In the arduous years of persisting in the Anti-Japanese War, the wife of the president and the wife of the professor of Southwest Associated University used to sell the "Dingsheng Cake" made by them in a basket in order to maintain their lives......
Nowadays, many middle school students yearn for (and even superstitious) "famous schools", especially those of Tsinghua University and Peking University. However, there may not be many people who can understand the historical evolution and spirit of the two schools. When asked about Cai Yuanpei, he was still at a loss, not to mention Mei Yiqi, but also "Mr. doesn't know who it is". In recent years, the "centennial celebrations" of several universities have been commemorated, so some texts refer to the scales and claws of that year. For example, when talking about Tsinghua University's "master" level teachers, it always quotes Mei Yiqi, the last president of Tsinghua University in Beiping before 1949: "The so-called university is not a 'building', but a 'master'." "Naturally, the work of the latecomers in building a building in Tsinghua Garden cannot and must be erased.
Mei Yiqi is deceased, and his wife Han Yonghua once returned to the mainland to visit relatives and old days. This lady, like many professors' wives who taught their husbands and children back then, is not simple. Here is only one small thing, which is the hard life in the Southwest Associated University during the Anti-Japanese War mentioned in her "Forty Years of Sharing Joys and Sorrows - Remembering What I Know About Mei Yiqi" written in the spring of 1981:
The professors' monthly salaries (after 1940) were only enough for half a month, and the inadequacies had to be found by the wives, some embroidered scarves, some made hats, and some made some food, which they took out and sold. I'm older than the others, and my eyesight isn't very good, so I can only help make scarves and tassels. Later, Mr. Zhao Shichang, the general manager, introduced me to make pastries to sell. Zhao is a native of Shanghai, taught me to make Shanghai-style rice noodle bowl cake, by Mrs. Pan Guangdan in the countryside to grind seventy percent rice, three percent glutinous rice rice noodles, add sugar, and good noodles, with a silver ingot-shaped wooden mold to make a cake, two or three minutes to steam a piece, named "Dingsheng Cake" (original note: that is, the meaning of victory in the Anti-Japanese War), by me carrying the basket, walk for 45 minutes to the "Guansheng Garden" consignment. Yuehan (i.e. Mei Yiqi) still did not agree with us operating in the office, so she had to go to Mrs. Yuan Fuli's house, who lived outside. The Yuan family has six children, who are younger than our children, and sometimes when the cakes cannot be sold, they are given to their children to eat. Someone suggested that we put the stove at the door of the "Guansheng Garden" to make and sell it, but I refused to do so because of Yuehan's face. When I was selling cakes, I wore a blue cloth gown and claimed that my surname was Han instead of Mei, but despite this, everyone knew that Principal Mei's wife sold "Dingsheng Cake" in a basket. Due to the long way I walked, my shoes and socks did not fit properly, and once my feet were worn out, I became infected, and my calves were all swollen.
The above quote is from the book "Revelation of the Southwest Associated University" edited by Zhang Manling. The book also mentions the sentiments of other professors and their relatives who did everything possible to overcome the difficulties of material life during the war, and it became a good story over time. In the same wartime context, this is probably comparable to the deeds of some male and female intellectual cadres in Yan'an who participated in spinning and other labor production. The difference may only be that in Yan'an, labor is glorious, and cadres, especially senior cadres and their families, are more exemplary and leading, and everyone should learn from them; In Kunming, Mrs. Mei has to take into account President Mei's "face", obviously the "old consciousness" is at work, but thinking of their original social status and economic life, we can't help but admit that they have actually put down their shelves, or that they have no shelves for the president's wife and professor's wife, and they have no complaints about the hardships of the Anti-Japanese War, which is enough to shame those of us who live in a peaceful environment.
