My College Days

My father, who had worked for the revolution, was executed by the Kuomintang in Xiamen (Amoy) on October 16, 1949, the eve of their flight to Taiwan. The following day, the PLA (Chinese People’s Liberation Army) took Xiamen (Amoy). When my father died a martyr, he was 34; my mother was 28, I was 8 and my brother only 3.

Left in the world without him, we were honored with a red wooden billboard at the door which read: "Glorious Martyr’s Family," but we had very trying times. The 24 yuan (Chinese dollars) per month which Mother earned from a temporary job was far from being enough to meet the family needs, even though we attended school on government subsidies and even though Mother’s monthly wages was later increased to 38 yuan. What was worse, we were fatherless. When Mother was out working, I often had to look after my brother by taking him to the ponds and the river, where we tried to fish with fishing rods I made from bamboo sticks, sewing thread and safety pins. How I envied those children who had fathers to show them how to swim! How I envied my cousins whose father had bought them Ping-Pong paddles!

By the time I was at college learning English (picture below), our home was almost bare of furniture. All had been sold piece by piece over the years in exchange for food, especially in the early 1960’s when the whole country suffered from food shortages after the disastrous "Great Leap Forward" of 1958. Many of my classmates in the English department were overseas Chinese or their dependents, who had money and extra food supplies and who dined in a secluded campus dining hall with fine drapery. I was often hungry, as millions in the country were. My additional supplies were the rice coupons and dollar bills that Mother sent with her letters. She once sent me a food parcel of home-made cake—a mixture of ground rice-husk and extracted sugar-cane sediment. Never had I tasted anything as delicious as that!

Yannan and his mother and brother in 1960

I was needy but not miserable. Most of my classmates and teachers were kind to me, and I had Mother to care for me and books to entertain me. While my fellow students were having a good time in the dances that were held to keep them from dwelling on the hard times, I kept to my books. I read through the four graded volumes of Nesfield’s English Grammar, which I came by one by one from a second-hand bookstore, and was soon in a position to tell the syntactical difference between "please sit down" and "sit down please." I also learned touch type during the National Day holiday of 1959, when a professor lent me his typewriter, a 1920 Underwood. For five days and nights of this 10^th anniversary holiday, I sat at my bedside desk typing—copying whole poems of Percy Busshe Shelley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Rabindranath Tagore into loose-leaf notebooks. That great-grandfather of a typewriter worked after I moistened the dry ribbon with kerosene. In my third year at college, I bought a grandfather typewriter for myself for 70 yuan—an astronomical figure for me at the time. It was purchased after repeated shop visits and many second thoughts, and after a classmate loaned me 30 yuan to add to the 40 yuan that Mother had remitted to me. That big debt of 30 yuan was later paid off for me, without my prior knowledge, by two other classmates who looked upon me as their little brother and who, incidentally, became husband and wife upon graduation (picture on left).

Yannan's college classmates in 1963

Also see: College Classmates & Professors