The Great Flowing River

by Chi Pang-yuan

  In mid-September I went to Hankou, returned to Wuhan University, and registered for classes. I wrote fewer letters until I wrote none at all. Before leaving for Hankou, I wrapped up his letters and left them with Cheng Keyong, a good friend from Nankai who was studying at National Chiao Tung University. In November, I had her send them all back to Mr. Yu, and wrote a short note saying that our paths would henceforth be different, bid him farewell, and wished him the best.

  I wasn’t very focused in my fourth year. Too much had happened in the three months of summer break, almost to a degree unbearable for my youthful heart. In three months I had traveled the Yangtze River from beginning to end and had gone halfway back upriver. In the three great furnaces of China—Chongqing, Nanjing, and Wuhan—I had truly experienced the joys of meeting and sorrows of parting for the first time in my life. I often seemed to find myself in an illusory realm where nothing was real. The hero I worshiped when young was in heaven, and all that was left was a pure longing for him. And there was no place in the world of reality for Mr. Yu and I to coexist; he was a person who came on the wings of song. When I was young, I often thought of him, but it was like a song that gradually faded with time, leaving a reality without songs. In middle age, when I listened seriously to classical music I sometimes recalled the birds singing in the forest, but only far off in the recesses of my spirit.

  LUOJIA MOUNTAIN: 1946

  We were the first group of demobilized students to return to Wuhan University.

  I was deeply disappointed the first time I set foot on the Wuhan University campus on Luojia Mountain. Not only did the place appear desolate, but it had been so ruined by the Japanese and the neighboring villagers that it was hardly fit to live in.

  While we were in Sichuan the teachers were always saying how impressive and beautiful the palacelike buildings were and how they faced the vast and lovely East Lake. However, in September 1946 when I went to find the women’s dorm, the workers were still putting glass in the windows and installing wooden doors. I was assigned to the very last room, along with my classmate Kuang Shufang, who was always nice to me in four years at school. Soon, school recommenced and Xie Wenjin arrived from Shanxi.

  That year, the three of us had class together, and on weekends we often took the ferry from Wuchang over to Hankou, where we would buy surplus American military canned goods sold on the avenue along the river. Mostly we bought powdered ice cream, and when we returned to the dorm we would add hot water and drink it as a substitute for milk, which was comparatively more expensive. After evening dorm inspection in the winter, we would light a small coal fire to roast various things such as small potatoes and gingko nuts, which were really very tasty. Life was much better here than at Leshan. Two years previously, Xie Wenjin had married her childhood sweetheart, Meng Baoqin, and taken leave from school, and after she gave birth to a son, she returned. She was more settled then, and after studying she would write long letters to her husband. She was very diligent in doing her homework and had a stabilizing influence on us. Shufang and I admired that marriage of hers.

  The motto of Wuhan University was “Intelligence, honesty, and a broad and strong mind.” Like all university mottoes, it consisted of four Chinese characters that had a deeper significance, though I can’t recall what it was. In any event, the pragmatic attitude of the place was everywhere apparent. Most people in China in 1947 seemed to be running all over and moving house like a bunch of ants with no apparent goal. Most of the faculty in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures had opportunities for better employment elsewhere. Professor Zhu Guangqian was already at the School of Literature at National Beiping University making new plans. Before he departed, he hired Professor Wu Mi (styled Yu Ceng) to head the department at Wuhan University.

  Professor Wu had not returned to Qinghua University when National Southwestern Associated University moved back to Beiping; instead he had gone to Wuhan University, probably out of his personal friendship with Professor Zhu. In my fourth year, I took two of his classes, one of which was called Literature and Life, which was open to the entire university, and was said to be a well-known class he had taught at Qinghua University upon his return from Harvard University. He offered the class again at Wuhan University and taught it for only two years. He was extremely well read and highly idealistic. His course outline and the content of his lectures covered everything, classical and modern, Chinese and foreign. If it had been an era of peace, order, and prosperity, he could have given an early boost to the study of comparative literature in China. Unfortunately, in 1947, most students were full of worries and it was difficult to find a settled young person, totally unlike the previous generation who had solely pursued the ideal of a “moralist of realism.” He edited Measure of Learning magazine, and throughout his life he stressed that literature must have a serious purpose and rhetoric must be based on sincerity. But stories of his blind passions became the stuff of legends in those days.

  The thing I remember most clearly about Professor Wu is that he offered a class called The Long Poem for third- and fourth-year students, which served as a continuation of Professor Zhu’s English poetry class.

  He started with the 152 lines of Milton’s “L’Allegro” and the 176 lines of “Il Penseroso.” The vocabulary and many allusions made them very difficult for us. The Italian titles were quite sonorous and have stayed with me to this day.

  Having memorized poems for Professor Zhu’s class, we had good memories and assumed we had to memorize these two long poems, so we set about intoning and memorizing them. I still remember large portions of them, which proved fairly useful when I later went on for advanced studies or taught English literary history.

