The Great Flowing River

by Chi Pang-yuan

  Shen Zengwen returned from America during summer vacation and my period of substitute teaching came to an end. Principal Jin Shurong asked me in all sincerity to stay on as a high school English teacher. Fate seemingly had provided me with a greater challenge, but I had to take stock of my own real difficulties: first my husband had to agree, and then I needed the support of my parents. In those years, my mother ran back and forth between Taipei and Taichung. When I was pregnant or ill or Yuchang went abroad for work, my mother always arrived to help out in a timely manner. During that same period of time, my father began to find himself in a difficult position politically. My parents were concerned that my less than robust health would not allow me to handle the twin responsibilities of home and work. However, being young and self-assured, I soon regained the Nankai spirit while substituting. Ultimately, I accepted the offer from Taichung First High School and from that moment entered the world of education, which I had admired from a very young age. I had another secret reason for taking the job: in three years’ time, I wanted to take the test for a Fulbright exchange. If my middle school and college classmate (Xie Wenjin, who was a year ahead of me) could pass, then I probably could too. In those days, one could only apply for a passport if one had such funding. This was to be the first stop for my future.

  In addition to the uniformly high-level curriculum at Taichung First High, the senior class strived toward the goal of passing the National College Entrance Exams with every breath they took. Not only did they want to get into college, but they also wanted to get into specific schools and departments. I was unfazed by this because I had once lived and breathed the same way. It was said that students were assigned to the four sections of the senior class based on student ID numbers. Math and English were the focus of the striving, and the teachers of those classes, in order to enhance the performance of their own students, secretly offered extracurricular competitive exercises.

  It was in this environment that I met my lifetime friend Xu Huifang. She was ten years older than I and a graduate of the English department of Hujiang University. Her father was a famous book collector from Wuyi in Jiangsu Province. Her brother, Xu Zhongnian, studied abroad in France and returned to serve as a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Central University during our days at Shapingba in Chongqing. He was also a famous writer and critic, and I read a number of his books at the Time and Tide Bookstore.

  The teachers’ lounge at Taichung First High was quite big, with several rows of long tables that my colleagues from the various departments used as their own space. Soon after I started, I met Yang Jinzhong, who once taught at Taichung First High, through a letter of introduction written from America by Lin Tonggeng, a lecturer at National Taiwan University. Yang would soon accompany her husband, Hu Xuguang, when he took up his post as an envoy at the embassy in the United States. Her friends, Li Yunxian of the Chinese department, Meng Wenkan of the history department, and Lu Hanfen and Xu Huifang of the English department, all of whom were senior faculty, looked after me. Xu Huifang taught the second section of the senior class and I taught the third. She lived on Lide Street, only two hundred yards from my house. Sometimes we returned together after class, and eventually we arranged to go together in the morning, taking the same pedicab. The first thing we would talk about was that endless topic of class work, and then our households. She had come with her husband, Jiang Daoyu, and family to Taiwan, where three generations lived under one roof as a large family for several decades.

  In the last month of the final term of the senior year, all classes ended and we began providing guidance for the advancing students. Based on their individual specialties, the teachers of each department would rotate, teaching the four sections. We had to prepare our own teaching materials, focusing on the potential questions on the National College Entrance Exams, sharpening the students’ minds and ability to answer precisely. Xu Huifang and I were assigned to the fields of translation and changes in the parts of speech and other grammatical issues. Each of us also had to provide several short pieces that could be read aloud for practice and to enhance reading ability.

  We did our utmost to collect materials. At the time, I started going to the library at the United States Information Service in Taichung, and my brother and his old classmate Yang Kongxin, who worked at Central News, sent me some English texts, mostly articles on literature and culture. After sufficient discussion, and after the children had been put to bed in the evening, Xu would come over to my place and, sitting at my desk, would write the teacher handouts or practice questions for the entire class, and I would cut the stencils for them to be printed at the office the following day. The stenciled handouts were quite successful and several years later were “stolen” for a number of commercially produced guides for scholastic advancement. Naturally, none of us in those days had any notion of copyright. My handwriting is blockish and not very elegant, but ideally suited for making stencils. Not yet thirty years old, I was very happy at being involved in such “important” matters.

  The first thing that comes to mind about the seventeen years we lived in Taichung, besides life at home, is my small desk, often placed at the end of the hall. I hung a red carpet to separate the space from the bedroom. In the circle of light created by the low shade of a small desk lamp, we wrote and stenciled. It was both romantic and bitter. Actually, it wasn’t all that romantic; most of the time we were just a couple of housewives who didn’t enter that space to face the mental challenges until everyone else had gone to bed. English has a most accurate word for this: necessity. We and our families knew that once we started, we had to finish. Working at that small desk of mine in our small living space (it was only in 1972, when we moved to the faculty dorm on Lishui Road, that I had a study of my own) required the understanding of my husband. He “consented” to our work because he worked seven days a week and was frequently away on business, something about which I never complained.

