It was delightful to be enrolled in the NCMS, but a lot of difficulties were waiting for me. I had thought that I finally became a student of a public senior middle school, accommodation would be sure more convenient than that in the Erjia Private School. I had never thought that due to the economic recession the government decided to reduce the urban population and didn’t allow the students from the four people’s commune around the county town to migrate to the school and to eat the grains supplied by the government. Jinyu was one of the four communes and I could not live in the dormitory of the school, which meant I had to solve my accommodation myself. To my great disappointment I had to find a place to sleep. Furthermore, the NCMS was located in the northwest of the town and at that time it was in the country surrounded by villages, there being not any commerce. Where I could have my meals worried me badly. The residents of Jinyu often said that it was 12 Chinese li from Jinsha, the county town. In fact it meant getting to the eastern bridge of Jinsha, which was called “Dongyangqiao” , the eastern foreign style bridge. (I guess our ancestors used wood to build the bridge, but this one was made of cement and local residents called “simenting”, the sound of the English word “cement”). But you must go through the whole town and plus another 3 li to get to the NCMS. Altogether it was about 18 or 20 li (9 to 10 km). Father went there on foot and paid a visit to several homes close to the school. When he came back he told us that he found a family which had two people, an old man and his son, who worked at a primary school in another village and came back only on weekend. In the home two students of the NCMS already lived there, I would be the third one and would sleep in the sitting room. There was an old brick stove, whose inner part had fallen into disrepair over years. Father said that he could repair it and I could cook on it which meant that I had to cook food for myself. In 1961, I was 16 years old, about 1.45 meters tall and my weight was about 35 kg, not grown up, still a child, and accordingly I felt terribly worried: how to carry the grain and fuel (dried straw), and vegetables, edible oil, salt, sauce and vinegar as well. Wasn’t I worried, was I? At that time the three meals were very simple. For breakfast and supper, we ate only salted vegetables, and I only had to cook some fresh vegetables for lunch.
The two days before the school begins, father and I went to the house of the old man, father carrying some grains, straws, oil and salt. He made mud of water and soil and used it to repair the inside part of the brick oven. After the arrangement father went back home, leaving me alone. Before leaving home, mother and elder sister taught me how to cook porridge and rice. It was not easy to cook food for only one person. In the morning I cooked more porridge than I could eat and in the evening I heated it for the supper. At noon when I came from the class I was very hungry, but had to cook something myself. To simplifying the process, I cooked rice and vegetable all together, adding some oil and salt. Hunger was the best seasoning and I wolfed it down quickly, without knowing its taste. Every Saturday afternoon I went home over 10 km on foot and came back on Sunday afternoon to school, carrying with a shoulder pole, one end being grains and the other end fuel. Mother gave me the best straw, esp. the dried beanstalk. Because of my weak energy I had to rest several times before I could get the house where I lived. During the childhood how I wish to read in the middle school, and never thought of so many difficulties I had to overcome.
All the students from the four communes around the county town had to rent houses and cook for ourselves and for the convenience to manage us, all of us were arranged into one class, including those from the county town, Class Four, Senior Grade One, being day students. We reported our difficulties to the school administration, resulting in all of us being allowed to buy meal tickets with the grain coupon, which we got by selling the grain to the grain management centre. As a result, we didn’t need to cook ourselves and could concentrate our attention upon our studies. In the next year, i.e. in the second year, urban population was controlled more strictly and all the students far away from the school had to migrate back home and were not allowed to eat the grain supplied by the government. We were all equal, so the students of our class moved to the school dormitories and slept on bunk beds. But the grain coupon mentioned above could not be got from the grain management centre, because almost every household had no wheat and rice to sell to it. We had only corn and naked barley. The management of the school cafeteria kept pace with the times and allowed the students to exchange corn for meal tickets, so that we could give the amount for a whole month to the cafeteria, and didn’t need to go home every week and bring the corn to the school
The second year (from autumn of 1962 to summer of 1963) was a particularly lean year for grain in our country and all of us used corn flour to get a meal card for a month instead of meal tickets, on which there was a table, which had 93 cells for 31 days, three for three meals of each day. When you had a meal, one cell was crossed. Whether you were a girl or a boy, without considering how much you needed to eat, everyone got the equal amount of meal. My hometown persons usually didn’t eat mantou, and cooked corn flour just like rice. We had corn flour gruel for both breakfast and supper. When late studies by ourselves in the evening completed, all the boy students in my bed room went hungry. Some of us brought some rice with them and when they fetched hot water in the thermos they put some rice in it. Before they went to bed they poured rice out to appease hunger, which we called using thermos to cook porridge. Only those who were badly hungry were willing to eat such tasteless meal. However, it was very popular in our bedrooms and almost everyone had eaten it.
