THE DISTANT SPRING BREEZE OF 1943
I lived in mainland China for twenty-three years; a half century later I returned, and the only people who really recognized me were a few close friends from school. During the eight years of the War of Resistance, Chongqing was my home, and after coming to Taiwan, I recalled Shapingba most frequently. The three li between school and home, the countless paddy fields, and the simple road that ran to the Xiaolongkan Highway were all part of my growing up, as witnessed by the students in the class of 1943 at my unforgettable alma mater Nankai Middle School, for which I am most grateful. After mainland China opened for people to visit their relatives, the first to do so were my classmates living in America, some of whom produced mimeographed handwritten accounts. The first letter I received—just a simple postcard—was from Pan Yingmao in Canada, on which she wrote a couple of lines about her recent activities and current address. Yingmao was a good friend in my senior year of high school; she always sat in the neighboring seat and our dorm beds were usually very close. Her mother was French, so she was bilingual and often came across as a dreamer who seemed to waver outside of both cultures. When the lights went out and it was my turn to tell a story from a new book or movie, she was always my most faithful (I like to talk and you like to laugh) listener. I remember her crying without stopping through my telling of the first love of Lamartine’s Graziella and her death for love. Lamartine was a French Romantic poet and Graziella, the heroine of the tale, is sixteen—the same age as we were at the time.
After victory, Yingmao and I lost touch, and when her postcard reached Taiwan, we were already seventy years old. I had originally intended to attend a conference in Europe, following which on my return flight I would stop in New York to meet Jennifer Crewe, the senior editor at Columbia University Press, and from there proceed to Canada to see Yingmao. My trip to the States happened to coincide with Thanksgiving, and the person organizing my itinerary said, “Everyone is on the road home to be with their family,” as a result of which I didn’t go to the States or Canada, figuring I’d go the following year to attend a conference. Unforeseeably, the following year I received a letter from Lu Wenjing in Beijing informing me that Yingmao had passed away after an illness. Not getting together with her was one of my biggest regrets. Feeling ashamed, I wrote a long letter that could never be delivered.
To Yingmao,
I’m sorry to be so long in returning your letter. Upon receiving it, I was quite excited for some time and all the beautiful, perplexing, and regrettable memories of those years came flooding back. Do you still remember? The summer of the year we graduated, we were all awaiting the results of the university entrance exam. We went to Chongqing to see you, and the five of us walked hand in hand to the train station. Suddenly a jeep came straight at us, scattering us, and after recovering from the fright, you said in that calm voice of yours: “I’m afraid we won’t see each other again. My mother’s French superstition holds that when people holding hands are forced apart, it is just an omen for separation.” Over the years I have sometimes thought about that farewell. That omen was quite accurate—we really did separate, all going our separate ways, never able to inquire after one another.…
The long letter is an offering to our youth among the flames of war, snuggled close together for warmth, unable to check our happiness and sadness. I also mailed the letter to friends in mainland China from the class of 1943 who had been urging me to come back for a reunion. Soon thereafter, the 43 Newsletter printed my letter, on account of which I received even more news and more urgings to return.
I was impelled to go to Beijing in 1999 and attend the annual reunion of the class of ’43 on account of the news of the death of Lai Shuying, another good friend. We were classmates through primary and middle school. Her father was from Jiangxi and became acquainted with my grandfather during the Zhi–Feng wars. He was the oldest among my classmates’ fathers.
As I recall, her family lived on the slopes of Zengjiayan in Chongqing, where my father took me to visit with a great deal of respect. Shuying wasn’t among my sworn confederates of inveterate daydreamers, but she was a frequent guest at our house in Shapingba and closer than most to my parents. After family visits were allowed across the Strait, she immediately wrote to me and asked me to help find out the whereabouts of her brother Lai Guangda, who had gone to Taiwan with the Nationalist government. Before I had made any inquiries, I received word from another classmate that Shuying had died suddenly from an illness. I knew she had married a well-known Beijing physician surnamed Wu who gained the trust of high-ranking Communists after “liberation,” and therefore she probably had not been tormented. But how could she have died at just seventy years of age? If I didn’t return for a reunion soon, how many of my old classmates would there be left to see?
