The Great Flowing River Read online

  After marrying into the Chi family at nineteen, my mother never stepped beyond the tangible or intangible entrance of the estate compound for the next ten years. My father was the only son, so my mother had to do all the things expected of a daughter-in-law; if she had any free time, she had to sew clothes, stitch shoe soles, embroider shoe tops, and, most pleasantly for her, embroider pillowcases in patterns of her own design. She had no friends, nothing of what we call a social life, and was immensely grateful to be allowed to go home twice a year to her parents’ house twenty li away. As I recall, my mother’s life at home was spent standing respectfully attending my grandparents when they ate, and crying in the forage grass. In those ten years, my father came home during four or five summer breaks and stayed at most two or three months. Once when my mother was pregnant, she had a craving for cherries, but there was only one harvest a year in July or August, and countryside peddlers carried baskets of them on their shoulders, selling from town to the villages. One day a peddler arrived at the entrance to our village, and my twenty-one-year-old father ran out to make a purchase. Not having a bag with him, he wrapped the cherries he bought in his long scholar’s gown and carried them home. That bunch of cherries, carried all the way from the village entrance to our house, supported my mother through nine years of loneliness.

  That year he came home from Japan during summer break and said that her name, Yuzhen, was too common and so changed it to Chunyi.

  Later he went directly from Japan to Germany. Letters and photos sent home were addressed to my grandparents and always began with “Greetings Dearest and Respected Parents” and ended by mentioning my mother’s name and sending his regards to her as well. In those days, a man was either embarrassed or did not dare to write a private love letter to his wife. And so two people of the same age were taking two entirely different paths in life. Women stayed at home and were busy with the unending household duties at the estate—cooking three meals a day; polishing the sacrificial vessels for the New Year and preparing for the endless festivals; washing an unending stream of pots, pans, and dishes; and sweeping up the dust that was always blowing in from beyond the Great Wall. In October she watched the hired hands place cabbages and carrots in the cellar, and another year passed. All the while that young man of nineteen out in the wide world devoted himself to books and ideas, taking part in the society and activities of young people. Their paths diverged ever more, and she was no longer capable of imagining how vast and broad was the world that beckoned him. Even if the two of them had wished to pour out their feelings to each other, they no longer shared a common language with which to recount their vastly different life experiences.

  The principal support for my mother in the loneliness of life was the birth of my older brother and me. My father returned every year during the summer break, and afterward a baby would be born, as if it were a token of pledge or a double of himself. The second spring after Father came back home, my older brother, Zhenyi, was born; two years later in the spring, I was born; and the following spring, my little brother, Zhendao, came along. In the small Chi family, our births took on a great deal of significance. In those days of undeveloped medicine, the child mortality rate was high. When my little brother was three years old, he was cavorting inside the house when he burned his hands on the stove. He was taken to Shenyang for treatment and while staying with our aunt, he caught meningitis from our cousin and died two weeks later.

  My mother could not accept the fact of the death of her youngest. She cried and blamed herself and gradually slipped into a state of mental confusion. In traditional society, a young daughter-in-law crying for “no reason” was looked upon as inauspicious, so all she could do was avail herself of the time after serving dinner to hide in the forage grass as the sun was going down and cry. The empty yard behind the house was overgrown with grass as tall as a person. From when it grew a tender green after the snow melted in the spring until it became a vast expanse by snowfall, it provided refuge for her suppressed sobbing. After the snow melted, she took me to the family cemetery one li away, where she fell atop the small mound of my brother’s new grave and cried bitterly. I recall that the cemetery was planted round with pine trees that swayed violently in the spring wind. Pink flowers blossomed all over the cemetery. I went and picked a big bunch amid the sound of my mother’s grief-stricken weeping. When we returned home, my grandmother told me they were herbaceous peonies. Later, when I grew up, every time I saw peonies I would seem to hear my mother’s suppressed weeping. That large expanse of petals, semitransparent and seemingly fragile, possessed a noble and delicate beauty so different from the other wildflowers thereabouts. Later in life, they came to represent for me images of the unending, undying beauty and sadness of much of life, especially the sufferings of the women of that past age.