The assembly hall of the NCMS was used as the dining hall as well. When a meal was served, cooks carried the rice and porridge buckets to the assembly hall, and the students were lining up with an earthen bowl in each hand. When it was your turn, you handed the meal ticket and let the student on duty cross the cell of the certain meal of the certain date, so that you could not come again to fetch the meal for the second time. Everyone, including beautiful girls, didn’t use an ordinary glazed bowl but an earthen ugly-looking bowl, which could hold more and was suitable for our capacity for food. There were no dining tables and benches, so all of us stood on a spot and finished eating the meal in a short while. The student on duty usually crossed the table cell on the meal card with an ink circle. When the card was used for 10 days or so, it became old and some students with large capacity for food tried to scratch off the ink circle with a knife. Carefully they used their nails to press the scratched paper fabric on it and then could go to the dining hall to fetch the porridge for the second time, which was very frightful. I heard that frequently someone was caught, for whom we had much sympathy.
So much about the meal was written. Is it far away from the subject of the study? About decade later I got touch with the theory of human needs by Maslow: Physiological need is the basic one of our human. We must first meet our basic needs, solving food and shelter problem, and then we can perform other activities. I have written down what kind of life the students in the school lived and let the next generations know our difficulties at that time and in what kind of background we persisted in studying. As to the cause of why people lived in such an abject poverty, I didn’t want to write anything, which was not the subject of the book “As aTree with the Passage of Time”.
Back to my study. I came from a private school, and felt the pressure when I entered the senior grade, esp. after a quiz on physics. I got only 40 scores of 100. More than half of us failed in the exam. But one male classmate, however, got 90, and a female 85, a heroine, who I paid tribute to. I felt my days were hard. From the primary school to the junior middle I had always been one of the top students in the class, but now in the senior grade of the middle school I was so backward in the class, which I felt terribly frightened of. I was not sure about how the things would develop in the following days. As time went on however I gradually got used to all the subjects, including the physics, esp. when we began to study Newton’s three laws of motion, I showed great interest. I understood the gravitation and knew that every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. I felt the explanation about the motion of the solar system very reasonable. In the subject of chemistry, I gazed in full admiration at Mendeleyev, the Russian chemist, who summarized a periodic table of the elements. I felt that the algebra arrangement combination and the computational methods were of practical use. The basis of solid geometry and triangle is plane geometry, so I didn’t feel very difficult to grasp them. Although quite a few students studied better than me, I had no pressure of failing in the exams. I was a qualified senior middle student.
