A Story about the Older Generation

​The following is an account of how my mother from a Hainanese family living in Saigon during the Second Sino-Japanese War got an education from a well-known school in China, and what happened to that school.

The following is what I gathered about my mother's secondary school at Guilin known as Hanmin Middle School 汉民中学. Hanmin is from Hu Hanmin 胡汉民, who was a right wing leader of Kuomintang 国民党 (KMT).

The principal and founder of the school Ren Zhongmin 任中敏 was the secretary of Hu Hanmin. He founded the school in 1937 at Nanjing, or Nanking, at that time the capital of the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek. He named the school Hanmin to commemorate Hu Hanmin, his old boss, who passed away in 1936 from brain hemorrhage. 

At the time of Dr Sun Yat-sen's passing in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek was in charge of the Nationalist army, while the Nationalist party KMT was under the control of a triumvirate consisting of Hu Hanmin on the right, Wang Jingwei 汪精卫 on the fence (he was a hero of the 1911 Revolution but later became a famous quisling by agreeing to act as the leader of the Japanese occupation's puppet government), and Liao Zhongkai 廖仲恺 on the left (husband of famous women's rights activist He Xiangning 何香凝, father of the famous Communist leaders Liao Chengzhi 廖承志 and Liao Mengxing 廖梦醒). Liao Zhongkai was assassinated shortly after the death of Dr Sun. Although the case was never solved, the prime suspect was Hu Hanmin, as he afterwards joined Chiang Kai-shek to purge the communists from the KMT (it is not a well-known fact that under Dr Sun, many communists including Mao and Zhou Enlai became members and executives of the KMT), during which the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were decimated and Mao's wife Yang Kaihui 杨开慧 was executed by firing squad for refusing to renounce the CCP and Mao. 

At the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), Principal Ren moved Hanmin Middle School from Nanjing----shortly before the Fall of Nanking and the infamous massacre by the Japanese army----to Guilin 桂林, the provincial capital of Guangxi 广西 in the south-west of China, where my mother attended the school. She probably went there in 1940, when she was just fourteen years old, by sea from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City 胡志明市) to Zhanjiang 湛江 (then known as Guangzhou Wan 广州湾), and then by land to Guilin. She went by herself without the approval of her father and was financed by her mother who had to sell some of her jewelry. At the time, the school received funding from Chiang's government and was renamed National Hanmin Middle School 汉民国立中学. It was probably the only middle school in China at the time with national status.

My mother returned to Saigon in 1948 for a one year break, granted by the school to all expatriates, most of whom had not seen their family for many years. During her stay in Saigon, my mother witnessed the escape of Tsinghua Professor Wang Zhou 王洲----then known as Wang Anzhou 王安洲----from the colonial police. At the time, the two families being from Wenchang 文昌----hometown of the Soong Sisters----lived in the same house. Wang Zhou was a young communist from a wealthy family. The police came knocking in the middle of the night. He escaped by the night-pot opening----through which people pushed out their excrement into the back alley for the poop collector----to Paris, where he became an expert in nuclear physics. Prof Wang returned to China in the eighties to teach at Tsinghua. My mother lost Prof Wang's phone number and couldn't confirm it but he probably still lives at the campus at the ripe old age of 90. After the one-year break, my mother was supposed to return to Guilin for continuing studies in 1949 but got stuck in Hong Kong during her transit (by sea from Saigon to Hong Kong, and then by land to Guilin) as Chiang's regime collapsed during that year. That's how my siblings and I ended up being born in Hong Kong. 

My mother and Bliss (my elder daughter) visiting Prof Wang Zhou (with his Russian wife) at Tsinghua in 2003

Prof Ren never left China despite his connections with the Nationalist government. He was much more of a scholar and educator than a politician. In addition to his not insignificant contributions to ancient Chinese literature, Ren was famous for being strict with his students. According to my mother----as it is not recorded elsewhere, but this is probably a true story----he expelled his own son, a handsome young man idolized by the teenage girls at the school, from Hanmin for committing a minor mischief. Then the old man personally carried his son's luggage to attend a lesser boarding school in the area. His son later joined the Nationalist air force and died during the Sino-Japanese War. It's unclear whether he died in training or in combat, but it was a dangerous profession with a high mortality rate in the first place. When the report of the son's death arrived at Hanmin, it was a sad day for Principal Ren and for everyone at the school who knew the young man.

After the establishment of the PRC in 1949, Hanmin Middle School became Guilin First Middle School 桂林市第一中学, making it the top rung school of the city if not the entire region. Ren continued educating and became professor of Chinese studies at Sichuan University. He returned to his hometown Yangzhou 扬州 to teach at Yangzhou University during the early eighties. Few people knew that Prof Ren came from the same city and was a fellow student as well as good friends with renowned writer/educator Zhu Ziqing 朱自清, whose famous essay "Shadow of My Father's Back" 背影 we learned as a part of secondary school syllabus in Hong Kong. Prof Ren passed away in 1991 aged 95. He is now fondly remembered by his students and colleagues, and a bronze bust of him was erected in the campus of Yangzhou University in 2007. ​

My mother never knew what happened to her middle school principal and, after I told her the rest of Prof Ren's story, regretted not having visited him before he passed away. Hanmin Middle School was highly influential for my mother's career as a teacher. She did not have her credentials when she started looking for teaching jobs in Hong Kong. When she applied at a private school and hoped that the principal of that school would believe her, it turned out that the principal's son was a fellow student at Hanmin, although several classes lower. The principal knew a lot about Hanmin from his son's letters, and my mother's description of the school checked out. She was hired on the spot, as Hanmin was a sort of ivy league school in those days, famous even outside of mainland China for churning out high quality graduates. Thanks to the principal's unselfish character, he would later sponsor my mother to take the Hong Kong Teacher's Certificate Exam, as she couldn't take it without any credentials. The certificate would allow my mother to teach at government schools at much better salaries and benefits as a government employee. It was a difficult exam and the principal's wife took it ten times over ten years before finally passing. My mother passed it on her first try. The rest is history.