  After returning home from the family cemetery, my mother would sit listlessly on the kang, staring blankly out the window, and sometimes even when Grandmother called her, she failed to hear. Every year after Tomb-Sweeping Festival the ice would melt and the ferns would sprout. There was one kind called “fiddleheads” that were bitter but fresh and tender, and the village women all went to the vacant land by the riverbank to dig them up; naturally I was happy to go along. When we got to the vacant land, we would see flocks of geese in their V formations flying back from the south, their calls bleak and sorrowful. My mother would frequently stand and stare for a long time, returning home only after everyone else had left.

  LEAVING HOME

  One morning, my maternal grandfather paid a sudden visit to my paternal grandparents. Someone had gone to Xintaizi and told him that his daughter Yuzhen had become so absent-minded and out of sorts that when she was cooking breakfast for her in-laws she had felt no pain when she thrust her hand into the wood-burning stove when adding firewood, and that she had been in this state for some time. Moreover, he had heard someone from Nanjing say that my father had taken up with some fashionable students studying abroad and was living with them, men and women together. My maternal grandfather finally obtained my paternal grandparents’ permission to have my mother and us two children sent to Nanjing to be reunited with my father. If Father wouldn’t have us, then he’d take us all back to his place. I clearly remember the autumn of that year—the trees had shed nearly all their leaves, the sorghum had been harvested, and two hired hands readied a horse-drawn carriage and took us to the Luanshi Train Station five li away; the stones from that area were used in laying the Chinese Eastern Railway. For the trip to Nanjing, I wore a long cotton padded gown with blue flowers on a red background that had been specially made in Shenyang. I was extremely excited.

  Not long after our horse-drawn carriage had left the village, we saw the rows of barren hills just outside it, stony and rugged, where not a single tree grew. I asked, “Ma, what is this hill called?” My mother, who had been listening to my noisy questioning all morning, replied, “This is called the Hill of Weeping Ghosts and Howling Wolves.” The name of the hill along with my mother’s look left an indelible impression on me.

  Now she was setting off with two small children to rejoin her husband, who had been away from home for years, in a big, unimaginable city thousands of li away, where she had no family or relatives. Wouldn’t she have been confused and fearful, exactly like entering a world of weeping ghosts and howling wolves? She knew the future remained uncertain, but she was no longer willing to return to that small village out in the middle of nowhere, where she had been lonely and cut off for a decade, living the life of a widow. My passion and sense for literature actually came from my mother, who had never received an education above middle school. She turned the natural phenomena of the vast earth, the threats of wild beasts, and the unspeakable loneliness of life into many a story on a summer night, providing me with instruction and inspiration for a lifetime. Some of her rural tales were of gentle longings and sorrows; others were filled with terror, like the Hill of Weeping Ghosts and Howling Wolves, unembellished, powerfully
symbolizing her fear of a big southern city as well as her anxieties about her fate.

  The clearest memory I have from childhood is my maternal grandfather taking my brother by the hand and my mother taking me by the hand, and riding the train from Shenyang that traveled without stopping day and night. Outside the train window, there was no end to the fields, long harvested and cleared of wheat and sorghum stalks. In addition to the sparse windbreaks of trees, there was the dark brown soil stretching all the way to the horizon. My maternal grandfather said that plowing would commence the following year only after the thaw in the third month.

  Arriving in Beiping after passing Shanhaiguan, we switched to the Tianjin–Pukou Railway to get to Nanjing, a trip that lasted three days and two nights. As we pulled into Xiaguan, my mother looked out the window and through the thick white steam saw him, a stranger, handsome and confident, with spirited eyes, standing ramrod straight on the platform. Even late in life his back was always straight and he never stooped. As the steam slowly dispersed, the wife he had been forced to marry at nineteen stepped off the train, her footsteps hesitant and her hand that held mine trembling like an elm losing its leaves. A shy look on her pretty face masked her joy. Standing beside her on the platform were two country kids dressed in brand-new padded cotton gowns.

  My maternal grandfather stayed in Nanjing about ten days before getting back on the train and returning to his home beyond Shanhaiguan. At his departure, my mother cried, reluctant to be separated from him. My maternal grandparents had four boys before they had a girl and she was much cherished as she grew up, and now he had to leave her behind in this vast southern sea of people, with no family. In those days, my mother often told my brother and me, “If you don’t study hard, your father will leave us.”

