by Ji Xianlin
I was born not long after the god of fortune smiled on my family for the first time. My uncle had lost his job and had been roaming around Guandong. With his last coin, he bought a ticket in a lottery raising funds for flood relief in Hubei. He won the jackpot, apparently worth thousands of taels of silver. Our family was suddenly rich. My father bought ten acres of well-irrigated land, and to show off their newfound riches, the brothers decided to have a large house built. Since there weren’t enough bricks to be had at short notice, my father announced to the village that if anyone was willing to tear his own house down and sell him the bricks, he would pay several times the going rate for them. Sure enough, his extravagant offer attracted takers, and while other families dismantled their houses, we built ours. It was a large courtyard house with five rooms in each of the north, west, and east wings, and an impressive, south-facing entrance. The brothers had finally done well for themselves.
But their good fortune didn’t last long. My father was generous to a fault. On a whim, when he was going to market in another village, he might treat everyone there to lunch. Before long, he had to sell the land and tear down two wings of the new house so that the bricks and tiles could be sold off. The bricks he had bought for their weight in gold were now being sold for next to nothing.
The reverie was over; we were penniless again.
By the time I was old enough to remember anything, we were destitute. We could only afford to eat wheat congee about twice a year, and our diet consisted mostly of sorghum cakes; even cornmeal cakes were a treat. In the spring and summer, I would cut and bundle grass or sorghum leaves, and take them to my second cousin’s home to feed his cow. Then I would hang around until he gave me a meal of cornmeal cakes. In the summer and autumn, my two aunts, who lived across from us, would take me with them to glean wheat and beans in the fields of neighboring villages. I would return with a small handful of grain to give to my mother. After many such trips, the wheat could eventually be ground into enough flour for a meal of wheat congee, the greatest delicacy I could imagine. My mother never ate a single bite. She simply sat watching me eat, her eyes growing wet. At the time I was naturally unable to understand her feelings. I decided then that when I grew up, I would buy her wheat congee. Yet in the poet’s words, “Just as the tree longs for stillness when the wind blows, the child longs to take care of his parents when they are no longer there.” My mother passed away before I ever had the chance to treat her to a meal of wheat congee, a loss that I grieve and regret to this day.
In my father’s generation, there were eleven men in the family. Six of them left for Guandong because they were unable to make a living in the village and were never heard from again. Of the five who were left, one was given to another family as a child. My eldest uncle had a son whom I never met because he died young. That made me the only male child of the family in my generation, and in traditional Chinese society, that was no small thing. My uncle, who lived in Jinan, only had one daughter, so he and my father decided that I should be sent to Jinan. I was too young to understand how my mother must have felt. Many years later, I was told that she had apparently said, “If only I’d known he would never come back, I would have died rather than let him leave!” I never heard her say those words, but they have echoed in my mind over the decades. As the poet Meng Jiao wrote, comparing a child’s debt to his parents to a plant’s debt to the sun, “How can a blade of grass repay the warmth of the spring?”
I left home when I was six.
Life has its ironies, and no one chooses the life they lead. If I had stayed in the village, I would have remained a peasant all my life. It would have been a hard life, but one with few hazards. Instead, I saw the world, learned many things, learned about life, and made something of a name for myself. The path has been easy at times and uphill at others, and now I have grown old. If I had been permitted to choose my own path in advance, which life would I have chosen? That would not have been an easy choice.
The reflection in my heart’s mirror when I left home was of a once-wealthy village family whose fortunes had crumbled and fallen on hard times.
Jinan was a new world. I had never seen mountains before, and I had pictured them as gigantic stone pillars. I was fascinated by the sight of real mountains.