I’d like to write something about how I was fond of studying Russian. Entering the senior middle school, I began to study a foreign language, which caused a very good feeling to me. I remembered when I was a young child that one of my neighbor’ sons who was about 10 years older than me, was a student of the Agriculture School at the foot of the Wolf Mountain of Nantong City, who later wanted to go to a college or a university and read a foreign language in his house, walking up and down. I listened for a while outside, and didn’t understand what he was reading. Later he became a student of Beijing University of Agriculture, whom I admired a great deal. Now I could also study a foreign language and got very excited. Every morning I got up early and read it. The other two students living in the old man’s house hated the subject of foreign language and often made a joke of Russian. For example, in Russian “Sunday”is Воскресенье which sounds in Chinese just as “socks were put into the shoes”; “go home” is Дом sounding in Chinese like “knit the woolen sweater”; “speak Russian” is Русскоязычное, which sounds like in Chinese “report to Doctor Li” and “speak Chinese” Это китайский “report to Doctor Tang” and in the NCMS there were just two doctors. One was Li, and the other was Tang. How funny it was! They didn’t understand why I liked Russian so much that I got up early every morning and read it tirelessly. But I always enjoyed doing so without feeling tired. Remembering words and the use of the six cases in Russian grammar were not very difficult for me and my Russian score was placed in the front position of the class. Especially when I entered the third year, the teacher who taught Russian was a lady named Shen Gao. She looked very beautiful in a skirt and was very friendly too. She often walked with his husband in the campus, a couple admired by all of us. I liked her lesson very much. My performance in class got her immediate attention and I was often asked to answer her questions or recite paragraphs. If there were mistakes in my answers she would smile and gave me a tip in order that I could correct them myself. Her friendly expression in class was deeply impressed upon me. I didn’t have any personal touch with her and knew nothing about her and her husband. After graduation I didn’t meet her until once I was in the Nantong Wharf, waiting for a ship for Nanjing. I came upon them and got to know that they were graduates from Shanghai Foreign Institute, and both were Shanghainese. The relation breakage between China and the Soviet Union led to the result that Russian was not taught in the middle school any more so they were teaching English still in a middle school of Nantong County. When they heard that I was studying German, they said that they had studied scrap copper and rotten iron and I was studying silver and gold. At that time, I had confidence in German and in the bright future and didn’t think of the bad fortune like theirs was also waiting for me
In the second year, our class organized a trip to Nantong City by bike. I was one of those who were most enthusiastic about it. I rode the heavy bike of my elder brother, which he used to carry goods to do his business. We started off lively and vigorously. Several girl students who were not able to ride bicycles were carried by boy students. I had just learned to ride and was not able to carry a girl. When we were approaching Nantong, one mate was speeding and appeared suddenly in front of me. The front wheel of my bike touched the back wheel of his and I fell down heavily and nothing happened to the front bike and rider. I had a small abrasion on my knee, which didn’t affect my journey and playing. I climbed the Wolf Mountain, and looked into the distance from it, seeing the fog being boundless. Here was the widest part of Yangtze River and it was about 8-9 kilometers from the north bank to the south one, just like vast sea, limitless. What was impressed upon me most was the daring antithetical couplet carved on the two black columns of the “Guangjiao Temple” gate composed by Ping Han, a province official during the period of Daoguan Emperor in the Qing Dynasty: “Crying loud and long makes mount and valley echo each other; looking in all directions sees wide sea and sky linking up into a single stretch”, which appropriately described the extraordinary imposing manner of the Wolf Mountain. We also visited the Southern Suburb Park and Nantong Young People Palace, strolled on the People Road and enjoyed the city life for a while for the first time. I saw the red and green traffic lights, the speedy and slow traffic lanes and the zebra pedestrian crossing with my own eyes which we had learned during the primary school.
The utmost left boy is me
When entering the second year, we began to talk about gaining admissions to colleges or universities. In the third year when the general revision began, the students were divided into three categories: the first being sciences and engineering, emphasis on mathematics and physics; the second being medicine and agriculture, important subjects were chemistry and biology; and the third liberal arts, examinations on history and ancient Chinese. Politics, composition and a foreign language were common requirement subjects. A few of us began to lay stress on some disciplines. Hanlin Jiang, who sat behind me and was not good at mathematics, physics and chemistry, liked Chinese very much. He was more mature than us. When we were muddleheaded about the college entrance examination, he had already decided to register liberal arts. His Russian record was not good, but he spent a whole summer holidays and improved a lot. He said that Russian was boring, but it was a stepping stone. Once he entered the college he would throw it right away. I didn’t completely understand what he said, but also began to think of the entrance examination, laying emphasis on some disciplines.
