A Recollection, High School Life
In September 1947, I was put by my parents into a Chinese German High School in Guangzhou. The school had a six acres ground, its building backed onto a small river. The main building consisted of the administration offices, class rooms, library, and a big cafeteria. On its left and right wings were the boys and girls’ dormitory. The vast grounds in front of the school building were the fields for sports and military training.
In the Kuomintang regime all the high school students were subjected to military training.
A battalion captain was assigned by the government as dean in our dormitory, few soldiers were also assigned to guard the school.
Every day the bugler performed three times, I loved the sound of the bugle and the melody it recited; it heightened my spirit in the boring school life. Everyday we had to perform line-up in formation, roll calls, hoist the national flag and listen to the principal’s speech. As usual, the captain would follow up with a disciplinary speech giving us his reprimand by barking and showering to our faces. When he saw us in flabby state, he would kick our knee caps, and occasionally he would kick the knee joint from the back of a student making him kneel down. Though boys were treated harshly, girls were not.
We all hated him so much that we decided to get even with him.
One evening, after the retire roll call, twenty of us visited his room which was located next to boys dormitory. We asked him intensively about his war stories to distract his attention, while other boys stole his shoestrings and leather waist belt, and then squeezed tooth paste into his shoes, but we left his pistol untouched. When the job was done, we said good night and returned to our dormitory.
The event passed on quickly throughout the dormitories early the next morning. When the assemble bugle sounded, six hundred boys and girls lined up in formation with complete uniform and full spirit. This time the captain was late, when he arrived his uniform was untidy and his shoes were missing the shoestrings. He was deeply embarrassed. That was the only morning none of us received the usual shouts and kicks. For the rest of the semester, the captain seemed to have loosen up relatively.
