Chapter 25 twenty two.end of war

Sicheng's trip to Chongqing to deal with the Ministry of Education was already time-consuming, and a wartime appointment prolongs his time away from home.He was appointed as the vice-chairman of the China Battlefield Cultural Relics Protection Committee, which is responsible for compiling a set of catalogs of important cultural relics in the occupied areas, including temples, pagodas, museums, etc., and marking their locations on military maps , to prevent them from being destroyed in a strategic counteroffensive.The information is bilingual in Chinese and English with photos, and was sent to the American pilots who were still bombing the Japanese military bases in the eastern provinces of China at that time.One copy was delivered to Zhou Enlai, which apparently caught his attention.

When I returned to China in the summer of 1945 as the cultural attaché of the American embassy, ​​Sicheng was on his vice-chairmanship in Chongqing and greeted me.The world situation developed rapidly in Midsummer that year.The Russians took part in the war against Japan.The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.The headlines in the Chinese press about "atom bomb" (an unfamiliar Chinese name) were scary.Rumors say it's frighteningly big, but what exactly is it?Professor Needham, Science Counselor at the British Embassy (Wheein wrote about him), held an outdoor seminar the next evening to explain the coming of the nuclear age and answer many questions from the still perplexed audience.

News of Japan's surrender reached Chongqing at about 8:20 pm on August 10, 1945.Sicheng and two young Chinese writers joined me for dinner in the canteen of the American embassy.After dinner, we pulled the rattan chairs to the platform on the top of the hill in front of the porch of the embassy to enjoy the shade (it was extremely hot that night), and waited to see the lights on the hills on the other side of the Yangtze River light up.Sicheng told about Tagore's visit to Beijing a long time ago.Suddenly he stopped talking.He and the others became tense and alert all at once, almost like hounds.I had to listen as hard as I could to hear what they heard.This is the sound of sirens in the distance.Could it be that there is another air raid?It was absurd, yet each of them, after years of personal experience, was wary of the possibilities.Or, is this announcing victory?

Under our feet, the news spread rapidly throughout the city.On this high hillside, we can almost observe the whole process, at first there is a suppressed chirping, maybe some people running in the street, then there are individual shouts, crackling firecrackers, and finally a group of people everywhere A group of people shouting, cheering, and clapping, it seemed that the whole city woke up in a roar. Sicheng felt a little lonely and had been waiting for eight years, but he was not at home when the news came.We all went down to the street to mingle with the crowd.This time calls for something symbolic: the flag, the V-sign, the thumbs-up, the sound of firecrackers, the red lights of the fireworks and the white lights of the searchlights intertwined in the sky into five-pointed stars.Jeeps, trucks and buses full of celebratory crowds formed a spontaneous parade.When vehicles meet on the street, the passengers on the vehicle shake hands with each other along the way to celebrate the victory.When Sicheng finally returned to the guest house of Academia Sinica, he found the scholars there laughing, dancing and celebrating victory with a bottle of long-stored baijiu.

A good American pilot agreed to take Sicheng and me to Yibin by C-47 transport plane, which has the nearest airport to Lizhuang.After flying in the air for 15 minutes, Sicheng pointed to a small town with a wall at the bend of the Yangtze River at his feet and said, "This is the last place we arrived on the first day of sailing on the water." The plane flew over Lizhuang in 45 minutes. In the sky—it will take three and a half days by boat.The grass on the apron of Yibin Airport is knee-deep, but it is still usable.Sicheng and I traveled several miles down to Lizhuang by small steamer.

Huiyin lying on the bed was pale and thin, but he was not discouraged.She and I had many long conversations, telling each other what had happened in our lives after being apart for so many years.The hardships and illnesses she endured deepened her understanding and empathy.I began to think, looking back at the lives of those Chinese intellectuals we knew in Beijing, that their practical problems of leaving China were almost as remote as us foreigners.But all that has changed over the years. Her daughter, Bao Bao, is sixteen years old, and now people call her the adult name Zaibing.She is very petite, feminine and reserved.In the monotony of Li Zhuang's daily life, she brought a special kind of lightness to the family as she brought the world news she understood from school to her mother's bedside each day.Huiyin is the same as ever, living with the joys, sorrows, troubles, and intrigues of the people around her, even if they are only on the childish level of the baby's age.

