The Great Flowing River Read online

  More than a decade later, after victory over Japan, she went back to northeast China to pay her respects at her parents’ graves and return to the Chi family house on Little Western Hill where she had spent ten lonely years. Following this, she was forced to flee the north for an even farther destination: Taiwan. Twelve years later in Taichung, she again softly sang “Su Wu Herds Sheep” as she sat by my son’s cradle. Su Wu still herded sheep at the edge of Lake Baikal for nineteen destitute, sad years. In the thirty-eight years before she was buried at Tamshui, Taipei, my mother never again saw the Lake Baikal in her heart.

  A LARGE FAMILY GOES INTO EXILE

  My father believed that founding National Northeast Sun Yat-sen Middle School was something he was meant to do.

  In 1932, he left Nanjing for the north, risking his life exiting Shanhaiguan and secretly returning to his homeland, only to see the underground military forces like the volunteer army fighting against the Japanese in complete desperation. His comrades in the underground felt he should go back to Nanjing because he could more effectively assist his homeland from his established position in the central government and through the Northeast China Association.

  And so he went first to Beiping, where he set up the Office of Educational Relief for the Young People of Northeast China, in which exiles from cultural and educational circles looked after young people who had fled to Beiping and Tianjin rather than become abjectly obedient Japanese subjects after the puppet state of Manchukuo was established. Some wandered destitute on the streets, suffering from cold and hunger by the roadside when winter arrived. The Office of Educational Relief put up some tents, fed them, and looked after basic needs.

  At the mass celebrations of the Nanjing government at New Year’s in 1934, my father got to know the Vice Premier of the Executive Yuan, Peng Xuepei. Knowing that he was also from north China, he persuaded him to allocate fifty thousand silver dollars, with which he immediately, with his friends in Beiping, Li Xi’en, Huang Henghao, and Zhou Tianfang, proceeded to set up a school. On March 26, 1934, with space borrowed from Baoguo Temple, the Shuntian Government Administration Building, and the former Advanced School for Police Officers, they set up the National Sun Yat-sen Middle School, admitting two thousand exiled students, from junior high freshmen to high school seniors. Thus China’s first national middle school came into being, because my father convinced the Ministry of Education that only the state could securely guarantee the continuous existence of such schools that aimed at saving the country from extinction.

  Li Xi’en, the former president of Jilin University, became the first principal of the school. (He had been a classmate of my father’s eldest cousin in Germany. He and my father shared similar political ideals, and my father looked upon him as a brother.) The teachers were almost all university professors in exile in Beiping. My brother, who had been studying at Chongde Middle School in Beiping, took the exam at the Sun Yat-sen Middle School and was admitted to the second year of junior high.

  By the autumn of 1936, the situation in northern China was as tense as the turbulent wind before a storm. The people and undertakings directly supported by the central government were gradually becoming difficult to maintain due to the hidden threat of Japan and the infiltration by the communists. Therefore my father, Huang Henghao, Gao Xibing, and other anti-Japanese comrades from northeast China purchased a piece of land in Banqiao Village, twenty li outside Nanjing, where they built some basic school buildings and living quarters for the teachers, then moved the school from Beiping to Nanjing.

  After getting settled there, the students themselves set to work and leveled the ground for a playing field, and built the school walls and gates. On the mud brick wall at the front gate a huge motto could be seen from afar: “Though Chu has only three families, it will be Chu that destroys Qin.” Every morning at the flag-raising ceremony, the teachers and students sang the school song (lyrics by Hao Lengruo; music by Ma Boshui) that reflected their shared fate:

  High are the white mountains, long are the black rivers;

  truly beautiful is the country, the hatred and suffering cannot be forgotten.

  There are young people drifting in misery.

  The Three Principles of the People provide guidance, take them as the country’s ideal and bear the hard tasks.

  School serves as home as shelter where the students thrive, a bracing shelter where Taiye, Qinhuai look on.

