The Great Flowing River

by Chi Pang-yuan

  For a decade David and I communicated by letter, and when faxes came along, the first letter I sent to him by fax was on New Year’s Eve 1998: “The cold comes in wave after wave, and there are far fewer firecrackers outside than last year. It’s said there’s a recession and everything is depressed.…” Actually, I wrote that letter about the English translation of Li Qiao’s Wintry Night. One of Columbia’s outside readers for the manuscript felt that Wintry Night had value in terms of the study of world literature, but that most English readers would not be interested in it. I said, “If the book has value, then it should be published in the series. Naturally, from the perspective of Rose, Rose, I Love You or The Butcher’s Wife, books like Wintry Night or Orphan of Asia would be of little interest. But Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, two award-winning books in America and England, would be much the same type. Taiwan books such as Wintry Night, The Three-Legged Horse, and A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers are dear to us, but the world contains many different us’s.”

  Rereading this letter ten years later, I think of how David Wang and I struggled in various ways while selecting books to be translated, having them translated, and getting them published. I can say that it was a revolutionary feeling. Yunzhong Chongzhong, David Wang’s mother, joined the Ethical Society in Shenyang and spent her life dedicated to female literacy classes, craft classes, kindergartens, and other social services. The Ethical Society in those days had a heart of religion but without the trappings of a religion, nor was it involved in any political activities; instead, it used the simplest methods to get close to the people. In the homeland to the north, which had been closed off, they helped countless women escape the sad fate of ignorance. It was the same when they came to Taiwan. David Wang was born in Taipei in 1954, and from a boy who liked to find a quiet corner in which to read he grew into a true scholar, one who enjoys helping others, regardless of whether they are family or not. We share a common attitude toward Taiwan literature: we wanted to contribute something out of our feelings for the place, even before “Do you love Taiwan or not?” became a political slogan. Fortunately, as long as Columbia University exists, the press will continue to operate and our series of books will continue to exist. When our descendants abroad read these books, they will have a truer understanding of the place of their origins. So, our efforts, David’s and mine, ought to have some everlasting value.

  9

  CONFIRMATION OF THIS LIFE

  From the Great Flowing River to the Sea of Silence

  MOTHER’S PASSING

  August falls in that season of intense summer heat in the seventh lunar month, but it was unusually hot in 1983. Mother grew noticeably weaker, so we took her to see a cardiologist for a check-up at the Tri-Service General Hospital.

  She left the hospital three days later, a little after six in the morning. I received a call from her home in Neihu informing me that she had passed away. The suddenness of her departure left me inexpressibly frightened. I hurried home with my sister Ningyuan to see my eighty-four-year-old mother lying peacefully in bed. That morning she had gotten up and washed by herself, gone to the balcony to water the flowers, returned to her room, sat down on the edge of her bed and asked the maid to prepare lunch for her aged husband, and then clearly said, “Oh God! You call for me, so I go.” Sitting there, she passed away. Father was sitting in a chair by the door and heard everything clearly. Her leaving the world with such religious conviction was our greatest consolation.

  Mother had converted to Christianity at the beginning of 1950, just after I had moved from that bagasse-board room to Jianguo North Road. It was also at that time that the Chinese Language Church on Nanjing East Road started holding services in an old wooden house. Wu Yong, the pastor, preached in strong terms of heaven and hell in order to make comparisons between good and evil vivid and to explain the joys and sorrows of the world. My mother suffered sadly for half of her life: after a hard wait of ten years, she went to Nanjing to be with my father, and then spent another twenty years drifting and wandering, without ever having a house of her own. Then she crossed the sea to Taiwan, a place with which she was entirely unfamiliar, to live with the family of her son and daughter-in-law in a thirty-tatami room in a Japanese-style house. Cut off from the past, she didn’t know what the future would bring. Pondering deeply, she couldn’t understand what the suffering meant. Although she didn’t believe in heaven and hell, those extreme forms of reward and punishment, she did begin diligently to read the Bible. Over thirty-five years she read my large Bible, which had been a wedding gift (a gift from my father’s friend Uncle Dong Qizheng, who inscribed on the flyleaf: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) countless times, marking in red those passages she memorized, and passages that had provided answers to some of her perplexities were most certainly also marked. Perhaps this was her true form of worship, the only spiritual realm of her own, beyond having devoted her whole life to her husband and her children.

  I was probably the only one who really understood her, and for the longest time! Following in her footsteps, I accompanied her through all the lonely days. Although we were of different times and had different educational opportunities, we lovingly and easily surmounted all “gaps” for sixty years. Those times when I was most in need of help, she was always there, arms outstretched, to help me overcome my troubles and move forward. During the seventeen years I lived in Taichung, each time I met her at the train station and saw her off, it was at a turning point in my life. In the years I was abroad studying, my three boys never lacked a mother because she was there. When she stayed with us on Wulang Lane in Taichung, many old friends from our refugee days would get together and talk about old times, which created a festive mood. Father supplied me with a profound idealism; Mother gave me my feelings for literature and attitude about the treatment of others. When I was growing up, suffering deprivations and hardships on the road and taking shelter in the woods during bombings, my mother told me stories of the wilds of our homeland and the family history. My children and grandchildren all know her stories and the need to get ahead through education: “You can’t be a wolf hunter!” On no account can you fall behind because of idleness and laziness, to be the food of wolves. The homeland of her youth in the northeast a hundred years ago was a plain where packs of wolves were sometimes seen. The frigid wind of the first lunar month, the threat of tigers and wolves, the joy at the renewal of the pasturage in spring and summer in her stories, all inspired my imagination for a lifetime.

