The Cowshed

by Ji Xianlin

  I audited or sneaked into many classes in other departments. Mr. Zhu Ziqing, the renowned poet and essayist, was a professor of Chinese literature; Mr. Yu Pingbo taught Redology, the study of Dream of the Red Chamber; Ms. Xie Wanying, better known by the pen name Bing Xin, as well as Mr. Zheng Zhenduo, who wrote under the name Xi Di, also taught at Tsinghua. On one occasion, Ms. Xie courteously asked several male students, myself included, to leave her classroom. Although we failed in our attempt to attend that class, we were permitted to sit in on Mr. Zheng’s lectures. Mr. Zheng was less arrogant than some of the other professors, and he had no patience for academic cliques. Wu Zuxiang, Lin Geng, Li Changzhi, and I were among the young students who got to know him by auditing his lectures. Along with Ba Jin and Jin Yi, he edited the avant-garde Literary Quarterly, and he permitted some of us to write or edit. We were thrilled to see our own names in print on the cover of the quarterly, and all of us remained friends with Mr. Zheng until his untimely death in a plane accident in 1958, which grieves me to this day.

  The political situation at this time was tense. While Chiang Kai-shek was focused on eradicating the Communists, the Japanese army had entered Gubeikou and Manchuria. After the Mukden Incident, the staged attack on a Japanese railway that gave the Japanese an excuse to invade Manchuria, I joined a group of Tsinghua students protesting Chiang’s refusal to declare war on Japan. In a rush of patriotism, we staged demonstrations and hunger strikes, and even traveled to Nanjing to present our demands. But Chiang deceived us, and we returned home without having succeeded in causing any change.

  Tsinghua itself was not insulated from political turmoil. There was a deep rift between Kuomintang and Communist students. Comrade Hu Qiaomu, a history student in my class who would later become a prominent cadre, was already heavily involved in revolutionary work. It was an open secret that he slipped Communist pamphlets into our washbasins overnight. I remember one evening when he sat on my bed until late, attempting to persuade me to join him, but I was too timid and cautious. Instead, to repay his friendship, I agreed to help teach at the night school that he ran for workers’ children.

  The Communist and Kuomintang supporters among the students often clashed, but I knew little about their arguments since I wasn’t involved in politics and had no interested in getting involved. I had leftist sympathies but wasn’t affiliated with either camp. Communist and Kuomintang students did sometimes work together: For instance, many students traveled to villages near Shahe and Qinghe, to educate the villagers on the importance of resisting the Japanese. I took part in some of those trips, and remember seeing Kuomintang supporters there. After all, nearly all of us were patriots, in the long-standing patriotic tradition of Chinese intellectuals, even though Chiang Kai-shek was refusing to resist the Japanese invasion.

  My family was still struggling financially. Whenever I was about to return to campus after the winter and summer breaks, I had trouble scraping together the funds to pay for tuition and board. As a state university, Tsinghua required minimal expense. Tuition was a nominal forty yuan a semester, and at graduation the university returned all tuition to students to subsidize the traditional post-graduation vacation. Rooms in the dormitories were free; board was six yuan a month and included meat at every meal. Even so, I could barely afford my studies. I must have been the only student from Qingping County attending a state university, so the county contributed fifty yuan a year toward my expenses. I also wrote a few articles as a way of earning some money to lighten my family’s financial burden. I survived four years of university education that way, and at the end of the four years, I had a photograph taken in a rented graduation cap to mark the conclusion of my undergraduate career.

  It was said that “graduation is unemployment,” and none of my classmates were immune to what we called “the problem of finding a rice bowl” except the few children of wealthy magnates and high-ranking officials. By my third year, I began to worry about finding a job, especially since I would be my family’s main breadwinner. I had no connections or talent for flattery. I spent sleepless nights worrying, but there was nothing to be done.