My uncle took great pains to give me a good education since I was the only male descendant of the Ji family. After about a year of traditional Chinese school, which consisted in learning to recite the classics, I was sent to one of the new primary schools, Jinan Teacher Training Institute No. 1 Primary School. The educational reforms advocated by the May Fourth Movement had reached Shandong, and the principal of the school was a reform-minded man who instituted the use of a modern textbook. My uncle caught sight of the chapter containing “The Camel and the Arab,” a translated fable, and cried, “That’s ridiculous—everyone knows camels don’t talk! We’ll have to put you in a different school!” So I was sent to the New Education School instead. Transferring to my new school turned out to be a straightforward process. There were no strings to pull or bribes to pay, and I was simply interviewed by a teacher who wrote the character for “donkey” on the board. I could identify the character, whereas my cousin, a year older than me, couldn’t. I was hence put in the lowest class of the upper school, while he was put in the highest class of the lower school. A single arbitrarily chosen character had given me a year’s advantage over him. Our first textbooks were in classical Chinese, but we soon switched to modern Chinese books, in which even the toads and tortoises had speaking parts, not to mention the camels. This time, my uncle didn’t intervene.
My uncle was an extremely intelligent man who had never received a formal education. He had somehow taught himself to write poems and lyrics, practice calligraphy, and cut seals by hand. He had also read widely in classical Chinese and was fascinated by Song and Ming dynasty neo-Confucianist philosophy, an extraordinary interest for an uneducated man. To this day, I can see him sitting up straight at his desk, reading Qing dynasty philosophical compendia such as the Wang Qing Jing Jie, looking completely and absurdly serious.
My uncle’s philosophy shaped my education. He wanted me to receive a classical education as his brother’s son and the bearer of the family name so that I would pass my learning on to subsequent generations of the Ji family. I was forbidden to read Ming dynasty novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or The Water Margin, because he considered them frivolous. But I enjoyed reading novels precisely because they were forbidden and devoured dozens of them. After school, I would hide behind heaps of bricks and tiles and read instead of going home, or read under the covers with a flashlight. I spent years immersed in these novels.
My uncle had other plans for my education. Throughout my time at Zhengyi Middle School, he paid for me to be tutored in classical Chinese, and in my lessons we read difficult and obscure texts such as the long history Chronicle of Zuo. After having dinner at home, I would immediately set off for the Shangshi English Learning Society, where I took English lessons until late in the night. Several years of my childhood passed this way.
The motto of the late Qing dynasty reformers was that “Chinese learning is to serve as the foundation, and Western learning is to be applied.” My uncle certainly believed in the first half of the motto, but it was hard to say whether he also believed in the second. At the time, many people thought that acquiring some Western knowledge could help secure a government job and make you rich. They could see that foreign learning was useful, even if they didn’t appreciate it in itself. But my uncle was not given to pandering to foreigners, and he never doubted the superiority of Chinese civilization.
Upon finishing middle school in 1926, I was accepted to the humanities program of the Affiliated High School of Shandong University in Beiyuan Baihezhuang. My teachers there were all extremely erudite men. They included Mr. Wang Kunyu, the Chinese teacher; Mr. You Tong, Mr. Liu, and Mr. Yang, the English teachers; Mr. Wang, who taught mathematics; Mr.
Qi Yunpu, who taught history and geography; Mr. Ju Simin, who taught ethics and was also the principal of Zhengyi Middle School; and Mr. Wanyan Xiangqing, the principal of No. 1 Middle School. Of the two teachers of Chinese classics, one was nicknamed Empire of the Great Qing (I no longer remember his name), and another was a Hanlin Academy scholar under dynastic rule. Neither of them ever had to bring a book to their classes on the Book of Documents, I Ching, and Classic of Poetry, because they already knew the texts by heart. They were excellent teachers, and the campus itself was filled with lotus ponds and willows, which made it an excellent environment for studying.
