Chapter 67 Chapter 2 New Heaven and New Earth - Friendship

I came to National Taiwan University just as an ignorant teaching assistant. Because I first arrived, I settled down in Ma's house, but I saw the overall situation of National Taiwan University taking shape.Professor Lu Zhihong, who will soon become the principal, and several other early professors live in the two alleys in front.I went back and forth almost every day to discuss school affairs with Uncle Ma and others, and sometimes asked about the original affairs with the Japanese professors in Shangjia Qingtian Street who were waiting to be repatriated.When they walked to the door, they often heard Uncle Ma’s loud laughter. All they thought about was the future vision. The initial focus was to maintain the strongest tropical bioscience research and medical school in Taipei Imperial University, and to effectively enrich the teaching of National Taiwan University Hospital.

with service.The foundations laid then are still strong today. Three months after arriving in Taiwan, facing the two rooms of books in the Department of Foreign Languages ​​and Languages ​​of National Taiwan University, I began to organize piles of books, read them one by one, and roughly categorize them.However, my heart was in a floating state. After work, I walked along Liugongzhen to Heping East Road and Qingtian Street. My heart was empty, and my mind was ups and downs thinking: Do I want to go back to my home in Shanghai during the winter vacation? Do you want to come again?Besides, apart from moving books, there is nothing that needs me.Only about half a dozen people in Taiwan know of my existence.Full of melancholy, a lonely and lonely person walked back to a strange house with Japanese straw mats on the edge of the town at dusk.

On New Year’s Eve, I locked the door of the Department of Foreign Languages ​​and went back. It was getting dark early. When I arrived at the alley of Qingtian Street, the lights in a room next to the street were already on. The New Year's Eve dinner has begun.The warmth of that scene made me miss my mother and sister in Peiping and my father in Shanghai. Thinking of my own inexplicable "independence", tears welled up.I hurried back to Uncle Ma's house, and there were a few elders who came to Taiwan alone sitting at the dining table, drinking warm Japanese sake. One afternoon after New Years, my utter loneliness changed.

That day, it was raining non-stop, and when I was bored, I put on a heavy raincoat and took a bus to Rongding (now in the area of ​​Hengyang Road, Baoqing Road, and Boai Road) at the entrance of the lane to Heping East Road to buy some supplies. Only the No. 3 bus is in front of the police station (sixty years later, it has not changed). It was raining heavily, and it was just me and another woman waiting for the bus.She was wrapped in a raincoat and her rain hood was pulled down.The car didn’t come for a long time, so I looked at her. At that moment, I saw a familiar face, and she also looked at me. We asked almost at the same time, "Are you Yang Junxian from Wuhan University?", "Are you from Wuhan University?" Is it Qi Bangyuan?"

So miraculously, I found a link to the past. Yang Junxian is a senior in the economics department two years earlier than me. I met her in the girls' dormitory, but she didn't date her. She came to Taiwan with her sister to work in the accounting office of a power company.She also came to Taiwan with her classmate Yu Yilie, who worked in the sales office of the Taiwan Sugar Company. The two were engaged. It is Jiutiaotong of Qingtian Street, only three or four lanes away from Ma's house.Sister Yang Xixian teaches in the Department of Economics at Normal University and was the head of the department for the previous three terms.The couple were forthright and enthusiastic. Their daughter Ge Dingyu (nicknamed Ning Ning) was four years old at the time. Like her parents, she often laughed and laughed a lot. Sometimes she sang a new kindergarten song and danced for us.Ge's house has gradually become the most attractive and warm house to me.Many years later when I taught the history of English literature.Every time I read Bede's "Edwin Hanyiji" in the 13th century, I read their description of the situation before and after the conversion to Christianity, like a sparrow flying into a banquet hall, where there is a fire and food, and when it flies out, There is only cold and wind, just like how I felt when I was alone in Taiwan.

After the Chinese New Year, Junxian and Yilie invited me to attend the Wuhan University Alumni Association in Taiwan.At that time, there were dozens of people in Taiwan, most of them were early seniors of polytechnic institutes and law schools, working or teaching in government agencies.Knowing that I just graduated and came to Taiwan not long ago, the president Li Linxue (graduated from the Department of Chemical Engineering and held a senior position in an oil company, he helped the alumni who came to Taiwan to find a job and took care of him the most. Enjoying a long life, he can be said to be the soul of the alumni association) invited me Report on the situation of your alma mater in the past two years.I got up and made a report as far as I know.Luo Yuchang, a senior of the Department of Electrical Engineering, was present at the time.Work at the railway bureau.According to what he told later, he saw me at the alumni meeting that day and made up his mind to marry me back home.

Three or four days after the alumni meeting, he and alumnus Tan Zhongping (graduated from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, met me at the Leshan Fellowship) came to see me at Uncle Ma’s house on Qingtian Street.I sat in the living room for a while, but I didn't care about it, but I will come again next week, inviting me to visit Yang Junxian, and sit at her house to talk about the recent situation of the alumni who came to Taiwan.The three of them were in the same class, they were the last class to graduate from Leshan, and they were the first technical and administrative personnel to come to Taiwan.So there are a lot of common topics, and for me, a young literary and artistic youth who doesn't know the world, I seem to know the way.We have been together in Taiwan for fifty years, and their protective attitude towards me has never changed.

