being with his older brother. The three kept silent while walking cautiously along the potholed country road. Not far away were farmers’ cottages and their surrounding croplands dotted with manure pits here and there. At times, gaunt and dark-skinned farmers would throw a puzzled look at these three neatly dressed and pale-skinned outsiders. Their skeptical gazes made Hwa-Wei feel uneasy, as if he were about to enter another world.
The outlines of the mountain in the distance were gradually obscured by the approaching sunset. In contrast to the bloody and brutal war in other parts of the country, the area seemed peaceful with curls of cooking smoke and the calls of frogs and cicadas. The father and sons hurried along heading toward Wufuchang, literally “a place with five good fortunes,” and into an utterly new life for Hwa-Wei and his older brother, Hwa-Hsin.
2
The junior high campus of the National Number Two High School for Overseas Chinese was in a western-style house made of wood and bricks with an arched door and narrow windows. The two-story building was quite different from the numerous low-rise farmhouses. Local people called it Yangfangzi, “foreign house,” as its original owner was a foreign missionary. About three hundred feet in front of the school flowed the limpid Zuanjiang River.
By the time Hwa-Wei entered the school, there were already some four hundred registered students distributed on the junior and senior high campuses. Educating that steadily growing student population was complicated by extremely underdeveloped facilities and a severe shortage of teaching aids, books, desks, and chairs. To cope with the lack of student desks and chairs, the school sent students to Longdeng Mountain where they would cut and bring back bamboo trunks. Local craftsmen were then hired to make school furniture. A locally made student bench called a zhukangdeng, “bamboo-supported bench,” used two fire-curved bamboo trunks as legs to support another thick bamboo trunk that crossed over them.3
Every low-income student was eligible to receive a school uniform, made of a thick chunky cloth called Luosifubu or “Roosevelt cloth.” The uniforms wore well and were good all year around. Unfortunately, all other daily commodities were of low quality. Students had only flimsy straw sandals that they would purchase or make themselves. Quite a few students were just in their bare feet.
Textbooks and notebooks, frequently in short supply, were made of a poor-quality rough paper and were often shared among the students. The rough surface made writing on those papers difficult when using a pen. Brush pens thus became the only writing tool for students, even for their English homework.4
The living arrangements were equally austere: seven or eight students shared one dorm room furnished with crude bunk beds made of local bamboo. A typical bed was made by loosely tying several bamboo trunks together and was covered only by a thin blanket, which often lost its original color due to sweat stains. Students had to be extremely cautious when lying on their beds so that they would not be trapped in any of the cracks between the two bamboo trunks.
In the summer, the hot and humid weather in Chongqing made the students’ lives more miserable; until late at night, they felt as if they were choking, as if they were enclosed in an airtight cabin. Hungry mosquitoes thirsted for those poor students’ blood. The dank winter did not make the situation better. The twelve- or thirteen-year-old children were still too young to take care of themselves properly. A lack of clean clothes and infrequent bathing resulted in constant outbreaks of lice.
Lice, the size of a sesame seed, were a type of parasite often found in the student dorms. Blood-sucking parasites of exceptional vitality, the tiny insects spread quickly. Once found on one student’s body, the lice, before long, would have infested all the students sharing a room. At the beginning of the infestation, students would feel itchy over their entire bodies. Strangely, the itching feeling would eventually go away. It seemed that almost all of the refugee students had some experience with this widespread infestation of lice. Every time Hwa-Wei went back home, the first thing his mother would do was put all of his clothes in boiling water and wash his hair with liquid medicine.
Each day, the refugee students received two meals, breakfast and dinner, both seldom containing meat. A typical breakfast was up to three bowls of boiled rice soup; but three bowls represented a lucky day. A common dish was often salty beans cooked with hot peppers. Dinner was rice again accompanied by some seasonal vegetables flavored with a few slices of fat pork. The insufficient food supply felt to Hwa-Wei like a cruel punishment; his constant hunger remained deeply inscribed in his memory. It was difficult to fall asleep at night with an empty and gurgling stomach. Most of the time, Hwa-Wei kept a constant lookout for food, but that was in vain.
In his early teenage years, Hwa-Wei started to develop an enormous appetite as his body grew. He hoped that he could get five bowls of rice for each meal, but, on most days, ended up with no more than two. The rice from greedy merchants was always mixed with lots of barnyard millet, sand, and, even, small stones, earning the rice its nickname—“Babaofan,” meaning rice with eight treasures.
During dinner, students, who were always in a hurry for more bowls of rice, spent no time picking out the impurities and learned to eat those “treasures.” One serious consequence of eating “Babaofan” daily was that many students developed appendicitis. Hwa-Wei was one of them.
The hardship of life, however, seemed to have little negative impact on the students’ desire for learning. Instead, they all treasured their peaceful time during the war years. Every morning, reading aloud could be heard throughout the school. Every evening, study groups of three to five students each could be seen in the classroom, dining room, and courtyard. Students with good grades would volunteer to tutor other students with their schoolwork. Looking back, Hwa-Wei remembered the warm orange-colored light coming from the oil lamps in the evening at the Yangfangzi, western-style house, as a symbol of faith and hope for peace in wartime China.
Often seen together with Hwa-Wei were four boys and two girls. One of the older girls called Dejie, “big sister,” really acted like a big sister, always taking good care of the others. She helped Hwa-Wei do his laundry.
Being away from their parents, the boys and girls formed a close-knit group looking after each other. Whenever one of them received a remittance from home, he or she would take the others out for a sumptuous meal, or share some money with others in need. Every time one of them received a food package, the entire group would become excited, sharing the food as if it were a holiday celebration.
During some of the weekends, a group of children would go out and spend a day helping nearby farmers in the fields picking snow peas and digging sweet potatoes, or watering and fertilizing the vegetable crops, in exchange for some pocket money and sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes were restricted to onsite eating only, so the children wouldn’t stop eating until they became extremely full. In spite of their different personalities and backgrounds, the children helped each other, depended on each other, and endured difficulties together during the national crisis.
This rural area had its unique charms. Wufuchang had abundant orange trees, with plenty of orange orchards near the school. During a golden fall season, the small town was full of ripe oranges, clusters of orange-red among the bright green leaves. The sweet and astringent odor from those ripe oranges irresistibly tempted the students, who were normally hungry, to steal them. Stealing thus became a popular student pastime.
Knowing that there would be no way to stop the children from picking oranges, the farmers came up with a smart idea: They encouraged orange tree adoption by a student at a reasonable price. Once adopted, the tree became the “property” of the student adopter whose name card would be attached to it. The student then had the right to eat as many oranges from his or her “property” as he or she could. This approach was very effective. Farmers made a profit; students gained the pride of ownership. Hwa-Wei, who was one of the adopters, took care of his orange tree. Indeed, it was the first property that he owned.
3
Almost every boy in the school was equipped with a special weapon—a slingshot—which was used for bird hunting. To those starving boys, birds represented their foremost source of meat. After school, groups of boys would often go out on bird hunts, which sometimes took longer than anticipated as the birds