by Fang Lizhi
There were no sewers, either. At Messenger Alley we poured wastewater onto the base of a large tree. We took for granted the tree’s ability to recycle. In winter, when the ground froze, the recycling function froze with it, and wastewater ice of various colors accumulated, layer upon layer, in one great sheet at the base of the tree. Many years later, when I read in the professional journals that comets are formed of dirty ice, that multicolored slab at Messenger Alley always sprang to mind. Looking at beautiful comet tails in the high heavens, I could not help thinking that they carried a certain stench.
In winter, coal dust was another source of pollution. People burned lumps of coal to heat their homes, and many dumped the ashes onto the streets, where eventually they formed great piles. In some places these mounds rose to a foot or two higher than the foundations of the houses. Coal dust is primarily silicon dioxide, which is extremely fine and light. When vehicles passed by the dust would fly up in the air and take a long time to settle back down again, turning Beijing, one might say, into the original Silicon Valley. My parents had been married in the south, where coal dust was not a problem, and they had chosen white furniture as their nuptial theme. Their tables, chairs, beds—even the little beds for us children—were white, or cream-colored. After its baptism in silicon dioxide, all this lovely furniture turned to a dignified Beijing gray.
In this and other ways we Fangs gradually morphed into Beijing people. Our roots may not have been as deep as those of the Peking Man that had been dug up at nearby Zhoukoudian, but in other ways we became fairly authentic. There was one little way, though, in which we were never the real thing: we traveled. Real Beijing people did not travel. They stayed put, and were happy to do so. Not only did they remain in Beijing; they didn’t even move around inside Beijing very much. When we lived in the Western City, we had neighbors who seldom ventured into the Eastern City. Eastern City people didn’t come over to the Western side very much, either. This immobility may have been a carryover from imperial times, when there were strict regulations that prohibited servants of the emperor from making informal contact with one another—because such association could become the basis for a rebellion or a coup. The regulations were gone by now, but the habits of life that they had shaped remained. Geographically, the Eastern City and Western City were separated only by the imperial palace and the Forbidden City—a distance of just over a mile. But if a resident of the Western City said, “I’m going to the Eastern City,” it sounded about as serious as when someone today says, “I’m going on a journey.” When I was in elementary school there were public trolleys connecting the Eastern and Western Cities, but I had classmates who had never been on one. Many residents of the inner city had never been to the outer city, and many outer city residents had never been outside the city walls. The two sides of the city walls were two different worlds.
My parents, though, broke with Beijing custom when it came to travel. My father was averse to motion by nature, but as a point of theory in rearing children he favored the principle that “travel is good.” In the war-torn 1940s there was no such thing as a travel industry. War-related disruptions of transportation made people afraid to travel, and less-well-off families couldn’t afford it in any case. For them, the only reason to travel was to flee war. Financially speaking, our family was in the class that could not afford travel, but there was a policy that the families of workers in the Ministry of Railways could ride the rails free of charge. My siblings and I took advantage of this rule during our summer recesses from school and (if war conditions permitted) traveled to our ancestral home in Hangzhou. At first our parents went with us, but later they trusted us to go by ourselves. Mother forbade us to walk on the Beijing streets in the dark of night, but she let us journey alone hundreds of miles to the south.
Today, eight hundred miles from Beijing down to Shanghai or Hangzhou seems nothing to speak of. But in the 1940s, with war raging, the trip was a major enterprise, and those journeys left me with impressions deeper than any others from my childhood.
The first trip I can remember was in 1941, when I was five years old and my mother took me to Nanjing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. The trains stopped at the larger stations long enough for us to get off and buy things to eat. My most vivid impression, though, was not of any food we ate or people we saw. It was the discovery that different places have different odors. Hangzhou smelled like Hangzhou, Suzhou like Suzhou, and the Yangzi River like the Yangzi River. All different. Perhaps the olfactory sense of a child is sharper, more like a dog’s, and a child’s memory more capable of locking the distinctions in.
The trip from Beijing to Shanghai normally took two days, but it was longer if war intervened. In July 1949, my brother and I headed south on the new Tianjin–Shanghai line that had just opened. War still smoldered in the area, and it took two full days and nights to reach Pukou on the northern bank of the Yangzi River across from Nanjing. There, the whole train got ferried across the river on a barge and then proceeded toward Shanghai. The Nationalists’ warplanes were still doing a lot of bombing in the Yangzi delta, and our train, to avoid being targeted, stopped during the daylight hours one day at a small station near Qixia Mountain. July in that area is torrid, and all the more so when one bakes inside a railroad car. Most of the other passengers were traveling on business, either official or commercial, and naturally were curious about my brother and me, two youngsters traveling alone. To be safe we had to disguise the fact that we were traveling for fun, because that sounded unlikely and therefore suspicious. (The civil war was brutal; it was normal for people to be suspicious of one another.) Whenever someone asked why we were traveling I deferred to my brother, who could respond with a fusillade of nonsense. He was better than I at that. I can no longer remember any of the words he used, but we did reach Shanghai safely.