  Just as I was about to graduate in the early summer of 1934, the principal of my alma mater in Jinan, Mr. Song Huanwu, sent word inviting me to return to the school as a Chinese teacher. My monthly salary would be 160 yuan, twice the salary of a university teaching assistant. Perhaps because I had published a few articles, I was considered a writer, and back then people assumed that a writer must be able to teach Chinese. I was overjoyed to have been offered a job, but also alarmed. As a student of European literature, I was ill-qualified to teach high school Chinese. The students were known to be a demanding group, and they had already driven away my predecessor. I was convinced that teaching high school would be asking for trouble and hesitated for a long time, but the summer vacation was approaching and I had no other options. I eventually decided that if the school was offering me a job, I would be so bold as to take up their offer.

  So in the autumn of 1934, I became a high school Chinese teacher. I got along well with the principal of the school and with my students, but the other Chinese teachers put me in an uncomfortable position. There were three year groups, four teachers, and twelve classes, and each of us was responsible for teaching three classes. My colleagues were all older than I was. They were experienced, well-trained teachers who barely had to prepare for class. But they each taught three classes in the same year, whereas I taught the remaining class in each year, which required preparing for three separate classes. As a result of my heavy workload and awkward relationship with my colleagues, I was dissatisfied with my job despite earning a fair wage (160 yuan was 3,200 yuan in today’s terms). I hadn’t achieved my dream of studying abroad, and my “rice bowl” didn’t seem secure.

  But if the god of fortune exists, he must have been smiling on me: Just as I was beginning to feel trapped, Tsinghua signed an agreement to exchange students with German universities via the German Academic Exchange Service. I was elated, and immediately wrote to apply. When I learned that I had been accepted, I was even happier than I had been when I was accepted to Tsinghua. I would have a bright future; I would never want for anything; and when I returned I would have plenty of job opportunities and a secure job for life.

  But there was no escaping the fact that my family was penniless, and I had elderly relatives and a young child to support. I faced another difficult choice. If I turned the offer down, I would be a schoolteacher for the rest of my life and might not even have a secure livelihood. But if I did take the offer, who knew what awaited me? As the poet wrote: “With peach blossoms ahead of me and snow behind me, how dare I turn my horse back now?”

  After thinking it over and talking to my family, I decided to go ahead and participate in the exchange program. After all, it was only for two years, and I would be home again before long.

  In the summer of 1935, I left for Beijing and Tianjin, where I completed the paperwork necessary for traveling overseas, and took the Trans-Siberian Railway across the Soviet Union to Berlin. It felt as though I were following in the footsteps of the famous Tang dynasty monk Xuanzang, who had long ago journeyed west to bring Buddhist scriptures back to China.

  Between graduating from Tsinghua and leaving for Germany, the following image was reflected in my heart’s mirror: Chiang was brutally suppressing Communist activity, the Japanese army had invaded, and my fellow students were divided in their allegiances. Those were interesting times.

  The peach blossoms ahead of me seemed ethereally beautiful from a distance, but up close they looked like ordinary flowers.

  I spent several months in Berlin, which was full of Chinese students, many of whom frittered their time away. Government officials who wanted their children to “study” abroad often sent them to Germany. They despised me, I despised them, and none of us wanted to be so much as seen with the other. Berlin was clearly not for me. In late autumn I left for Göttingen, a university town known for its tradition of sci
entific excellence. In the seven years I spent living there, I never once left the town.

  The German government gave me a monthly stipend of one hundred and twenty marks. Rent alone cost about 40 percent of that, as did food, and I hardly had any money left over. Students funded by the Chinese government had a stipend of eight hundred marks a month, and mine was peanuts compared to theirs. During my years in Germany, I never once took a winter or summer vacation or traveled anywhere, partly because I was penniless and partly because I wanted to make the most of the time I had to study.

  After all, I had come all this way to be a student, though I didn’t yet have a clear idea of what my studies would focus on. In my first semester, I took Greek with the intention of studying the classics. But I was dismayed to find that I was no match for my German colleagues, many of whom had taken eight years of Latin and six years of Greek in school.