I have always been easily influenced by my environment, which explains why it was only in high school that I began to study hard. While I was a relatively good student in elementary and middle school, I never was and never aspired to be the best student in my class. I was content to keep fishing and catching prawns. As a high school student, I was at the top of the class in English, and my teacher, Mr. Wang Kunyu, often commended my essays. Doing well in other classes wasn’t difficult as long as I was willing to learn the material by heart. For the first time in my life, I had the highest grades in my class, and my 95 percent average was, in fact, the highest in the school. The president of Shandong University at the time was Wang Shoupeng, the minister of education for Shandong Province, who had previously been a primus or top scorer in the imperial examinations. He gave me a fan he had inscribed with poetry and a pair of scrolls with a rhyming couplet. The recognition spurred me on and doing well in exams became a point of pride for me. My hard work paid off; I was first in the class in midterms and finals four times in two years.
At the time, China was overrun by competing warlords, and the balance of power was shifting constantly. In 1924, the dominant Zhili faction was defeated in a coup by the pro-Japanese Fengtian clique. One year the high school students were invited to Shandong University’s annual ceremony honoring Confucius, and there I saw Zhang Zhongchang, a general belonging to the Fengtian clique, who had more cash, concubines, and soldiers under his command than he knew what to do with. I have never forgotten the sight of him in the long robes of traditional dress, kowtowing in front of the shrine to Confucius.
In 1928, Chiang Kai-shek launched a military campaign to unify China in the name of “revolution” and Sun Yat-sen’s legacy. His Northern Expedition gained momentum and won the Communists’ support as he marched north from Guangdong to Jinan. Japanese forces attempted to take advantage of the confusion by sending troops to Jinan, sparking a violent conflict that resulted in thousands of civilian casualties on both the Chinese and Japanese sides. Schools in Jinan closed as a result.
At this time, the reflections in my heart’s mirror were of an education that blended elements of both the traditional and the modern approaches, against the backdrop of constant fighting between warlords.
The Kuomintang army retreated, and the Japanese eventually succeeded in occupying Jinan. Schools did not reopen, and for the next year I belonged to a conquered race.
The Japanese were now the only authorities in Jinan. Like all illegitimate rulers, despite their outward show of strength, they were actually terrified of the Chinese people and treated ordinary civilians as dangerous enemies. They often conducted lightning raids of civilian houses, and news that the Japanese were coming always caused commotion at home. Some of us felt that we should open the main door, while others thought we should close it. The former pictured the Japanese soldiers saying, “How dare you be so bold as to leave your door wide open!” and then stabbing us to death. The latter pictured the Japanese soldiers saying, “You must have sinister designs, or why would you close your door instead of opening it to welcome the Imperial Army?” and then stabbing us to death. We vacillated endlessly between leaving the door open and closing it. Everyone was frantic. Our terror of the Japanese could not be imagined by an outsider.
I knew the Japanese hated students for having started the movement to burn Japanese goods in Shandong. Since schools were closed, I shaved my head in an attempt to pass as a shop apprentice. One day, as I was walking along Dongmen Street, a few Japanese soldiers came toward us and began to search everyone on the street. I knew I had to stay calm; if I tried to run I would be killed. I tried to look nonchalant as I walked up to the soldier, who searched me and found that I was wearing a belt. He was pleased with his discovery: “Very cunning you. You not apprentice, you student. Apprentice don’t tie belt!” He gave me a blow to the head with his cudgel, but luckily I didn’t faint. I immediately started explaining that these days, lowly apprentices were also paid well enough to afford belts. The soldier refused to believe me. Just as we were arguing, another soldier came up, possibly one who was higher ranked than the one I had been arguing with. I broke out in a sweat. “Just let him go!” he said irritably with a wave of his hand. I quickly made my escape.
During this year, my heart’s mirror reflected my life as a member of a conquered people.
In 1929, the Japanese troops retreated, and the Kuomintang retook Jinan. A new stage of my schooling began. The high school I had been attending was closed. I was permitted to enroll at the new Jinan Government High School, the only high school in the province, without having to take an entrance examination.
