I recall speaking to him once about how cruelly teachers and people of culture were being treated by the Red Guards and wondered where they would lead China when they grew up and ruled the country. I was deeply concerned. Qian Mu said that when the Cultural Revolution came to an end and the people in their fifties, who still preserved some of the national legacy, could regain their voice, there would be renewed hope for the continuation of Chinese culture.
THE INSPIRATION OF THE GOLDENRAIN TREE
In the summer of 1977, John Deeney, who taught English literary history in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University, left to teach in Hong Kong, upon which Hou Jian asked me to return to NTU full time and teach the course. For me, this was a lifelong ambition.
In my time at the National Institute of Compilation and Translation, I worked diligently day and night and courageously made many reforms to complete many cultural and literary plans, including the translation of contemporary works of Chinese literature for the global literary arena; the compilation of new Chinese textbooks from a literary perspective rather than from a political point of view; and the compilation of a series of Western classics and a “Modernization Collection.” Many people expected me to continue in this line of work, but what I wanted more than anything else was to return to the classroom. For this reason, I left the institute with no attachments.
The morning I left the National Institute for Compilation and Translation, I stood alone in front of the desk I had occupied for five years, looking at the lovely goldenrain tree outside. Amid the daily routine and frustrations, I had often looked up from my electric typewriter to watch the magic of the changing light of day, with Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees” coming to mind: “A tree that looks at God all day, / And lifts her leafy arms to pray.”
Ah! That tree made me think of all the difficult junctures I had passed through in my life, coming up with so many solutions, consulting so many scholars and experts, struggling and engaging in discussions to arrive at the sound conclusion of an international publisher. The learned investigations and opinions of these people, in that age before Xerox machines or computers, amount to page after page of treasured tracts. The names of these scholars are a veritable who’s who in Taiwan’s cultural history from 1960 to 1980. Their voices and smiles and the goldenrain tree outside my window are so vivid to me.
By the summer of 1977, Director Wang had retired and I had left the institute, body and mind, and returned to that quiet building at NTU that houses the College of Arts and Sciences, to those bright halls.
DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES, PAST AND PRESENT
Descending those steps and walking down Zhoushan Road, which no longer exists, you entered the NTU campus through the old wall. Passing the campus security office, the school store, and then following a walkway between the administration building and the Department of Agricultural Chemistry, you came out in front of the College of Arts and Sciences. Then down a broad walkway planted with azaleas and palm trees, past the school clock in memory of school president Fu Ssu-nien, you’d pass through a wide and imposing gate to enter the corridor, which for me possessed a sort of ceremonial feeling. That old bright and spacious corridor with its arched ceiling was situated at the heart of the old Taiwan Imperial University campus (built in the third year of the Showa reign, 1928). Small gates stood at either end and it surrounded a central courtyard, which was completely unchanged since I had first seen it thirty years earlier. During the long Taiwan summer, it possessed a faint whispering coolness.
At variance with my memory was the fact that the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures had moved downstairs and was now a very busy place. At the right upon entering the college door was a row of large rooms, the door of only one of which was always open. There you found yourself facing a wooden cabinet on top of which was placed one of the large aluminum teakettles that were a standard fixture in offices those days. The day you no longer had the strength to take it down off the cabinet was the day you retired. Tea was kept in a small white hempen bag, which was supplied to each department office by the general affairs office. To this day, I remember the taste of the astringent, coffee-colored tea, which was always too hot to drink between classes, and so a large cup was always eventually consumed cold. The cabinet had several dozen pigeonholes that served as faculty mailboxes, behind which were several desks and chairs side by side where five teaching assistants sat along with an office clerk, who handled a never-ending stream of people and tasks. Even by the time I retired, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures never had a formal faculty break room, and all faculty contact between classes was conducted in the hallways. I still remember how we’d come out of Classroom 24 and lean with a good deal of fatigue against the wooden windowsills to wait for the bell for the next class. You might see an old friend whom you had not seen in ages and then there would be a hurried exchange of phone numbers, after which you’d both run off to class.