  Learning to know shame so as to know uprightness, only the people of Chu have upright men;

  with merely three families to destroy Qin, I come from the north and to the north I will return.

  In the early days at Banqiao everything was difficult, not to mention that everyone was quite young. My father always thought optimistically of the long run. Thus passed a year and a half of poor but settled days filled with hope, until Nanjing could no longer shelter us. After we left Nanjing, the days were much harder over that long journey than in Banqiao; we wandered in a desperate plight and suffered hunger and cold over half the land of China.

  ZHANG DAFEI: THE STORY OF HIS FAMILY BROKEN UP AND DISPERSED

  My brother moved with Sun Yat-sen Middle School from Beiping to Nanjing, and he would bring five or six classmates home with him every Saturday. After dinner, they would take the Jiangnan Railway train back to Banqiao, while my brother would spend the night at home.

  In her happiness, my mother felt that every child without a home from northeast China was her own. After we moved south and during the eight years of the War of Resistance, every student at San Yat-sen Middle School was homeless, and almost every one of them had a heartbreaking story.

  The first time Zhang Dafei came to our house, no one really noticed him. He sat quietly, saying very little and not taking part in any of the games. When it came time to eat, my mother insisted he sit beside her and kept putting food in his bowl.

  Prior to this, all I knew was that Father had asked my brother to locate a student surnamed Zhang; his father had been the chief of police in Shenyang County right after Manchukuo was established. Because he had assisted and released many anti-Japanese comrades, the Japanese had doused him with varnish and burned him to death in a public square.

  My brother finally found him among his classmates. He was three years older than my brother, took part in no extracurricular activities other than playing basketball, and seldom spoke. My brother only found him when he heard Zhang’s story through Fu Baolu, a national pole-vault champion (all the girls idolized him in those days) who had graduated that year and who had played basketball with Zhang.

  On New Year’s Eve that year, the students stayed at school ands prepared dumplings to celebrate the New Year. Two days later, Zhang Dafei came home with my brother. It started snowing that day and it was very cold, so we made a fire in the house, and after eating we sat around the fireplace. My mother asked him about the circumstances surrounding his leaving home.

  He said that after the Japanese burned his father but before they came in pursuit to kill the rest of the family, he and seven other family members fled in all directions. He and a younger brother and sister took flight that night to seek refuge with an aunt in Yingkou, where they attended a church-run middle school; they had morning prayer service every day, which started with the Lord’s Prayer: “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.…” In this way he could entreat the protection and love of a father to his heart’s content, and as a result he became a Christian.

  In the second year after Manchukuo was established, the Japanese began a policy of assimilation through education. At fifteen he entered Shanhaiguan on his own and went to Beiping to seek refuge with an uncle; he had missed a year of school and couldn’t stay long with him. There were at the time a huge number of homeless young people from the northeast on the streets of Beiping and Tianjin, and by winter, many had died of cold and hunger.

  One day when he was at th
e end of his rope, he wandered by Baoguo Temple and noticed several tents pitched in the courtyard, and on the gate was pasted a notice that National Sun Yat-sen Middle School was recruiting exiled students from northeast China. He tested into the third year of junior high school. After being admitted, all students were provided with food and accommodation at government expense, so from that point on he had a home where he could settle down.

  The academic standards of the school were high, and he felt like he had a future, but with the Japanese pressing on north China from Manchukuo, the situation became precarious and gradually so untenable that the school was forced to move south. When it came time to leave Beiping, he could only send word indirectly to his mother, who was homeless in their native land, that he would follow the school south. After arriving at Banqiao in Nanjing, he never received news of her.

  I’ll always remember that icy cold evening. I saw him muster all the dignity an eighteen-year-old could to keep from crying as he sat beside the fireplace in our warm house, narrating the story of his family broken up and dispersed. It was as tragic as that little boy telling me about his father’s head hung above the city gate a few years before.

