The Great Flowing River Read online

  After a while, my father changed his surname again, this time to Xu, and I had to change schools on account of this. At that school there were some English missionaries who taught oral English, but I was only in the third or fourth grade and did not usually use English, so it was soon completely forgotten.

  After bearing the surname Xu for a while, I was renamed Zhang. Because my father kept changing his surname, my mother kept changing from Mrs. Wang to Mrs. Xu, and so on. Often before going to class, I would ask, “Mom, what’s my surname today?” It was oddly funny for a seven- or eight-year-old child to be asking her own surname.

  In those days, surrounded by danger and owing to our frequent moves, my mother no longer cried. In those uncertain times, the relationship between my parents deepened and grew stronger, my mother being happy to be able to share my father’s troubles, and that kind of wholehearted acceptance and support provided me with the greatest sense of security growing up. Shortly before she died at the age of eighty-three, we talked about a woman’s right of choice in marriage in the new age, and I asked her if she still would have chosen my father. At the time, she smiled without answering; in a few days she said, “I’d still marry him. Although he wasn’t a man who put family first, he was a real gentleman, warm and untarnished.”

  Returning to Nanjing from Tianjin, we rented a house on Fuhougang Street. It was a small new house facing a large open space of empty land filled with locust trees that were covered with racemes of fragrant yellow blossoms in early summer. I have loved them more than anything else all my life, and like herbaceous peonies, they give me a strong sense of family happiness.

  Every morning, I would follow the newly laid tracks of the Jiangnan Railroad to the Drum Tower Elementary School, along with Duan Yonglan from the neighboring lane and her cousin Liu Zhaotian. Along the way there were always dandelions and an assortment of other little flowers in bloom.

  Right after the start of summer vacation in 1933, my mother gave birth to my younger sister. My father chose the name Ningyuan for her in memory of our homeland, Liaoning Province.

  She was a plump, cute, and extremely healthy baby, who smiled all day long but would often cry when night fell. My mother was afraid she’d wake my father, so she would hold her and walk around the house.

  Mama Li, who had just arrived to help look after the children, was concerned about not being sufficiently helpful, so one day she asked a comrade in the underground resistance named Yang Mengzhou, who had come to Nanjing to report on his work (he was living with us at the time, waiting to set off for Xinjiang to offer his services to Sheng Shicai) to help her write an edict from her hometown in Fengyang, Anhui: “Lord of Heaven, Lord of Earth, my home has a child who cries at night; passersby and gentlemen, please recite this three times, and the child will sleep till the sky grows light.” She asked my older brother to paste it on a telephone pole on his way to school.

  As we passed it every day, we looked to see if anyone had stopped to recite it three times. We were also afraid lest our father see it and get angry. While in the Nanjing central government, his greatest ideal was to get rid of superstition and corrupt customs so that all the populace could found the new China.

  During the time I was attending Drum Tower Elementary School, Nanjing was filled with a new spirit. I was nine years old and I remember the slogans of the New Life Movement, which elementary school students helped paste up; the slogans included “No Spitting” and “Stir Oneself to Be Strong.”

  No one mentions these nowadays, but I remember when I had just arrived in Taiwan, “No Spitting” was still an object of struggle. On the streets were slogans such as: “Be Hardworking and Thrifty,” “Don’t Drink,” Don’t Gamble,” “Eliminate Superstition,” and so on.

  From 1928 to 1937, China, with its capital in Nanjing, was filled with hope, and there was new construction everywhere. Some call it “the golden decade” in modern history. Official Japanese records mentioned that their military advocated war as soon as possible, because if they didn’t strike now before China became strong, they would never be able to strike at all.

  LIME-SCATTERED CHILDHOOD

  I became sick quite suddenly in the summer of 1934.

  Ever since I was little, my trachea and lungs had been in poor shape. That summer I suffered from pneumonia twice, with my life in the balance, and many times it seemed to hang by a thread.

