Professor Wu Mi’s words of hope and encouragement in those days—“The Buddha says, Love is like a torch, though it light ten thousand fires, its light never diminishes”—sustained me for more than sixty years. Under political persecution, he too lost his academic honors. Nearly fifty years later, several students of Professor Wu Mi, now famous scholars, pieced together an outline and his lecture notes for Literature and Life and had them published, and Qian Zhongshu inscribed the title. There were also some handwritten notes in English and Chinese, some of which were written with a brush. One of the editors was retired Professor Wang Minyuan of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Beijing University, who translated the English into Chinese. He was eighty years old at the time and “sitting and facing the wall for several months, I used a magnifying glass to decipher and study his original handwriting word by word. After translating it, I also added annotations.” The book also describes Professor Wu’s lifetime dedication to study and teaching, and although he himself led a simple and thrifty life, he never stinted when it came to helping others. However, during the Cultural Revolution, he “came to a bad end.” He was not allowed to teach; he was struggled against and criticized, humiliated, forced to write self-criticism, forced to labor, beaten, not allowed to eat, seized by both arms, quickly frog-marched and fell to break his legs, and lost his sight.… In the final moments of his life, he lost consciousness, repeatedly calling out, “Give me water, I am Professor Wu Mi. I want to eat, I am Professor Wu Mi.” He was persecuted to such an extent because he had the audacity to say at a meeting dedicated to the criticism of Confucius that “Some of what Confucius said is still right.” When someone tried to force him to criticize Confucius, his reply was: “I would rather die.” In his afterword, Professor Wang writes, “A person who ought to receive respect in any civilized society—I deeply cherish the memory of Professor Wu Mi.”
Nearly all of these teachers under whom I studied in the university did not survive, and their bitter experiences are the worst suffered by China’s intellectuals in the last century, and all were the result of politics. All the water in the three rivers would not be enough to wash away the anger and resentment.
A HERO’S MEMORIAL
After the reunion in Beijing I went to Nanjing, and there to meet me was Zhang Wen, another member of the class of ’43. We were good friends in school, and she was straightforward and kind, never calculating. Her father was in cultural circles, so we had much in common with regard to our attitude toward life and what we talked about. She was one of the earliest to write to me after Taiwan permitted family visits to the mainland. We recognized each other at once the first time we saw each other after fifty years. She was still big and robust and appeared optimistic and dependable, as if she possessed a calm and unhurried poise with regard to aging.
Returning to Nanjing was like returning home. The first day we got together for lunch with four other friends from the same class. I hadn’t been all that close to them at Nankai, so we had no intimate talk, and with so few of us, we didn’t sing either. Following lunch, and according to my plans, I went to look for our old house on Ninghai Road. I first located Lane 3 on Ninghai Road, where I recognized nothing save the street name. The primary school on Shanxi Road was squeezed between two old buildings, with no playground to speak of. Drum Tower Primary School was just a hundred feet from the Holiday Inn where I was staying. I walked over and back from the hotel but never saw the name of the school above the dark and narrow, dilapidated door. The signs on the stores on either side seemed to block it out. Entering, I simply couldn’t believe how small, simple and crude, old and shabby it was. Among primary schools in Nanjing, Drum Tower was one with a history, and if I hadn’t see its current state with my own eyes, I never would have believed that such a gap could exist between memory and reality. Before 1937 was the “golden decade” of the capital, but of the Nanjing that underwent the extensive nation-building plan not a trace remained.
The following day, Zhang Fei and her husband, Liu Shousheng, came to show me the Nanjing of today. First we went to see the newly constructed memorial to the Nanjing massacre. Going through the door, we entered into the front courtyard paved with yellow sand, around which stood stone markers inscribed with the names of the dead from the various city districts. Inside the broad and weighty single-story building were related photographs and materials. The deep grief was displayed in the simplest fashion. To this day, I can’t remember how I walked out of that building.
The next place I hoped to see was the Sun Yat-sen Memorial. When I was young, when guests arrived from the north, my parents would have me accompany them to climb those seemingly never-ending stone steps. However, when the taxi arrived at the memorial, I saw all kinds of peddlers among the mix of trees, but never the entrance to the stairs. Getting out of the car, I stood looking up at the white stone mausoleum and a few scattered people ascending and descending the stone stairs on four sides, all the while entirely lacking a solemn demeanor. Suddenly I felt disappointed and didn’t want to go up. I returned to the car and, recalling the map of Nanjing I had seen the night before, I asked Zhang Fei if she knew where the public cemetery for aviator martyrs was located on Purple Hill. She said she knew where it was and had thought about going to see it. She asked the driver how far it was and if we could go. He said we had to head south around the mountain for about thirty li, and that he could take us and would be willing to stay and wait to take us back to the city.
