Indiana University’s famous library and the bookstore were two places I frequented. At the Asian Library, I met Professor Teng Ssu-yu (1906–1988), a respected expert on the modern history of China. His works in English, including Historiography of the Taiping Rebellion; New Light on the History of the Taiping Rebellion; and Hung Jen-kan, Prime Minister of the Taiping Kingdom and His Modernization Plans, were all published by Harvard University and were required reading for all Western sinologists. Professor Teng was from Hunan, and although he had come to America years earlier and had a family and career there, he was deeply concerned about China’s difficulties, about which we had a lot of conversation. When he retired, the university held a large banquet for him and he invited me to sit at his table. During the event, a letter from John King Fairbank was read in which he stated that when he had just arrived at Harvard for graduate study, Professor Teng had offered him all sorts of guidance and that he would be eternally grateful to such a model Chinese scholar.
My simple, pleasant life of study came to an end during the winter break of 1968. When I had applied for my Fulbright, one of the requirements had been that I had to teach and that the valid period was for one year; I could not extend my stay to obtain a degree. I had applied for a six-month extension, so I had to first return to Saint Mary in-the-Woods College and teach another semester. In that semester I matriculated at Terre Haute State University, where I took Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature taught by Professor Mullen, an expert on Spenser. Another very enriching class for my future research was Literary Criticism. Indiana University accepted the six credits and I returned to Bloomington for my M.A. qualifying exam, which I passed. All I needed was six units of French and I would have my M.A., but I never had the opportunity to go back and finish the degree.
When my exchange scholar visa ran out, I was still vacillating as to whether I should apply for another six-month extension. Then I received a letter from my father in which he said that Yuchang’s heavy workload was taking a toll and that my family badly needed me. The legal limit for my stay was at an end, and promises had to be kept.
In Genesis, Jacob dreams of a stairway to heaven. At Indiana University in Bloomington from spring flowers to winter snow, I too had dreamed of my academic stairway, with angels ascending and descending. But just as I placed my foot on the first step, the stairway was withdrawn, which provided me with regrets for many years; I was only able to accept my fate after many a realization and wisdom acquired that the world is not necessarily without an academic stairway or angels. Although I was summoned back by reality, by no means did I fall from the stairway. I finally understood that throughout my life, beginning with my sickly childhood, I had been building a stone stairway, book by book, climbing upward with every word and sentence I read, and that I would never stop.
THE DREAM I BUILT BECOMES A REALITY
A myriad flowers fell and the stairway disappeared. I returned to Chung-Hsing University in Taichung to resume the three years of teaching required by my contract. My husband and sons were in Taipei, so every Tuesday I would take the 7 a.m. train to Taichung, and every Friday I’d take the 6 p.m. train to Taipei. On Saturdays, I’d teach advanced English at the graduate school of National Taiwan University. Two days a week I’d vigorously play the role of housewife with the help of a female servant. We lived across from my parents, so everything was just a call away. But my parents were already in their seventies and my three sons were already young men. I’d get up at 5 a.m. every Tuesday and prepare breakfast for the family and then rush off to catch my train, my mind full of anxieties. Sometimes the waning moon would still be hanging in the sky when I left the house. I’d look back three times every step of the way—at first just to keep my promise, but gradually, I’d return to Taipei filled with anxieties about my responsibilities at work in Taichung.
The establishment of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Chung-Hsing University was the fulfillment of a dream of many years. With all the power I could muster as one teacher, I had pushed for this under three school presidents—Lin Zhiping, Tang Huisun, and Liu Daoyuan. Because Chung-Hsing was the sole national university in the central part of the island, a school of liberal arts was essential. Once the school was established, the departments of Chinese and history were the first to be set up. Finding highly qualified faculty was the biggest problem for a department of foreign languages and literatures. There were few such qualified teachers in Taiwan at that time, and Ph.D.s in English and American literature were worth their weight in gold. Gradually, a few who had completed their studies began to return, but they were immediately snapped up by National Taiwan University, the Normal University, Zhengzhi University, Danjiang University, and Fu Jen University, all located in Taipei. The degree holders were unwilling to go to other cities. In Taichung, Providence and Tunghai universities had faculty available to them through their religious orders, while national universities had stricter standards. This problem was precisely where ideal and reality most diverged. In all those years of talking about the importance of liberal arts education, I had never anticipated this problem.