It was when we departed Shanghai that we ran into trouble. After staying in the city for a few days with an aunt, we headed for Hangzhou to see our grandmother. No one saw us off. We went to the Shanghai North rail station alone, saw our train waiting at the platform—and then the world suddenly went haywire. People began running wildly. For a moment we had no idea what was going on, but then we heard someone yell “Strafing!” Next we heard a volley of gunfire. Then we, too, ran for our lives—outside the train station and all the way to a sheltered nook on Baoshan Road. We could still hear gunshots, and some were coming from very close by. After a few more minutes the gunfire stopped and quiet resumed. Later we learned what had happened. We had witnessed a low-flight strafing attack on the Shanghai rail station by Nationalist fighter planes based at the nearby Zhoushan Islands. The gunshots had been return fire from machine guns on the roofs of buildings near the station. After ten years of life during wartime, this was my closest encounter with actual fighting.
When we got back to Beijing, we related our war experience to our mother. It had been much more dangerous than our expedition, one night, to go see a movie. But this time she did not apply the punishment of making us stand and stare at a wall. She felt we had grown up.
3. ELEMENTARY SCHOOL IN OCCUPIED BEIJING
I first went to school in 1941. My start was at the elementary school attached to Beijing Normal University, where I was a student continuously for five and a half years, the first four and a half of which were during the Japanese occupation of north China.
I began at midyear—in the second term of first grade, when I was about two years younger than most of my classmates. My mother did this not because she thought I was some kind of wunderkind but because two younger sisters had been born and her hands were full enough. She needed to offload me. Nursery school was not an option, because there were no nursery schools in Beijing in those days. Wealthy families hired nannies to care for their small children, while poorer families just let them “graze” in the neighborhood on their own. My parents were in between: they couldn’t afford nannies, but they also didn’t approve of grazing, so they packed me off to first grade for want of a nursery school.
My mother had two other grounds for her reasoning in the matter. One was that I was still weak from my childhood illnesses so wouldn’t have enough energy to be seriously naughty at school and cause any embarrassment to her. The other was that the school was right next to where we lived on Messenger Alley. The gate was only about seventy feet away. Mother wasn’t really concerned about whether I could catch up with my classmates. If I flunked, it wouldn’t matter. Even if I flunked two years, I would still be at grade level for my age.
My progress in first grade mirrored the story of my physical health. From “perhaps unrevivable,” my body had somehow pulled through to reach stasis, if not strength; in school, from a condition of “flunking would count as normal,” I somehow muddled my way up to middling.
I don’t have memories of getting help from my teachers in schoolwork during those years, but I do remember getting help with tying the belt strings of my pants. The toilets were outdoors and had no roofs, and in the frigid winters, my visits to the outhouse could be truly terrifying. My fingers got so cold that no matter how I fumbled I could not tie the belt strings when I was finished. If the school bell rang, calling us back to class, I panicked—which only made the fumbling worse. I would often have to run back to the classroom holding my pants up by hand. Since I was the youngest in the class—the shortest, too—I was assigned to the front row, where my predicament was obvious to all, including the teacher. In second grade I had a teacher named Hua. She was about the same age as my mother and was very kind in noticing my plight and helping with my belt strings. Even today I can picture her voice, face, and smile in vivid detail.
The class work, for children of normal intelligence, wasn’t much harder than learning to tie belt strings. The main work in first and second grade was rote memorization of a few hundred, maybe a thousand, Chinese characters. We weren’t asked to learn very much about what they meant. This might seem a cruel burden to put on young children—how can you expect them to memorize so many arbitrary line patterns?—but actually it is not. The memory function may be the most primitive element of human intelligence. It doesn’t demand any logical processing and generates no great stress in young minds. Very few of my classmates had to stay behind in school because they couldn’t memorize characters. I myself slipped through in the first and second grades, and that shows, I think, how hard it was to flunk. In third grade, when I learned how to use a dictionary and could look up characters on my own, my fear of characters went away.
Even though my grades were not great, most of the teachers liked me—at least that was the impression I got. (Teacher Hua, whom I have just mentioned, was one.) This may have been because I was physically small and weak, seemed generally naive and wide-eyed, and did what I was told. There was only one point on which I was disobedient. There are strict rules about the order in which the strokes must be made when one writes Chinese characters by hand. In general, one goes top to bottom and left to right. There are exceptions, but the exceptions are not optional: you still have to follow the prescribed order. Our work was marked wrong if we violated the order. I disobeyed when I wrote my surname Fang 方. I wrote the last two strokes right to left—officially backward. I did this because my father, before I ever went to school, had taught me the “secret” that writing the strokes in this order produces a prettier result. I had tried it myself and found that he was right. So I wrote the character that way and still do today, in the “secret” Fang family tradition.
In third grade my grades began to improve. I was usually around the bottom of the A group or near the top of the B group.
The Japanese occupation did not have much effect on our primary-level education. The closest thing that came to any influence occurred on Saturday mornings when the whole school gathered on an exercise field to listen to the Japanese emperor Hirohito’s latest proclamations on the Greater East Asian War and the Pacific War. In fact, though, this was mostly just ceremony. I don’t think any of us primary school students, no matter how many times we listened to the pompous but awkward Chinese language in those pronouncements, took anything away from them.
