Education in the Chinese Hills

by LO CH’UAN-FANG and RUTH EARNSHAW LO

1

The Professor Speaks

HUA CHUNG COLLEGE
HSICHOW, YUNNAN, CHINA
THE plight of the college professor in China today is as familiar to the man in the street as the notorious wealth of war profiteers. After six long years of refugee life, the once honored intellectual aristocrat of Chinese society is forced to accept a mode of existence only a few steps higher than that of the proverbially poor and maltreated Chinese coolie. Unlike the physical toiler, who is accustomed to hardships and deprivations of all kinds, the college professor in China has had to learn to readjust himself to ever deteriorating circumstances. This constant demand for readjustment has not been easy for one who, before the war, enjoyed the luxury of social prestige, economic security, and the ready gratification of intellectual cravings. The professor in wartime China has made himself conspicuous, not by his mental wealth, but by his material poverty.
Most distressing, perhaps, to the academic mind is the loss or scarcity of the essential tools of education. To his infinite sorrow, the refugee professor is obliged to curtail both teaching and research, for the simple but weighty reason that educational and research materials are limited, and cannot be replenished for a long time to come. Thus the very fulfillment of professorial duties and ambitions is greatly handicapped. Books are rare or out of reach, and the price of paper is becoming prohibitive — not to mention the absence of laboratory facilities for scientific investigations.
Most college teachers have lost contact with the outside world of learning. Since Pearl Harbor, for example, I have not been able to buy a single book or subscribe to a single periodical. The college library has nothing new to offer either. After a little while one is forced to recognize the unpleasant truth that the professorial mind is becoming stale and isolated, and can present to the students nothing better than a repetition of old lecture notes. Sometimes a professor may not mind repeating the same lecture to different classes, but sooner or later he gets tired of saying the same thing every year. Sad is the moment when he discovers that what he knows to be antiquated doctrine is dutifully recorded in students’ notebooks as precious truth.
It is equally impossible to try to live up to one’s educational ideal by enforcing high scholastic standards upon students, most of whom do not own a single textbook on any subject. For very few textbooks are available either in the market or in the college reading room. It is this feeling of being compelled to remain ignorant in one’s own field of study, and to relinquish high standards of education, that makes college teaching in China today a demoralizing routine.
Literature of general interest is just as difficult to get as college textbooks. In our college, which is located in the backwoods of Yunnan, the newspapers that reach us are at least three days old. One is fortunate indeed if one can get hold of a copy of Life or the Reader’s Digest of any date. It is greedily consumed and shared by the whole faculty. Thanks to the American Information Service and the Press of the British Embassy, one may gain an inkling of what is going on in the world through the war bulletins that they distribute among the English-speaking public in China.
In the wartime Chinese college, research is carried on only under exacting conditions. The most general references are often not available. In one refugee college, the only encyclopedia that it possesses is almost sixty years old. For physical and chemical experiments, the supply of electric power is a problem, even for the equipment and materials at one’s disposal. Social scientists who wish to make an extensive survey of any kind are confronted with the difficulty of communication and transportation.
In spite of all the handicaps, however, some research is going on in almost every refugeo college in China. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake has not been willingly abandoned by the povertystricken professor. As is to be expected at this time, there is a great demand for research in the practical fields of industrial chemistry, physical engineering, meteorology, and wartime economy. The Chinese Ministry of Economics, with the coöperation of the Ministry of Education, is offering prizes ranging from $5000 to $100,000, Chinese currency, to anyone who succeeds in inventing native processes for the manufacture of war and industrial commodities. Since the migration of Chinese colleges has brought them into close contact with the tribes of Miao, Lo-Lo, Ch’iang, and others, philologists and sociologists have been busy studying their dialects and folklore. The Ministry of Education has contributed toward the maintenance of scientific research by awarding prizes for distinguished works and by making grants in aid of special studies.