I arrived in Beijing at night during the third month, late in spring according to the lunar calendar, so it was still fairly cold in the north of the country. Xing Wenwei, who was responsible for keeping in contact with me, was already waiting for me at the hotel. Entering the lobby, among all the people coming and going, I saw a woman standing at the reception desk; her look of expectation was different from most. She walked over to greet me—it was Xing Wenwei! She was the true blossom of Nankai Middle School, and was the focal point of the girls’ section for the boys’ dorm to gaze at from afar. She was the most soberly beautiful girl I ever saw. In the first year of high school, I sat between her and Yingmao and was the envy of many. Of course, the woman now holding me tightly was not that cool and reserved beauty, and though her eyes had dimmed, she still stood out in a crowd. With her was Yu Yuzhi (who, along with Liu Zhiqi and me, were the three literary friends in the class). They said that Liu Zhiqi was living in Tianjin and in recent years had always said she would be sure to attend a class reunion when Chi Pang-yuan showed up. When they were leaving my hotel that evening, I said that I had made the trip specifically for a happy gathering and we would not discuss 1) illness or medicine and 2) returning to the motherland.
The following day, I went to Xing Wenwei’s house (after graduating from college, she had married Kang Guojie, a classmate who adored her for his whole life). More than ten people from the same class were there, but we didn’t recognize one another when we met, all of us being old women. Only when we mentioned our names was there a startled outburst, but we quickly adjusted the image of ourselves from fifty years before to the reality of today. So many “Do you remember?” questions seemingly explained something that had puzzled me greatly in Taiwan and proved that my youth had indeed been a very happy one. These people and events, the fish pond and plum orchard, had all existed, and though times might have changed, none of it could be destroyed.
Around noon, the doorbell rang. Xing Wenwei called me to the door and said, “Liu Zhiqi has come from Tianjin to see you, but whatever you do, don’t say you don’t recognize her.” The door opened and two young people entered, supporting an old woman. I never could have imagined unyielding Liu Zhiqi being bent over and unable to stand up straight. Entering the corridor, she embraced me and crying said, “I never thought I’d see you again in this life!” The night before, I had not been told that due to a spinal injury she could not take the train, and that for our gathering her daughter had hired a car so that she could half recline the entire sixty miles from Tianjin to Beijing. Our different fates were sealed when a half century before, she and some friends had gone to the area liberated by the Communists and I had gone to Taiwan alone. Reciting lines from the Qing dynasty poet Gu Zhenguan’s “To the Tune of Jinluo qu” was no better than a sob: “Jizi, how are you? Even one day you’d return, all things in this life bear not a look back.”
During the summer break of 1946, the various universities were being demobilized after victory and began returning to their original campuses from Sichuan and Yunnan. Classes began in the fall, and Liu Zhiqi left her home in Sichuan with great excitement and went to Beiping. She studied at Yanjing University, which during the
war had moved to Huaxiba in Chengdu. Ten of our classmates were there and had one more year to go before graduation. Before I returned to Wuhan to resume classes, she and I met again in Beiping and happily did some sightseeing together. As this was her first time in the north, she was filled with curiosity at the vast spectacle of the politics and culture of the ancient capital. Liu Zhiqi must have been one of the last to personally witness the final days of Yanjing University. Just after liberation the university was categorized as useless because it was an “American imperialist” Christian university. The beautiful campus and famous Weiming Lake (such an inauspicious name!) were forced to become part of the Beijing University campus; those who wrote recollections of student life on the shores of Weiming Lake after 1950 were all students of Beijing University. I’m certain that no one in China in the second half of the twentieth century would dare openly write nostalgically about Yanjing University and its elegant traditions. Political power had thus categorically extinguished a common memory! After fifty years of turbulence, how would that friend of mine who was filled with literary feelings look back on our parting in 1949?
The reunion made me feel more timid the closer I got to home! Every moment was precious, with too much to say about the events of those years and too many old songs to sing. Our voices feeble and memories weak, we sought to rekindle the Nankai spirit.… Before parting the following afternoon, they started singing our class song, which I had written as an eighteen-year-old with literary aspirations: “The blossoming plum trees and the morning sun; the western pool and the evening clouds … the wind of 1943 is now far away; farewell, alma mater, we know not when we’ll return.”