  From a very young age I had learned to worry and never slept soundly. Sometimes I would awaken at night and hear my father talking softly to my mother. His voice was warm and steady, and I would peacefully go back to sleep.

  Soon after arriving in Nanjing, I was sent to the local elementary school for first grade. Recently arrived from rural northeast China, I was very skinny and rustic and could not understand the local dialect. The only thing I understood my teacher say on the first day of school was, “Drinking one moment and peeing the next is not allowed.” I found going to school frightening and had a hard time making the few friends I did. One classmate who liked me gave me a colorful red and green eraser, something I had never seen in the countryside, which made me happy. Two days later he got upset and demanded the eraser back, which made me feel terribly sad. To this day I can still remember that eraser; when I began to travel, I always bought pretty erasers.

  One other thing that left a deep impression happened early one spring when the snow was melting. To get to school, I had to walk down an alley called “three alleys,” which was all mud save for two dry strips on either side that had to be treaded upon with caution. Having always been curious, I looked at everything as I walked. That day, as I was walking to school with my brother, I stepped into the mud by accident, and my cotton shoes sank into the muck. My brother, afraid of being late, hit me, and I started to cry. At that moment a car pulled up and stopped, and my father was seated inside. He told the driver to pull my shoes out of the muck and help me put them on, after which they drove away. When he returned home that night, he said that children were not allowed to be taken to school in a government car, nor were we allowed to use paper with an official letterhead. This was because we had to distinguish between public and private, and also because a child shouldn’t develop a desire to show off.

  When I was spanked for the first and probably only time, he informed the six-year-old me in the same tone of voice that I shouldn’t run wild as I had in the countryside, I shouldn’t pick flowers in the parks, and even if I did, I shouldn’t lie about it. He said, “The reason I spanked you is so that you will remember.” This very early impression made me rarely ever tell a lie. Even if I told a small white lie to make someone happy, I always felt guilty.

  THE GREAT FLOWING RIVER THAT COULD NOT BE CROSSED

  My father, Chi Shiying, as I remember, was a gentleman of mild temperament his entire life. He said that was the real wellspring of his ideals—to be a man, you had to comport yourself like one.

  In his youth, he had accompanied my grandmother to stay where Grandfather was garrisoned and got a taste of barracks life as well as the chance to see many northern villages, thereby becoming profoundly aware of how blinkered most citizens were, almost entirely ignorant of the fate of their country, and themselves. Behind the façade of pure and simple virtue was indifference and foolishness. When he was fifteen years old he began to attend the Tianjin Anglo-Chinese College and for three years he received an English-style education for the cultivation of a courteous gentleman. In Tianjin he often heard the people from Shanhaiguan mock the roughness of Zhang Zuolin’s Fengtian Army. As regular as the flag-raising ceremony at the Anglo-Chinese College, every day there was a morning class devoted to Bible reading. Although the students were not forced to convert, it did lead my father to begin considering questions of the soul and the meaning of life.

  Obtaining official funding to study in Japan at eighteen, he got to know more about a modernized country. People there were generally brought up to be sanitary and law-abiding, and those who had a higher level of education were concerned about civility and manners, encouraged the pursuit of learning, and pledged fierce loyalty to their country, which was why Japan, despite its small size, became a powerful Asian country.

  He entered the preparatory course of Tokyo First High School to study Japanese. A year later he was assigned to the School of Natural Sciences at the Kanazawa Fourth High School, one of only eight high schools in Japan back then, which was rich in artistic and cultural tradition. Kanazawa, located in central Japan overlooking the Sea of Japan, was referred to as Kaga Hyakumangoku after the sixteenth century. All the departments of that school were strong, and language instruction was emphasized. In addition to Japanese, every week there were eight hours of instruction in English and German. In his three years there, he laid a solid foundation for a lifetime of reading. Initially, he frequently attended church where he read works on Christianity, but finding them wanting, he began reading works of philosophy. The teacher who had the greatest influence on him in those days was Nishida Kitaro, who first taught at Kanazawa Fourth High School but later taught philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University. He guided my father’s reading in works of philosophy, economics, and socialism, especially The Tale of Poverty by Kawakami Hajime, and others that permitted him to see that society was filled with various kinds of inequality. He didn’t have much money to buy books, so it was arranged with the bookstore that he could return the books if they were still in good condition after he finished reading them and have 80 percent of his money back to buy other books. It rained frequently in Kanazawa and snowed heavily in winter, so he spent a good deal of time indoors reading. With the passage of time he went from being a smart and active youth to a deep-thinking, well-read young man.