When I returned to Chung-Hsing University at the start of the spring semester in 1969, I discovered that I had been presented as the new chairperson of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. Not only that, but the first class of forty-five students had been admitted and had already completed one semester. The administrative work for the department had been handled by the dean in addition to his other duties. The curriculum had been established as required by the Ministry of Education, with nearly all common core courses, with combined elective courses being offered by all departments. Courses in logic and literature were not offered until the second semester. The first time I entered the school president’s office after returning from abroad, I understood that the two letters I had written from the States in which I had truthfully informed them that I had not obtained a degree, that I didn’t know anything about running a department and was not ready to do so, and that I was only suited to be a literature teacher were understood by the school president and the dean (there was no dean of the school of liberal arts at that time) as mere politeness on my part. I had been promoted to regular professor and was certified as such by the Ministry of Education, and had been lobbying vigorously for a department of foreign languages and literatures for years. The message was, now that the department “has been established for you” and the teachers (six teachers teaching first-year English, French, and German, half of whom were over sixty) have been waiting for you for six months, who is going to run the department if you don’t?
As I was coming out of the president’s office, Dean Wang Tianming, seeing the look of trepidation on my face, said, “I believe you are capable. Feel free to come and discuss any issues of official business with me. We have conservative expectations for the department chairs, so in the future please don’t wear such flowery dresses.” Short skirts were in fashion in those days, but I had neither long nor short skirts. I always wore a loose-fitting qipao.
In that way I went from being a hardworking bookworm to department chair, who faced nothing but real problems. Luckily, the students who came to us via the National College Entrance Exams were all pretty good. This was in the days before National Sun Yat-sen University and National Chung Cheng University, and only four of the national universities had departments of foreign languages and literatures. Moreover, acceptable scores for departments of foreign languages had to be higher, so the quality of the students was on the whole quite good, and later in life they performed above the average.
In the three and a half years that I served as department chair, the biggest torment was faculty appointments. New hires Shi Zhaoxi, Xu Jingtian, and the young Zhang Hanliang, all confirmed by my “discerning eye,” were all well liked by the students. Those who had been teaching in the department, including Ding Zhenwan, Yao Chongkun, Sun Zhixuan, Tang Zhenxun, and Xiao Kunfeng, all worked together strenuously. The
department possessed a harmonious centripetal force: anyone arriving at the two rooms of our small office on the second floor would inevitably hear the sound of laughter. The door to my office was always open, and teachers and students came and went with smiles on their faces.
The first class of students was divided equally between young women and men. Shortly after I took charge, the young women held a welcoming ceremony for me in the dorm, with several plates of crispy cookies and soft drinks. They had planned no entertainment such as singing, but simply surrounded me and asked lots of questions. They said they were happy to have tested and been admitted to the department, but after one semester, they still weren’t sure what they were going to be studying. They felt the courses had been much like those in high school, including Chinese, English, and modern history, the only difference being that the teachers were a bit older. This meeting established our way of direct communication. I accompanied those forty students every step of the way from their initial confusion through the pressures of their workload over the next three years. I had a moral duty of one who was building a dream of taking that department from nothing and making something out of it. I possessed a loving motherly concern for those nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, who were in search of their dreams.
My greatest moral duty for the new department was to establish its academic standards. In the first year, the Taichung USIS donated our first books, largely because of my relationship with them, having borrowed books for years as well as having been a Fulbright scholar twice. Ding Zhenwan also borrowed several paintings by her husband, Chen Qimao, and suddenly our empty office was transformed into something with culture.
USIS advised me that the U.S. State Department’s Embassy School in Taichung had a number of students with M.A. degrees in English and that the wives of some of the Americans stationed at the Qingquangang Air Base at Shuinan in Taichung were qualified teachers. That was during the Vietnam War and there were quite a number of civilian medical and communications personnel, many of whom might have spouses who were qualified to teach at a public university. Having these two sources, the following year I divided the second-year class into four sections and offered English conversation classes as required by the Ministry of Education. I was able to get four students from the Embassy School to teach two hours each week, and in the following two years I had six or seven of them. They fit in well both in class and in extracurricular activities. Our students were simple and sincere and invited their teachers on extracurricular field trips outside of town; some even invited their teachers to their homes for a meal, allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of the lives of the Taiwanese. I was also able to get the wife of a doctor to teach Shakespeare and a communications officer to teach a class on fiction. Not only were they qualified, but they also had experience, and the class content was of the hoped-for quality; thus I was able to get through those early difficulties. I taught the history of English literature, and in the second year I was able to get Professor Peter Shay from Tunghai University to come and teach English poetry. He was from England and taught the best class on English poetry at Tunghai. Our students were inspired by his natural depth and charm, which was different from the other faculty members.