When entering the third year, the class teacher was Yunzhong Zhang , my favorite one, who taught us Chinese. Every Monday afternoon we had a weekly assembly class, in which Mr. Zhang talked to us about all kinds of subjects. I thought he was a teacher of high quality. He concentrated on a subject and never talked at random. One week, one subject, and impressed us deeply. By attending these assembly classes, I got to know what one’s life was, how to spend one’s life merrily, the function of good manners and training, the goal of one’s life, and how to realize it. He told us that as a human being we should emancipate our minds, and dared to make our idea come true which seemed to surpass our ability. I liked his weekly assembly class more than his Chinese one, and couldn’t help writing to him, telling him my feeling, which added to our exchanges and independent contact opportunity. I told him that I was discovered color blind and he told me about many specialties that I could not study and suggested me registering the liberal arts. It was somewhat difficult to ask me to give up studying mathematics, physics and chemistry because I already had interest in them. I didn’t want to give up any subject. In addition, those who registered liberal arts were most inferior students, so I didn’t think that I should be of this category. So many limits to the programs I could major in made me confused and interfered with my emotion to continue to work hard on mathematics, physics and chemistry. At that time pursuing proportion of the students who can enter the college was criticized and we could not review the subjects of college entrance examination ahead of time. Later we were informed that the students would be divided into two categories: one was science, engineering, medicine and agriculture, the other liberal arts. Most students had made up their minds and I came to decide to study liberal arts. Most of the students who decided to register liberal arts were not good at mathematics, physics and chemistry. Jiang Hanlin was full of confidence. To my surprise, the above mentioned heroine Yihua Tao also registered the liberal arts, who I showed great respect to because she got the second place in a physics quiz. She was one of the top students in our class and held the position of Young League secretary, so she has frequent contact with Mr. Zhang. Mr. Zhang had said to me that he hoped that someone in our class could study in a department of journalism and would be a reporter or do newspaper edition work. The NCMS began to admit the senior students in 1953 and up to 1963 there were 9 years of graduates, none of whom entered the department of journalism. Other departments of liberal arts were not so precious. He suggested that we should have the courage to strive for the honor for the school. I was monitor and Tao Youth League Secretary. Both of us registered the liberal arts, which caused many to think that Mr. Zhang selected some students who were good at mathematics, physics and chemistry gave up science, engineering, medicine and agriculture and targeted the top majors of the liberal arts. Four of us who registered the liberal arts were hopeful: Tao, Jiang and me, and the fourth one was Maoli Qiu who was also color blind. He was better at mathematics, physics and chemistry than most of the students who registered the liberal arts, somewhat similar to me. Before the examination both of us often communicated with each other, and encouraged ourselves, repeating the sentence “one who wants to get something must give up something”.
It was not until almost April did we begin to review the subjects of the liberal arts. The administration class still existed. We still had Chinese, Russian and politics lessons together. When the class had mathematics, physics, and chemistry, all of us who registered the liberal arts went to another classroom and reviewed ancient Chinese with the aid of the teacher. The history teacher gave us the history revision outline, which could help us remember what we’d learned during the first year. It took us only about three months and then we took the college entrance examination.
