I’ve been teaching for a bit more than three decades now, and while the students seem to be getting younger & younger [while I, of course, don’t change!], my appointment as Resident Professor in Nanjing has introduced a whole new – and quite fascinating – window on a very different learning experience. So you can imagine my interest in a couple of books I’ve read recently that describe student experiences here in Nanjing back in the 1980’s… when China’s world looked considerably different.

John Pomfret is a journalist who was kicked out of China in 1989 after reporting about Tiananmen Square. Earlier in that decade, however, he had been one of the very first Western students to study at Nanjing University after the country had opened up. He studied Chinese History, and then — more than twenty years later – returned to find out what had happened to his fellow classmates. The result was a well-received 2006 book, Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China.

What comes through most clearly in the book is the sheer resilience of his fellow students – young people who had lived through the chaos and painful disorder of the Cultural Revolution. One particularly harrowing case included a classmate whose parents were both prominent educators in Jiangsu Province – but in 1966 they had been paraded onto the central field at Nanjing Normal University (the former Ginling College, noted in the May 2015 posting, and located only a few blocks away). Locked into wooden yokes, they were heckled as “black gang” members, and were subsequently beaten to death. Somehow the student managed to put this all behind, even writing a criticism of their activities in order to become a Party member. The past was gone…. and on all accounts best left well behind; the future was the only thing that mattered.

The other book, Daughter of China: A True Story of Love and Betrayal, had been published a few years earlier, in 1999 — and was of special interest because its authors, Xu Meihong and Larry Engelmann, had been a student and professor, respectively, at HNC in the late 1980’s. Xu was a member of an elite People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit that focused on intelligence matters, and while enrolled as a student was reporting HNC activities to both the PLA and the Ministry of State Security. She unfortunately became rather close to Prof. Engelmann…. and then became embroiled in complicated in-fighting amongst PLA factions; was quickly removed from the Center & kicked out of the PLA; and ultimately ended up in a job doing cooking and household chores, & selling instant noodles on the street. The book covers that story, as well as her later re-emergence from such a low point… to an eventual role as Prof. Engelmann’s wife in California. The book ends on a less-than-heartening note, however, given that the marriage there only lasted a few short years.

It was certainly interesting to read about conditions in HNC’s early years. The book suggests that American professors at that time never fully understood the pressures under which their Chinese students labored – and often mistook cautious responses as indicative of lack of thought & imagination (“…a mistake most foreigners make in China”). Another fascinating topic was the evident interest in Chinese intelligence circles about goings-on within the Center. We’re now coming up on HNC’s 30th year celebrations – and an intriguing question, of course, is exactly how much things have changed in China during those three decades…. and how much the past matters for the future.

[Note: Prof. Engelmann was an author as well as a professor; he wrote other books about Vietnam, China’s Cultural Revolution, and a N.Y. Times ‘Notable Book of the Year’ about female tennis stars of the 1920/30’s. You can see him interviewed about his writing on YouTube – wearing a Johns Hopkins sweatshirt, & with comments about ‘Daughter of China’ starting at 14:30. He passed away just last year.]