Actually, from the time of the agricultural college, all the departments treated me well, mainly because after I offered second-year English, my classes were always full. In the 1960s, academic research on agriculture was already quite modernized, being one of the vanguards of Taiwan’s development, so the departments all encouraged the students to go abroad and study. The Graduate School of Agricultural Economics, which was very impressive, was headed by Li Qinglin, who was a member of the Legislative Yuan. He sent all his grad students to take my class and, with the tone of a father’s friend, he ordered me to give them more composition assignments so as to further correct their English. He probably wanted most of them to go to the States for professional degrees, so that upon returning they could make real contributions.
In the 1960s, many graduates set up modern farms in the central part of the island and on the Jianan Plains, and often sought “guidance” from their teachers. Professor Liu Zuoyan, the wife of Song Miannan, the college president, and I were English-teaching colleagues. We were often invited along. At the time, a number of foreign exchange professors were living in the dorms on campus, and they too often went along to visit the countryside. During those years, we went to many out-of-the-way places deep in the mountains, and from the mountains to the sea. We really got to know Taiwan and saw how higher education on the island took root and prospered during that period of collective and concerted effort. One frequent destination where we took our foreign friends was a rose nursery in Yuanlin. The wife of Zhang Zhun, the nursery owner, was later elected Rose Queen. Upon first seeing such a large operation using scientific breeding methods, hearing the names of their new hybrids and about their hopes for large-scale export, no one would ask a superficial question like “Do you love Taiwan?”
I’ll never forget the beginning of winter 1966, just after midterm exams. I suddenly heard the news that Tang Huisun, the president of the college, had died while climbing a mountain on an inspection trip of the experimental forest run by the forestry department of Ren’ai Township in Nantou County. While climbing, he had a heart attack and died on the forest floor, supported by Director Song. Forty years later, each time I hear of Huisun Forest being a tourist destination, I can’t help but think about him and Director Song and those other warm, scholarly, and refined early pioneers. I also think of Yu Yuxian, the first director of Taiwan’s Agricultural Commission. When I first started teaching, he was a lecturer in the Department of Agricultural Economics, and he married Ji Chunyu, one of my first students. When they were fighting for Taiwan agriculture, they would talk to me about their idea of an army of one hundred thousand farmers, and about the names of their improved fruit cultivars such as Sweet Miss Star Fruit, Yang Guifei Lichee, and Immortal Grapes, as well as share the joys of their foundational work with me. When I see a lovely tree-lined street, I also think about how he died at fifty-eight, after a three-year bout with cancer, his last wish being to be able to see the trees outside his window.
At Christmas in 1968, while I was in America pursuing advanced study, I received a Greyhound Bus ticket from A. B. Lewis, a visiting professor at Providence College of Agriculture, and his wife. Mrs. Lewis’s father had been a missionary in China at the end of the Qing dynasty, and she had been born in Tianjin. In Taichung, she had always looked upon me as another northerner and frequently shared her pleasures of reading with me. She invited me to take a real American Greyhound Bus trip from Indiana to Connecticut, a trip of two days and one night. They then took me on a road trip of New England to see their village. Wearing high snow boots, we trudged through deep snow to see the woods of the poet Robert Frost and to pursue a hare through the snow. Early one morning as we drove, they said, “We’re going to take you to see someone.” We drove six or seven hours along the narrow country roads, which were bordered by dense shrubs or corn stalks, giving an air of mystery. Just after noon, a hillside bright with sunlight suddenly appeared before us, on which sat a solitary small farm. A Chinese woman wearing a qipao and with her hair done up came out of the house to welcome us. The normally reticent Professor Lewis introduced us: “This is Mrs. Buck.” Appearing at the door was John Buck, the former husband of Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Good Earth. Pearl Buck had accompanied her missionary father, A. Sydenstrieker, and once lived near our house on Ninghai Road in Nanjing. In 1921, after marrying, she and her husband went to Fengyang in Anhui Province and took part in improving village life in the early days of the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, during which time she collected the materials for her novel The Good Earth. The novel made her famous overnight. Later she divorced and married her publisher. Mr. Buck took a young Chinese woman in marriage. After coming to America, she insisted upon entertaining guests in a qipao, as a way of remembering her homeland. Sitting in front of the farmhouse fireplace, we talked about suffering China, where he had once worked and where I was born. Working with him had been Yan Yangchu and Qu Junong (whose daughter’s name was Ningshu), who were fathers of my Nankai classmates.
These people and events formed fated and unforgettable moments in my life.