During the Anti-Japanese War, I was not in the rear, nor in the revolutionary northern Shaanxi, but in the occupied areas to study in primary school. As far as the eye can see, under the rule of the Japan invaders, the embarrassment of the Catholic personnel is still a little known. Similar to Mrs. May's pastries, I have heard of a secondary school teacher's wife working with several women in the same situation to make biscuits, probably because of a lack of technical guidance, just spread the pancakes on the pan, cut them into diamond shapes, and seared them until they were dry and crispy. I've eaten a few samples that are different in shape and texture than the usual biscuits. The experiment appeared to have been unsuccessful, and nothing has been reported since. But these wives want to make a living as housewives to support the family, and even though I am still young, I can vaguely feel this painstaking effort. I heard that some elementary school teachers go to pull foreign carts or pedal tricycles after school (the former is the kind of rickshaw pulled by "Camel Shoko", and the car rent is cheaper than the tricycle). I went to a church school, and the teachers were paid a higher salary, but when the Pacific War broke out, they were all taken over by the Japanese puppeteers, and they were no different from other municipal elementary schools. Mr. Chen Jiebai, who was teaching in the Chinese Department of Peking University on the beach at that time, lived in the backyard of my house, and his three children were in middle school, and his life seemed to be tighter than my family.
Anyway, the people who had some dealings with my family, except for a few who later learned that they were engaged in underground work to resist Japan, were all civilians who called themselves "slaves of the dead country", who did not participate in the actual anti-Japanese activities, and said that they were obedient to the people, but they were not willing to be obedient to the people, and waited for the destruction of the Japan devils and traitors under their wings. This is a typical psychology of "the remnants are in tears, and the king is looking south for another year".
Finally, in 1945, Japan surrendered, and then the "Wang Division" also "returned to Luang". The elementary and junior high schools where my siblings and I worked did not change much, and the principal appointed during the enemy occupation was removed as a matter of course, and the teachers continued to attend classes. The university is different, for example, Peking University, which was the president of the Red House on the beach during the fall of Zhou Zuoren, was called a "pseudo" school, the so-called "pseudo Peking University". Professor Fu Sinian, who returned from the rear of the university and was in charge of receiving it, announced that not a single faculty member would be left as a faculty member of the "pseudo-Peking University" and that the students studying in the "pseudo-Peking University" would also have to go through "screening." This caused spontaneous protests by the students, and later the underground Communist Party organizations joined the leadership, forming the first wave of the struggle against the Kuomintang. Zhou Zuoren naturally belonged to the "rebellion" and was prosecuted for the crime of cultural traitor. The professors and lecturers did not seem to protest against their resignation, they were adults, and perhaps they were ashamed of their colleagues who had gone into exile, so they all retired. If in 1937 or 1938, they all left Beijing to participate in the War of Resistance at the front or in the rear, at least they did not teach at the "puppet Peking University", nor did they stay under the control of the enemy and puppet public education personnel, and would rather starve to death and insist on adopting a positive attitude of non-cooperation, then the "puppet Peking University" would not be able to open its schools, and the number of private universities would have been limited, so a large number of students would have dropped out of school, and even if they did not have sufficient political consciousness, they would have gone to the War of Resistance and Revolution because they had no way out, and everything would have been a different story!
In this case, although it is very "ideal", it is unlikely to look back and think about it. The boss of a national army could not resist the enemy, retreated one after another, left behind a large area of land and the helpless people to fall into the hands of the enemy, can all Chinese carry out a "scorched earth war of resistance", men, women and children all run with the government, or go up the mountains to fight guerrillas? Some teachers and students from Peking University and Tsinghua University retreated from Changsha, walked through Hunan and Guizhou provinces, and all arrived in Yunnan; But the poet Zeng Zhuo's mother, an unorganized refugee, died alone on the way from Wuhan to the rear.
