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Tides from the West, a Chinese Autobiography, written by Chang-Mung Lin, read by Tang Da-min. Chapter 6, Further Education Thus, at the age of fifteen, I was brought back home by my father. We were afraid that the Boxer War might extend to Shanghai and so returned to the village. But after a short stay, as the bandits became worse, we moved to Yuyao, the district capital, to live. Here I was sent to a local school to study English and arithmetic and studied Chinese under a private tutor. After a year or so, I went to Hangzhou, capital of the province of Zhejiang. This was the center of the silk industry in China and also one center of the tea trade. Hangzhou silk and tea were famous all over the country. Hangzhou is well known for its scenic beauty. To one side of the city, the Chintang Tides rush up from Hangzhou Bay. On the other is the West Lake, mirrored against a blue sky with reflections of temples and villas perched on the surrounding hills. The city was known as a paradise on earth. This was the city that Marco Polo adored in his travels and it was the ancient capital of King Jinleo who kept his domain in peace through long years of incessant invasions and wars in China. Here the south songs made their capital for 150 years and here famous poets and men of letters lived. It is a city rich in historical records and monuments. The imperial library was filled with valuable books. It was the right place for young scholars to nurse themselves to grow. In this city of learning, I stumbled accidentally into a backwards school, a local Christian academy run by an American missionary. Here I hoped that at least I might learn English well. The atmosphere was far from congenial. The principal was a carpenter by trade. This pious American had been carried to China by his religious zeal. He had done some missionary work in my prefecture before being given charge of the academy. As he taught nothing except the Bible, I did not know how much he knew. And since learning was honored in China, the carpenter teacher evoked secret contempt in the hearts of his pupils. My English teacher was a man of vulgar manners, a new convert whose soul may have been saved but whose tongue remained distinctly heathen. I had tramped from this school to that, trying to find a really good English teacher, but to my great disappointment, I was still simply chasing after shadows. It was compulsory in the academy to attend exercises in the chapel every morning. We sang hymns in Chinese. Sometimes the clever pupils saw fit to render them in paraphrases, which gained more popularity among us than the hymns. In spite of Sunday schools and morning exercises, my mind was closed tight as a clam against any spiritual foreign elements. Having got rid of its spirits, ghosts, and gods, it was reluctant to admit any new elements of similar nature. And indeed, ever since that time I have remained an agnostic, trying to find immortality rather in this world than in the next. This conforms with the basic teachings of Confucius. The only respectable buildings on the campus of the academy were the chapel and the residence of the principal. The students lived in cell-like mud sheds, and classes were held there or in the shabby dining hall. Out of curiosity, some pupils liked to loiter around the principal's house. These unwelcome guests were often told to keep away. Eventually they obeyed and walked off, but on one occasion a student rebelled and got into a quarrel with the teacher who happened by. A crowd began to gather. The student accused the teacher of slapping his face and wept to draw the ready sympathy of the mob. The commotion spread like fire, and within a few minutes the majority of the student body had joined in demanding the immediate dismissal of the teacher. The demand being refused by the principal, the crowd became enraged, and the emotions soared to the highest pitch. The principal told them bluntly that if they did not like the school, they could leave. In about two hours the whole school walked out. This marked the end of my education in a missionary school, and I had no regret. The sooner I left, the better. One may ask, why such a thing should happen all of a sudden? It was not a mere outburst of ugliness on the part of unruly students. The slap was only a trigger pulled on a loaded gun. The explosive charge is not to be identified with a little missionary academy. This was part of a countrywide student rebellion against school authority. Even a backward missionary school in Hangzhou was not exempt. The rebellion had started in Nanyang College in Shanghai during the previous year. A student had left an ink stand on his professor's chair, and the professor had sat on it. His clothes being stained, he got very angry. It was reported to the president, and a few suspects were dismissed. There followed a clash between the college authorities and the student body, the latter supported by a number of faculty members. Eventually, all the students walked out. The younger generation was changing, and it was a change from submission to rebellion. Dismayed at the encroachment of foreign powers upon China, people blamed the imperial court for it. The students, inflamed and aroused by Dr. Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary propaganda, were ready to strike whenever there might be opportunity and at anything they could get hold of. They delivered their first blows at the school authorities who were handiest to them. The provincial college of Zhejiang followed suit. A minor fracas between a student and a sedan chair bearer of the imperial governor who was visiting the college set off the incident. All the students went on strike in consequence and left the college in a body. Many incidents of like nature occurred in other schools, with eventual disruption of a number of institutions of new learning. It spread throughout the country. The new elements in the country sympathized with the strikes and blamed the authorities for their despotism. The old elements condemned the students in no uncertain terms and sympathized with the school authorities. Number one's opinion, few realized that this was the eve of a revolution. From the time of these early student rebellions to the revolution of 1911, which marked the birth of the Republic of China, was only eight short years. It was the rebellion of the coming intelligentsia against the class of old literati who controlled China intellectually and socially as well as politically. With the introduction of the theory of evolution, with special reference to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest and other scientific ideas, the mental attitude of the young generation was undergoing a radical change in social and political philosophy. 18th century concepts of individual freedom encountered the 19th century industrial revolution. Freedom in the form of rebellion against established authority and industrial revolution in the form of imported products which doomed the old trades to decay. China's old structure was crumbling and the new one was yet to be built. There was a general unrest throughout the country. Poverty, bandits, famine, plague, official corruption, ignorance of world affairs, and the pinch of foreign aggressions all were contributing factors. The students, the young blood, merely took the lead. It was not an insignificant inkstand, nor the slapped face of a pupil in the missionary school nor any altercation between a student and a chair bearer that set educational institutions ablaze throughout China. After leaving the academy, our youthful student body organized the school for themselves, the School of Reforms and Progress. The name was suggested by Zhang Bing-lin, one of the famous revolutionary scholars of our time. Our ambition was to make the school as great one day as Oxford or Cambridge. Pretty soon, as was natural, we found ourselves disillusioned. The student body dwindled in the course of half a year to a few elected officers. When these few found no one to re-elect them, they also departed to seek education elsewhere. For my part, I registered at Zhejiang College under a new name lest the college authorities find me persona non grata. I took the entrance examination, passed it, and was admitted. The college had just been reorganized after the strike and was the highest institution of learning in the province of scholars, as our province was known. Its forerunner had been Zhou Shi Shuyuan, or the school for seeking what is right. It is the proper frame of mind for a scholar to seek what is right, and this was the attitude of Chinese scholars of former generations. This had been a school similar to the Sino Occidental School of Shaoxing, a node-style Chinese school whose curriculum included some foreign languages and science teaching. As the new subjects grew in importance and were allotted more time, it developed into a new type of school, and was renamed Zhejiang College. Situated in the provincial capital and maintained by the government, the college served as a center of cultural movements in the province. The curriculum was very similar to that of the Sino Occidental School, but the courses were more advanced, more various, and better taught, with less sheer memory work. It was a modern school in the making. I had been trotting along in the dark since entering the school in Shaoxing. My mind always rushed for the place where I caught a glimpse of bewitching light and groped in some other direction when it illusively disappeared. By this time, however, I saw things in much clearer perspective. I had begun to study world history in English. At first it seemed as difficult to understand the doings of other peoples as when one tries to understand the behavior of the masses, but gradually I began to see, albeit dimly, the development of Western civilization. This was of course only in a very general and vague way, but my interest in Western history was aroused and a foundation laid for further study. Here I was in the midst of intellectual activities. Through reading, lectures, and conversation, my information about China and the world was accumulating. I grew familiar with some 40 centuries of China's history with a fair understanding of the causes as given by the great historians of the rise and fall of many dynasties. This served as the basis for a comparative study of Western history later on. In the field of contemporary history, there was plenty of material. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894, of which I had learned from the misleading colored pictures in my childhood. The short-lived reforms of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao in 1898, which had taken place during my stay in the Sino-oxidental school. The Boxer War of 1900, news of which I learned at such close range in Shanghai. And the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, which was even then raging, with China's overwhelming sympathy for Japan. Each and all furnished rich materials for thought and study. One might study history backward too. There was the Sino-French War in 1885, in which China lost Indochina. The Taiping Rebellion, which lasted from 1851 to 1864. And the ever victorious Army of Generals Gordon and Ward. The Opium War of 1840, as a result of which China lost Hong Kong. And if one went farther back, there was the coming of the Jesuits, during the later Ming and early Qing periods, and the travels of Marco Polo during the Yuan Dynasty. Still farther back, China had relations with the Roman Empire. Liang Qichao's Young China, an encyclopedic monthly published in Tokyo, furnished a great variety of materials, ranging from short stories to metaphysics, and including elementary science, history, politics, biographies, literature, etc. His Lucid pen was capable