There were now quite a few Kuomintang officials on the faculty. The ideological tone on campus became more pronounced, and the Kuomintang bias irritated me. The educational philosophy of the school had also shifted, most notably in Chinese classes. The teacher nicknamed Empire had left, classical Chinese was no longer taught, and essays were to be written in modern instead of classical Chinese. Many of the new teachers were prominent intellectuals in the May Fourth Movement. My first Chinese teacher at the new school was Mr. Hu Yepin, who would later die for the Communist cause. Mr. Hu seldom followed a fixed syllabus. Instead, he spoke with great urgency about contemporary literature and art and about a new “literature of the people”—that is, the literature of the proletariat. Several of us responded to these ideas enthusiastically, setting up tables outside the dormitories and inviting our fellow students to study sessions on the subject. We were even going to publish a journal, for which I wrote an essay called “The Task of Contemporary Literature” that I had cobbled together from chunks of Marxist aesthetic theory translated from the Japanese. The translation was scarcely intelligible, but it was full of zeal and revolutionary slogans in equal measure. At the time, Mr. Hu was wanted by the Kuomintang, and he fled to Shanghai before my essay could be published. He was killed by the Kuomintang a couple of years later. My revolutionary zeal waned, and I had no further thoughts of revolution until the Communist Liberation in 1949.
Mr. Dong Qiufang took over from Mr. Hu as our Chinese teacher. He was a graduate of Peking University and friend of Lu Xun, who wrote the introduction to an anthology of Russian revolutionary literature translated by Dong. Mr. Dong commended my essays. He considered me the most talented writer in the class, indeed in the whole school, which naturally flattered me. For the past sixty years, I have maintained the habit of writing essays alongside my academic work. Regardless of their literary quality, they provide an outlet for my anger and joys and allow me to express my emotions and my ideals. I will always remember Mr. Dong with affection.
That year, the reflection in my heart’s mirror was of a new stage in life.
After graduating in the summer of 1930, I traveled to Beijing along with most of my classmates to take the entrance examinations for universities there. All kinds of universities existed in Beijing at the time—state-run universities, private ones, religious ones—and they varied immensely in quality. The most prestigious among them were the two state-run universities, Peking University and Tsinghua University. We all applied to these two universities, which had dozens of students competing for each place. Being accepted to one of these extremely selective universities was considered a great honor, like being a proverbial carp transformed into a dragon. The year that I applied in Beijing, a fellow student fr
om Shandong who was also traveling to Beijing told us that he had already taken the examinations five times; this was his sixth. He was rejected yet again. Suffering a nervous breakdown, he wandered around near Xi Mountain for seven days before recovering his senses. He decided to give up applying to university and go home, and I never learned what became of him.
Of course, I too applied to Peking University and Tsinghua, but unlike my friends, I didn’t apply anywhere else. I must have seemed confident of getting in, but the truth was that I hadn’t thought very hard about where to apply. My friends applied to an assortment of good, bad, and mediocre universities—some of them applied to seven or eight altogether. I’ve taken countless examinations over the course of a lifetime and have often been lucky. This was no exception. Both universities accepted me, and my friends envied the difficult choice I had before me.
I weighed my options for some time before settling on Tsinghua. Opportunities to study abroad were as highly sought after then as they are now, and Tsinghua was reputed to have the edge when it came to sending its students abroad. Since that was my eventual goal, I chose to enroll in Tsinghua’s Western Literature Department (later renamed the Foreign Literature Department).
Tsinghua’s Western Literature Department was well known at the time for having a faculty that consisted almost entirely of foreigners and for teaching in the original languages. Even the Chinese professors often conducted their classes in foreign languages, usually in English. This alone made it extremely attractive. It turned out that our foreign professors were mediocre scholars, many of whom would have barely qualified to teach high school in their native countries, and most of my required classes were unilluminating. But there were two especially memorable classes: I audited Mr. Chen Yinke’s class on Buddhist literature in translation, and as an elective I chose Mr. Zhu Guangqian’s class on the psychology of literature and art, which was effectively a class on aesthetics. Mr. Ye Gongchao of my own department taught us English in my first year. His English was fluent, but his ostentatiously unkempt appearance left me with a bad impression. I also remember Mr. Wu Mi’s classes on the comparative study of Chinese and English poetry and on English Romantic poets.