In those days, the department had about eighty regular faculty members as well as quite a few adjunct faculty. That first group of old faculty, including Ying Qianli, Wang Guohua, Huang Qiongjiu, Su Weixiong, Li Benti, Xia Ji’an, Li Liewen, Zhou Xuepu, Cao Qinyuan, and Zeng Yuenong had all left. Of the department after 1970, someone once dramatically remarked, “The carved railings and jade steps ought to be there still, but the vermillion (Zhu) color (Yan) is changed.” In the old and mottled, though spacious corridors, many of the students were there because they had such high college entrance exam scores, so there was no doubt a sense of traditional prestige. But there had been, in fact, enormous changes to “modernize” the curriculum, and the biggest movers and shakers for change were surnamed Zhu and Yan. Zhu Limin and Yan Yuanshu had returned from the United States with Ph.D. degrees, and on the NTU campus they were described as “worth their weight in gold.” Shortly thereafter, Hu Yaoheng also came back to NTU with a Ph.D. He taught Western drama with the latest pedagogical methods and through a comparative literature approach guided his students in a loving concern for the development of Chinese drama.
The reform with the greatest impact was compiling a new textbook for freshman English to increase the level of English proficiency of all students and to broaden their knowledge of the humanities and science. For department freshmen, a course titled Reading Literary Texts was opened, and Literary History of China was made a required course. The latter was taught at one time or another by Tai Jingnong, Ye Qingbing, Lin Wenyue, and Ke Qingming from the Chinese department. This not only helped to increase the students’ knowledge of the Chinese literary tradition and its development but also strengthened the collegiality among the faculty of the Chinese and foreign languages departments, which had a broadening and deepening effect on student development.
The History of English Literature became a two-year course for twelve units: the first year covered the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century; the second year covered the Romantic period to the twentieth century. For our textbook, we used The Norton Anthology of English Literature of about five thousand pages, which was the international standard then and included important works along with discussions of background, trends, and developments.
At NTU, I taught the second-year courses, except for one year when Yan Yuanshu went abroad and I taught the first-year courses in his stead. I had taught the same courses at Chung-Hsing University for four years, so I was well prepared. In the course of the week, you always had to make some adjustments; for example, I had to teach the Old English epic poem Beowulf in the second year, and this meant playing some recordings of the text being read. The following day, I had to teach the “The Mental Traveler” by the profound English Romantic poet William Blake. The poem describes two opposing cycles of human life and nature, and the entire class time was required to thoroughly explain the profundities of the text. In middle school I had read an article by an Englishman that asserted that the brain had different compartments for storing different
types of knowledge. I kept the important works of each period of English literature separate in my brain, each with its own dazzling brilliance, so that I never confused them or made some anachronistic error.
ADVANCED ENGLISH
Another cornerstone of my teaching after returning to NTU was the course Advanced English, which I had offered to the graduate students in Chinese and history since 1978. It was my greatest and most steadfast challenge, but it was also the challenge I most relished.
In those days, most grad students in the College of Arts and Sciences had plans for advanced study. Unlike the graduate students in foreign languages and literatures, those in Chinese and history often lacked the foreign language ability necessary for conducting cultural research, and for this reason the range, depth, and speed of their reading had to be enhanced. In 1970, when I first taught the class, I mimeographed some articles in English on cultural issues to measure their grasp of English. After they had read the pieces, I would ask them questions. I was startled to discover that few first-year grad students had read articles on Western cultural concepts or had ever had the experience of struggling through books written in English, volume after volume. I believe that to reach an advanced level in any language, one must read entire books for a more complete understanding, rather than just reading selections. It was my hope to read two books in the first semester, and three or four in the second semester. When I mentioned my plan, I heard some faint gasps: “What? Read five or six books in the original?” But I knew that NTU grad students would never admit to something being “difficult.”