The Chinese under enemy occupation still have to live, the peasants still have to farm, the workers still have to work, the students still have to go to school, go to primary school, go to middle school, go to university, how can teachers teach is equivalent to taking a false position? Those who have traveled thousands of miles to the rear, whether they are in the army, politics, business, or teaching, or who have gone to Yan'an or behind enemy lines, whether they are workers, shop assistants, young students, or other intellectuals, who have gone to the national disaster together (as long as they are not "making a fortune in the country" or "using the revolution for personal gain") are all glorious and belong to the advanced among the whole people. However, in any society, the advanced are only a minority, and their responsibility is to enlighten the backward, not to exclude and suppress the backward. There are so many professors and their families in Southwest Associated University, and I haven't heard of anyone who is proud of "Lao Tzu's Eight Years of Anti-Japanese War" after demobilization. However, like Fu Sinian, when he returned to the ancient city of Beiping and stepped into the Red Mansion on the beach, he referred to it as "pseudo" from top to bottom, from teachers to students, which was quite a bit of "self-resistance (Japanese)" arbitrariness, and to paraphrase later political terms, it had a somewhat "leftist" connotation. It is inevitable that a "genuine" "liberal" like Fu Sinian will stand out from the crowd and oppress others with a sense of political and moral superiority, and it can be seen that this land of China is indeed not a suitable soil for the growth of liberalism.
During the eight years of the fall of Beiping, my father was idle at home, and eight years later, when he saw acquaintances and old friends from the rear, he had to be called "Gao Feng Liang Festival", but this was due to the fact that the family had a little money at that time to support the bottom. The deposit was frozen, depreciated, and there were two properties, the small one was sold first, and the large one was partially rented, and then the large one was simply sold. It can be imagined that if there is no other income, the poor teachers who live on their monthly salaries will not "go out of the mountains", what will they eat? Mr. Chen Jiebai, who once rented my backyard, still had a salary at that time, but his money was becoming increasingly tight, so he had to change to a smaller house.
Taking my father as an example, from the autumn of 1945 to the winter of 1948 after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, he first participated in the takeover of the Japanese military hospital, and then worked as a military doctor in the "Joint Logistics General Hospital" for more than three years. At the beginning of 1949, he became a "retained person" after the takeover of the Communist People's Liberation Army, and he became a "pseudo-military doctor" in our file form. The Kuomintang and the Nationalist government, which had been in power on the mainland for 22 years, became a "puppet dynasty" during the "Ming Zhengshuo" period, just like the "restoration government" established by Wang Jingwei who defected to Japan.
Recently, I read an article by someone (it seems to be written by Mr. Fu Guoyong), Fu Sinian had a meeting at the end of 1948 before bidding farewell to Nanjing with Hu Shi, which was already very bleak. Fu Sinian once denounced the corruption of the Kuomintang authorities with a fearless spirit, but the scholarly business was so angry that it was difficult to turn the tide, so he could only leave with tears, and President Hu Shih, who drank with him, was already on the list of "war criminals" wanted. And a large number of their classmates and comrades, only a few of them went to Taiwan with them. In Fu Sinian's ideological vision, the teachers who stayed on the mainland, whether out of their own choice or out of practical helplessness, feared that they would become some other people who had joined the "puppet dynasty," and their reasons for discrimination might be no less than those of the lecturers who were in the "puppet Peking University" in those years, or they might be like Nanming looking at the readers in Li Zicheng's camp (such as Li Yan and his ilk), because these people were "stranded in the bandit area" and openly expressed their support for the new regime in the newspapers, and their writings should be banned in Taiwan, and their names could not be mentioned there.
During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the Civil War, the Chinese Kuomintang, based on the interests of its ruling clique, decided to alienate all groups of people in society, and even to the enemy, thus establishing layers of social and political discrimination.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the victory in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Sixty years ago, Mr. Lao She once said that we were "a miserable victory"; Looking at China in the world pattern, at that time, in addition to cheering, it was indeed not without a sense of bleakness. In the early years of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, whether it was the Kuomintang-led rear areas, the Communist-led anti-Japanese base areas, or the vast cities and villages under Japan's occupation, except for a handful of traitors and traitors who defected to the enemy, the overwhelming majority of the people, although they had never eaten or heard of the "victory cake" made by Mrs. Mei and her own hands, really once united in the hope of defeating the invaders and building a new China, but after the war, because of the internal war of the nation, the opportunity for national rejuvenation was missed.
Mrs. Mei Yiqi, their generation is long gone. Even the young Junyan of the Southwest Associated University has become an old man. A primary school student like me, who was in the eight-year Anti-Japanese War, is also over 70 years old. Only hope is placed on generations of young people.