  Before Mother passed away, we knew our parents were aging, but the thought of them dying never crossed our minds, much less did we ever talk about making final arrangements. Hastily, my younger sister Ningyuan accompanied a representative from the Legislative Yuan to Danshui and found a plot on a mountain slope in Sanzhi Township. It was an open spot overlooking the Pacific Ocean and resting on the slope of Mount Miantian. And so the Chi family had a foothold on Taiwan. Mother was buried there after cremation, and my father, in his last years, would often go there and sit before her grave, watching as the ships passed far out at sea. He said that from the grave you looked northeast and that the ocean flowed home toward Bohai Bay and Dalian: “We can’t go home, so it’s a good place to be buried.” Four years later, Father was also buried there. Yuchang and I purchased a plot directly adjoining theirs from below. In the future, I will forever rest at the knees of my parents, together in death as in life, never again to wander. As of today, there are four generations of us on Taiwan, a place where falling leaves can return to their roots!

  UNEXPECTED MISFORTUNE

  In 1985 on my way back to Taiwan from Berlin, I stopped in London to attend an international cultural conference held at Cambridge University, where I was to present a paper on which I had taken great pains, titled “The Mellowing of Modern Chinese Poetry in Taiwan.” When I returned to our empty nest in Taipei, I started preparing for classes that would soon begin.

  On th
e Sunday morning before the start of classes, I had arranged for Yuchang and me to meet our good friends Yilie and Junxian and my sister Ningyuan to climb Mount Datun, because it had been ten years since we last climbed it. Yilie called us the “Idiot Mountain Climbers.” The five of us used our brains in real life (Yilie was the assistant general manager at Taiwan Sugar; Junxian was the assistant chief of accounting at Taiwan Power; Yuchang was the chief engineer at Taiwan Railways Administration; Ningyuan was the assistant general manager of ZTE Ticket Co.; and I taught at National Taiwan University). Over ten years, regardless of the weather, we went to the seldom-visited scenic spots and climbed all the mountains in the Taipei area. Yuchang was a reliable driver and fancied himself a semiprofessional mountaineer! In the mountains, we leaped and shouted in a return to nature, our minds emptied, like idiots.

  That Sunday morning, our reliable driver had to attend a meeting, so I went to the sidewalk in front of the Normal University across from Lishui Street to wait for a cab and then go on to pick up the other three. It was very early, so there were not many people or cars about. Absorbed in looking left for an empty cab, I did not see when a motorcycle suddenly flew through the intersection against the light and was struck broadside by a taxi, hurling it into the air toward the tree under which I was standing, as shiny fragments rained down all around. The next thing I was conscious of was that my head was resting on a beat-up tennis shoe, my left foot was nowhere in sight, and I couldn’t move my right arm. I managed to prop myself up with difficulty using my left arm and saw my left foot in a new shoe, looking like the leg of a folding chair that had been broken off, pressed under my left leg. My right arm was broken and my sleeve felt empty. I just felt numb, for the pain had not yet set in. Three or four pedestrians looked at me to see if I was still alive; one of them asked me my name. I asked them to call my husband at once. A car stopped and out stepped a large man. When he saw the quantity of blood I had lost, he picked me up and put me in the back seat of his car. One of the pedestrians said, “You can’t move her; you have to wait for the police.” He shouted angrily, “If we wait for the police, she’ll die from loss of blood.” As he drove, he asked me which hospital I wanted to go to. I said “Tri-Service General! (For thirty years I always found the places I felt safest.) But first stop at Jianguo South Road. There are people waiting there for me.” Under the bridge, I could see Yilie standing there anxiously looking around. My mind was still clear, and I told him to get my sister and meet at Tri-Service General Hospital. Upon arriving at the hospital, I remember that I grabbed the sleeve of the man who had brought me and asked him his name. He refused to say, but did reluctantly leave his address. My family was never able to locate him, but I will never forget him for as long as I live.

  All of this occurred within a matter of fifteen minutes. The young man who ran the red light had just recently been discharged from the army. The rider, his two legs broken, and his smashed motorcycle flew through the air and landed under the tree where I was standing, and I was struck by a number of pieces. The doctor said the piece that struck my right arm missed my carotid artery by an inch. When I fell to the ground, my head landed on the beat-up shoe of the motorcyclist, which protected my head from the impact with the rocky ground.

  For years now I have wondered how someone like me, a person who has remained aloof from the world, could meet with such unexpected misfortune. Was it God’s wish that I experience for myself this level of human suffering? Was it punishment for my excessive happiness at traveling to Europe and visiting the historical and scenic spots to my heart’s content, not knowing how to avoid the danger lurking on the dusty city street?