As the car traveled the winding mountain road, I seem to find myself in a dream world. The car stopped at a place where the mountain road widened, and we entered the cemetery through a high and spacious stone gateway and ascended the stone steps. I still had the feeling of being in a dream. What a strange and unexpected journey! Only when we stood facing a large stone tablet on which was inscribed in Sun Yat-sen’s hand “Saving the Country by Air,” which was situated in a pavilion, did I begin to believe that it was true. Ascending still farther, about halfway up the slope, there was a large white terrace, at the center of which stood a large stone tablet and a pair of stone statues of soldiers in flying gear—one Chinese and one American. On the stone tablet was written: “Memorial for the Aviator Martyrs of the War of Resistance Against Japan.” On the first level on the slope was a group of more than seven hundred gravestones for American martyrs. Flowers were placed in front of some of the markers (the brochure about the memorial said that descendants continue to come from America to pay homage). Continuing up the slope, on the second level was row after row of even larger tablets of black granite on which were engraved the more than three thousand names of the Chinese Air Force martyrs. Trees were sparsely planted on the slope behind, and under the early May sun, the large swath of gravestones was in no way gloomy or forbidding. Climbing to the top of the stone steps, I let go of Zhang Fei’s hand and quietly said to her that I wanted to be alone and find stone tablet M. Before I left for Beijing, Zhang Dafei’s brother had sent me a booklet about the memorial and said his name was located there.
All of this was absolutely true. On stone tablet M were engraved twenty names, and the line for Zhang Dafei was simply written:
Zhang Dafei Captain, from Yinkou, Liaoning Born 1918—Died in the line of duty 1945
This young man who was determined to be like the hero in the poem: “If the winged general were at the Dragon City, / the enemy horsemen would never cross the Yin mountains” gave his life for his country, and his twenty-six years of life were reduced to a single line. Could this piece of stone and these few words become the refuge of a soul?
That day in May, the sun shown down on me in my seventy-fifth year, and was as warming as his unforgettable voice. Was my visit there something to which he eagerly looked forward? Or was it not completely a matter of chance, like attending the church memorial service on the one-year anniversary of his death in the line of duty? I sat for a long time on the small stone bench in front of the marker, until Zhang Fei took me down the hil
l and we returned to the city via Xuanwu Lake, which was one of the places I had planned to see. But it was close to sunset, so the water was dark and the color of the trees difficult to distinguish—all the events of my childhood were concealed in the twilight.
Among the rows of large stone markers with no individual characteristics of life and death, I thought of the winter of 1936 and listening to him cry, telling with difficulty how the Japanese had tortured and burned his father to death. That was the first time I understood why my father was frequently not at home and the work that occupied him after returning to the north since the Mukden Incident; and also why with Mother in Beiping and Tianjin, we frequently changed our surname from Wang to Xu to Zhang … and finally why the heads of the fathers of the Gai children had been hung on the city wall.
Undertaking the first stage of exile from Nanjing to Hankou, the senior high boys of Sun Yat-sen Middle School became my family’s traveling companions, to live or die together. They carried my seriously ill mother and my three baby sisters onto cars and boats. These boys who were not yet twenty, their very existence threatened, grew up to become protectors. Disembarking from the boat in Hankou, the troop of boys shouldered more than a hundred rifles and were settled in a primary school auditorium. One December night, when there was not enough clothing or blankets to stay warm and while the Japanese planes bombed the city and riverside around the clock, a dozen or so boys who were eighteen years old crossed the river to apply for admission to the Central Military Academy. Zhang Dafei applied for the air force. He said that from that point on in life, there would be no tears, just struggle and the defense of the country.
From then on he was totally committed to the new world of the protector. He earnestly undertook military training from winter to summer, which totally transformed him so that now he walked with his chest thrust forward and with great strides. After flight training began, he entered yet another world. On his twentieth birthday, he wrote to my mother, my brother, and me, excited about having read the biography of Gao Zhihang, whose patriotic and idealistic spirit made him increase his own efforts in his studies and gave him more determination to pass the flight-training exam and one day join a pursuit squadron to fight the enemy in the sky and reduce the casualties among his fellow countrymen. “Although pilot Gao Zhihang died, there will be countless others to take his place.” He also had to develop steadiness, resourcefulness, and accurate judgment, so that in a dogfight he could use his sharp eyes and quick reflexes to pursue and shoot down enemy aircraft and live to return.
In those youthful days, I worshiped the heroes who flew pursuit fighter aircraft! That kind of hero worship can only exist at a certain age and during wartime. My feelings were pure and sincere, for which propaganda was unnecessary, and which nobody would mock. Those who had fled and took shelter amid the wail of air-raid sirens for years not only worshiped the heroes who beat back death in the sky but also were grateful and ashamed—a feeling of being too beholden. When we on the ground fled and hid from the enemy bombs, they stood at attention and set off into the sky to destroy the enemy planes. While we received a proper education without interruption, they fought not knowing if they would be alive tomorrow.