My biggest difficulty then was how to talk with people from diverse fields at the same time. I had a great deal of respect for people in the fields of Chinese and history, but they studied different curriculums and had different goals when it came to advanced study and career. How was I to get them interested and help them reach an advanced level of English competence? The only way was to appeal to a common interest in the spirit of literature.
That was at the height of the Cold War, when the world was polarized between the United States and the USSR. Taiwan, after twenty years of anti-Communism, had a lengthy list of proscribed books. Most teaching materials came from the United States, but only a few of the latest books were available near NTU, such as the simply bound, authorized with copyright editions of books on culture, psychology, and philosophy from bookstores like Ouya and Shuangye. Fortunately, Time magazine, which was readily available, had a list of the top ten fiction and nonfiction best-sellers in each issue. Photocopied editions of many of these books were often available in bookstores on Zhongshan North Road, such as Cave’s Books, which I frequented. The moment the list was published, pirated copies would be available. I still remember carrying those Western books down the sidewalk on Zhongshan North Road to my home, where I would devour them that very night. The books I used in class had to have weight and be of interest to the young people. They had to be well written, but not be too political to the left or right, not too thick and not too thin, and copies pirated in Taiwan had to be available so that the students could afford them.
Although I cannot remember all the books we read year by year, I’m sure that the teaching materials would reflect twenty years of Western cultural concerns and changes. Pirated and read in Taiwan, they had a great impact.
The first book I taught was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was not widely read in Taiwan in those days. For most of my students, the book had to be read in the original in a few weeks’ time, probably making it a “Vexing New World” for them. After Brave New World came Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Both books were about two hundred pages long, but very different in terms of story and style, and both were extremely successful literary works against totalitarianism or communism.
Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four were always on my reading list, and sometimes I’d have the students read them on their own. However, in 1983, I once again taught the two books, because the year 1984 was upon us. After writing this famous prophetic work in 1948, the author died, and a distance of thirty years separated us from that frightening world he foresaw, but time passes and in the years just before and after 1984, everyone compared, weighed, and examined the world Orwell prophesized and the real world. A tremendous number of articles were written and it was a momentous time, culturally speaking.
In the eighteen years that I taught Advanced English, I forced the students to read and study books in the original language and made them answer my innumerable “whys.” To reply in English was only possible after having done the readings, there was no getting around that. In the course of one year, I probably asked around a hundred questions. In eighteen years, I did everything I could to make the course truly advanced. The more than four hundred students who went through it are probably all in their fifties now and the core of society. The members of that generation serve in academia, education, and the world of culture, and have achieved notable success in the fields of literature and history.
After leaving my classroom, the students would enter real life, and among those young people, there were always a few who became understanding friends. In middle age after a life of joys and sorrows, they still remembered some lines and ideas, like a sound heard in some other forest of falling leaves.
SEEKING A DEFINITION FOR TAIWAN LITERATURE
What is Taiwan literature? The term has always elicited much debate, with political objectives often having dictated the discussions and arguments. Sometimes full of sound and fury and at other times silenced, the nature of the debate depended upon the situation at the time. But what people didn’t know was that literature is like roses: by whatever name it is called, it does not change its essence. Taiwan literature is a natural happening, its existence unchanged by its name. Since there have been written records, Taiwan literature has included works usually written in Taiwan about the Taiwanese and events there, and even about its myths and legends. Generations of writers residing in Taiwan have naturally written Taiwan literature. During periods of upheaval in Chinese history, adherents to the former dynasty and immigrants have come to Taiwan, so works of homesickness are also part of Taiwan literature.
The so-called first patriarch of written culture who came from over the sea to the east was Shen Guangwen (1612–1688). With the fall of the Ming dynasty, he drifted on the ocean, “taking a small boat to the south, endlessly buffeted about by the waves.” Meeting with a gale, he was pushed to Taiwan, where he remained the rest of his life. He experienced Dutch rule and rule by three generations of Zheng Chenggong’s family before the island was unified under the Qing dynasty. In 1685 (the twenty-fourth year of the Kangxi reign) he and a number of officials who had been sent to Taiwan organized the first poetry society, the Eastern Song Society, which can be called the origin of Taiwan literature. A full three hundred years after Shen Guangwen, approximately two million people—soldiers, civil servants, educators, and their dependents—arrived in Taiwan with the Nationalist government. They came from all over China, each with his or her own sad story of separation, a huge homesick contingent!