  In more than a month spent in the surgery ward of Tri-Service General Hospital, I did indeed walk through the “valley of the shadow of death.” After the numbness following the crash wore off, my whole body was in excruciating pain for which the painkillers, shouting, and cursing were useless, but I was able to maintain a degree of quiet self-respect. Over time, the bone-piercing pain spread, following sunrise and moonset, throughout my body. My left leg was shattered and could not be joined, so an eight-inch steel pin had to be inserted below the knee to provide stability, and my right arm was reaffixed through surgery and would heal naturally. Dr. Lin Liuchi, who performed the surgery, was a happy and self-confident young physician, in charge of my case. In addition to performing the surgery, he visited me every day and always said, “Today we have to conduct …” His smile brought me back to the world of the living, which I’ll never forget.

  How did I get through that hot beginning of autumn and those long nights? All I remember is freeing myself from the eighteenth circle of Dante’s Inferno and clambering up to the most peaceful of Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems: “A slumber did my spirit seal, I have no human fears.” I had to stand up and stride once again with happiness. I could not rely on painkillers forever and had to master the tyrannical pain with my own mind. A year later, under the guidance of the rehab physician at National Taiwan University, and supported by that steel pin in my leg, I returned to school to teach.

  Thank God my mother had already passed away so that she didn’t have to weep for me.

  FATHER IN A SEA OF SILENCE (YAKOU SEA)

  However, it was unexpectedly my father’s turn to weep for me.

  Mother had been gone for two years, and Father had never known such loneliness. Normally when he was at home, he would eat when meals were ready, and wear what was laid out for him. Mother had taken care of everything for decades, and the morning she passed away, she was still asking the maid to prepare a meal. He was left alone, and I had to resort to all sorts of stratagems, pleading with him, encouraging him, even duping him, to try to get him to move in with us, but he refused to leave the house in Neihu. My sister Ningyuan and I would take turns going to see him there on alternate days, after class or work, but he would be out on the balcony facing the street at nine in the morning watching for us.

  After my accident, he hadn’t seen me in days and kept asking my sister where I was, and she would reply, “She had to attend a conference overseas.” He’d reply, “Didn’t she just get back from Germany?” This went on for nearly two weeks, so my sister finally told him, “She slipped and fell and can’t walk.” He said, “Then I’ll go see her.” This went on for another month, when suddenly his stomach acted up and he was sent to the surgery ward at Tri-Service General, on the floor below me. By that point, my upper-body cast had been removed, but the one on my left leg was still in place. I was worried about my father’s illness and a few days later, having received permission from the doctor, I went in a wheelchair to see him. The lower half of my body was covered with a blanket and I no longer looked like a mummy, as before. Entering his room, I called out to him, and his eyes filling with tears, he said, “What happened? How could you have taken such a fall?”

  The floodgates of his tears, which he had kept shut for forty years, thus broke open, never to close again. Referred to as “Old Steel,” he was never seen to shed a tear in adversity, but from that day forward in the last years of his life, he would weep incessantly each time he saw his daughter who had nearly lost her life. Sometimes he would say, “In the years I was involved in the revolution, your mother took care of you and suffered no less than I did. For all these years I never realized how much she suffered for this family.”

  In his final lonely years, recollections of past events filled his thoughts. Sometimes he’d say to me, “The mind is like a mighty charging force,” and would lament the extreme fate of China. The Cultural Revolution was winding down and there was a lot of news about people and events coming from various quarters, which allowed him to understand those days more comprehensively. For example, in 1981 while he was in Disabled Veterans General Hospital, Zhang Xueliang suddenly came to visit him in his sickroom. Since they had parted on bad terms in Wuhan in 1935, this was the first time they had seen each other in half a century, which left my father greatly disturbed. The two dashing young men of those
days were both eighty-two years old, and living thousands of miles from home with a lifetime of frustrations behind them; they had so much to talk about, but no need to say anything. Frequently my father would ask himself: If we had been able to cooperate in those days, what would the northeast be like today? What would China be like? In point of fact, even if time could flow backward, cooperation wouldn’t necessarily be an easy matter. At twenty, Zhang Xueliang assumed control of the Fengtian clique and the territory it controlled, and without any decisive preparation and knowing only power, he rashly precipitated the Xi’an Incident with its grave repercussions, putting hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the northeast into China proper, losing the power to address the fate of the northeast. How could he cooperate with Chi Shiying, who respected human dignity and was an idealist for democratic reform? The day the two of them met, the only thing they had in common was their fond regard for General Guo Songling. Zhang Xueliang thought about General Guo assisting him in power; my father thought that if General Guo had been victorious at the battle of the Great Flowing River, the situation in the northeast would have been entirely transformed; the Japanese would not have been allowed to enter and establish the puppet state of Manchukuo, and even with war between China and Japan and Japan’s subsequent defeat, the fate of the vast northeast would not have been decided by the Russians and those southerners like Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Tu Yuming, and Lin Biao. Although these humiliations were no more, they continued to torment him for the rest of his life.