But in his letters he repeatedly said that in his heart, songs of hero worship made him even more conflicted. He never lost his dream of becoming a military chaplain. When he went for training in Colorado, he frequently kept company with the base chaplains, and attending their gatherings only served to strengthen this idea of his. When he returned to China, he attended church at the Kunming base, where he obtained the warmest feeling of inner peace in his entire life. Later he probably learned that there was no system of military chaplains in the Chinese armed forces, but still the hope sustained him. Not wasting his time with drink and women, he had a hope in life and obtained true spiritual redemption. He was the first person to talk to me about the soul. The Twenty-third Psalm in the Bible is a prayer for safety, and he recited the passage “He restoreth my soul.” In the education provided at home and in school in those days, no one discussed the soul, but for my entire life, this has been an overriding issue in my reading.
Among my mother’s things I found two photos of Zhang Dafei in military uniform, one taken when he rose to the rank of first lieutenant and the other when he was promoted to the rank of captain. The warm smile on his face was at odds with his stern military dress. For fifty years I had searched war memorials of that age in which he gave his life in the line of duty.
In 1998, his brother sent a story from the Henan Xinyang Daily News reporting on the search for where he died: “In May 1945, a plane did, in fact, go down on the riverbank below the old street of Xishuanghe. Quite a few curious people went to have a look at the plane, which lay with one wing upright, the other buried in the sand. A few days later, people were sent by those in authority to dismantle the plane and ship it with the use of salt rafts down the canal to Xinyang.”
In an article of three thousand words, not a single word was devoted to the pilot’s body. The plane had not caught fire, so his body must have been intact. Where did the local people bury him? No one in the last fifty years seems to know or ever will know if that poor soul, whose family was destroyed and scattered and forced to wander and who lived another ten years after finding religion, will ever really find spiritual rest. Or is his soul still wandering around on the land where it entrusted its body, a bloody wandering ghost with nowhere to return?
Late at night after receiving the copy of the Xinyang Daily News, as the clamor of the city gradually subsided, I took down the Bible he had presented to me before he left in 1937, looking for guidance as to how I should view his life after half a century, and my life. I opened it straight to chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes:
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die;… a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
All of this seemed to be the last sixty years of my life. With his blessing, I have arrived at the time in life to cast things away. Ecclesiastes reminded me that the happy days of youth were gone and the days of decline and disintegration were now upon me. In my reading, what I most enjoyed were the symbols for that time in which to cast things away:
While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain … and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because all men goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets. Or ever the silver cord be loosened, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.
I read the passage again after returning from Nanjing and having seen the black granite stone on which the name “Zhang Dafei” was inscribed, along with the dates of his birth and death. What was the concrete connection? With a few memories buried in real life, I had been able, with the power of reason, to gradually sum up the wisdom transmitted by the Bible: wisdom is an awakening from all emptiness.
In my heart, Zhang Dafei’s life was like a night-blooming cereus, blossoming deep in the night and quickly closing to fall to the ground: such glorious purity, such unspeakable nobility.
ANCHORAGE FOR A SOUL
In early autumn 2001, on the seventieth anniversary of the Mukden Incident, my brother escorted me and my two sisters, Ningyuan and Xingyuan, across the Pacific to Shenyang to attend the opening ceremony of the Chi Shiying Memorial Library at Northeast Sun Yat-sen Middle School, memorializing that generation of drifting souls.
Chi Shiying, who nursed a grievance from 1925, when he accompanied General Guo Songlin at the Juliu River, to 1987 when he was buried
in Taiwan, led a wandering life with his wife and children in tow, with no roof overhead and no land underfoot. The family home was demolished and the ancestral graves were plowed under, and the ancestral home of Tieling, Liaoning, that my siblings and I named when filling out forms had become nothing but a homeland on paper.
The fate of the Northeast Sun Yat-sen Middle School from its very founding was rocky. A group of homeless children and teachers were recruited at Baoguo Temple in Beiping to form a large family linked by blood and tears. From Beiping to Nanjing, from Nanjing to Hankou, to Xiangxiang, Guilin, and Huaiyuan, in vehicles when they were available or on foot when not, they traveled and wandered down into Sichuan, finding shelter at Jingning Temple, where the school stayed for eight years, their education never interrupted. After victory in the War of Resistance against Japan, they made their way home, running happily. The school shut down in 1946 and reopened in 1994, pushed for by alums from all over the country and overseas.
The Great Flowing River Page 49