This morning May 16, 2023, when I logged into LinkedIn, a message alert popped up. It came from my friend Mr Chin in Taiwan. He informed me that Mr Fu, a distinguished professor of English, had passed away on April 29, at the advanced age 100. Reading the message, I found all memories of the gentleman flooding back.

I came upon the name, Fu YiChin, in an English learning and translation journal titled The World of English, published by The Commercial Press Beijing, probably in 2003. That year, I got my first Windows PC but had not been wired by then. One issue of the monthly publication carried an essay on the art of translation contributed by Mr Fu. From the short bio of the author, I learned he was born in Yunxian and then was located in Taiwan. I am a Yunxian native. All the schools I attended myself, from primary to college, had their names beginning with the Chinese character, Yun. This discovery left me curious about the man. My high school is one of the most prestigious in the area with its roots dating back to ancient times. I reckoned Mr Fu must be a YYHS alumnus. When I turned to some senior colleagues, however, none of them knew better.

In the autumn 2014, I received through email a comment from my English blog, Shengliver’s Garden, which I started in 2005. The reader gave very positive feedback on the English I used. Having browsed through some entries, he learned I am a Yunxian native. Not only that, but I was teaching English at the high school which he, as a teenager, had attended.

Thus, our online interaction kicked off. We corresponded in English by email. This friend was Mr Fu YiChin. For the next couple of years, we had a lot of email exchanges discussing the English language and the home county. When Mr Fu discovered I had attended Yunyang Teachers College, he got very excited. It turned out that one of his primary school classmates, Mr Leng Yuchun, had been on the faculty of the institute. I decided to help the two childhood buddies get in touch.

I contacted the admin office of YYTC and got the phone number of Mr Leng’s son. One weekend, I paid a visit to Mr Leng Yuchun at his son’s flat. The gentleman was already in his late eighties. After I told him about my encounter with Mr Fu online, Mr Leng beamed and shared a lot about their childhood and student days. Before I bade farewell, he asked me to pass his regards to another of his former schoolmates, Mr Chin Chiu-Cheng, who had been working at the same uni as Mr Fu on the island, Taiwan Normal University. According to Leng, Chin, a Yunyang native too, had helped him gain access to some valuable historical archives stored in a number of libraries on the island. Those archives, dating back to the Ming Dynasty, had been transferred to the island in the 1940s. The photocopied files Mr Chin had posted to him across the straits played an irreplaceable role in Mr Leng’s research into Yunyang’s status in the Ming Dynasty.

During the interview with Mr Leng, I took a couple of photos of him, which were later sent over to Mr Fu by email. One detail Mr Leng revealed about his trip to the university in the 1940s left me in awe of the octogenarian. According to him, he, together with some other students, travelled on foot across the mountainous terrains of western Hubei (Yunxian, Fangxian, Shennongjia and Yichang) to Enshi. The eastern and the central parts of the province were already lost to the Japanese. The journey took them roughly for ten days.

Very gladly I passed Mr Leng’s message to Mr Fu. In Taiwan, the Fus and the Chins had a get-together in February, 2015, celebrating the resumption of their contact with their roots. Both retired, it had been almost 15 years since their last meeting. Later, Mr Chin’s son Patrick called Mr Leng’s son on the phone. In Patrick’s childhood, both his father and Mr Fu had been professors of the same university. The two families had been very close to each other. In fact, they had resided in the same tower block in those years, one family directly above the other.

Mr Chin, Mr Fu and Mr Leng are all YYHS alumni. During the War Against the Japanese Aggression, all three finished high school at YYHS (called Hubei Provincial No 8 High School then) and entered college in the early 1940s. The oldest of the three, Mr Chin finished college in Wuhan. Mr Fu and Mr Leng, however, attended uni at Enshi, the wartime capital of Hubei Province. Wuhan by then had been occupied by the Japanese army.

The War Against the Japanese Aggression was followed by the Civil War between the Communists and the Kuomintang government. The KMT were losing so fast that within a couple of years the Communists had large swathes of the country under their control. Towards the end of the Civil War, the KMT was forced to retreat to Taiwan. A lot of government officials, academia and students joined the mass exodus. Mr Chin and Mr Fu, still students, were among the outgoing crowd. Hence, Mr Leng was, from then on, cut off from his former schoolmates.

In the 1980s, when ice across the straits started to thaw, Mr Chin came back to Yunyang to visit his folks. Life was just beginning to pick up on the mainland, thanks to Reform and Opening Up advocated by Mr Deng Xiaoping. In his ancestral hamlet, however, the villagers still had no access to tap water. An ordinary professor, Mr Chin donated generously to have a drinking water system installed in the home village.

In 1992, Mr Fu came back to Yunyang on a visit to his family and friends. I joined the YYHS faculty in 1991. At the time I seemed to hear of his visit but there was no way that we could meet. Mr Fu and his former mates had a group photo shot at the newly-built first bridge across Hanjiang. I often took a stroll on the bridge in the evening in those years. What luck!

In the early autumn of 2018, Patrick flew over to Wuhan on a business trip. He took the opportunity to come back to his fatherland. We met at the hotel where he was staying. I learned that his father Mr Chin Sr had passed away earlier that year.

During our meeting at the hotel, I learned something shocking about the Chins, which speaks volumes about the unshaken friendship between his father and Mr Leng. On Porridge Day (lunar December 8) 1947, 9 members of the Chins (3 adults and 6 children) were stoned to death in what is known as “Class Struggle” of the formative years of the new republic, when the rich and the privileged left over from the former regime were targeted by the new government as Enemies of the People. Their properties were confiscated. In worst cases, they lost their lives. The Chins had been well-off landlords and merchants before the Liberation. Mr Chin Sr was still a uni student when his family was being persecuted. Therefore, he was ignorant of what was befalling his kinsfolk. He was on the way to his hometown from his college for winter vacation when Mr Leng, who had got the news of his family, intercepted Mr Chin and turned him away. Otherwise, Mr Chin would have suffered the same fate.

After 2018, the correspondence between Mr Fu and me gradually dwindled. I sent seasonal greetings to him, but there came no response eventually. I felt concerned about his health.

Mr Fu’s academic achievements in the English language are dazzling. He took charge of revising the widely-circulated Far East English Chinese Dictionary after Mr Liang Shih-Chiu passed away. He was one of the very first Chinese language editors of the renowned bilingual Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD), which has benefited English language learners in the Mandarin-speaking parts of the world. I used a pirated edition of OALD in my college days (1989—1991), with Mr Fu’s name printed on the editorial page. Regrettably, I knew nothing at all about his background then. My online encounter with the master in 2014 and our subsequent communication inspired me beyond measure. I have been pursuing English studies over the years. Since our first meeting online, my English language proficiency has been elevated to new heights, thanks to the inspiration and the fresh motivation.

The two gentlemen, Mr Chin and Mr Fu, did not witness the reunification of the motherland. It is my personal wish that the issue could ultimately be resolved peacefully. The Chinese do not lack wisdom.

When this short memoir was posted on the blog for the first time, I thought that Mr Leng was still up and running. I was wrong. Some friend kindly reminded me that Mr Leng had passed away too. The three childhood buddies are thus reunited up in heaven.

May Mr Fu, Mr Chin and Mr Leng rest in peace.