In the student movement that was rolling on with full force behind the lines, from demonstrations in the street evolving into full-fledged participation, some of our university classmates went to Yan’an, all of whom had long stories to tell. One of them was Fu Qizhen, who was from Taiyuan in Shanxi Province. She was still big and hearty. I immediately recalled her resonant laughter when we talked at school. It was said that not long after starting college, she and several friends went to Yan’an. In middle school it was nearly impossible to distinguish who was “progressive” and who was “reactionary” because no one revealed themselves! For the last half century the people from Yan’an have been the masters of China, so her lot should have been a fortunate one. (Five years later I received photos in the mail of her during her Nankai days, in one of which she was wearing a PLA uniform, with a note that said: “Entering Taiyuan City with the Army.” Her letter said it was not entirely accurate.) There were so many questions I wanted to ask, but at a gathering of more than ten people, I really didn’t know how to put those individually vital questions. Now nearly sixty years later, with recalled enthusiasm, we sang song after song from when we were young, our hearts having gone through so many hardships. How can you still remember? Our generation that grew up in wartime Chongqing taking shelter in the desolate outskirts amid the sound of air-raid sirens, our heads were filled with and our imaginations absorbed in the blind love of Days of Tomorrow and Graziella, but in our lives was there ever a sky-blue bay? Was there ever the possibility of “Black hair blown by the wind, the shadow of a sail passes over my cheeks, as I listen to the fisherman singing at night”? Those who remained in mainland China experienced political turmoil, and some suffered; those who went to Taiwan or abroad always felt uprooted. While we were meeting anew like this, it seemed like a different world. When there was “too much to say” and songs like “The Wind of 1943 is Now Far Away” had been sung repeatedly, memory and oblivion were like two soft strands circling above a roomful of white-haired childhood friends. The elite of the elite in their youth, they lost much time for a normal life due to political disruptions and the demands of marriage, becoming a lost generation, swallowed up in the simple sigh of a “faraway spring breeze,” with no desire to remember and no ability to forget.
That afternoon, we left Xing Wenwei’s house and walked to the big street at the end of the lane and had lunch at a restaurant. I forgot to ask the name of the street, and all I remember is that it was planted with willow trees or Persian silk trees, and April was the time of flying willow catkins, so thick as to cover the ground. Holding hands, Yu Yuzhi and I brought up the rear. Seeing the heads and shoulders of the seven or eight classmates ahead of us sprinkled with willow catkins, I couldn’t help but recall “Water Dragon’s Chant,” Su Dongpo’s lyric about willow catkins that we memorized, which was included in Professor Meng Zhisun’s textbook of selected lyrics. Yu said she remembered that it began, “It seems to be a flower, yet not a flower.” In relay, we recited: “And no one shows it any pity: let it fall! / Deserting home, it wanders by the road; / When you come to think of it, it must / Have thoughts, insentient as it may be.… A pond full of broken duckweed! / Of all the colors of springtime, / Two-thirds have gone with the dust, / And one third with the flowing water! / When you look closely, / These are not willow catkins, / But, drop after drop, tears from people who part!” We stood on that unfamiliar Beijing street amid the white willow catkins, our lives drifting together and apart, and the sadness carpeting the ground that no poem can capture!
Two years later in Taipei, I received a copy of the 43 Newsletter, which contained the news item: “Xing Wenwei Passes Away.” Upon first seeing it, I couldn’t believe my eyes, but examining it by lamplight, I found it was true. Even beyond the grief, however, I noticed that her name, Xing Wenwei, was written in simplified characters, which angered me and made me question its veracity. At our age, death draws nearer, but I had no idea she had fallen ill and I could not convey my sympathy! And here was her death announced with this Chinese character I didn’t recognize. There were quite a few of us present the last time we met, and each of us was unable to articulate what we had encountered. The singing, the laughter, and the talk were not a complaint about the suffering and regrets of being born at the wrong time—that cup of bitterness had been drained long before—but that gathering nearly sixty years later served to prove that I had been young once.
Gradually, news from my school friends ceased; the spring breeze of 1943 had not only grown distant, it had vanished forever.