  Outside the window, several small trees my mother had planted swayed in the snow and bent as if they would break. From that moment, I could never forget his name—after he had fled to Yingkou, he changed the auspicious name his parents had given him, Zhang Naichang, to Zhang Dafei (fly).

  From then on, I would look forward to seeing his gentle and melancholy smile among my brother’s noisy classmates every Saturday afternoon. He really liked to take my three-year-old sister out to play in the courtyard and would sometimes help my mother by carrying my baby sister, who was still in swaddling clothes. Occasionally he’d go over to the chair I often sat in and read the books I had recently bought. One time he brought his small copy of the Bible with its gilt-edged pages to show me and my mother, saying it had been his only source of support since leaving home. At the time I didn’t understand, but many years later it became clear why in his gentle loneliness he had a peace and serenity about him. I seemed to have encountered another profound book waiting to be understood, to which I was attracted, but he took it with him when he left.

  Early that spring, the school built several small wood-framed bungalows with mud walls outside the gate. Mother went to these and stayed four or five days each week because she was pregnant again and she liked living a rural life and could raise some vegetables. In addition, there were a number of teachers and their families from northeast China who could better comfort her in her homesickness.

  I went to Banqiao every weekend, where I could run wild in the mountains and fields as if I were six years old again. Zhang Dafei often showed up, and what he enjoyed the most was holding my two little sisters as he watched my mother do her household chores, but still, he seldom spoke.

  One day after lunch, my brother and seven or eight of his classmates said they were going to climb a small nearby mountain called Mount Bullhead. I had long had my eye on that mountain, so I caught up with them and followed them there.

  At four in the afternoon when we started down the mountain, the wind suddenly sprang up, and as I walked slower than the others, I soon found myself left behind. My brother and the other big boys had already descended the mountain while I was stuck halfway down, holding onto a small rocky outcrop, unable to proceed or go back. The mountain wind whistled sharply, and, filled with fear in the cold wind, I began to cry. Just then I saw Zhang Dafei look back at me from a narrow defile.

  It was getting dark, but he walked back up, took me by the hand, and led me down the mountain. At the mouth of the defile, he wrapped my sixty-odd-pound body in his cotton student’s coat and said, “Don’t cry, don’t cry, everything will be fine when we get to the main road.” The sympathy and concern in his eyes were something a twelve-year-old marginal person like myself, who frequently changed schools, rarely encountered.

  Upon returning home, my brother said to my mother, “She should never come with me again! She was so slow going up the mountain and then couldn’t get down, crying at the drop of a hat. What a pain!”

  At the beginning of summer, we moved back to Nanjing in readiness for my mother to give birth.

  Our lives and the fate of China soon changed completely: I was fated never again to set foot in that small house.

  In all my travels around the world in the decades since then, every time I saw a friendly little mountain, I would always think of him looking back at me from the defile in the wind.

  2

  A JOURNEY OF BLOOD AND TEARS

  The Eight Years of the War of Resistance

  DENSELY SPREAD THE CLOUDS OF WAR

  The Northern Expedition was successful in 1928; the country was united; Nanjing became the capital of the Nationalist government; the best from each province gathered together to establish the new China. That decade was not only the nation’s ten golden years but also the ten golden years of my father’s life.

  Chi Shiying, who arrived in Nanjing from outside Shanhaiguan, was given a hearty welcome. Although Guo Songling’s military remonstrance of Zhang Zuolin was defeated and he himself perished, his demand that the Fengtian Army remove itself from the contention among warlords in the central plains, return home and build up local strength, and resist Japanese and Russian aggression had spread throughout the country. Thus, the Nationalist government formed by the revolutionary party that had overthrown the imperial system welcomed this first young revolutionary from the northeast to take part in the work of building the nation. His Kuomintang Party membership card number was 1, Liaoning Province.

