The Great Flowing River

by Chi Pang-yuan

  Amid the large-scale destruction caused by the storm, the dispatchers and the engineers worked anxiously night and day, gradually developing friendships cemented in adversity, supporting one another, taking turns working over twenty-four hours, doing everything they could to solve the problems. Despite the hardships, they were honored to participate in this epoch-making and innovative work. However, four months after the flooding, when everything was back on track, a man-made catastrophe occurred: one freight train hit another from behind on the Zhuoshui River Bridge. The engine of the second train was hanging over the side of the bridge, and the pulling and hanging made it extremely difficult to get things fixed, so the times for all trains the following day had already been changed and a new schedule published. According to the dispatcher Cai Renhui in his memoir Digressions on Fifty Years of Taiwan Railways, “All those associated with the CTC found themselves in a nightmare. The abnormal train operations reached the nadir and the ‘faults’ of the workers were really hard to imagine. One could say that it was unprecedented (and ‘should never happen again’).”

  In the age when the railroads were the sole means for large-scale shipping, the goods were piled high in the stations and freight and passenger trains were of equal importance. After the flooding and the total rescheduling of the trains, when the central CTC equipment was down, old-style manual signaling had to be used and freight trains often spent more time sitting and waiting in halfway stations than running on the tracks. There were twenty-four stations monitored at the central dispatcher’s room in Changhua, with fifty-eight telephone loudspeakers for station relay offices. During these times, engineers and repairmen, station workers, and those on the trains all vied vocally with one another. By the end of a four-hour shift the dispatchers were hoarse, and they were never without their throat lozenges. When they went home, they would end up shouting in their sleep, frightening everyone in the family. They didn’t have any family life to speak of. Those in the administration initially opposed to reforms believed that those in the Communications and Signal Division had overestimated themselves and embarrassed everyone. The newspapers (fortunately there was no TV) assigned blame every day, with freezing irony and burning satire. One cartoon depicted a passenger getting off a train, opening his umbrella and walking, and still arriving at the next station before the train.

  RAILWAY WORKERS TOGETHER THROUGH THICK AND THIN

  Those were times of trials and tribulations! Yet it was a key period in which our lives took root. A young Sichuan middle school student, called “Geometry Luo” by his classmates on account of his dream of speeding trains joined the Taiwan Railways Administration. During those desolate days in a marginalized Taichung, he sought to give his life and work focus, concentrating on his research, starting the work of a lifetime, actually leading his own troops to modernize Taiwan’s railroads. The most difficult stretch of CTC construction was from Changhua to Tainan. From a halting start to steadiness and after successful dispatch operations, the second coastal CTC line from Changhua to Zhunan was installed in 1964 by the original players. In 1969, the CTC mountain line was finished at a total of two hundred miles.

  This group of companions who went through thick and thin, braving the elements without rest, worked together until they retired. Chen Ximing, Yuchang’s first assistant section chief, was born in Tianzhong, Changhua County, in 1928. He graduated from the Electrical Engineering Department at National Taiwan University in 1950, joined the electrical section of the Railways Administration, and was sent abroad seven times to Europe, America, and Japan to examine railroad signaling and electrical technology. He served for a total of forty-two years in the Railways Administration, working his way up through the ranks as an engineer, from section chief to assistant department head to department head, chief engineer, and deputy director, retiring only in 1993. For over thirty years they labored together, becoming lifelong friends (each admiring the intelligence of the other). In our two families there were a total of seven children who grew up together, from diapers to youth. Today they are all middle-aged, and when we get together from different places far and wide, what they like most is reminiscing about the happy times pushing the empty carriages on the deserted railway tracks in the Changhua switching yard.

  From 1950 to 1960 was a time of struggle and of laughter and tears—it was a golden decade for us all. From the rafters of that small Japanese-style house on Fuxing Road in Taichung, we suspended a cradle for three babies. At six months, they were moved to a small wooden bed built by a carpenter based on a picture in Dr. Spock’s Baby Care book. The bed was covered with screen on all four sides and on top. Our friends and relatives referred to it as the screened closet, which was no safer than most baby beds made of wood. “Growing a little each night,” they grew up in the blink of an eye. One by one they soon graduated from National Taichung Primary School (Taichung in the school’s name doesn’t mean it was the earliest primary school in the city, but the name is significant). Lin Haifeng was a student there and after becoming famous, winning the Honinbo Go title, he returned to his alma mater, and we all felt extremely honored.

  During that decade, I watched countless dodgeball games on that large playground; it was a new ball game for me, and to this day it seems to make a mockery of life. I had attended so many elementary schools and never once seen it played. The game seemed to involve little skill, victory being determined by how many opponents a player could hit, a very passive sport, as if one could exist in a crowed spot only by eliminating enough other people. I’ve always been repelled by the dodgeball view of life, sadly watching all those children on the dusty playground doing their best to dodge a ball so as not to be removed from the game. I wish all children throughout the world could grow up in peace and stability and not have to develop strong and vigorous bodies just to flee from disaster.