  My parents were deeply concerned and a doctor told them, “With lungs like hers, she should be in the dry north if she is to improve.” My grandmother was still in Beiping then, and when she learned of my condition, she wrote saying, “Send her here to Beiping.” My grandmother herself was not well, and owing to my father’s connections, she frequently went to the German hospital there.

  I remember taking the Tianjin–Pukou Railway with my father to Beiping without knowing the real reason for the trip, but because my father himself was taking me, I was extremely happy.

  The train traveled for about two days and two nights. On the second day, when we crossed the steel bridge over the Yellow River, I ate in the dining car for the first time. My father cut the steak into small pieces for me, showing me how to hold a knife and cut with it. Amid the steady, vigorous rumble of the train as we crossed the long steel bridge, I sat facing my father for the first time, and I still clearly remember the happiness I felt.

  After the German doctor at the hospital in Beiping examined me, he said to my father, “If the child continues in this way, you will most likely lose her. It would be best to send her to a sanatorium.”

  My father took me by the hand and took me to the Western Hills Sanatorium twenty li from the city, which was a German–Chinese joint venture located at the foot of the Western Hills. The German doctor had assured us that I would receive excellent treatment there.

  The sanatorium was run in Western fashion, with each patient having an individual room. Even though I was the only child there, I too lived alone. Every night when I went to bed alone in the room I was frightened. I stayed for one year and was frightened the whole time.

  In those days, pulmonary tuberculosis was a serious illness, and some people were cured while others were not. For this reason, people often died at the sanatorium, after which lime would be scattered in their room. At first I didn’t understand; later I knew that if lime was scattered it meant that someone had died. I didn’t understand what death was, but as soon as I saw lime being spread, I’d start to cry.

  There was an Old Wang there who brought meals to everyone. He was stout, had a pale complexion, and was probably thirty or forty years old. He had a daughter about my age and always called me “Little Girl.” Every time I cried, Old Wang would say, “Don’t cry, Little Girl. I’ll go boil a potato for you.”

  I loved to eat potatoes more than anything else when I was little. Even today when I go out to eat with friends, whoever has a round boiled potato will give it to me. Every time I think about this, I feel an irrepressible sadness.

  Every Saturday, my grandmother, who was over sixty, would take a sedan chair for twenty li to visit me at the sanatorium. Each time she left, I would tearfully try to climb out of bed and go after her, but I was not allowed out of bed, so I just shouted, “I want to go home with you! I want to go home with you!”

  Far away in her sedan chair, my grandmother could still hear me crying, but she couldn’t take me away. Once when she was about to leave, she also cried, her tears flowing sideways along her wrinkles. I only realize now what the ancients meant in their writings by “tears flow sideways.”

  In the sanatorium was a female patient by the name of Zhang Caiping, who was probably twenty-five or twenty-six. I called her Sister Zhang. Old Wang said she had become sick on account of having been disappointed in love. She was very interested in me because she thought I was a clever child and I understood everything she said to me, so she often secretly invited me to her room (the sanatorium did not permit us to visit the rooms of other patients). She had many volumes of new literat
ure, most of them translations from around 1935. I read all of her books, of which I still remember Lin Qinnan’s translation of La Dame aux Camélias; his was a style I really enjoyed in those days.

  I remember very clearly one afternoon, lime was being scattered in her room, so I asked Old Wang, “Why are they scattering lime in Sister Zhang’s room?”

  Old Wang said, “Little Girl, I’ll boil a potato for you.”

  Although I really didn’t understand what death was, I knew she had died. That was the first time in my life that I perceived death’s relationship to me, all on account of lime being scattered in my friend’s room.

  I think I was probably pretty distraught and cried all day, making it hard for my grandmother to bear. Throughout my life, I have often thought of my grandmother, who worried about her granddaughter from the day I was born until she herself was old and ill. I often feel that I owe her too much. A few years later, we roamed for quite some time from Hankou to Chongqing, where we received news indirectly that she had passed away. I couldn’t believe that that warm body that had held me in the winter could ever become cold.