of making people understand almost any subject new or difficult to the reader. This was very important, at a time when there was a need to introduce Western ideas into China. His style was clear, persuasive, and easy to follow, and therefore very profitable reading for students. I was one among thousands who came under his influence. I think this great scholar did more than anyone else in his time to popularize modern knowledge among the rising generation. His was the fountain of wisdom from which every young man drew to quench his thirst for the new learning. Politically, he stood for constitutional reforms under the reigning dynasty. Meanwhile, the revolutionaries were publishing a number of periodicals to sponsor Dr. Sun Yat-sen's radical idea that for China, a republican form of government was better than a monarchy, and that China must be governed by the Han Chinese and not by the corrupt and degenerate Manchu ethnic group. That published by the Zhejiang students in Tokyo was a monthly Ties of Chintang. This magazine attacked the reigning dynasty so fiercely that it was barred from the males among other like periodicals by the postal authorities. But the movement had the sympathy of the Tokyo government, and the tabooed periodicals therefore flowed continuously from Japan, where they were published, into the international settlement of Shanghai, where Chinese jurisdiction reached only partially. So Shanghai became a clearinghouse for revolutionary ideas, and from there, the literature was smuggled into other cities by sympathizers as well as profit makers. Zhejiang College itself was deluged with pamphlets, magazines, and books of revolutionary propaganda. Some depicting the atrocities committed by the ethnic Manchus during their invasion of China, others describing their misrule and the unequal treatment of ethnic Manchus and Han Chinese under the existing regime. The students devoured them volumptuously. No power on earth could stop them. Moreover, concrete examples of the misrule and incompetence of the Qing dynasty could be found just outside the college gate. Within the city walls of Hangzhou was a walled city for the ethnic Manchus who were stationed there as a garrison to watch over the Han Chinese. I was warned not to enter it. Anyone did so at his own risk. More than 200 years earlier, this city within the city had been set aside exclusively as barracks for the Manchu soldiers in Hangzhou. After them, their children's children had lived there nominally as soldiers for generations until they were killed by the Taipings during the siege of the capital. Enter marriage between the Han and Manchu ethnic groups was in general forbidden, but ethnic Manchus were allowed to marry Han Chinese women if they preferred, although such marriages were rare. When the civil war was over, a part of the garrison stationed at Jingzhou in Hubei Province was moved to Hangzhou to fill the vacancy. Some of these were still living and spoke Hubei dialect. Most of them had died, but their children lived there and still clung to the dialect of their fathers. Thus, they were easily detected by the natives of Hangzhou, but the third generation had begun to speak the local Hangzhou tongue. They sent ten of their boys to study at the college. These youths behaved wisely toward the revolutionary movement in the college by pretending not to know of it. One of them, an ethnic Mongolian, actually told me he was in favor of a revolution against the Qing Dynasty as he was not an ethnic Manchu in spite of being a so-called Manchu soldier. These so-called Manchu soldiers were no soldiers at all. They were just the same as civilians. They had families and reared children in the so-called barracks and knew nothing of the arts of war. The only difference was that they lived on government rations and had no occupation. Theirs was a sort of parasitic life, and they degenerated physically, mentally, and morally. They haunted the teahouses on the west lake, some of them in the fashionable manner carrying a bird in its cage, and people generally kept away from them. They would slap anyone who offended them. These living examples of degeneration, corruption, and arrogance woke hatred and contempt in the hearts of the young students. It was just as effective as revolutionary propaganda, if not more so. While we got our mental food from Liang Qichao, we drew our emotional nourishment from Dr. Sun Yat-sen and his sympathizers. Generally speaking, it is emotion that leads to action when a decisive hour comes. When an hour came in China, Dr. Sun, both dreamer and man of action, won a decisive victory over the new literati who stood for constitutionalism. Such was the general atmosphere of Zhejiang College. Similar conditions also prevailed in other institutions. I was interested in all these activities. I liked to get hold of information and to think with the materials thus secured, and also to feel and to act. But nothing carried me away entirely. To play safe, I still planned to take the imperial civil examination, still the only road to a government position except by way of revolution which seemed long and difficult to me. I was at times timid and shy, at others bold and reckless, and therefore did not trust my own temperament. So I often acted cautiously, feeling my way before making a definite move. Especially at any crossroads, I would consider again and again before coming to a decision. In case of doubt, I was abbed instead to sit by the roadside and indulge in daydreams. But once a decision was made, I would stick to the end. I made mistakes in life, but never so fatally as to be swept away by the advancing tides. What you just heard is Tides from the West, a Chinese autobiography, written by Chiang Meng Lin, read by Tang Da Min, and published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Some names and terminologies in this book have been updated per contemporary usages.