After my family moved to Taipei in 1967, I had been constantly busy with my work and academic career, and half the time I was not at home. In the three years I had been back since returning from America, I had spent more time in Taipei, but rain or shine, I did take that 7 a.m. train on Tuesday for Taichung and the 6 p.m. train on Friday back to Taipei. When I was not in Taichung, department matters were all handled by Ding Zhenwan in collaboration with Huang Chunzhi. She wrote dozens of “love notes on putting out fires” for me. Saturday mornings I would go to National Taiwan University and teach advanced English for the graduate schools of history and Chinese. Most afternoons, I’d go to Cave’s Books on Zhongshan North Road to look at the latest pirated books, to see if anything could be used as teaching materials. I was exhausted in those days but said nothing. Living across from my parents, we had help, but I was burdening my mother too much. Yuchang’s work on railroad electrification was peaking, and my unease gradually became an ordeal. In those years, the only place I could have the peace of mind to think or read was during the three hours on the train between Taipei and Taichung. I was thankful to have those hours to myself. Now that the first class had graduated, my request to quit was finally accepted by the president, Liu Daoyuan.
Where was I going after leaving Chung-Hsing University? I had no time to make plans, and no one in any department in Taipei would believe that I would leave such a fine new department. I didn’t really feel like providing fodder for speculation by looking for a job. Perhaps it would be best just to stay at home for a year before looking for work.
Perhaps once again it was fate that reached out. Dean Wang Tianming was invited by Luo Yunping, the new minister of education, to come to Taipei to serve as director of the National Institute for Compilation and Translation. Wang Tianming (1911–1983) was a revolutionary comrade of my father’s and a graduate of the history department at Peking Normal University. In the northeast, he had thousands of acres of cropland and had contributed harvests for the sake of the country. When Manchuria became Manchukuo, he went to the Northeast Sun Yat-sen Middle School, which had been established in Beiping, to teach history. From Beiping he went to Nanjing, Hunan, and Sichuan, and watched me grow up on that road of exile. When Sun Yat-sen Middle School moved back to Shenyang from Sichuan after victory over Japan, he served as principal. He initially thought he could return home and work in education, but in 1948, when the Communists entered the city, he and ten family members fled to Taiwan. His students said that his history classes, from the ancient to the modern, covered the rise and fall of dynasties in rich and voluminous detail. At the beginning of the 1970s, the Institute for Compilation and Translation played an important role in university, middle school, and primary school education. He knew that I had left my job, so he invited me to come and run the section on humanities and society, with the idea of doing some intellectual work for the good of th
e country. He especially hoped that I could implement a plan for the translation of Chinese writing, first with a number of collections of Taiwan literature in English, so that the island might have a voice abroad. He said to me, “You have spent your whole life teaching and never worked as a civil servant. You can start at the Institute of Compilation and Translation and help me. If it doesn’t work out, we can give it some more thought.” In this way I once again set off on a totally undreamed of road.
8
UNIVERSITY TEACHING, TAIWAN, AND LITERATURE
ADVANCING UPON THE WORLD LITERARY ARENA: ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Facing an entirely new life situation, the only thing I could do was to settle down and begin to understand my new job.
The first thing to be done was to draft a plan for the English translation of an anthology of modern Chinese literature, but first I had to find people with whom to work. Fortunately I was able to recruit the famous poet and translator Yu Kwang-chung, Professor Wu Xizhen of National Taiwan Normal University, Professor He Xin of Zhengzhi University, and Professor John Deeney of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. Together we formed a small editorial committee of five. Professors Wu and He were both important editors at Time and Tide during the Chongqing days. Professor Deeney was one of the first American professors to study comparative literature and had a deep understanding of Chinese literature; he taught the history of English literature at National Taiwan University. They were all interested in the plans for the English-language anthology and more than happy to participate.
Starting in February 1973, the five of us met twice a week. We first settled on the three genres of poetry, prose, and fiction, and then chose the pieces to be translated and selected the translators. The process of reviewing and discussing the translations through countless critical readings took two years before we were able to finalize the contents. Every word of every translation had to be weighed and considered before a decision was made. After countless afternoons of diligent and cooperative discussion, the manuscript of the first edition of An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature: Taiwan 1949–1974 was final. The book was released in 1975 under the auspices of the University of Washington Press in Seattle. This was the first comprehensive anthology in English introducing contemporary Chinese literature to European and American sinologists. Beyond the iron curtain of mainland China, Taiwan’s writers, since 1949, had been able to continue the Chinese literary tradition and produce widely read works, opening a new era.
The anthology covers the period from 1949 to 1974 and includes works of contemporary poetry, prose, and fiction in three volumes. In the preface, I offered a brief description of the past twenty-five years of literature:
Amid the vicissitudes that have beset the entire world since the end of World War II, Taiwan has been steadily pushing its way forward toward greater modernization and cultural self-identification. This process of transition, adaptation, and innovation has affected the traditional life-pattern of the fifteen million Chinese living here. Their struggles, triumphs, setbacks, and sufferings have naturally found an echo in literature.