After the ’43 reunion I went to Chaoyang Gate to meet with Yang Jingyuan, who was two years ahead of me at Nankai and with whom I had once shared a room. When I got to Wuhan University, she was in her third year in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and was an advanced pupil of Zhu Guangqian. At Leshan, I once had New Year’s Eve dinner at her house. Her father, Professor Yang Duanliu, was an expert on currency in the Department of Economics, and her mother, Yuan Changying, since returning from Europe in 1929 had taught drama and Shakespeare in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Wuhan University (I studied with her for two years), and was referred to as one of the “Three Luojia Talents,” the other two being Ling Shuhua and Su Xuelin.
Growing up in such a household, Yang Jingyuan was a solid student with depth of thought, and was kind and romantic by nature. During normal times she could have become the writer she longed to be as well as an intellectual capable of doing academic research. However, before graduating from college in 1945, she had already joined the political trend of thought that perplexed most university students. The students who leaned toward Communism referred to themselves as “progressives” and those who were more conservative as “reactionaries.” At that time, the Nationalist army that had spent six years fighting the Japanese found itself sunk in the most difficult stage of defending Hunan, Guangxi, and Guizho. Sichuan was too large, and most urban and village dwellers passed peaceful lives, but the refugees from downriver once again found themselves in a panic, thrust again into the proximity of the fighting.
In 2003, Yang Jingyuan published The Diary of Ranglu, in which she recounted what attracted her to politics in those early days and the feeling that the government was “thoroughly corrupt” and had to be reorganized. A leftist student loaned her One Month in Ya
n’an and Random Jottings of Going to the West, which changed her from a girl who was a diligent student of English and American literature; as she put it: “I had to read it; I had to seize every opportunity to learn about Communism.” At the time, her parents earnestly advised her to first finish her studies and not rush into joining a political party: “Politics and love are quite similar, for there is no escaping once you’ve been together for a while.” After she graduated from Wuhan University, her parents did everything in their power to help her pursue advanced study in the English department of the University of Michigan, but swept up in the tide after “liberation” and on account of love, she abandoned her studies without consulting anyone and returned to build the New China. Fifty years later, she published the collection of love letters from two places, Letters to My Love—1945–1948 (Henan People’s Publishing House, 1994). That year in Beijing I saw her and her beloved, Yan Guozhu (Institute of Engineering, Wuhan University, and in the same class as I was for four years), and learned that her life had been happy in love. However, the cruelty of the political persecution her parents had suffered was perhaps difficult to forget. In 2002 she published The Peacock Flies Home—Yuan Changying (Beijing People’s Publishing House), in which she gives a detailed account of how miserably Professor Yuan was treated late in life: she swept the campus streets and then was banished back to her old home where she found refuge alone with relatives, which she referred to as imprisonment in a “mountain jail,” living a solitary existence until she died. It made this student of hers weep to no end.
I also recalled Zhu Guangqian, the professor I visited who had encouraged me to change to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and who would have been my advisor. Shortly after Taiwan allowed people to return to mainland China for family visits, I read an article in Luojia, the Wuhan University newsletter, written by an upperclassman by the name of Wang Zhu titled “Scenes of Professor Zhu Guangqian During the Ten Years of the Great Catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution,” from which I learned that after spending four years in a “cowshed,” Professor Zhu was sent back to Beijing University to the United Nations Materials and Translation Section in 1970, and while under continued supervision and reform through labor, he could get his hands on a few books while sweeping and cleaning toilets. One day while he was sweeping up in the Department of Western Languages, he happened to discover his manuscript translation of the second volume of Hegel’s Aesthetics, which had been taken away as something “feudalistic, capitalistic, and revisionary” when his house was searched and his property confiscated. Once again seeing this manuscript on which he had so painstakingly labored seemed like something from another world. Fortunately, Ma Shiyi, the section chief, took it and hid it. After laboring by day, Professor Zhu worked at pounding out a final draft, word by word, line by line, as well as translating the third volume. His work was published after the Cultural Revolution. Professor Zhu was lucky. In 1989, Qian Mu went to Hong Kong to lecture at the New Asia College and had the chance to meet him again. I too had intended to go to Hong Kong to pay my respects but never did, because when Qian Mu returned to Taipei, he informed me that Professor Zhu scarcely recognized anyone any longer.
The Great Flowing River Page 48