  I envied the children their serene environment: that screened baby bed, the yard full of generations of cats of all colors, large and small, along with the huge banyan tree in the back, which together constituted the three sights of the Luo house in Taichung. The air roots of the banyan tree were long and abundant. There was also a hole in the trunk, and every time guests they particularly liked arrived, my three boys would hide the visitor’s shoes in that hole and then would come in and announce: “ “You can’t leave now!” The guests would feign surprise. The boys never tired of these games, until they entered middle school. In those seventeen years, the five of us all grew. Taichung is the homeland of childhood memories for my children and me. My own childhood memories do not contain such a beautiful place.

  SILENT WAVES

  In 1966, the Railways Administration transferred Yuchang to the General Administrative Division in Taipei to take part in the railroad electrical planning of the Ten Major National Construction Projects. The following year we left our home of seventeen years in Taichung and moved to Taipei. Our two older sons, who were in senior high school, had to sit for a test in order to transfer schools, and our youngest son, who had just graduated from primary school, was facing the fiercely competitive junior middle school exams in Taipei.

  From that point until 1979, Yuchang focused his energies entirely on electrification engineering. The comprehensive modernization of the railroads meant that trains that didn’t burn coal and emit smoke were about to travel on electrified railway tracks! The project was supervised by the government and watched with great interest by the populace. The progress was reported nearly every day on television, a recent addition to most households. As the engineer responsible, Yuchang frequently had to be on the scene to explain things; his life and his family’s were not easy during those years. His official title went from head of the Communications and Signal Division to chief engineer to deputy director, all just names suitable for his work. The Railways Administration honors an old tradition of the yamen, with a rigid hierarchy in which those with insufficient rank are not allowed to speak (to me it was a very cold place). However, Yuchang was of a tranquil disposit
ion and indifferent to wealth and fame. Carrying out this project was an affirmation of his abilities. He concentrated his mental faculties on each stage of the line, each diagram, and the system, watching as construction from one station to the next became a reality. Seeing a train travel over new track was deeply satisfying and his greatest reward. It could be said that the period of time from the installation of central traffic control in 1950 to the electrification of the railroads constituted the glory days for an engineer.

  But unexpectedly during that busiest of times, the “Two Road Case” of the intelligence agencies actually delayed things.

  My own understanding is that the Two Road Case was an investigation of a number of high-ranking technicians at the Railways Administration and Highways Administration conducted by the Bureau of Investigation from 1970 to 1980. No contact was allowed across the Taiwan Strait, and the investigation was mounted as a result of a number of engineering personnel from the Taiwan Veterans Engineering Department Office, when repairing highways in Thailand and Indonesia, writing to family members in mainland China, which resulted in propaganda from mainland transportation circles being directed at the Taiwan engineers, calling upon them to return to serve the motherland. Thenthe relevant agencies had doubts about their “degree of loyalty” to the nation. Those who were detained, interrogated, and convicted were all from among the more than forty people in the 1946 class of transportation specialists who arrived in Taiwan on the same ship as Yuchang. The construction of the electrification project was being highly publicized, and Dong Ping, who had succeeded to the post of director of the Railways Administration, strenuously guaranteed to the Garrison Office that Yuchang was in no way involved, and insisted that the the administration could not lose the person responsible for carrying out the present stage of the project. The Bureau of Investigation agreed to allow Yuchang to write and submit a detailed account of his activities, his work, and his family life since arriving in Taiwan before anything else would be done.

  During that period, I recall him dragging himself home, exhausted and eyes wide open, to sit down at the dinner table in the evening and write until midnight. After the first fourteen-page account was submitted, he received orders that more information had to be supplied. The tympanitis Yuchang had suffered from in his youth flared up as a result of overwork and lack of sleep. During the day he would go to the Railroad Hospital and get an anti-inflammatory injection, but there was no time for further treatment. In 1979, the electrical modernization of the railroads came to a glorious conclusion and the launch ceremony announced the success of the Ten Major National Construction Projects. Yuchang was awarded a level five Order of the Brilliant Star and inducted as a researcher into the Council for National Construction. But he had lost half his hearing. His remaining efforts went into finishing the extension project for the north–south railroad, and he saw the opening of the direct rail line between Taipei and Hualien, but he was already deaf to the delightful sound of the waves striking the shore. By the time of his retirement in 1985, only 10 or 20 percent of his hearing remained. When we had something to discuss, we often relied on writing. It was difficult for him to have dealings with others after he retired, and his tranquility deepened in silence.

  7

  SPIRITUAL DESCENDANTS

  TAICHUNG FIRST HIGH SCHOOL

  After the Lunar New Year of 1953, Shen Zengwen, the Nankai classmate I had become reacquainted with, arranged for me to fill in for her in her high school English classes at Taichung First High School, because she was going to the United States for six months for training in the teaching of English. She was the recipient of an American postwar fellowship for cultural exchange, known later in the 1960s as the Fulbright Exchange Program, which has had a long and profound impact on international cultural exchange.