  In the spring semester of 1936, I discovered from the course listings that Professor Ernst Waldschmidt would be offering a class on Sanskrit. Mr. Chen Yinke’s classes on Buddhism at Tsinghua had awakened my interest in Sanskrit, but there was no way of studying it in China at the time. I was excited by the prospect of studying Sanskrit and immediately decided to take it up. At the time, earning a doctorate at a German university required a major and two minor fields. My major fields were Sanskrit and the Pali language, and my minors were English and Slavic linguistics. I began my formal course of study then.

  The term of my scholarship came to an end in 1937, just as full-scale war between China and Japan was sparked by what became known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Japan clearly had its sights on China and all of Asia. Returning home would now be impossible. Fortunately for me, the chair of the Sinology Department asked me to serve as a lecturer in Chinese, and I immediately agreed. The lectureship was not too time-consuming, and for the rest of my stay in Göttingen, I would spend most of my time studying at the Sanskrit research institute and some of my time lecturing in Sinology.

  In 1939, the Second World War broke out. I had thought that a violent war in which millions were to be killed would start with a bang that would terrify the beasts as well as the humans. But war crept up on us silently. The declaration of war was marked only by the barking of a few fascists, and I was already used to that. At the beginning of the war, the Wehrmacht was often successful, but while the Germans were thrilled to hear of the Wehrmacht’s victories, every victory was a blow to me. Every time the Wehrmacht won a battle, I would take a sleeping pill at night. I developed a case of chronic insomnia that has stayed with me ever since.

  At first, the war had little impact on daily life. Then, gradually, butter and meat were rationed, followed by bread and other necessities. By the time I noticed that the screws were being tightened, they were quite tight indeed. Yet no one complained, apart from a few anti-fascists. The Nazis governed Germany with an iron fist, and the Germans struck me as an enigmatic people.

  As the war progressed, Germany was increasingly besieged, and food shortages became acute. I went hungry all day, and at night I dreamed of eating Chinese peanuts. Even in my dreams I am unambitious: Someone else might have dreamed of delicacies like shark’s fin or bird’s nest, but I dreamed of nothing but peanuts. I felt like a hungry ghost in hell, so hungry I could swallow the planet itself whole.

  The war did not interrupt my studies and teaching. At the beginning of the war, there were very few air raids. I finally finished writing my doctoral dissertation. Professor Waldschmidt had been conscripted, and his predecessor, the retired Professor Sieg, stepped in to teach his classes. Professor Sieg was a renowned scholar of Tocharian who had spent decades studying the language. He was old enough to be my grandfather and treated me as his own grandchild. He decided to teach me everything he knew about the Vedas and the grammar of ancient Indian languages. Despite my protestations, he also insisted on teaching me Tocharian. When Professor Waldschmidt was home on furlough, I seized the chance to pass my orals, and also took my Slavic orals with Professor Braun and my English orals with Professor Roeder. Then Professor Sieg continued to advise my work. We met every day. On winter evenings I would walk my octogenarian mentor home along the snow-covered streets. Neither the war nor my constant hunger seemed to matter.

  Of course I missed my homeland and family. All communication had been cut off. The poet Tu Fu wrote: “After three months of battle, a letter from home is worth ten thousand pieces of gold.” After three years of war, a letter from home would have been worth exponentially more than that to me, except that by then there was no way of getting one through. The lack of news from home only exacerbated my insomnia. I was taking more pills by the day, and my research work was my only solace. By then, British and American air raids had become more frequent, and despite the hunger, I managed to write a few articles between the raids. All the men had been conscripted, and the campus was full of women. Eventually a few men returned, but they were all missing either a leg or an arm, and the chorus of crutches echoing down the hallways became a familiar one.

  By now, news of defeat was filtering in from the front lines, and the façade of Nazi lies about the war was beginning to crack. We foreigners could tell that the game was up. There was nothing the Wehrmacht could do to avoid defeat.