The way Huiyin celebrated his victory was to go to the teahouse in a sedan chair, and I walked beside him.It was the first time in her five full years in town.As bad as it may have been for her health, the trip left her with new sights, new voices, and new faces to ponder for weeks to come.Every day she could, she wrote something, sometimes a dissertation on architecture or Han history, and she even conceived a novel. To me, the lack of even the most basic living facilities in Lizhuang is striking.Its only connection with the outside world is by riverboat.There is no telephone, no electricity, no radio, no cars or draft animals, and even the trail leading from the river to the mountains is just a stepping stone in the cascading rice fields that only allow two people to pass. No wonder in this isolated rural area, the residents So backward, superstitious, poor and sick.The Institute of History and Linguistics of Academia Sinica is famous for the Anyang excavations that pushed Chinese history back to 1500 BC. to the locals.Rumor has it that this is some cannibalism.

In this auspicious environment, when we walked three miles into the mountain on the stone road, we came to a group of picturesque farmhouses, passed through several courtyards, and entered a building with a strange appearance on the inside, where What a surprise to find an excellent Chinese library that also has rare and important publications on Asian archeology, history and excavations in English, French, German and Japanese, this Academia Sinica library is almost real It preserved the lives of several refugees, including Huiyin and her younger brother-in-law Liang Siyong, a famous archaeologist who was bedridden for four years because of tuberculosis. Emotions run high.The chronic illness of these two men was no exception.And, in a remote town with no hospital but a modern doctor who walks to see the doctor, of course there will be tragic deaths, especially of women and children.Among others, Li Ji of the Central Museum lost two teenage daughters in five years, and sociologist Tao Menghe's wife also died of tuberculosis.

In addition to the material hardships and the hostility of the local population, there is also the internal friction, both jealousy and quarrel, that makes this kind of society the inevitable victim.There are even more subtle cultural clashes.For example, Tongji University, which moved from Shanghai, was founded by Germans and was staffed by German students, while most of the academic origins of Academia Sinica are in the United States.This makes the relationship between the two parts a bit cold. It is not easy for scholars to continue to engage in research under such difficult conditions and prepare to go to Shanghai to publish their results when paper and printing conditions are available after the war.But Sicheng was determined not to wait, even with a primitive technology known locally as a "manual lithography machine."Sicheng and his young colleagues used their manual skills to publish the last two issues of the "Hui Jian" of the Construction Society in this way, with 200 copies of each issue printed.

Huiyin is still as in the past, torn between her physical ailments and endless chores, and there is a necessary third, her strong interest in writing and research.All three things were vying for her attention at the same time.Concerning her health, she wrote to me, "the things that bother me are worse than before, especially the severe pain in the bladder area, which may have been severe." Articles on residential buildings in the journal should be published in Volume 7, Issue 2 of the "Hui Kan" of the Construction Society.Finally, with the onset of winter, "those tattered robes and rotten clothes that have served us for nine to ten years have to be mended. Sicheng is going to Chongqing, and his things must be mended first. He wore them out in Chongqing last winter." They were so badly damaged, they were like warships after the war, they had to be taken to dry dock for major repairs, and some were so damaged by torpedoes or bombs that it took a lot of skill to repair."