In school the professor struggles to present a semblance of higher learning in the absence of adequate laboratory equipment, reading references, and other ordinary teaching aids; at home he has to labor even harder to satisfy more material needs. His domestic problems are numerous, though of a different nature. First of all, he cannot depend on domestic help to relieve him from the drudgery of housekeeping. When he is not occupied with teaching, he has to lend assistance to his wife in marketing, cooking, washing, or looking after the children.
The monotony of housekeeping is greatly heightened by the lack of wholesome entertainment, especially for the wife of the family, who has few contacts with the outside world. In many college communities, there are no motion-picture theaters or recreational grounds. The chief forms of recreation are dinner parties, picnics, bridge and mah-jongg games. But entertaining friends at home is expensive, and teachers with large families can seldom go out to parties. Travel, except for a very few, is practically impossible. There are families that have stayed at the same spot for four or five years without any chance of visiting the nearest town.
A peasant who is accustomed to the plainness of rural life may not feel that he is missing anything at all. But the refugee professor and his family have memories of city life, with all its attractions and excitements. On the surface, the lack of entertainment does not seem to impose a handicap on higher education, but many domestic and college personnel problems may be traced to the misery and dullness of refugee life in the backwoods of China.
The principal worry of the refugee professor is undoubtedly the high cost of living. Before the war, a professor with a salary of three hundred dollars a month could always manage to save a little. He could pay for his insurance premiums regularly, and make provision for the education of his children. But now, though his monthly income may exceed three thousand dollars, ho is fortunate if he can escape debts.
Colleges have tried various subsidies to help the faculty and staff to meet their financial obligations. A professor’s basic salary may be four hundred dollars a month. In addition to this, he may receive three or four subsidies. There is the general wartime subsidy, which may be 150 or 200 per cent of the salary. Another subsidy is for rice — one or two hundred dollars a month per mouth. Still another subsidy is for the special wartime prices of daily commodities. The subsidies are not fixed, but are increased from time to time with the rise of prices. Altogether, a professor may receive a monthly income of from three to four thousand dollars, depending on the size of his family. This sounds like a lot of money, but actually it is only a living wage.
Not a few teachers, unable to make both ends meet, have given up teaching and have gone into business, which in wartime China is quite profitable. Those who do not wish to give up their teaching profession entirely try their best to secure part-time jobs elsewhere, in addition to their regular academic load. But part-time jobs are not always available. Other ways of making money are then resorted to. One professor whom I know deals in secondhand goods. Another helps his wife to run a restaurant. Another sells typewriter ribbons and razor blades. The more adventurous speculate in cotton yarn, dyes, and other articles of value. The high cost of living has made everybody moneyconscious and money-wise. Anything that can be turned into money becomes a source of income. Rare old Chinese books, spare clothes, fountain pens, ivory chopsticks, and silver and gold ornaments are sold to the highest bidder.
It is no wonder that no professor in China today can afford to buy a new garment. But one has to wear socks and shoes, and they are a big item in the budget. Some examples of the wartime expenses of a man may be given: haircut, $15 or more; socks, $130 a pair; shoes made of leather, $500; one sheet of Chinese paper, $2 to $5; Chinese writing pens, $22 apiece; native cigarettes, $3 to $20 for a package of ten. As prices are going up all the time, no one can accurately foretell how much money he will need two or three months from the time of estimation. Financial security is practically unknown to the refugee professor.

Deprived of intellectual nourishment, burdened with domestic drudgery, and constantly troubled by financial worries, the professor in wartime China presents a sight that easily induces public commiseration. Fortunately, he has also a few moments of self-forgetful diversion and one or two pleasant indulgences. He can still enjoy his pipe fed with tobacco often prepared by his own hands. He can still concoct an inexpensive drink out of local ingredients, and be thankful that bombs are not falling around him. Above all, war has not deprived him of the pleasures of the mind. After a weary day’s labor he can always refresh his soul by renewed acquaintance with the great masterpieces of literature or the wisdom of ancient philosophers. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, or Li Po can still provide a much needed temporary retreat from the horrors and disappointments of life.
The professor is a refugee from war. Where can he find the reassurance that college teaching in wartime is really worth while? Some professors have already abandoned the educational world. Those who are sticking to their teaching jobs do not always find satisfaction in purely academic achievements. If they are occasionally awakened to a sense of their own importance, it is through their personal, living contacts with young and healthy men and women placed under their tutorship and care. When a boy comes to you for guidance in his disappointed love affairs; when a girl wants your advice about her future career; when some extracurricular demand is made upon your time and energy to help students solve their peculiar social problems and religious perplexities, then you feel you are serving a generation of hopeful, intelligent, and unspoiled youth, who may yet create a new order out of the chaos that we and our parents have brought into the world.
Mencius, the ancient Chinese political philosopher, once said that the training of men of talents was one of the pleasures of a superior man. That pleasure still remains with the refugee professor in spite of war and poverty.