  That small desk laid the foundation for our lifetime friendship, until Xu Huifang passed away at a ripe old age in 2007. None of life’s changes came between us in fifty years. My three sons warmly remember her as Mama Jiang. That shared spirit hunched over the small desk writing and stenciling has remained with me throughout my life in Taiwan, from when I first started teaching at Taichung First High.

  At around 10 p.m., I’d walk her back to the intersection of Lide Street via Fuxing Road. We never ran out of things to talk about in all the times we saw each other home. We remained close, even years later after I had left Taichung First High. In addition to schoolwork, we discussed life and our families. Her dignity, wisdom, and magnanimity had a tremendous influence on me.

  In those five years, looking at the roster of successful entrance exam candidates each summer was another big thing for me. Like a new coach watching a ball game, I constantly told the students not to think about winning or losing, but inside I was anxious for them and was upset that I couldn’t get the first newspaper off the press. I’d circle the names of my students in red on that densely packed list. It is no different today than it was fifty years ago: first I’d look for the names of those on the rosters for National Taiwan University Medical School and the School of Engineering, especially those in electrical engineering, because they had the highest scores. I cannot claim to have been above such “vanity,” and the success rate of the students advancing under my tutelage filled my young mind. During those few days, the only thing missing was the setting off of firecrackers at my door. The students who had passed and made it onto the roster came in a steady stream to thank their teachers. Overall, the students did quite well; however, for some the results were less than ideal and they failed to make the rosters for the public universities. Several days later, they would show up at my door. Some came in and wept. I not only tried to comfort them but also encouraged them to retake the exam the following year. Most were satisfied.

  Sharing their successes and failures resulted in me developing a
long-term “comradeship” with many of the eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys. As they grew older, some would write, and some would come see me when they came home to Taichung to visit, especially during the summer they completed their military service. I heard many interesting anecdotes about training new soldiers. A constant stream of students rang at my door, and every Sunday I’d prepare sweet-sour plum infusion and steam plenty of tasty baozi. Even after many years, I still remembered many of them. The most unforgettable story I heard about soldiering was told to me by Shi Jiaxing. He asked me for a number of small passages in English, which he then recited while on sentry duty, leaving me with a feeling of great respect. While he was studying biology at National Taiwan University, he met regularly with a number of classmates to discuss issues of literature and culture. He fell in love with Jian Chuhui (who later became the famous writer Jian Wan) and even brought her along to visit. After graduating, he taught for several years. When he obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell University, he invited me to take a walk around Hu Shi’s campus, where I saw the place he had lived and pursued his advanced studies. That evening he invited several classmates and his wife’s younger sister, Jian Jinghui, to chat about all the happy events of those years. In fifty years I saw him go from a young person to a scholar of international caliber. In 2008 he was awarded the World Poultry Science Association prize for research, an awarded bestowed every four years, and I was really able to share in their feelings of accomplishment.

  Traditionally at Taichung First High, fewer students went on to study the humanities at the university level. Those who frequently stayed in touch over the decades included Luo Zhiyuan, the outstanding diplomat; Zhao Shoubo, the political commentator who ran the Broadcasting Corporation of China; and Professor Liao Yinan of the National Taiwan University School of Law. Those who graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures include Lin Borong, Zhang Heyong, Zhang Pingnan, and Chen Da’an. Lin Borong was in the first class of students I taught. He had spoken to me of his ideal of doing something for Taichung before he established Liren High School and eventually ran for mayor of the city. I had left Taichung by the time he served as mayor, but it was obvious from the literary style of the written election announcements that he had received an education in literature, even though he was clearly aware that the world of politics he had entered was something completely different. When Zhang Heyong, who was in the same class, was working at Tatung Company, he translated a number of classic works of the humanities for the Hsieh-chih Industrial Library. Zhang Pingnan was the student of whom Xu Huifang was most proud. His Chinese and English were both excellent, and he was also widely read in works of literature. When I was working at the National Bureau of Translation and Compilation, I asked him to translate Erich Auerbach’s (1892–1957) Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a book that was required reading in literature courses, into Chinese. Youth Cultural Enterprise Company published this very significant work in 1980.

  Chen Da’an, who was in the last class I taught, studied in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. He was a student who really loved literature and had deeply original ideas about the literary works he read. When he was at university, he frequently asked me what books he should read outside of class. In five or six years he wrote a good deal of new poetry that was both profound and creative, and I was always his first reader. Later, he too went to the United States to engage in cultural work. At the beginning of 1990, I watched on TV as Muse Cordero Chen Advertising Company, which he and a friend had co-founded, won the silver medal awarded by the Association of National Advertisers. In 1994 they won the Effie Gold Award given by the American Marketing Association. To win such a competitive national prize clearly indicates that someone possesses a firm foundation if literature and art and is creative in such a way as to touch the hearts of others.