I believe there are numerous reasons literature flourished in Taiwan; foremost among them was the widespread rise in the level of education, which produced a strong sense of cultural mission. Owing to the twin forces of politics and economics, the vision of the island’s writers broadened, their stylistic mastery deepened, and a more reasonable balance between literary ideals and real life was achieved. Another important motivating force was the competition among literary supplements of the newspapers and literary magazines. They demanded not only a large number of literary works but also works of a constantly higher quality, resulting in some very positive results in thirty years. In addition to the annual prizes awarded by the government, the Wu Sanlian prize and the United Daily News and China Times awards were set up in an eight-year period. This led to increased contributions, open judging, and greater authoritativeness, which had a far-reaching impact on writing. During the diplomatic setbacks after 1970, Taiwan relied upon itself and fought to produce its economic miracle, which provided a sense of pride internationally. But internationally in the cultural arena, we were practically mute! Some ridiculed Taiwan as a cultural desert, and we were unable to counter such claims! Actually, literature on the Chinese mainland over the last thirty years had been all but silent, with the exception of some protest literature and the Misty poetry; whereas in Taiwan, literature had matured naturally owing to a diversity of subject matter and style; whether realism or art-for-art’s sake writing, it reflected real human life without taking a back seat to politics.
Since the three volumes of the anthology were edited with the global literary arena in mind, the criteria for selecting the works to be included were different than if they had been edited for a domestic readership. It was deemed best to select works with themes and vocabulary exhibiting less Western influence in order to provide a picture of what the people of Taiwan were thinking. Overly pessimistic and decadent works were avoided because they were not what the many years of struggle in Taiwan had been about. Space was limited, so repetition in terms of theme and style was avoided. The works were arranged by author age, from oldest to youngest, an arrangement that naturally delineated the various stages of creative development, with very few exceptions.
Of the three genres, modern poetry showed steady and firm development with the clearest successes. The poets of the early period organized important poetry societies including Modern Poetry, the Blue Stars, the Epoch Society, the Bamboo Hat, Dragon Race, Great Earth, and Mainstream. With extraordinary talent, the poets wrote new poetry rich in imagery, attuned to the times, and concerned with the fate of the country. They wrote and responded to each other, debated, competed, and were mutually encouraging, together creating a vibrant new Chinese poetry. Theme and technique fell between the schools of Western poetry and traditional Chinese poetry, exercising an enormous influence to this very day.
From my perspective as chief editor of the anthology, fiction required the most effort, whereas poetry required genius, and the prose essay, the mainstream of Taiwan’s creative writing, required inspiration. During the editing process, Lin Yutang had just come from abroad to live in Taiwan and Liang Shiqiu’s Sketches of a Cottager had elevated him to a lofty status, respected for his artistic mastery and learning. Both were active in literary circles, and their works were included because of their fame, but also because they really were actively writing in our midst. The elegant writing of each generation from Lin Yutang, Liang Shiqiu, and Qi Jun to the middle-aged generation of Yang Mu and Xiao Feng to the youngest such as Hei Ye displayed a refined use of language and apt content with regard to life and thought. Perhaps because this was the first substantial anthology of Taiwan literature in English, the University of Washington Press sent us sixteen reviews after publication, all of which were positive in their praise. The most gratifying was that by A. R. Crouch in the summer 1976 issue of China Notes, one passage of which says: “The English of the translations is superb. All the writers are from the Republic of China, which some may find a limitation, but none of them has written propaganda under political pressure. With the exception of two or three poems that deal with the 1911 Revolution or the Vietnam War, few of the works express a political position, which was a welcome relief from the standard propaganda fare from mainland China.” This review was a special delight for those of us who were translating into English and not into our mother tongue.
In those days before computers, I was very fortunate to have a reliable assistant in my secretary Zhuang Wanling. When I decided to go to the institute, I chose her from among the students of the first graduating class at Chung-Hsing University, because she wrote well, had a warm disposition, and was steady and pleasant. In her position as secretary, she helped me to establish a good working relationship with others at the institute. I relied on her quite heavily in matt
ers both of spirit and work. At the time the China Times was running a cartoon titled “Security Is …” One day there appeared a cartoon with the following caption: “Security is when I say something, you do it.” When I showed it to her, we looked at each other and laughed. She was a great comfort in a precarious place. After the anthology was completed, she married and moved with her husband to the States. Two years later, I too left. I was never able to replace her and continue to cherish the memory of our days working together.
The first year spent working on the anthology was the happiest time of the five years I spent at the institute. With the help and support of Director Wang, I was able to handle all the business of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences; able to devote all my energies to all the issues, large and small, pertaining to the anthology; and was especially happy to work directly with the writers, translators, and editors. All aspects of the anthology were considered by the five of us, and I found that the whole process enhanced my ability to evaluate literary works. Today, thirty years later, when I look through the anthology over which we slaved, I feel a modicum of pride. If I hadn’t been exiled in those years, I might never have realized my long-cherished ambition of working in academia.
SOWING THE SEEDS OF LITERATURE: NATIONAL TEXTBOOK REFORM
The Great Flowing River Page 39