2

And His Wife Continues

Our mountain fastness seems to become more and more remote as the years of war roll along and we are more and more cut off from contact with the outside world; yet we arc still here and flourishing.
Our remoteness is really a paradoxical thing. Every day the skies overhead are filled with the hum of airplanes ferrying in freight over the Hump, and occasionally we even hear a brisk bit of gunfire, but our personal excursions are limited to the distance we can walk. Occasionally we have the great excitement of a visit from some military people from an airfield at a nameless place, and then we all rally round to hear the latest news, borrow their magazines, and shamelessly steal as many of their cigarettes as we can get away with. We are almost as puzzled by them as they are by us, and such visitations make us realize how we are being affected by this curious life.
Little by little we have all been reduced to the bare essentials for living. Hardly anyone has any foreign supplies, such as coffee or baking powder, any more, and we are all inured to the work of the kitchen. All our clothes are wearing out and the newest thing any of us has is now two years old and well worn. Our shoes should be preserved in museums, and most of us now use local cloth shoes or sandals to spell out the fragments of our Western footgear. The doctor, whose mileage is probably the greatest of any of us, has frankly abandoned shoes and taken to straw sandals. All of us now wear the local big straw hats, rather like sombreros, except at Christmas and Easter, when we dig out the last foreign hat we have, and have a good laugh. We are all used to each other now, and only when someone from the outside sees us do we catch a reflection of how odd we are becoming. All hairpins have given out and long bobs are still the fashion as a result. We gave up stockings long ago. Nightgowns have all been transformed into petticoats, and pajamas into underwear. One more winter will see us in matting.
Why not wear what the villagers do? The reason is easily put. The cheapest cloth of which a dress could be made costs $90 for 10 inches. We are a “fixed income” group, and as money depreciates and prices go up, we live plainer and plainer and think higher and higher — when we have energy left to think at all! It is a compensating development that our community life has shown a tendency to break down artificial standards and to be more honest and kindly than it used to be. The “Ladies Dress Exchange” is one instance. When any of us finds a garment no longer usable by reason of shrinkage or personal expansion, it is immediately passed on to someone else. Everyone is now using some garment originally belonging to someone else, and false pride has died a natural death. Every new baby in the community offers an occasion for everyone else to dig down and find some essentials, and as fast as the not-so-new babies grow bigger, they pass on their diapers and socks to the next size smaller.
So much for our plain living, and now for our high thinking! It is truly very difficult for our science staff to be so isolated, and perhaps they miss their learned journals and newspapers more than anyone else. However, they do what they can with what there is. The chemistry department has done research on local dyestuffs and indigo; the physicists have worked out practical water-power electric lighting and have “lit up” the local middle school; the economists plug away at the economic phenomena of our constantly shifting prices. The work I see most of, naturally, is Ch’uan-Fang’s and in spite of extremely heavy academic hours and the demands of housekeeping he shares with me, he is driving away at his work on Chinese opinions and mental traits.
Under his direction as acting head, the Chinese department too is turning out some interesting research on local religions and dialects. This place is like a museum for old customs and traditions, and we sigh for an anthropologist to do something about it. The English department suffered a large loss in personnel this past year and we have all been struggling to do the essential extra work, but we are proud of the reputation of our Western Languages department in Free China, and would do a lot to keep it up.
We have a small enrollment as colleges go, even in wartime, but our high standards attract good students, and I feel more and more that they are worth while. Other colleges have met wartime conditions of ill-prepared freshmen by lowering their requirements, so that the bachelor’s degree is now being awarded to students of what would be pre-war sophomore standing; but we have put on five-year and six-year courses instead, so that our seniors are up to pre-war senior standards. This result is particularly noticeable in English, where we have standardized tests and results dating back fifteen years. All our students have a choice of jobs when they graduate, a situation which seems like a fairy tale to me, a member of the class of ‘31.