We began Japanese language in third grade. Our school got special attention from the Japanese authorities because it was attached to Beijing Normal University, a national standard-bearer in teacher training. Teachers were sent from Japan to our school both to teach Japanese and to keep an eye on things. I don’t remember having any nationalist consciousness at all as a third-grader, still less any clear thoughts about “resisting Japan.” But it certainly was true that we third-graders hated studying Japanese. After a full year of study I still had not mastered the fifty kana in the Japanese syllabary, and I was by no means the only third-grader in that position. There is something obviously abnormal in the fact that young minds that could memorize several thousand Chinese characters somehow could not soak up a mere fifty hiragana or katakana—things that in any case had been adapted from parts of those same Chinese characters. Every day at the beginning of Japanese class, we had to stand up and say “Sensei, ohayō gozaimasu!” (“Good morning, teacher!”). Later one of our mischievous classmates came up with “Sunzai, wo hayao geizai yimaoqian,” which sounded sufficiently close to the original that the Japanese teachers still thought we were expressing our morning respects, even though to a Chinese ear it meant “I yawn and give you a dime, grandson!” The phrase spread through the school; we all loved it. This probably counts as my first participation in a political movement—resist Japan!—even though the glaring cowardice of the method is not something I can be proud of.
Another example of our resisting Japan, which I now deeply regret, was to abuse a dog. Not far from our school there lived a low-ranking Japanese military officer who had one small child and one big dog. The animal was as militarist as its master and, to us schoolchildren, several times more intimidating. This led to a decision by a few of our physically larger classmates to beat the dog up. I was too small to be one of the beaters but went along to supply moral support. It turns out that elementary students are more intelligent than dogs, and, in order to avoid detection by the master, we were able to lure the unwitting animal to a secluded corner under a wall, where five or six of my classmates, in a matter of seconds, broke one of its legs. Then we all whooped and fled. We were never discovered, and the dog, now crippled, was much less intimidating than before. This has been my only experience in life of joining a violent action.
Our feat of dog beating did not spring from any lofty principles about national independence; such thoughts were well beyond our understanding. Still less had we ever heard of things like principles of nonviolence. Our inspiration to beat the dog sprang more from a desire to imitate the righteous heroes in Chinese kung fu fiction. These are heroes who appear, as if from nowhere, to defend the downtrodden as a matter of principle—in our case, the principle was revenge against a beast that was menacing innocents. I can remember that it was around third grade that we children were first smitten by kung fu stories. We could read on our own by then, and kung fu books were the easiest to find, so those martial arts masters became the first heroes to occupy our imaginations. Between classes we used to play a game in which we aped them. We would pull our overcoats up onto our heads, half-covering our crowns, and then strut around kicking up fusses and picking make-believe fights in shows of kung fu bravado.
The Japanese occupation forces ruled elementary schools with a relatively gentle hand. Plenty of stories about how the Japanese were oppressing Chinese people circulated privately in those days, among us students as well as in our families at home. My parents often spoke of how one of my uncles had been burned to death by the Japanese. But nothing so fearful ever happened to us elementary school students. That scary dog was about as bad as it got. Only once did I ever come face-to-face with a Japanese soldier. That happened one day on West Fourth Avenue, right after a sudden declaration of martial law, when a detachment of Japanese soldiers—apparently led by a colonel or the like—passed by. Traffic immediately came to a halt
while the soldiers formed rigid lines along the two sides of the street, as if preparing for a fierce battle. I was on a street corner waiting to cross when a Japanese soldier, holding a rifle with a bayonet attached, took a stand right in front of me. I could see the mettle of an occupier glinting in his eyes. There were, however, no Japanese soldiers like that at our school. What we heard at school were only things like “Japan and China hand in hand” and “Japan and China warm and close.”
In school I was drawn personally into a “Japan-China friendship” activity involving the exchange of calligraphy. Elementary school curricula in Japan stressed the writing of Chinese characters—it was a required course. At one point the Japanese authorities decided to select examples of calligraphy by Chinese students under age ten and send them to Japan to exhibit as models for Japanese children to emulate. They hoped, as a secondary goal, that pen pal relationships between Japanese and Chinese children—“meeting friends through characters”—would naturally follow. I was drawn in because my father had taught me, before I ever went to school, to trace the characters of the master Yan Zhenqing (A.D. 709–785) from stone tablets. As a little boy I had been attracted to the “rhyme within the bones” in Yan’s calligraphy, and I imitated it. This led to one of my pieces of calligraphy being selected for export to Japan. I can’t remember if I ever heard back from any Japanese person of similar age expressing admiration for my calligraphy in the exalted fashion of Yan. But even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered much, because one of the goals of the Japanese authorities was to encourage Chinese children to read Japanese, which meant that any letter from a Japanese youngster would certainly have been written in Japanese and would therefore have been unreadable by me. My Japanese was well below the level of reading or writing letters. But that, in the end, may also have been for the best. If I had in fact become the pen pal of a Japanese child, then later, when the Cultural Revolution called in 1968 for “purifying class ranks,” one more item—“communicating with the enemy”—would no doubt have been added to the list of my criminal activities.