  When my parents reached seventy, they moved to Neihu and lived there peacefully until they died. That period of time was when we most frequently got together and were happiest, it also being the time my father and I talked most closely. One day after dinner, he saw me to the edge of the lake to wait for the bus, and I mentioned to him how I had felt at the Western Hills Sanatorium and that it had made me timid and afraid of the dark for the rest of my life.

  “You were very cruel to send me alone to that hospital on that barren mountain.”

  He sighed and said, “No one knew anything about child psychology in those days. I was involved in the revolution for many years and constantly in danger, and didn’t know a child’s psychology could be so complicated. I spent one-third of my monthly salary for you to stay in the sanatorium, and my only hope was that you would live. Friends and relatives all said I was a good father!”

  We sat on the bench at the bus stop without saying anything for a long time, and only came back to ourselves with the arrival of the bus.

  I’m sure he was thinking, If I had known this at the time, what would I have done? But I knew how very fortunate I had been: my parents bore me, raised me, and strove to keep me here.

  Without much of an alternative during my year in the sanatorium, reading became my sole pastime, gradually becoming a lifelong interest. Books were like a magnet that drew me toward them. Sometimes when I think back on my attachment to books that was so deeply rooted, I could describe it as a lifetime of happiness rising out of misfortune.

  I remember after leaving the sanatorium, I saw a Chinese edition of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations at the house of an uncle who had studied abroad. Naturally I didn’t understand it, but read it with great pleasure. I read practically everything I could lay my hands on, all the while reading Little Friend magazine, despite scorning the cat and dog cartoons inside. I still remember connecting the numbers to draw a dog.

  A year later, the doctor declared me cured and my father came and took me back to Nanjing. My younger sister was already nearly two years old.

  Initially, I returned to Drum Tower Elementary School, but none of my classmates would play with me. I understood later it was because their elders had heard that I had contracted tuberculosis and had spent time in a sanatorium. A classmate by the name of Wanfang, who, I remember, had been my best friend and who was quite a charming little beauty, suddenly blurted out to me, “My mom told me not to play with you.” I didn’t have any idea what I had done wrong and didn’t understand that people were simply afraid of being infected.

  Later we moved to Ninghai Road in the Xinshe District, where I attended the Shanxi Road Elementary School. Because I was a transfer student, most of my interaction was with other transfer students and marginal students who had been held back, and we all got along well. My essay writing was excellent, and the teacher lavished attention on me. Gradually, my health improved and I graduated from elementary school without a care or worry, and a lot of nice memories from that year.

  MOTHER AND HER RELATIVES FROM HOME

  After Zhang Zuolin, who controlled northeast China, was assassinated with a bomb by the Japanese army in June 1928, that part of China seemed leaderless. Zhang Xueliang had negotiated a settlement with the central government in Nanjing and the flag of the Republic was raised before the New Year. This grand changing of the flags eliminated the greatest obstacle to the Northern Expedition.

  That fall, the Whampoa Military Academy (after it moved from Guangzhou to Nanjing, the name was changed to the Central Military Academy) began recruiting students from all over the country for its eighth class, and the party asked my father to assist in the recruitment from the northeast. When my father met with Chairman Chiang Kai-shek, he suggested that the hundred-plus students from there who passed the first exam should be accepted so that these young people, who for so many years had possessed only a concept of region, could develop a concept of nation and thereby become the seeds of revolution, possessed of modern military knowledge. For this reason, from the ninth class to the twelfth, Zhang Zhizhong, who was the dean of instruction at the academy, entrusted my father to appoint someone to go to the northeast every year to recruit a hundred high school graduates. After the Mukden Incident, students from the northeast accounted for almost one-quarter of the whole academy. These young people whose homeland had fallen to the Japanese were assigned to all branches of the armed services after their graduation, where they became a vital force in the War of Resistance. Few of them were able to return to their homeland.