In the early days of the department, our basic faculty consisted of the teachers who taught the common courses in English, French, and German. Miss Tilford and Mary Sampson, who taught first-year English, had been with us since the days of the Agricultural College. They were both conservative Southern Baptist missionaries, their church being located behind a row of flame trees outside the school gate. We had been on extremely friendly terms for years, but they did not approve of the “radical” course content of some of the younger teachers. The first-year English textbook that I edited was used instead of the one published by Young Lion Company, for which I was censured by some of the really “old” professors. However, having just returned from studying abroad, I had done a good deal of research on basic teaching materials for English and American literature, had collected numerous examples, and knew that the students couldn’t go on using the same old standard selections, requiring instead new pieces from all cultural fields of the postwar period. Fortunately I received lots of support, including from the students. The first-year curriculum included the course An Outline of Western Literature, taught by William Burke of our department. He was a Presbyterian missionary with fairly progressive ideas who was widely supported by the students. That year we coedited a textbook to fill the void we had been facing. Gu Baohu and Wang Yongqing (principal of the Weidao Middle School), who taught French, were both Catholic priests; both had high scholastic attainments in French and were hardworking teachers. The first-year Chinese teacher was Chen Guimiao, and the first composition topic he gave the students was “Clusters of Sunshine for You.” The students who had just graduated from high school and taken the National College Entrance Exams had never encountered the like! Thirty years later he was still a great talker. I had him teach first-year Chinese until he went to Taipei and became involved in politics, running for the Legislative Yuan, with many students as his enthusiastic supporters. Another memorable teacher was Zeng Xiangduo, who taught A General History of China. His open-minded and critical perspective on contemporary history was quite inspiring. Later, during politically troubled times, he ended up in jail and after being released, he hosted a political talk show. I ran into him in Taipei and I didn’t know what to say or how to begin.
In the fall of 1970 after the start of classes, I made plans for convening the first Symposium on Teaching English and American Literature at Chung-Hsing University. Such conferences were very rare at the time; in fact, there were few academic conferences at all in those days, and even fewer in Taichung. I sincerely hoped to have the opportunity to increase educational exchanges among schools, to help out the schools other than National Taiwan University. In all of Taiwan only four universities had departments of foreign languages and literatures, but that major was the first choice among humanities students. However, there were not enough teachers, and teaching materials badly needed updating in response to the times. About thirty people who taught literature courses came from all over the province, with Zhu Limin and Yan Yuanshu from National Taiwan University being the stars of the conference. With a limited number of participants, everyone talked to their heart’s content. That small new department of mine was busy for some time, and the happy enthusiasm of that early event was something rarely encountered in future conferences.
Inside and outside of class, we were busy all the way until the summer of 1972, when the first class of students from Chung-Hsing University’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures graduated. What came as a surprise to the whole school was that I quit. As required by my contract, I had taught three full years. I was far from willing to abandon the department that I had promoted, effected, set up, and headed; it seemed that every little thing bespoke the sadness of parting. After arriving in Taichung, I lived there for twenty years (the whole family lived there for seventeen, while I commuted back and forth for three years), and my most settled years were spent there. But there I was, seeing that promising tree finally beginning to bear fruit, and I had to leave! At the farewell dinner, all the students held candles and circled me, everyone in tears. No one knew that I, who had always been so active and so full of vitality, was feeling helpless and confused in the face of an entirely unknown future.
The students of that class, all of whom were about twenty-two years old, were just beginning their lives. For four years each one had been like my own child; I had looked after them and guided them to reach the appropriate level in their studies and become self-confident and clear-minded in character. Many of them later became hardworking teachers. Most of the young men entered professions such as trade and became successful. And today, twenty years later, we often see each other or write. The members of the whole class are like siblings to one another, and they still look upon me with the same affection as all those years ago.
Riding around campus on my bicycle those last few months, I was reluctant to part with everything I saw, for everywhere I looked bore the traces of my youth. In bidding farewell to Chung-Hsing University, I also bade farewell to the first half of my life, a life that had been simple those seventeen years in Taichung, and also filled with human warmth. With my own eyes I had seen the name plaque of the agricultural college at the gate replaced with that of National Chung-Hsing University. I had also watched as buildings sprang up over the largely empty campus. When the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures was first set up, all the classrooms had to be borrowed from other departments. The “base” for first-year classes consisted of two brick buildings with a small courtyard and a large tree, the earliest use for which was as classrooms for training people in a government aid program for agriculture in Africa. The second-year classrooms were borrowed from the Department of Animal Husbandry, which stood right next to the pasture. One day, as I was talking about Beowulf in the class on the history of English literature, a lovely calf wandered into the classroom. It was as startled as we were; fortunately, no one shouted. Finally, with some difficulty, it managed to turn around and leave through the door by which it had entered. Later, the head of the Animal Husbandry Department told me that it was an Angus calf that had recently been imported to upgrade Taiwan’s agricultural output and that since I had taught it about literature, both of us should be deeply honored.
The Great Flowing River Page 38