She added an enthusiastic postscript: "You can't imagine the difference between the loneliness now and the lively time we spent in this same courtyard when you were here." Chongqing to go.Both of us are going to make her yearn to reunite with us with Sicheng. "It's starting to feel a little like old times." She later wrote to Fei Zhengqing to welcome him, and said: "Tell Fei Weimei, I went to the city again last Sunday in a sedan chair, and I also took a pole-pulled boat with my two boyfriends who were colder, and ate at a restaurant." I stopped at another teahouse and watched a volleyball match from a tea shed by the river on my way back past a football field. "The first day I went to re-ice school in a casual outfit, which was stunning and caused a stir! But now that rare sunny day is gone and forgotten. Judging by the gray and rainy weather this week , they are totally unreal. "If the sun comes out again, and I can get back to my health, I'll venture to Chongqing, even if it's just for fun, regardless of whether it's cold or not. Because I've got my clothes sorted and mended Well ready to go, I should be fine to pack up and come to you when the atmosphere is right. But it's been raining in Tiankou...and there's no boat. Apparently it's easier for you to come to China from the US than it is for us to go to Chongqing from here Much more." "It's just for fun." As soon as she got a boat, she came with Sicheng.This is the first time she has left Lizhuang in five years.Her health was so precarious that she had to stay in the dormitory of the Academia Sinica guest house for most of her time in Chongqing.I sometimes take her out in a jeep.One day we drove to Nankai Middle School in the suburbs to pick up my younger brother.She finds everything new and interesting.Sitting on the jeep, she couldn't take her eyes off the new clothes we passed, the traffic, and the life of citizens in the big city (for her now) of Chongqing.Several times I took her to the American embassy cafeteria for dinner in a jeep.She liked the American military attachés in uniform who had fought here and there.She quickly joined in their conversation, her first with American Allied forces.For her, the war was a series of harrowing encounters with the Japanese enemy. The arrival of Fairbank and the newly created Postwar American Information Service brought us additional benefits.In Chongqing, where it is difficult to find even a tile to cover our bodies, we were actually allocated two rooms in the Meixin Department dormitory.It was a primitive building, a row of small rooms facing a long corridor.Each room barely fit a chair and a plank bed covered with bush mats, and one of our two rooms actually had a small fireplace in the corner, much like the ones we saw in New Mexico.We pushed a narrow cot to the side of the partition wall to make a sofa, covered it with a handmade blanket, and hung a beautiful rubbing of Tang Ma brought back from Xi'an.With little imagination one could see that it was a small living room.When Huiyin first came in, she choked and said, "It's like walking into a magazine!" Because she had only occasionally seen fireplaces and lampshades in foreign magazines in the past few years. When she could bear it, we took the Liangs to a play and two movies.Sicheng had to go back to his architectural school in Lizhuang, and thus missed the most memorable evening, which Huiyin and her young son attended.It was a reception at the USSR headquarters shortly after General George Marshall came to Chungking on a peace mission.Representatives of all Chinese political parties and factions and selected diplomatic representatives, including Russians, were invited and welcomed.It was such a magical moment.Japan has surrendered and the Chinese civil war has not yet broken out.After the long eight-year war of resistance, the atmosphere of hope for real peace is in the air.People of all kinds can forget their plots and worries for a while and enjoy the night. After drinking for three rounds, the Russians showed their true colors and began to sing.Perhaps it was this unofficial lightheartedness that broke the KMT's rigidity.Many Kuomintang officials who had known the Communist Party leaders when they were young (for example, Wu Guozhen and Zhou Enlai were classmates) were also present. At this time, after years of isolation, they suddenly toasted each other.As old friends and enemies wish each other good health, Huiyin watches this amazing reunion nervously.Huiyin's beautiful young son and younger brother attracted the attention of Feng Yuxiang, a warlord known as "Christian General".He was so big and strong, and the child, leaning against his mother, stared at the monster with jaw-dropping amazement.Hui Yin had a few words with him, but she paid more attention to the leaders of the Communist Party.They are guests from another planet.There was nothing she heard or read about them from the KMT but evil—yet in this environment they were human as much as anyone else. Dr. Leo Elousel, a famous American thoracic surgeon, was working in the post-war China Rehabilitation and Relief Administration in Chongqing.When he knew that Huiyin had suffered from lung disease for a long time, he generously agreed to go to the dormitory of the guest house to see her.After a simple bedside examination with a stethoscope and taking her medical history, he told me (without telling her) that he concluded that she had an infection in both lungs and a kidney, and that her short but colorful life was in a few years, perhaps Five years, it will come to an end.I didn't tell her, and she didn't ask.I think she knows it all.