  But when Chairman Chiang Kai-shek met him, he unexpectedly said, “You don’t look like someone from the northeast!” which meant something quite complicated. During the Northern Expedition, the impression most people had of the Fengtian Army soldiers was that they were brave and warlike, fierce, and even crude. But this twenty-seven-year-old revolutionary from the northeast was gentle and refined, graceful as a jade tree in the wind (a comment by Lu Chunfang). Knowing three foreign languages—English, Japanese, and German—and having studied historical philosophy at Heidelburg University two years before, he was very hard to classify. He informed Mr. Chiang that he was willing to work in foreign affairs, culture, or education; Mr. Chiang replied that there was too much to do in a huge country like China; therefore, he dispatched him to the Central Policy Committee (at the time it didn’t have a fixed name) to serve as an appointed legislator, working with Niu Yongjian, Huang Fu, Chen Guofu, and Chen Lifu. He thus made friends with people of note in the country and became the expert on Japan in the central government. He was also sent to Japan with the rank of first lieutenant to study at the Japanese Infantry School for a year.

  Japan’s ambition to encroach upon China had grown stronger with each passing day since the Treaty of Shimonoseki after the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, which had ceded Taiwan to Japan. In 1905, the Japanese defeated the Russians in the northeast and obtained control over the railroads there, after which they never ceased causing trouble throughout China. In 1915 they forced China to accept the unequal treaty composed of the Twenty-one Demands; in 1928 they fomented the Jinan Incident; and in 1931 they occupied Shenyang in the Mukden Incident, then a year later established the puppet state of Manchukuo. The Nationalist government was clearly aware of this string of aggressions, but before catching its breath, it could only quicken the pace of building up the army, establishing industry, and organizing the people. In those ten years, it was as if Nanjing were racing to build up the strength of an old man who had been gravely ill for a hundred years. It was such hard work, but filled with hope and good faith. The Xi’an Incident launched by the coarse and impetuous Zhang Xueliang hurt the image of the northeast army while providing the Communists in Yan’an with a new lease on life to later grow in strength, and thus focused the ardor of the people even more to fight the Japanese under the leadership of Chairman Chiang Ka
i-shek.

  In 1930, my mother took my brother and me and traveled thousands of miles to Nanjing in search of my father. There was construction everywhere in the flourishing capital. My father and his young friends were busy buying time, promoting all sorts of modernizing construction to strengthen the country, because they knew that the Japanese militarists were quickening their pace to invade. As the Japanese army said: “If we don’t act soon, China will stand up!”

  THE MARCO POLO BRIDGE INCIDENT

  On July 7, 1937, the flames of war at the Marco Polo Bridge changed modern China’s destiny and laid the foundation for my own lifelong attitude of hard struggle.

  The sanguinary blade of war severed me from my sickly childhood—on the elementary school playing field newly laid with gravel, just as I finished singing the song of farewell at graduation, the lyrics of which no longer fit the situation: “Beyond the pavilion, beside the ancient road, the fragrant grass extends to the sky.…” My childhood came to a sudden end.

  Before the summer in Nanjing—one of China’s three great furnaces—had passed, Japanese planes began bombing. On August 15, the first bomb was dropped on the Ming Palace Airport.

  Three days before, my mother had given birth to my little sister Xingyuan at the Central Hospital across from the airport. The strong blast broke the doors and windows of the hospital and everyone ran for their lives. Barefooted, my mother clasped her infant daughter and followed everyone to the basement, where she had a bout of metrorrhagia. Two days later, after everyone else had left the hospital, she was carried home, where all she could do was take styptics and wrestle with death.

  A month after the shots were fired at the Marco Polo Bridge, the Japanese army entered Beiping (Tianjin had already fallen). On August 13, troops dispatched from the Japanese concession in Shanghai started the battle of Shanghai, and Suzhou, Wuxi, and other cities were soon lost and the Beiping–Shanghai Railroad cut. The Japanese troops in north China followed the Tianjin–Pukou Railroad south, leaving Nanjing isolated; after the Northern Expedition, the residents of Nanjing, which was the capital and symbol of modern China, had to withdraw.