Out here we sometimes indulge in the notion that we college teachers are the forgotten men and women of the war. Those of us who feel that the reasons for which we entered the profession are still valid are determined to stick it out. In less discouraged moments we know that China’s war is not solely against the Japanese; it is almost equally against ignorance and poverty, and our battle on the education front will go on long after the last shot is fired at the invader. To sabotage Christian education at this point would be to act as traitors to our daughter’s generation. We are handicapped by lack of staff, and every term we lose a few more who are impossible to replace. How we wish the United States government would let a few good women teachers come over here! It is safe here, and on a gold salary from a Mission Board one need not suffer. It is only the Chinese (all 150 million of us) who feel the effects of inflation in the pantry. We need an economist or two; we need teachers in practically all the sciences — physics, chemistry, mathematics, and botany; we could do with a sociologist and an advanced piano teacher. Please, Uncle Sam, loosen up!
One of the most curious experiences we have had here came when some army men very kindly sent up a load of magazines, ranging in date from January, 1942, to March, 1943. We fell on them like starving men, and gulped them, only to suffer a kind of revulsion as we read. For several years now we have had radio bulletins and the classics as our only reading matter. It was a shock to see what kind of thinking and writing has been going on during our vacation from the world. We felt that — even allowing for the time lapse and age of the articles — American thought about the war, as expressed in the magazines, was very childish and that the writing was even worse.
It was hard to tell which was more disappointing: the note of pained surprise at the realities of war, or the childish “wait till we show ‘em” attitude. There seemed to be very little mature thinking about the total situation, and very little writing of permanent importance. (Speaking of pained surprise, in the middle of that last sentence I moved my typewriter from the garden to the study, and before my eyes were adjusted to the lamplight I sat down inadvertently on the kitten.)
As so often happens in the life of a mother with an eighteen-months-old baby, this letter was interrupted here, and I am continuing several days later, with no assurance of not being interrupted again. This brings me to the subject dearest to our hearts and of most profound importance in our lives — our little daughter. At a year and a half, she finds this world a most fascinating place and makes it such for us. She is a chatterbox (like her mother perhaps), and every day sees new additions to her vocabulary, which is about half English and half Chinese. We use English at home, so she is gaining more rapidly in that language, but in time she will be as bilingual as her daddy.
I sometimes wish she were not such a democrat, for reasons of hygiene, but I think it better to wash her often and let her make friends rather than keep her in cotton wool and under glass. Every day I take her for a ride in her tumble-down fourth-hand carriage up the road to the Big Trees, where our village road meets the old Marco Polo trail, and there on the turf under the two huge fig trees which are our landmark, she gets out and pushes the carriage, digs holes, and collects flowers in her tiny basket. Here we usually meet various villagers, tribespeople, Tibetans, soldiers, all the miscellany of the back country, going about on their various occasions, on foot, on horse or donkey back, in horse carts, jeeps, and trucks; and they all stop for a look at “Toots” and a word with her.
She is very much interested in them all, smiles, and says “Morning” to anyone in Western shoes, and “Halloo” to people in sandals! Fortunately she prefers not to be touched, but she is not afraid of anyone. Everyone in China likes babies, and all the mothers with babies strapped to their backs ask just the same professional questions Western mothers ask: How old is baby? Boy or girl? Can she walk alone? How many teeth? Can she talk? What does she eat? I know what they ask and have the answers all ready, and can return the questions for their statistics, although I can’t understand what they say in reply. They are always astonished when I admit that I no longer nurse the baby, but feed her on cow’s milk!
This must be sent by air mail, so I must stop while it is still a reasonable weight.
Love to you all,
RUTH