  Taichung First High also produced some outstanding members of the engineering and medical professions, which was traditionally the main strength of the school. Medicine was the ambition of all of those with the best grades. There was always one grinning student who would say to me, “Teacher, I’ll look after you when I become a doctor.” Being young at the time, I never thought I might one day need a doctor to look after me. Years later, I read how they had become famous physicians and even saw their names on their clinics, but I never sought them out on account of an illness. In one instance, a former student, Liu Maosong, who was deputy director of the Ren’ai Hospital, came to visit and chat about old times. My stomach was bothering me at the time, so he arranged a gastroscopy exam for me. In the middle of waiting my turn, I fled and felt so bad about it that I never went back. Several years ago, I gave a final lecture at the Hexin Hospital entitled “Pain and Literature.” Cai Zhexiong, an old Taichung First High alum, had come back to Taiwan after practicing medicine in the United States to serve as deputy director of that famous oncology hospital. Thinking about the old days, he came and visited and asked me to give that boundary-crossing lecture. I described how at the key juncture when I had suffered from an illness, I had memorized poems to help relieve the unendurable pain. And, as was my usual practice in the classroom, I copied a number of English poems for the audience to memorize and recite.

  In the summer of 2006, Academia Sinica member Liao Yijiu, who was in the first class I taught at Taichung First High and who later made contributions in the field of hydroponics, along with Wang Zhenxiu, an expert on lightning who had returned to Taiwan for the first time in forty years, and Zhang Heyong paid me a visit. When we met again after fifty years, I was retired and my hair all white, and they were all in their seventies. We talked about professional accomplishments and the vicissitudes of life with no small sense of wonderment. They mailed me a group photo of that visit, and I keep it on my desk even today.

  Over the decades, I have met Taichung First High students from all walks of life, in Taiwan and abroad. Meeting them always brings back warm memories. What many people remember about my class was the concentration and how they all felt enriched in class and outside. Fang Dongmei once said, “Students are our spiritual descendants.” For me, teaching has always been more than just a job; it is more a form of transmission, of sharing with others what I have read and thought. It is something more profound than just holding class. My students are all my spiritual descendants.

  THE START OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE

  By the start of the summer of 1956, I had taught for three full years at Taichung First High, passed the U.S. State Department Fulbright Exchange Teachers’ Program exam to receive funding, and was set to go to the United States to study English teaching for one semester. The trip was for six months, and it had been nine years since I graduated from the university.

  The Fulbright Cultural Exchange Program is America’s most successful postwar program for the promotion of world peace. It was proposed by Senator William Fulbright, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in 1946 for the selection and mutual exchange of American cultural figures and educators with cultural representatives from other nations, and intended through cultural exchange to console people who had suffered from war, as well as to further world peace. In fifty years, there have been more than ten thousand exchanges between Taiwan and the United States, with more than ten times that number from the rest of the world. It has had the most profound and far-reaching influence of any American program for cultural diplomacy. In this, my lifetime of literary exchange had such a fine beginning.

  In Taiwan, the selection process was run by the U.S. Information Service (USIS), and, much like a student exam, the seventy-two qualified applicant teachers sat at a number of long wooden tables and wrote in English their replies to a series of questions. Those who passed the first round also had to do an interview with a five-person committee. I was asked one question that I never expected. A Miss Whipple of the USIS asked me, “With three such young children at home, will your husband allow you to leave?” In addition t
o saying that my mother would be there to look after them, I added with quick wit at the spur of the moment, “My husband encourages me to go. He is a domesticated man.” They all burst into laughter, and this no doubt contributed in no small part to my score. In the 1950s, the feminist movement had barely begun, and the idea of a “househusband” was just a dream. Once in Time magazine—the only English magazine in the Taichung First High library—I read an article on the concept of the “domesticated man,” which had left a deep impression on me. It was also one of the most interesting examples I had of how English words change. However, if the same question had been asked two years later, I wouldn’t have answered in the same way, because once my husband started work on CTC engineering, until he retired more than twenty years later, he was rarely at home.

  Catching our breath after the war during the early years of the Republic of China on Taiwan, life was pretty hard. Many children didn’t have shoes to wear to school, and electric fans during the summer were a luxury. America, on the other side of the Pacific, was the home of heroes of World War II such as Douglas MacArthur and Claire Chennault, a distant and beautiful dreamland, and tourism was just a word in the dictionary. After I had obtained the program funding, my dreams were becoming a reality: I could apply for a passport and a visa, which were unavailable to the average person, and the best arrangements were made for me to further my studies for the future advancement of my career. The evening I arrived in Washington and stood looking out a window on the eighteenth floor, I was stirred by feelings of disbelief.