On Retrocession Day, 1946, the Nationalist government drafted its language policy: all newspapers and publications had to be in Chinese. The literary careers of most of the local writers who wrote in Japanese during the half-century occupation (1895–1945) came to an end. Works written in Japanese by important writers such as Lai He, Long Yingzong, and Lu Heruo, among others have been translated into Chinese and now form part of the Taiwan literary canon. Most of those who began writing in Chinese in those first ten years after retrocession, whether they were from mainland China or local writers, had the feeling that they were making their way through the fog, perhaps with the exception of modern poets, who seemed to have the most confidence. “Bridge,” the literary supplement of the New Life News, was edited by Gelei (Shi Ximu) for twenty months. A sincere promoter of literature, he encouraged all kinds of writing without any sort of regional favoritism. Although the many works of h
omesick literature were often crude and repetitive, still, a sense of warmth was provided for those who had just arrived from mainland China after such great misfortune. Narrative maturity came gradually, and the literary works provided supplementary reading beyond textbooks for a younger generation of writers.
In 1973, when I first began compiling and translating An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature, Taiwan literature was fully formed. The desire to translate Taiwan literature was latent during my two Fulbright visits to the United States. In various activities in those days, I was frequently invited to “say something about Taiwan.” From 1957 to 1969, many people would ask things such as: “Are you in Africa?” “Are you from Thailand, that place with the gold Buddha temple?” (“Taiwan” sounds a lot like “Thailand.”) After this, whenever I found myself in a public gathering, I’d do my best to wear a low-collared, loose-fitting qipao, slit to just below the knee, so as not to restrict my walking. I never wore a hat and hoped at the very least not to be mistaken for a Japanese. In the earliest exchange programs, the United States seemed even a bigger proponent of “returning good for evil” than Chiang Kai-shek. In my first question-and-answer session, there were actually four Japanese, while I was the only representative from the Republic of China, so I had to uphold the honor of my country—I could lose for myself, but not for my country.
“Say something about Taiwan,” a seemingly easy topic was, in fact, difficult. Go Ok-nam, a teacher from South Korea, and I were frequently in the same group. In introducing herself, all she had to say was “I am from Korea,” and everyone understood who she was, because the United States had just finished fighting the Korean War and everyone in the States knew that Korea was an “ally.” But the Republic of China, which I represented, was not on the Chinese mainland; my family was from the northeast; and our government was on Taiwan, across the Taiwan Strait from the mainland and more than six hundred miles from Shanghai. Things didn’t seem to get better with time, so I had to say with a good deal of self-confidence, “On Taiwan, we are a free and democratic nation, preserving a high degree of Chinese culture, while pursuing peace and prosperity.” In those days, such words were not merely slogans or propaganda but were the fervent hopes of all the people. On this thirty-six thousand square-mile island with a population close to ten million, approximately one-third of the people lived with this belief. Before 1949, the ragged and exhausted “quilted soldiers” and their surviving family members were still living in the temporary military compounds, longing for home and the old days while educating their children and getting on with life. After ten, twenty, and thirty years had passed, the government was done with shouting anti-Communist slogans and had wholeheartedly embraced development for Taiwan. Compulsory education was extended from six to nine years. This was probably President Chiang Kai-shek’s last written order, and the one with the greatest long-term influence. Gradually, clear and resonant voices emerged in Taiwan’s literary arena, which helped me when abroad to answer questions such as: “What is Taiwan like?” “How do the people live?” “What are people thinking there?” “Where will it be in the future?”
The Great Flowing River Page 41