  I was very interested in teaching. The most memorable teachers, aside from my parents, were my Nankai Middle School teachers. Meng Zhisun, my favorite among others, was an excellent model of learning and classroom performance. Later, when I attended Wuhan University, my teacher Zhu Guangqian not only possessed high standards but also was able to provide me with guidance at a confusing period in my life, ensuring that I had a fixed goal. For three years, I had been at the “stay-at-home university” (as my mother laughingly referred to it), and the substitute teaching work would have a critical impact on my life.

  The first time I walked through the front gate of Taichung First High School on Yucai Street, I saw the plaque commemorating the founding of the school, and each time I reread it over the next five years, I was deeply moved. On the front was carved:

  At first, we Taiwanese had no middle school until this school was started. Since then, in everything that has been established and in the public schools under township administration, the emphasis has been on language. Due to the ever improving environment, some, not shunning difficulties, went to the mainland across the sea. Leaving home in childhood, dwelling far away from home, and being short on funds to study gave rise to countless doubts and anxieties. The educated were deeply troubled and found it imperative to set up a middle school. In 1915, the committee members Lin Lietang, Lin Xiantang, Gu Xianrong, Lin Xiongzheng, and Cai Lianfang rose up and took charge.

  Donations amounting to twenty-four million yuan were collected, the Lin family donated ninety thousand square feet of land, and the school was constructed in 1915. It was the most important school for the Taiwanese during the fifty years of the Japanese occupation. Even so, to keep the name of the school required years of struggle.

  This justifiable pride at establishing a school elicited my respect. I taught there for five years and proudly became a small part of that admirable tradition. Taichung First High School made me frequently think of the Nankai spirit of my own education and the Northeast Sun Yat-sen Middle School established by my father’s generation, not only for the sake of “childhood education away from home” for the children of my homeland in the northeast but also to guide them at a time when the nation was destroyed and families were shattered and nurture them when they suffered deprivations and hardships as refugees. But the Sun Yat-sen Middle School, upon returning to the place where it began after the war, actually had less support, with the school’s name and history being buried for forty-six years, until in 1995, through the efforts of some early alums in Shenyang, the school recovered its name and history. Taichung First High School hung on to its founding ideals, educating first-rate talent and steadily developing for a hundred years despite many hardships, with its alums forming the backbone of Taiwan society.

  Schools founded upon such a spirit of survival all have a driving atmosphere of self-confidence. At that time, the Japanese colonizers had been gone for less than a decade and most of the educators were from mainland China and had experienced the chaos of war before coming to Taiwan. Most had graduated from good schools and, generally speaking, were enthusiastic teachers with high standards. For them, Taichung First High School was a place of physical and spiritual stability.

  I felt fortunate at being able to “steal” a few hours from the market, the coal stove, baby bottles, and diapers and once again talk about knowledge, precious knowledge, including fine lyrical, descriptive, or expository prose. A classroom of forty or so responsive faces looking up and listening to me lecture gave me a sense of being understood.

  One year was a long time, and even with winter and summer vacations a lot could still be discussed in nine months. By effectively making use of a fifty-minute class period and keeping the students’ attention focused, a teacher could be like a pilot navigating rivers and seas, with each lesson being like a voyage, allowing the students to see a different world.

  Teaching is indeed a delightful thing. Upon entering the classroom you hear “stand and bow” and see a roomful of uniformed students stand in unison, their minds immediately focused, their spirits cleansed, all outside concerns expunged, ready to challenge and be challenged.

  It seemed to be clearly stipulated for hig
h school English classes in those days that two-thirds of the class time would be devoted to lecture and one-third to discussing grammar, which was probably the ratio devoted to those subjects on the National College Entrance Exams in those days. Difficulties arose at the mere mention of grammar. My first challenge was to teach it in a clear and interesting way, blending it with the textbook lesson. Parts of speech, tense, and rules of grammar all formed the trunk and branches of the tree of language, while words and sentences formed the leaves and literary feelings the flowers and fruit. I didn’t translate each word and sentence into Chinese, but rather encouraged the students to freely use their own imaginations to make a deeper impression on them and increase their vocabulary. The wind could “whisper,” “sob,” “groan,” “roar,” and “howl,” and the flow of water went from “rippling” to “rapid currents” and “overpowering flood” to “violent torrents.” The comparative degree of adjectives was not just a matter of adding -er or -est. The Chinese like to say so-and-so is the greatest, but in English it is usually “one of the greatest,” because there is always someone greater. I taught using the method used when I was studying English myself to explain the lessons, effectively expanding the students’ perception of words. In a lifetime of teaching, I have used this method at all levels and found it much welcomed by the students. The students at Taichung First High School were all at a good level, eager to learn, self-confident, and unafraid of difficulties. It was a good start for my teaching.