Before the examination we filled in a form of what universities or colleges you wanted to enter. I thought that I was not good at ancient Chinese and history and wanted to display my advantage in Russian and mathematics. Accordingly, I registered some foreign language majors and philosophy which needed testing mathematics. I filled in draft forms and handed in to Mr. Zhang, who made modification to it. On the first form were key universities. Mr. Zhang decided the first one was the People’s University and the major was the journalism. The following were Beijing Foreign Language Institute, Nanjing University and Beijing Normal University. The majors were foreign languages or philosophy. In the second form were ordinary colleges, which were decided by myself. I had written down: the Central Financial Institute, Jiangsu Normal Institute and Yangzhou Normal Institute. Maolin Qiu’s first wish was the same as mine and Yihua Tao’s was the journalism department of Fudan University of Shanghai. Early in the second year Hanli Jiang decided to target Beijing Normal University and wanted to be a Chinese teacher. After filling the wish forms we were excited for days. The letters from the students who had entered universities in the previous year went round in our class and I especially admired one of them who went to his school on a large ship passing by the Jinshan Mountain the fairy story “Bai Shechuan”(the story of a white snake) had described in detail. Another one who was studying in the Scientific and Technical University of China said that he saw his principal Morou Guo, whose hairs were still black and had just married a young girl student. (Guo was a famous writer, poet and archaeologist) I thought if I could become a college student I would be sure experience something exciting. Every day I dreamed of the day approaching. But with the help of Mr. Zhang I became calm and got ready for two chances. At that time people called it “one red heart, two preparations”. Mr. Zhang asked us to think more about the entrance of the university before the examination to encourage ourselves and afterwards to think more about the failure to avoid excessive pain.
At the beginning of July in 1964 we went from Jinsha to Nantong by bus together, which was the first time I (sure most of us) took the bus. The bus ran on the sand road with high and low jolts, frightening us so much that we all cried and shouted. The examination place was in the Nantong Middle School and it took us two days. On the first day, it was very hot, and ice blocks were placed in the classroom to decrease the temperature. The exam monitor teacher iced the towel for us to wipe away the sweat. In the summer when I did labor work in the fields I sweated all over and in the exam classroom it didn’t get to the degree that the sweat was dripping, however I could enjoy the iced towel, which made me very happy. I didn’t feel hot at all. On the second day afternoon it thundered and rained heavily and cooled a lot, which made me regard this soul-stirring examination as an ordinary test. I was not nervous at all. I did what I could, and no accident took place, which meant it was smooth. Due to my register for studying foreign languages, on the third day morning I took part in the oral exam on Russian. I could understand what the interviewer teachers asked and responded appropriately.
Jia’geng Dong was from Jianhu County of Yancheng District, Jiangsu Province, who gave up the college entrance examination and went home, directly working at farming. He was a propaganda model of Jiangsu Province. He came to Nantong to give us a report after attending the Communist Youth League National Congress and being elected one of the central committee members. Listening to his report made me get ready to be a peasant as parents and grandparents, but I thought I was a senior middle school graduate and would much more different from them.
The summer vacation after the entrance examination seemed very long. I had grown up, 19 years old, 160 cm tall and 50 kilograms weight (physical examination told me, all were integers, easy to remember). I could do all kinds of farm work now. Every day I went to the fields with the man labors and the main work we did was to irrigate the rice field by stepping a kind of wooden pump. Four people climbed up and stepped the wooden chain pump, making rectangle wood pallets bring water from the brook into the fields. (This kind of wooden chain pump is a kind of tourist program in the southern countryside of Yangzi River. You can go to Huaxi Village of Jiangyin City to have a look)
In Nantong counties four people climbed up and stepped the wooden chain pump
According to the instruction of Mr. Zhang, I didn’t think of entering a college or a university, got everything ready to grow crops in the countryside, and determined to turn myself into a peasant like my ancestors whose hand and feet were rough and covered with calluses, feeling also rather happy. The very painful feeling during the childhood when labouring disappeared completely. Parents saw me working in the fields so hard that they thought I could not become a college student. They talked about how to accumulate for years and letting me marry at the age of 25.
In the Jinyu street lived a classmate of mine, named Ruji Chen, who had been my primary schoolmate, as well. His father was a shop owner selling traditional Chinese medicine, a resident eating grain supplied by the government, owning no land. After the college entry examination, he was waiting at home for publishing the list of successful candidates, afraid of not being in the list. Almost every evening he came to me, speaking out his restless moods. He had great pressure and felt terrible. I was much more relaxed. I was only the one among us six brothers and sisters who was a junior and senior middle school graduate and was very content. Ruji Chen told me directly, saying if both of us were not in the list, maybe his pressure was smaller; if I was in and he was not, he could not live any longer. So he thought the best result was both of us were in the list, and the second ideal result was he was in and I was not, the third result was both of us were not in. He prayed the fourth result would not appear that I was in and he was out.
