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.

The Girl Who Played Go, a Novel - by Shan Sa, translated by Adriana Hunter
There are two main characters in the story, a Manchuria girl and a Japanese soldier. The girl lived in Manchuria, and the Japanese soldier was sent to colonize Manchuria before 1931. The back drop of the story was in the era of the Japanese invasion of China in 1931-1937.

They met in the Square of a Thousand Winds, and played Go on a checkerboard which was engraved on a granite table. The girl was an excellent Go player, and the Japanese soldier, who spoke fluent mandarin, was undercover spying on the resistant activities in the public gathering places of the city. In the end the Japanese soldier fell in love with this young Chinese girl, when she was arrested he risked his life to protect her from torture and rape by other Japanese soldiers.

Though the author—Shan Sa was born in 1972, long after the era of War Against Japanese, she described the era with such accuracy. She is a respectable painter and writer.

The book is a well written novel first published in France 2001 and later translated and published in Great Britain in 2003. The author shows her readers a story frame by frame through each chapter like in a movie, which allows her readers to evaluate each of the characters’ inner worlds.

More commentary can be found here, here, here, and from Word Without Borders you can read an excerpt.

Switched website hosting and redesigned the site. Currently still fixing minor issues. Some posts will look odd as all entries were imported in. The import went well considering the two different systems. At least all the categories, images, and text were transferred over. Just a few exra line breaks here and there.

This is what my website use to look like. Originally a two column template, it was modified to have three columns.

馬燕日記

Ma Yan began to write her diary when she was thirteen in her last year in elementary on her way to middle school.  But her family could not afford to support her middle school, and she was asked to stay home.  She begged to continue her schooling for her goal as she wrote in her diary was “I have to study hard to make a contribution to my country and my people.  That’s my hope.

Her family has five members — her parents, two brothers and herself. They live in the village of Zhangiashu of Hui Autonomous Region of Ningxia [ 寧夏回族自治區 ].

China is much developed now as many cities have new high rise buildings, and full of commercial activities, one cannot deny the prosperous of a nation when entering all these big cities. Unfortunately, families living in rural areas have found great difficulties in support their children to get education. They work so hard in keeping their existence, let alone educationing them. There is no free education even for elementary schooling in China.  Villagers find that their children get no education, thus their next generation will probably be a reserve for the cheap labour force of the future.  There are many cases that parents go extra mile to work day and night picking scraps for money for one child to go to school.  Hoping this one child will change their life in the future.

This book was first published in France in 2002. It has created an outpouring of support for Ma Yan, and was later translated into English and published in UK. Now the book is published in America by Harper Collin Publishers in 2005. 

A note on the book jacket indicates that “A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to The Association for the Children of Ningxia."

A very good book. 

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Escape From China: The Long Journey From Tiananmen to Freedom

By Zhang Boli 張伯笠
Translated to English By Kwee Kian Low

The author was a prominent student leader in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square Demonstrations. He was twenty-six years of age and a graduate student in Beijing University. After the Tiananmen Square bloody massacre, Mr. Zhang was put on the “Chinese authority’s 21 most wanted list.” In the next two years, Mr. Zhang had to hide in different places all over the North Eastern provinces. One day, he had a high fever and was hiding in an elder cousin’s place. The elder cousin took care of Zhang and cured his illness. During his recovery, his cousin asked Zhang to read the Bible to her. She was a Christian, but she couldn’t read a word, an illiterate. This was the first time that Zhang held the Bible and learned about Jesus Christ. Once he began to read, he couldn’t stop reading, every day he read and reread the bible while he was waiting for his next move. When Zhang said goodbye to his elder cousin, she said to him “you must pray. Jesus will save you.”

Zhang crossed to Siberia in the hopes of getting to the West through Russia. It was nearly dark when he finally reached a large shed. The temperature was extremely cold. He was cold and tired. Sleepiness got over him. He wanted very much to lie down and sleep. It was too cold to just lie down, so he took some hay from inside and put it outside the door trying to make a fire for warmth. But suddenly, the wolves were howling in the nearby forest; and at the same time a man was approaching from a distance to the shed. He immediately went inside the shed and cut open a bale of dry straw and burrowed himself in the hay. He was worried that in this Siberian blizzard, he would not be able to keep himself alive till daybreak.”

Then he remembered his elder cousin’s last words: Pray to God. Jesus will save you.

So he began to pray and said “Oh, God. If you do exist, why let me die in this deserted snowy plain?” “Lord, I beg you to give me a way to the truth and the life.” On page 129 he says “I was in a state of semi consciousness, but a moment of great clarity had arrived. A blinding ray of light shone through the darkness, and I felt warm all at once. I couldn’t open my eye, but I heard a voice saying, ‘Zhang Boli, you are not going to die. For you will go forth in my name.’ After that he made a promise to God: “Lord, if you let me live through today. I will be forever in your service.” The ray of light disappeared, and at that moment he admitted that he became a believer in Jesus.

Unfortunately Zhang was unable to flee Siberia and was arrested and interrogated by the KGB and soon after was deported back to Heilongjiang—the northern bordering province with the Soviet Union. He spent the next two years trying to escape from China, during that time he received help by many civilians and national policemen. Finally, Zhang was connected by someone in Hong Kong who helped him flee overseas.

The dialogues in the book are very interesting as Zhang exchanged talks under different identities to different people which reflected the true nature of people in China. It is a great book of historical resonance.

Zhang Boli is now a pastor of Harvest Chinese Christian Church in Virginia, USA. His personal website in Chinese is http://www.zhangboli.net/

张伯笠牧师 豐收華夏基督教會

Read reviews on amazon.ca.

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