  We read only a few important parts and key lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost, but it was only when he taught Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” that we found out we didn’t have to memorize the long poems; however, for exams we were required to provide commentary from a much broader perspective and point of view. Later we read “Alastor” and “Adonis” by Shelley and “Endymion” by Keats, and he explained the conflict between the two poets’ early Romanticism and reality.

  After classes started again, Professor Wu announced that he would be directing the theses of those students who had been advised by Professor Zhu, including mine. Before leaving for Beiping, Professor Zhu told Professor Wu that I wanted to write a thesis about Shelley or Keats. It’s quite possible that Professor Zhu also told him about the sadness from which I could not escape—teachers do talk about the private feelings of the students they are concerned about!

  Professor Wu suggested that I write my thesis about Shelley’s long poem “Epipsychidion” (Greek for “dedicated to a young soul”). I wrote to my father and asked him to have someone in Shanghai find the appropriate book for me, because the school library was not fully back in place yet. Time and Tide had started publishing again in Shanghai and the chief editor, Deng Lianxi, was himself a graduate of foreign languages and literatures. Later, when we met, he teased me and said, “So, you’re researching Shelley’s view on love now, because Professor Wu Mi is your advisor.” Upon receiving the book, I flipped through it and decided that Shelley’s view on love was different from my own “love-at-first-sight school” and really wanted to switch to a poem by Keats, but both time and my knowledge were insufficient.

  Soon, Professor Wu summoned me and corrected about half of my huge draft outline. He used a writing brush to write a two-page outline in English and added one line in Chinese: “The Buddha said love is like a torch that attracts ten thousand others. Its fire always remains.” He told me that I needed to consider transcendental love, because loving others, having compassion and sympathy, was a “love” that was not limited to two people.

  I diligently read secondary works and wrote a childish first draft based on my teacher’s outline, which I handed in by the middle of April, and then proceeded to revise half of it, laboriously writing it by hand (I had never seen a type
writer in those days) until I had my thesis.

  Professor Yuan Changying taught Shakespeare to the fourth-year students. She fixed the year’s rate of progress using her accustomed steady pace. From Shakespeare’s thirty-seven dramas, the tragedies, comedies, and histories, she selected representative plays to introduce to us, but we had no book. All we had were excerpts read in class and the notes we took. Note-taking was my specialty and would come in handy if I ever had the chance to read the works. The topic of Shakespeare is vast and deep and would require a lifetime of study, something I never attempted.

  Professor Yuan led us through the palace gate, the third-year class on drama. First she explained the readings and then we read several plays. Our textbook was Hatcher’s Modern Continental Dramas, an anthology like Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, which we’d read in English poetry class. I remember her expressions as she taught us Hauptman’s The Sunken Boat and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which was translated by Wong Ruobi as The Big-Nosed Sage of Love and published by Yuanliu, Taipei in 1994, and how moving it was, inspiring us for a lifetime. Later I read a piece written by my classmate Sun Fali titled “The Shakespeare Bequeathed by an Outstanding Teacher,” in which she remembers how Professor Yuan analyzed drama using the fifth dimension. The three quadrants of line, face, and body were the quadrants of space, with time as the fourth quadrant, and their interrelationship (the structure) was the fifth dimension. We were indeed fortunate to have such a fine beginning to our career in literature in that chaotic period of war.

  BACKWARD AND “PROGRESSIVE” LITERATURE

  Shortly after classes resumed, a notice was pasted up outside the classroom stating that Dr. Tian Dewang, who had recently returned from Italy, was offering an elective course on Dante’s Divina Commedia for the third- and fourth-year students.

  Seven or eight of us were very interested in the course and made it known that we would take it, but in the end only three of us signed up for it. A few days before class, one withdrew, leaving me and one other male classmate, who also decided to drop, not being in the mood to study such a profound classic. The program head summoned the three of us for a talk and told us that to be able to have a real scholar and professor of Italian literature who also satisfied the standards of the Ministry of Education at this place and time was something that ought to be treasured. He said it was up to the three of us to allow the program to open the class so as to retain a talented professor. When we came out, I pleaded with the others not to withdraw from the class. In a spirit of compromise, they said, they would wait until the time to add and drop had past and then withdraw due to a class conflict. In short, I ended up being the only student to face the teacher.

  September in Wuhan was the middle of autumn. The classroom was small, and although the windows and door had just been installed, it was still cold and drafty.

  Professor Tian wore a Western-style suit and was thin and elegant, with the bearing of a European man of letters. At first he stood behind the podium and wrote on the blackboard; later he sat in a chair and I sat alone below him, and all I could see of him was his shoulders and above. After two weeks of class, we both probably felt a little funny, so one day he said, “The distance from the girls’ dorm to the classroom is about the same as to the faculty dorm. It would be better to have class at my house, and it’s warmer. There’s just my wife and me and the baby.”

  I went and asked Professor Wu Mi about it and he said, “Give it a try and see. We really don’t have enough classrooms, and it would be safe at Professor Tian’s place.”