  At twenty-two, he followed in the footsteps of his cousin and went to Berlin to study economics and philosophy, earnestly reading Marx’s Das Kapital and other works about socialism. But he felt he still had too many unresolved doubts, such that he could not establish an ultimate intellectual foundation, and he was rather hesitant. That was just after Germany’s defeat. Inflation was bad and Chinese and Japanese silver money was worth a lot, so he and his classmates lived comfortably and frequently got together to enjoy themselves, learning more about German society while neglecting their studies. The following semester, he transferred to Heidelberg University where he studied under the great philosophers of history Heinrich Rickert and Alfred Weber, the younger brother of the recently deceased Max Weber. He went there because he was attracted by their reputations, so he listened eagerly and often asked questions after class. The Philosophy of History school analyzed the phenomenon of life through the
history of political and economic thought, elucidating the necessity of rational thinking in the process of research while reminding him that regional realities were different and that one cannot with impulsive enthusiasm force a theory onto general policy, as in Das Kapital. This provided him with a lesson for a lifetime and the firm belief that only true knowledge and rational education were capable of saving a weak China by a subtle and gradual process, not via some impassioned mass movement. Arriving at the goal of class revolution by means fair or foul would leave many social and cultural problems that could only be resolved through even more rational solutions.

  During those two years, he would cross the bridge and think while pacing along the banks of the River Neckar. Those would be the best days of his life. The rapid flow of the river in spring made him think of the turbid Liao River at thaw, as his youthful ambition rose and surged like the water. He recalled a scene when he was five in which he wore a new pair of cloth shoes and walked along the bank of the Liao River, where he jumped and gamboled quite happily around his mother. He then heard a voice in his heart say: Go back to set up a school in my vast, beautiful homeland. I must dedicate myself wholeheartedly to acquiring a skill, and go back to set up a school in the most rational way. There will come a day when I will pay you back for your kindness to me in raising me with everything I have learned and know today.

  The greatest setback for him was his cousin dying of tuberculosis in Freiburg in southern Germany. At first he concealed the truth, but shortly thereafter his uncle died, and as he couldn’t explain away why the son didn’t hasten home for the funeral, he had to return home with his cousin’s ashes. After his return to Shenyang, the family was steadfast in not allowing him to leave again, so his dream of an education came to a halt. He was twenty-five that year. After the funeral, he left the estate and returned to Shenyang to find another way of continuing his studies. In Shenyang in those days, for a student with official funding to return from Germany was taken very seriously. General Guo Songling, who was a classmate and good friend of his father’s at the Fengtian Military Academy, felt that it was inconvenient for him to stay at a hotel, so invited him to stay at his house. On the northern frontier in January, snow and ice made the roads impassable but perfect for staying in and talking through the night, and they discussed everything from local to national and on to world events. When General Guo had important guests, my father would be invited to join in the conversation. The newly returned student thus had the opportunity to look at the local situation from a broader perspective, whereas the guests also found what he had seen in Japan and Germany to be of great interest. This was especially the case when he talked about Germany after its defeat in World War I, with its economy on the verge of collapse and the people living in difficult circumstances. But the people demonstrated in every way their national dignity and firm determination to overcome the difficulties. In their old houses with stone foundations, the columns still in good order, and the trees out front along the cobblestone streets, one could feel the stability provided by firm cultural roots. But northeast China in those days, coveted by both Japan and Russia, was in a dangerous situation, so in what way could the tangled conflicts of warlords make any sense? When would the people of China enjoy universal education and extricate themselves from the condition of being simple-minded and ordered about by others? He had no idea that those long conversations on snowy nights and those chance meetings, during which everyone was filled with indignation and a sense of a mission to reform, would change the course of his life.