  In addition to students recruited for the military academy, another twenty or thirty came to Nanjing to enter the Central Political Academy and the Central Police Academy. Every Sunday, my parents took turns entertaining this group of young students who ventured so far from their homeland. One of the reasons we moved from Fuhougang Street to Ninghai Road in the Xinshe District was to have more room to entertain, but also because my mother was expecting again. Soon thereafter, Jingyuan, my youngest sister, was born. That was certainly the happiest time for my mother—at thirty she had become the head of her own household.

  That newly built, cream-colored house had a big courtyard, and my mother quickly planted all sorts of flowers. Her bedroom window on the second floor faced Zijin Mountain, the highest point in Nanjing, and Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum sits at the foot of the north side of the mountain. The hue of the cloud mist that circles the peak is an indicator of the day’s weather.

  One of my father’s jobs was looking after the students who had come to Nanjing from the northeast, and it was a joy for my mother to invite them over to the house to eat every week, her greatest comfort in her nostalgia for her homeland. We had a cook from Shandong by the name of Old Song (who was with us through ten years of exile in Sichuan). Every Sunday, we’d invite a table of students from the Whampoa Military Academy and the Central Political Academy for some northern fare and in my mother’s heart, each one of them was family. She enjoyed listening to them talk about the seasons at home, their relatives, and their crops.

  After moving to Ninghai Road, she discovered a fairly large courtyard behind the house. She bought various sized jars and, with the exception of the hottest days of summer, she and Mama Li were always busy pickling vegetables (after the cabbage was blanched, it would be fermented in the jars for more than a month, after which it became a crispy, white pickled vegetable). She also had someone buy a copper hot pot in Beiping. Before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, more homesick hearts than I can say were warmed by the Chi family’s pork belly and pickled vegetable hotpot!

  My mother also believed that soybean paste from northeast China was the best. In Taiwan it’s known as sweetened soybean paste, but in fact it isn’t sweet. Soybeans are good and plentiful in northeast China, so most families make their own paste. Mother wanted to make the paste, b
ut the process is a little scary because the soybeans first have to become moldy. My father found out about this and was opposed: “What are you doing in the yard?” My mother replied, “I put everything in the backyard so no one can see it.” My father found it dirty and disgusting and forbid her to do it, but she was determined and made a vat in secret. When the Whampoa students arrived, my mother gave them cucumber slices dipped in soybean paste and then served the pickled vegetable hotpot. Some wept as they ate because they were reminded of home. They never had a chance to return for the rest of their lives.

  During the bombardment of Quemoy (starting August 23, 1958), my father and other legislators went to Quemoy, where the commander, General Wang Duonian, told my father that he had been one of the students recruited for the tenth Whampoa class and would never forget my mother’s home cooking. In battles fought from Nanjing to Sichuan, a number of Whampoa students looked after the students from Sun Yat-sen Middle School, as well as my family, as a token of gratitude to my mother. At my mother’s funeral, Zhao Jinyong, who had served as ambassador to the Republic of Malawi, recalled when he was a student at the Central Political Academy how my mother always showed concern for him and gave him spending money after our homeland fell to the Japanese.

  That year my maternal grandfather managed to come to Nanjing to visit his beloved daughter and saw that she was in high spirits, busying herself with flowers in the front yard and various sizes of vats in the back, which finally set his mind at ease. Two years after he went back home, he passed away in peace, with nothing more to trouble him.

  Mother was happy running her household, and she often hummed something while she was at work. I don’t know what it was, but whenever she held my little sister, I clearly heard her singing “Su Wu Herds Sheep.” When she got to the lines, “Sitting upright in severe cold, hearing a Tartar reed pipe makes him sad of heart,” she would sing it over and over again without missing a line until my sister went to sleep. Sometimes she would sit alone for a while.