It was winter vacation now, and since I saw that family having a New Year’s Eve dinner on the corner of the street on New Year’s Eve, I have been thinking about going home.Go back to Shanghai first, maybe mom and dad will eventually go back to Nanjing to rebuild our own home, and I can settle down and find a job.So I lost the airline and booked a flight a week later with a return ticket.Back on Qingtian Street, Uncle Ma said, "NTU will issue you a one-year teaching assistant appointment letter, and you will leave after only one semester. It is difficult for the school to find people. There are less than ten people in the Department of Foreign Languages. You should wait until the summer vacation." Explain." Junxian also said, "It's a pity that you left without seeing what Taiwan is like." Two days later, Luo Yuchang and Tan Zhongping also came to Ma's house and said a lot of words to persuade him to stay.

When I was hesitant to make a decision, Professor Guo Tingyi (taught in the History Department of National Taiwan University, and later transferred to the Academia Sinica to establish the Institute of Modern History) who came to Ma’s house to talk about the New Year was my father’s friend, and advised me to stay and help the Department of Foreign Languages ​​sort out those things. There are books scattered across the two rooms, so you can calm down and read them yourself.He said, "The situation in mainland China is quite chaotic now, and the north is especially turbulent. All universities are still in the process of demobilization, and you can't study there." dormitory.He went to the General Affairs Office and told me that I could live in that dormitory so that I could settle down and walk to school very close.

In so many voices of persuasion.I went to withdraw my seat and planned to move to the single dormitory. At that time, National Taiwan University, like many public institutions, was still in the process of "receiving".I received the "Temporary Letter of Appointment" written on the rice paper with a brush, which has a little "documentary" value today.There are no clear regulations on personnel and school property, so as a teaching assistant, I can officially take over a professor's single dormitory.I originally applied for a dormitory for singles. It was a military barracks-style bungalow that National Taiwan University had just built with cement in the open space next to Liugong Town. There were eight rooms in a row, but all of them were full at that time.Hua Yan, a teaching assistant from the Department of Economics, and Pei Puyan and Liao Weiqing from the Department of Chinese also lived there.

On the morning when we moved to the dormitory on Wenzhou Street, Junxian came to help.In fact, I don’t have anything to move, it’s still just a small suitcase. I bought a quilt and pillows in Rongding two days ago, and I also bought a quilt and pillows in Rongding when I first came here. I bought a small one-foot-high dressing box with a mirror and two or three drawers, like a wardrobe for house wine, where you can put some small objects.Xiusang helped me take it in a foreign car.Uncle Guo used to live in it, so I didn’t go to see it. It was the first time I saw a Japanese house without tables, chairs and beds (Ma’s house had beds and all the furniture), and it was really sad. When Junxian came in the morning, Luo Yuchang also came with her.He looked at the room, said a few words to Junxian and left, saying that he would come back later.Before noon, he came again, bringing a heavy Japanese-style tatami mat, a kettle, a thermos, two cups and an enamel washbasin.He also boiled the first pot of boiling water for me in the small communal kitchen and poured it into a thermos bottle.I never bought these things and never thought they were the basics of life. At noon, the Ge family invited us to lunch.I went out to buy some necessities, and went back to Uncle Ma's house for dinner. Junxian and Yilie sent me back to Wenzhou Street.After they left, they looked into the yard from the French windows in the corridor outside the house, and saw only dark shadows on the rockery and the big trees along the wall.Sleeping on tatami for the first time, listening to the wind in the trees outside the window, I really don't know where I am in the long night.At that time, I regained the fear I had when I was recuperating in Xishan for the coming of Li Shangbai.The room I live in is on the far right, about eight square meters, and there is a separate corridor outside, which is some distance from other rooms, and I rarely see people walking around during the day.Until two months later, a pair of teaching assistants lived in the adjacent room. The crying of their baby in the middle of the night became the sweet message I look forward to every night... A few days later, Luo Yuchang and two other classmates came to see me. He brought a homemade radio in a wooden box. They said that he is now a well-known radio repair expert in the circle of friends in Taipei.He said that when he was in school, the Department of Electrical Engineering was in the two groups of public electricity and telecommunications. He majored in telecommunications, so before coming to Taiwan, he was admitted to the Ministry of Economic Affairs as a technician in the transportation department.The distribution volunteers filled in the railway, because when I was in Sichuan, I was ridiculed by my classmates from other provinces for not having seen a train, so I decided to work in railway communications instead of going to the power company.At that time, all the conditions of the power company were better than that of the railway bureau, and the railway communication equipment at that time was still quite backward.In his spare time, he installed his own radio to play, and also provided free services to acquaintances. The one he gave me was probably relatively successful, and I could listen to local Taipei radio programs.It has greatly dispelled my loneliness in the silence.In addition to the news and music every night, there are mostly classical music and Japanese songs left by the Japanese. Among them, what I can't forget for many years is listening to "Night in the Deserted City" at night. I forget that it is a Japanese song in the music. Sometimes I think of when I was fleeing. The wind howling in the cold night in the wilderness, think about the millions of Japanese who died in the battlefields of aggression against China. Even though they were our hated enemies, there were people at home waiting for them to go home in the cold night.When I first arrived in Taiwan, I still saw Japanese waiting to be deported everywhere. Seeing them cowering and kneeling on the streets of Taipei as street vendors, I really had no sympathy in my heart, but I also knew that they were not the ones who should pay the blood debt.