  After that, I climbed halfway up the slope to Professor Tian’s house and during class had a cup of hot tea. Professor Tian’s wife was fairly young, unassuming, and warm. The male students said that Professor Tian had studied theology at the Vatican but was never ordained as a priest. Prior to the end of the War of Resistance, he had obtained a doctorate in literature and returned home and married. They also said that at Leshan, there was only one student in Professor Zhang Yi’s (Zhenru) class on Hegel, and the two of them often dozed off facing each other. They wondered if the same thing might transpire while I studied the Divina Commedia in Professor Tian’s room.

  I clearly remember the class that semester in which both teacher and student played their respective parts. Professor Tian diligently guided my reading of the most important parts of the Commedia. Of course, the focus of the class was not unlike other literature classes. More time was allocated to the Inferno than to the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, and special importance was attached to the beauty of the meter and rhyme and power of the imagery. In the second circle of hell, the story of the lovers Paolo and Francesca is heard amid the whirlwind. Dante writes: “I fainted with pity, as if I had been dying; and fell, as a dead body falls.” I later came to understand that the frequent treatment of sin and love in Western art and literature came as a commentary on the Commedia. Professor Tian produced and showed me different editions and illustrations of the Commedia that he had brought back from Italy, something that never would have happened in a regular classroom. He was a fairly restrained speaker and during class never discussed anything beyond the text, doing his best to make the class as substantial as possible.

  However, his dorm accommodations were not very big, and any noises from the neighboring room where his wife held the baby could be heard. And since I was a girl, we soon became familiar and when no one else was around, she would hand the baby to her husband. Embarrassed, Professor Tian would blush furiously, and I would stand up and take the baby, holding the seven- or eight-month-old boy for him as I listened to class. Later, his wife would hand me the baby at five o’clock, while she would go fan the fire in the kitchen and cook dinner. One time, a classmate came to get me for a class meeting. He returned and told the others how he saw me there holding the baby while the teacher’s wife fanned the kitchen fire and the teacher lectured on the eighteenth or some other circle in the Inferno. Soon everyone was talking and laughing about it.

  But that first reading of the Commedia provided a solid foundation and allowed me to avoid Professor Miao Langshan’s class, Contemporary Russian Culture, which was, at the time, an extremely popular and full class (I had already taken the required one-year course on Russian literature). My insistence on taking a class on the Commedia was an act against the current of the times. I had decided upon a simple path when many others were misled by an unreasonable enthusiasm for political literature and by their own political zealotry and pessimism. In my last year at the university, I chose to take the deserted course on the Divina Commedia rather than Contemporary Russian Culture. I did so out of my ambition to study, and it had real meaning.

  THE JUNE 1 MASSACRE

  The activities of the leftist students were carried out more or less openly in the classroom, dorms, and cafeteria, and on the playing field. Reading groups and singing groups no longer had the spirit of the War of Resistance but were filled with an enthusiasm for Russian books and revolutionary songs such as “The East Is Red,” among others. That year at Luojia Mountain, the reddest female classmate was Wang Yuncong, who was pretty, cool, and never engaged in “girl talk” in the dorm. One afternoon as I was crossing the playing field, I saw a volleyball match, which was surrounded by a sea of people. All eyes were on Wang Yuncong. Not only was she a skilled player, but also she was the acknowledged leader, not in the least like an ordinary university student. To this day I still clearly remember her fighting charisma.

  Professor Miao Langshan exercised a great deal of influence, but it was negligible compared to that of Wen Yiduo, Li Gongpu, and Pan Guangdan at National Southwestern Associated University. At Southwestern Associated, their speeches criticizing the government and condemning the current situation, their fiery activities, and even the sacrifice of their lives led to a nationwide student movement and allowed the Communists to influence the intellectuals, and as such it was significantly different.

  Since he had arrived at Wuhan University to teach midway through the
War of Resistance, Professor Miao Langshan’s classes, lectures, and forums had been very popular with the students. He used the rich content of Russian literary works to condemn the current situation in China and condemn the government. His talks were interspersed with lots of humorous remarks and mockery of others. They were hilarious, and the house was always full. He led many students who were dissatisfied with the current situation to be “progressive” and to throw themselves into the leftist camp. But he was not himself a Communist Party member.

  At the beginning of February 1945, the garrison headquarters wanted to apprehend him, so he went to see University President Wang, who told him he couldn’t protect him and suggested that he leave for his own safety. Student response was fierce. Some of the other professors felt he liked to talk too much and that talking so much about politics in class was inappropriate. Professor Zhu Guangqian, the program head, wanted him to stay, but for the school, no one could guarantee his background. The changes in the frontline situation, however, resulted in an official memo never being sent. When classes began again after winter break, Professor Miao Langshan’s job was secured by the Allied victory in Europe and the Russian occupation of Berlin. As a result, I took his one-year class on Russian literature. From the autumn of 1945 to the summer of 1946, he still attended to course content and progress, holding to his role as a teacher of literature. But upon our return to Luojia Mountain, Professor Miao’s classes became one-third literature, two-thirds politics. His political attacks accompanied by dramatic gestures became more forceful and inciting as the Communists began to go from taking land and cities behind enemy lines to coming out in the open and doing so. With a shortage of recently demobilized qualified professors, his stage expanded greatly to include the entire university. It was a current, a trend, and no one dared openly criticize his talks.