P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hans Ingvar Roth

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      After the bombing of the Marco Polo Bridge and, that same month, Nankai University and the city of Tientsin, many members of the Chang family fled from the Nankai campus in order to avoid further Japanese attacks. Nankai University and the Nankai School were regarded as hostile to Japan because of their nationalistic stance and because of criticisms of Japan’s presence in China by its teachers and students.

      The Polish-Jewish-Chinese journalist Israel Epstein recalled in his memoirs the dramatic events of July 1937:

      The invaders were dive bombing Nankai University, particularly concentrating on its library: books, along with patriotic students seemed the main object of their hate. I long kept the record I made of a press conference at the Japanese headquarters. We foreign newsmen asked, “Why bomb the university?” “Because, gentlemen, the outrageous Chinese are keeping troops there.” The “outrageous Chinese” was the official stereotype used by Japanese spokesmen to designate, in English, all Chinese opposed to them. “I saw no troops there,” said one correspondent. “But the buildings are very strong. The Chinese would use them.” “How do you know?” “If I were the Chinese commander, I would use them.” Is this any reason to bomb a world famous educational institution?” “Gentlemen, Nankai University is an anti-Japanese base. We must destroy all anti-Japanese bases. Nankai students are anti-Japanese and Communistic. Always making trouble for us.”⁵²

      Peng Chun Chang also found himself in the firing line by virtue of his high profile at the university as well as by his criticisms of Japan in his plays and speeches. Several of the university’s buildings were destroyed in the Japanese attacks. After the bombings, Chiang Kai-shek made the following remark to Poling Chang: “Nankai has been sacrificed for China but so long as China exists, so will Nankai.”⁵³ The statement reflects the exceptional standing of Nankai University and the Nankai Schools in the Chinese national consciousness. After the Japanese attacks, Poling himself declared: “Nankai has the honour of being the first and the most severely devastated university in China.” Chang Poling suffered a further catastrophe shortly after the destruction of Nankai University by the Japanese. His beloved son Xihu, a pilot, was killed in a flying accident when his plane crashed in the Kiangsi Mountains.⁵⁴

      Stanley Chang remembers the bombing of Nankai clearly, having himself been in the vicinity of the university. He describes his recollections of the dramatic events and the events after as follows:

      My education was delayed partly because of a hospital admission (TB in my legs) and partly because of the war between China and Japan. The Japanese bombed the Marco Polo Bridge in 1937. That month, they also bombed Nankai University, where my father was teaching. The University was an obvious target for the Japanese because it was famous for its credo of self-reliance, self-esteem, and nationalism. Teachers and students at the University had long expressed fiercely anti-colonial and anti-Japanese sentiments. For these reasons, the Japanese attacked the University and the city of Tientsin, and sought out prominent lecturers.⁵⁵ My father, who was one of the most voluble and well-known faculty members and who was serving as university chancellor—because Uncle Poling was in Chungking—was forced to flee in the night. My mother helped him to disguise himself as a woman, after which he fled to the harbour and managed to get on board a boat. He escaped from Tientsin to another harbour, Wei Hai Wei, on the Shandong peninsula, and from there to the capital city of Nanking. There he was commissioned by the government to relate the facts of Japan’s attacks on China to the West. He therefore travelled to Europe and the United States after his escape from Nankai, giving lectures and organizing events to raise funds for the Chinese government and its resistance to Japan’s attacks. My father was absent from China for more than three years.

      After the Japanese attack on Nankai, my mother and the rest of our family fled to the British zone, where we lived in a compound for several months. During this time, my Uncle Poling continued to pay out my father’s salary so that my mother was more or less provided for while on the run. Prior to the attacks on Tientsin, Uncle Poling had moved all his family to Chungking, where a new Nankai school [Nankai Middle School] had been established. After a while, it became clear that my mother and our family would also head inland in order to avoid the Japanese attacks as best they could. In early 1938, she took the whole family by ship, all the way around China, via Hong Kong, to Haiphon and Hanoi in Vietnam. The first stage of the journey was to Shanghai, where we visited mother’s brothers and sisters. During the boat journey we shared two and a half hammocks, in which we were fortunate, seeing as how most people had to sleep in the deck. I often slept beside my mother in a hammock. My sisters slept together and my elder brother Chen had to share a hammock with a stranger.

      While we were in Vietnam, my mother was robbed of all her money in Haiphon by a pursesnatcher. She was a very short woman, barely 152 cm tall. (My father was 180 cm tall.) Somehow she managed to borrow money in order to continue to the city of Kunming (she met passengers on the boat who knew of the Nankai Schools and were willing to lend her money). After reaching Vietnam by boat, we continued by train for another three days, travelling north through the mountains to Kunming, which lies three hundred miles south of Chungking, the country’s temporary capital since the attacks on Nanking. At night, we slept in boxes because the trains did not run at night. My mother was travelling with a nine-year-old boy, a ten-year-old boy, a fourteen-year-old girl, and a brain-damaged fifteen-year-old girl. Kunming was a temporary haven for Nankai University, which had joined with several other universities to form the Southwest Associated University. The weather in Kunming was often cloudy, which meant that the Japanese could not bomb it easily as they had the city of Chungking; even so, Kunming suffered many bombings. After we arrived in Kunming, my sister Ruth travelled on to Uncle Poling’s school in Chungking. My mother was far too proud to go with her and live on the Nankai campus in Chungking.

      Instead, my mother rented three rooms in Kunming, cooking food on a tiny charcoal stove on the ground. I shared a room with her, and my brother and Ming-Ming slept in the room opposite. We slept on thin mattresses laid on wooden boards. Flies and lice were our constant companions. The toilet was a deep hole in a room to the side of the house. It was emptied once a week. When the man came to collect the latrine bucket, the smell was appalling.

      One night my mother did not come home. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I went to my brother and told him that our mother had not come home. He said that I should go back to bed. In the morning, to my enormous relief my mother came back. She never said what had happened and I never asked. (A similar incident occurred many years later. One day, in the summer of 1948, my mother disappeared. At that time we were living in Peter Cooper Village in New York—my father, me, my brother, and Ming-Ming. Ruth had gone to graduate school in Wisconsin. I had taken over the kitchen duties. After several weeks, Ruth wrote to us to say that our mother was in New York City, to judge from the stamp on the letter which she had sent to Ruth. After a few more weeks, my mother came back, to my father’s great joy. On that occasion, too, I did not ask where she had been or why she had disappeared.)

      When words reached us that my father would be coming to Chungking in April 1940, we travelled by car from Kunming to Chungking. It was a new car that needed to be driven to Chungking from Vietnam and so the driver was earning a little extra cash by taking some passengers from Kunming. I sat in the front passenger seat, while my mother, brother and sister sat in the back. How my mother survived those three years without my father continues to amaze me.

      In this moving account, Stanley relates the hardships that the family had to endure in the 1930s. His mother revealed her tremendous strength of personality in bringing the family safely from Tientsin to Kunming and Chungking. The sacrifices that she had to make for the family can only be glimpsed between the lines. The entire story would serve as the basis for a dramatic film. Stanley’s brother Chen Chung also developed asthma in the damp tunnel shelters that were used when the Japanese attacked Chungking; he would be afflicted by this asthma for the rest of his life. Stanley’s account of his mother’s escape with her children also highlights how distant Peng Chun Chang was from his СКАЧАТЬ