In those years the college enrollment work proceeded very slowly. Almost in the middle of August we were told that the list of successful candidates had just arrived in the school. Ruji Chen and I went to the NCMS to ask Mr. Zhang about it, naturally on foot. On the way there, Chen was afraid of the worst result and I comforted him by saying that the second result was most possible and I would see him off. Seeing Mr. Zhang, we were first asked to sit down and then were told that both of us would become university students, which made us completely relaxed. He told us that Chen was enrolled in Zhejiang University and I was in Nanjing University. He asked us to wait for the admission notices and then we could know what specialties we would major in. Mr. Zhang remembered all of our classmates who were on the list. I got to know that Maolin Qiu, the People’s University; Yihua Tao, Fudan University; Hanlin Jiang, Bejing Normal University, all of whom realized their first wishes. Could Qiu and Tao really study the journalism? They would create the history of the NCMS. However, I was very content with the result to go to Nanjing to study.
After getting home I went by bike to Jielin Yi’s home to report the good news that he was admitted by Hefei University of Industry. The land of my hometown was so precious that the road was narrow and almost covered with the early-autumn high crops from both sides. I fell from the bike two times, the main cause being my excited emotions. It was lucky that there was no brook on the side, and otherwise I would have fallen into it. It was the year far from popularity of the telephone, and I had to use this method to tell him the good news.
About three or four days later I got the admission notice from Nanjing University and was informed of my major in the German language and literature in the Department of Foreign Language and Literature. I had never dreamed of studying the language of the German devil and wondered what I would do after graduation. I had a fuzzy knowledge that I would work far away from home and my heart began to fly. I also got to know that Yihua Tao and Maolin Qiu couldn’t study the journalism, Chinese and history file instead respectively. The idea that Mr. Yunzhong Zhang wanted to create the history for the NCMS didn’t come true. However, Mr. Zhang felt comforted that the students of the arts in our class could go to Fudan, the People’s University, Nanjing University and one student of the science was qualified to be elected to Qinghua University, three became students of Xi’an Communication University and one entered Zhejiang University. 15 of us 52 were enrolled and 13 entered the key universities of China.
The education of that time was called “outstanding person education” and it was too hard to have the chance to receive the higher education. It was also not easy to enter the senior middle school, let alone the college or university. In my impression, of more than 100 pupils in my grade in the primary school, twenty plus became junior middle students, four entered the senior middle school and only 3 were allowed to receive the higher education, namely Ruji Chen (Zhenjiang University), Ruiru Tang, Wuxi Institiute of Light Industry, and later renamed as Jiangnan University) and me, (Nanjing University), with one failing in the college entrance examination, who was Ying Wang. I mentioned in the above that her mother came to my house to tell us the good news that I was admitted by the NCMS. Every time I thought of these numbers, I treasured the chance to read in the university more and more.
Graduate Photo of Senior High School
There were only about 10 days left before I went to the university to login. There were not any celebration parties. Grandpa was very excited to come to my home to congratulate, elder sister made a pillowcase by embroidering, and uncle bought me a pair of athletic shoes, which was my first pair of shoes bought from the shop. Parents, elder brother and sister were busy preparing my leave. Before I left, parents gave 40 yuan, which was the greatest number I had never had in my pocket. As mentioned earlier, the board expense for one month was 6 yuan when I was studying in the junior middle school and the consumer price of goods were stable for decades. I had always thought that if I could become a college student I would not ask for money from parents any more because the government would support every student. Parents gave me so much money and I would never ask them to support me any longer.
