commemorate the memory of Zhang Xinfu.

  Zhang Xinfu was an engineer and a comrade of my father’s in the anti-Japanese underground in the northeast. After victory, he was sent from Chongqing to Liaoning, where he was to take over the largest coal mine in the country at Fushun. On January 16 as he was passing through Shenyang, he was bound and taken off the train by the Communists to a snowy place where he was killed, along with eight others. The Russian Communists quickly dismantled and moved the large factory machines in the northeast. Each time they left a place, they helped the Chinese Communists garrison it. This was the second nationwide student movement after the first demonstrations, which had been launched the previous November by National Southwestern Associated University and Yunnan University to oppose civil war and American interference in Chinese politics. Some of my classmates, whose political positions were clear, organized activities with stridently antagonistic slogans. The protesters squeezed into the damaged street that had been bombed in 1939 and still not repaired. The street was so narrow that the banners couldn’t be lifted, and all that could be heard were slogans being chanted till people grew hoarse: “Down with … down with … Long live! Long live!” Soon afterward, the protest march commenced and the target of the “down with” changed. In addition to the commonly chanted slogan “Long live the Republic of China,” others were frequently heard and changed.

  I participated in the march commemorating Zhang Xinfu, because he was an anti-Japanese underground comrade of my father’s of many years. I had grown up together with his kids during the war. However, I did not join in the planning before the demonstration or utter a sound during the march; I just kept up with everyone, expressing my sincere grief. But where White Pagoda Street met Jade Hall Street, I was pushed to the side of the street. Later I realized that since I didn’t belong to any political camp and if I didn’t actively participate, I would always be pushed to the side of the street. If I were to stand up at any gathering and say, “We should first study hard,” I would have been immediately charged and trampled to death, so I instinctively chose a lesser accusation of “living a befuddled life.”

  Half a century later, from the opposite side of the Taiwan Strait, I looked back at that ancient city at the confluence of three rivers and the sight of those classmates of mine, who for so many years had received their shabby clothes and insufficient food from the government, hoarse and exhausted from shouting slogans. Their anger at China’s weakness and many years of chaos exploded in those collective demonstrations and that unceasing student movement, ending with the toppling of the government of the War of Resistance and the welcoming of the “liberation” by the Communist Party. Their joy was, in fact, as transient as dew. Those classmates who went to China to visit relatives after the opening up said that few of the student leaders or political activists were satisfied and had ended up either dead or suffering degradation over the years from Liberation to the Cultural Revolution, owing to their strong idealism. My generation was one consumed by the times. Many people were forced to emigrate or wander by life’s difficulties or disaster. Taking up a load and putting it on their back, a single person or a whole family would start off to open up uncultivated land, with the hope of setting up a household. But my generation, with our universal education, ended up scattered and set adrift or sunk because of different political ideologies. Fifty years later, I returned to Beiping and got together with old classmates and friends. More than eighty female classmates all had the same ideals back in those days, but after 1950, very few had advanced in their education or were somewhat successful professionally. Those who hadn’t seen their families in ruins and scattered were fortunate. Almost an entire generation had been sacrificed to politics.

  When I was pushed to the side of the street during the demonstration, the roommate with whom I had locked arms was carried away, and I looked like a deserter as I walked home with my back to the wall.

  At that moment I saw Mr. Yu over the shouting protesters separated from me as he stood by the stone wall at the corner of Shuixi Gate, wearing a dark gray overcoat an
d looking at me with a sphinxlike expression.

  After the demonstrators had passed, he crossed the street and said, “So you also joined the demonstration!” I replied, “Uncle Zhang Xinfu was a good friend of my parents and they worked together for years in the anti-Japanese underground, so I felt I should join in the march to show my true grief.” He said that up until before his father died of a heart attack, it had been hoped that he would go to a free country for his education and not stay in Shanghai, which was occupied and ruled by the Japanese. He said here, however, neither the right nor the left had sought him for their political activities, probably thinking that the guy from Shanghai had nothing to offer but good English and a talent for singing.

  When the demonstrations grew more frequent, we continued to set out every morning from the dorm for the Confucius Temple to watch. Sometimes the demonstrations were announced, sometimes not. Few people stood in the classrooms and hallways and sometimes a teacher would show up carrying a book, but there were not enough students to hold class; sometimes half the class would show up but the teacher wouldn’t. So we seldom had class. The school was filled with a dispirited atmosphere.

  We had looked forward to victory through years of life-and-death struggle, but we enjoyed less than six months of happiness.

  BIRDS SING IN THE FOREST WITH THE MUSIC OF NATURE

  At around nine in the morning, the three or four of us who memorized English poems together as we walked left the Confucius Temple and took the stone steps on the left side of the square to Dingdong Street. An old man who sold roasted potatoes always sat at the side of the stone steps. Buying an average-size potato would keep your hands warm along the way, and it was just right to eat once you were back at the dorm. On County Street, a small shop sold small homemade sesame cookies, which were fresh and crisp yet soft. Whenever we passed by the store, we had to buy a small bag. We chatted as we passed Shuixi Gate onto White Pagoda Street. Passing the gate to the Baptist Church, we saw Mr. Yu striding through the gate of Boys’ Dorm 6. My companions hurriedly left me to face him alone as they scurried into the dorm.