  My ten years in Germany convinced me that the Germans are among the world’s finest peoples. The German civilization has produced more cutting-edge scientific technology, great authors, philosophers, composers, and scientists than any other modern nation. The Germans themselves are honest, upright people, but unfortunately they are also politically naïve, and many of them were genuine supporters of Hitler. Hitler himself frequently insulted the Chinese, whom he saw as destroyers of civilization. That should have made living in Germany harder, but it didn’t. I’ve been told that Chinese people in the United States have difficulty integrating into American society. But in Germany, I lived with German families, and my German classmates, teachers, colleagues, and friends all treated me as one of their own. I never experienced any racism. That, too, was unforgettable.

  I never learned how this great nation faced the thought of impending defeat because my German friends seldom discussed the war with me; in the face of extreme privation and brutal air raids, they seemed impassive, perhaps a little lost. Even when the Americans occupied Göttingen in the spring of 1945, and it was clear that fascism had been defeated, the Germans remained unmoved, as if defeat had left them dazed.

  Six years of brutal world war had come to an end. Deeply relieved, I immediately thought of my family and of China. I had already been away for ten years, and I could sense the call of the homeland. After some negotiation, the American soldiers occupying Germany agreed to take us to Switzerland in a jeep. I was heartbroken to be saying goodbye to my German teachers and friends, particularly Professor Sieg. He seemed grief-stricken, and his hands were shaking. We both knew we would never see each other again. My eyes brimmed with tears, and I didn’t dare look back. My landlady burst into tears at the news. Her husband had died and her son lived far away. We had lived together for years, and once I left Germany, she would be alone again in an empty house. My eyes grew wet as I bid farewell to her and climbed into the jeep. I found myself crafting a poem in the classical style:

  After ten years studying in Germany,

  My heart desires to return to my homeland.

  Instead we cross the border into Switzerland;

  Looking back at the trees of the place where I lodged, it begins to look like home.

  The reflection that these ten years left on my heart’s mirror was one of fascist rule, a cruel world war, and my own yearning for home.

  We arrived in Switzerland in October 1945. Several months later, in the spring of 1946, we left Switzerland for Marseilles, where we boarded an English steamer taking French troops to Saigon. From Saigon that summer we secured passage via Hong Kong to Shanghai. After eleven years away from China, I was finally home.

  By then, Mr. Chen Yinke had recommended
me for a post at Peking University, and Messrs. Hu Shi, Fu Sinian, and Tang Yongtong had approved my appointment. I decided that I wasn’t going to return to Europe, and wrote to Professor Haloun, an old friend from Göttingen who had moved to Cambridge, to turn down his offer of a job there. I also got in touch with my family and was able to send them some money. I am very grateful to my uncle and aunt and to my wife, Peng Dehua. Without their hard work, our family wouldn’t have remained healthy and intact during the eleven years in which I was away.

  In China, the raging civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists made it impossible for me to return home to see my family. Instead, I spent the summer in Shanghai and Nanjing. I was able to visit Mr. Chen Yinke in Nanjing, and meet Mr. Fu Sinian at the Academia Sinica there. In autumn of 1946, I took a boat from Shanghai to Qinhuang Island and then traveled on by train to Beijing. It had been eleven years since I last lived in Beijing and being back was overwhelming. It was a chilly late-autumn day and the streets were full of leaves. Mr. Yin Falu came to pick me up at the station, and he arranged for me to live temporarily in the Red Building, one of the main buildings on campus. The following day, I met Mr. Tang Yongtong, the dean of the faculty of humanities, who told me that no Chinese university could appoint scholars returning from overseas to a post higher than that of associate professor. Mr. Fu Sinian had told me the same thing in Nanjing. Of course I would have been content with any post at Peking University, and I wasn’t going to ask for more. But after just over a week, Mr. Tang informed me that I had been appointed a full professor and chair of the Eastern Languages Department. I was thirty-five. I had probably set the record for the fastest promotion to full professor. This was more than I could have hoped for. I was determined to work hard and publish industriously so as not to let down the teachers and elders who believed in me enough to give me this opportunity.