photo after receiving letter of admission
I could go to the capital city of our province to study in one of the most famous universities of China and I would never forget my kind teacher. I’ll use a paragraph to write something about the teacher Yunzhong Zhang. As mentioned above,
his weekly assembly class had great influence upon me. To say exactly, Mr. Zhang was the person who affected my life the most. Attention please, not one of the most influential person, but the most. After graduation from the university my pursuit, my work style, my mentality and my method, including how to behavior in the bad situation have the deep brand mark made by Zhang. When entering the third year of the senior middle school, I began to think of my life, deciding my life goal, making the plan and trying to realize my idea, affected by him. He often told us the deep thought using his own experience. Mr. Zhang’s original major was law and he taught us Chinese, becoming famous in Nantong District as a Chinese teacher. He was one of the four Rank Four teachers in the NCMS, a correspondent of Xinhua Daily of Jiangsu Province, at the age of 32 years old. A lot of his views affected my whole life, for example, he thought that a person who can only learn from his or her teachers and has no ability to teach him or herself cannot have a bright future; as a man or lady, he or she should continue to strive and try to do something excelling he or she can imagine; one should be satisfied with what you have achieved and not satisfied as well. Satisfaction can make you feel delighted and live happily and the dissatisfaction can cause you to make continuous progress. One should have the courage to think of the high goal. If you don’t think of it, you’ll never get to it; if you think of it, it is possible to reach it. Even if your aim doesn’t come into being you’ll also acquire some sideline products. All those mentioned above have been encouraging me, instructing me and even when I became 60 years old, I still regard them as worthy.
In 1963, the modern drama was popular and the cultural work group of the school selected actors and actresses to rehearse the modern drama “the Young Generation”. Mr. Zhang talked with us whether our class could perform a drama independently, which we dared not think of. But the performance on the stage had a strong temptation to us 18-19 year-old young people, and of course we were eager to try. Mr. Zhang would lead us to do something unusual. He decided a script and began to select actors and actresses. At the beginning I was chosen as a supporting role, Maolin Qiu as the hero and the heroine naturally was none but Yihua Tao. In the process of Mr. Zhang’s teaching us to read and recite the texts of the drama, he came to be not satisfied with the hero role and was finally determined to ask me to replace Maolin Qiu. Soon I remembered what the hero would speak at the stage and came to understand the personality and his pursuit. During the dress rehearsal there existed some faults of my performance, which forced me to think seriously. I decided to change some words of what the hero said in order to achieve better effects. In the evening of the official performance I gave Mr. Zhang a surprise, resulting in a good stage effect. The whole performance was a great success, which caused others to have great esteem for our class, Class 4, Senior Grade 3. All actors and actresses had satisfied a performance craving. Mr. Zhang led us and we succeeded in doing something we dared not think before, which encouraged our confidence in doing something difficult in the future.
I buried my missing of Mr. Zhang in my heart, which reappears once in a while and cannot be smoothed away forever. After the graduation from the senior middle school I had seen him twice. The first time was when I went to Naiyun Cao’s home. Cao was my classmate in the German class and was a neighbor of Mr. Zhang’s parents-in-law. Fortunately, Mr. Zhang and his wife were there and we had a long talk with each other. The other time was in the 1980’s, when I went to the county city and saw the heroine Yihua Tao, who had become a Chinese teacher of the alma mater and the director of teaching affairs, as well. We together went to the NCMS and saw Mr. Zhang. Tao’s husband, Bujun Huang, was also studying in Class 4, and graduated from Xi’an Communication University. Both of them called some other classmates to go there. So many people together, I could not chat with Mr. Zhang. At that time, I had no idea that this was the last time I saw him. After a period of time, Tao told me that Mr. Zhang was reassigned to Nantong Normal College and after another period of time, the bad news came to me that he had passed away. So much I had written about him in order to comfort his soul in the heaven only.
Nov. 27, 2008 in Melbourne
Proofreading on Jan. 29 2012 in Chicago
Uploading online on Aug 3 2023
