From Foot Soldier to College Professor：A Memoir

Preface

This memoir consists of three parts. In the first part, I describe how I, as a teenager, ran away from home in 1948, how I escaped from a Communists’ detention center located in the central eastern Shandong Province, how I survived by being a peddler selling shoes in Qingdao, how I was sort of student again, in an abandoned silk factory at a township, Changanzhen, and how I ran through the hilly lands to get to Fuzhou, and how I joined the army on the Penghu Islands. During the period of six years from 1948 to 1954, at one time, I was in danger of being killed falling off the rather steep cliff of a hill when retreating to the south in the Chinese Mainland, at the other, I almost died of typhus, the terrible disease spread on the Penghu Archipelago. As I ranked non-commissioned officer in the army, I once imagined that if I could be discharged from the army honorably, I would be content with very little living my life out as a nobody somewhere in Taiwan.

In the second part, education comes into focus of my life. With the amount of 940 yuan given to me when I quit the army, I got my undergraduate program done. And with the help of my friends, I got on two trips to the U.S. and earned two advanced degrees. And I was asked back to my alma mater to teach, and assumed many different university administration jobs from chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature through dean of College of Liberal Arts, chair of the Graduate Institute of Education to the Office of the Student Affairs, the highest position of my teaching career. During those two terms in office, I met with a lot of student protests due to the changes of political climate. I had never been frustrated by their demonstrations, nor did I look for the negative side of the students who had launched those movements. But they were often led by their own ideology, not considering the other students' points of view as a whole. Once I thought I was a troubleshooter, “untying all forms of the knots the students had tied for me.” The most regrettable thing was that there were 26 students who died of car accidents and others when I was in office.

The third part is perhaps the heart-rending one. In it, I describe how I invited my sisters to Hong Kong for a family reunion in 1989 and how I paid a visit to my hometown after my 44 years' absence in 1992, and kowtowed to my parents' mound grave murmuring to them: “Your prodigal son comes back to see both of you.”

I am a man who witnessed a part of the civil war between the Chinese Nationalists Army and the Communists Army when the National Government was retreating south and experienced the 713 Incident that took place in the Penghu Islands. It is called 713 Incident because it occurred on July 13, 1949. It is the cruelest but one, the 228 Incident at the beginning stage when the Generalissomo Chiang Kai-shek withdrew to Taiwan. In this 713 Incident, there are around 5,000 students from Shandong Province pressganged into the army, two principals and six students executed. And it is said that more than ten students who are carried on a fishing boat to the outer sea and put into burlap sacks and thrown overboard. This inhumane action is called “casting anchor.” I was lucky enough to have gone through all of these proscutions as a private soldier and able to live to be an octogenarian man. I hope this memoir of mine can testify about a part of that historical era.