Interview with Dr. Lucian W. Pye

June 19, 1994

Lucian W. Pye - LP
Mary Lewis Grow - MLG

MLG: What are your earliest memoirs of Fenchow?

LP: The American Board--this is the Congregationalist Mission compound in Fenchow--was one-quarter of the city. It was not a full quarter. I guess it was more of an eighth. But it was a quarter of the city. The city was right there. We could climb the wall, go inside the wall, go up to the top of it. It was a large city wall. The top of it was as wide as a two lane highway. It was one of the beautiful old city walls like the Peking city wall. Of course, that’s all been torn down now. In the compound, they had one part of it as the hospital. It was the largest hospital in the province. It’s still an important hospital. Then there was the boy’s school – a boarding school as well as a day school, but a lot of boarders came in from throughout the province – and a girl’s school. It was also like that. There was also a large church. The total school complex ran right up from kindergarten right through the high school. It was a feeder program. The better students came out of that and would be sent down to Yenching or to Bei Ta or to other universities. The two schools, the one in Fenchow and the one in Taiku--the Taiku school was connected of course with the Oberlin-in-Shansi--were the preeminent high schools in the province. The Carleton-in-China reps that came out would be English teachers mainly. The results was that you had a rather impressive quality of instruction. The teachers were a mix of Americans and Chinese. Most of the teachers gradually became Chinese. The shock to me when I visited Fenchow after the current opening to China, my wife and I went out to Fenchow and it was really a strange experience because the dominant buildings are still all there . . .

MLG: This was in 1973 that you first went back?

LP: I think so, though I’m not sure. This may have been ’80. It was a little later. The first time back was ’72. I forget the details. I’ll look those up maybe. We went back and Arthur Hummell was our ambassador in China at that time. Arthur Hummel was also born in Fenchow. We were little children together, so I knew him. I was also [childhood friends with] Teddy Watson, Dr. Watson’s son. A whole little community of children there. But let me get back to the description of going back there because when I went back, if you raised my eyes and looked at the buildings, they were all there and very much the same. Some of them, like our house, turned out to have been broken up. Where we had lived as just my mother and myself now had been carved up and there were eight or so families, each one crowded into a different room. Also, they had filled the whole compound with little one story – even less than a story, barely – rabbit warren of housing. Just filling it in. In that sense, it didn’t quite seem the same.
I was very distressed when we went to the school because during the Cultural Revolution, they had destroyed all the books. We went into the library and there were stacks or shelves completely empty. Just one little shelf was half-full of books. That’s all they had. We went into where the physics and chemistry lab had been. There were slate tables that were there from before. No running water. They showed us the equipment and there was just one or two beakers. There was nothing. It was really pathetic. One little board where they had wiring for parallel and serial wiring. There just wasn’t any physics there. There wasn’t any chemistry there that could do anything. In the library itself, you could see the radiators were disconnected. In the middle of the room, there was a single stove and a stove pipe that went across the large reading room and out the window. It was pathetically run down.
Now, I had not told the Chinese that my father and my sister had both been buried outside. We had a summer place. All the Americans had a summer place out at a place called Y¸ Tao Ho. There, about seven miles outside up in the foothills of the mountains, it was cooler in the summertime. I hadn’t told them that my parents were buried there because I felt that the cemetery probably was gone by now. They might feel it was inconvenient for us to come because they would not want to reveal that the cemetery had been desecrated. But, the first night we were there at the banquet they gave us, the government official that was senior person there said tomorrow we’ll go out to Y¸ Tao Ho and we’ll plant a tree in memory of your father. I was very moved. We went out, we planted the tree, and three old codgers from the village came out and the first told about how my mother came in the spring to open the cottage. He offered to clean the well out. My mother said, “No, no that’s a man’s job. Two men.”
He said, “No, no, I could do it.” Sort of a Maoist spirit there.
The second said, “I used to go hunting with you.” And he described my .22 rifle and so on. Sure enough, we must have. I played with these Chinese kids all the time when I was young there. Needless to say, I don’t remember the particular individuals.
The third one said, “I was a ball-boy when you were playing tennis.” He kept remembering who I played tennis with. There were some Eurasian girls that were the top tennis players and I’d played with them. He remembered that.
So, that was quite a vivid thing. The early childhood experience there [at Y¸ Tao Ho] was a lot of fun. It gave me an interesting perspective on Chinese children because I had to live with a lot of discipline. I had to come home at lunchtime. I had to do different things at different times. This was American, and Americans have to do that. That’s just the nature of being American. Chinese kids have nothing. They’re free to do whatever they want. They had to look after the goats, maybe. But they could go out and look after the goats all day. They didn’t have to come home. They didn’t have to be this, they didn’t have to that. So, I had this picture of Chinese being much freer. Also, my Chinese friends all the way through were divided into these two categories. One would be the lower class people who were free. I can remember one summer when our model governor, Yen Hsi-shan, wanted to impose universal education and force everybody to got to school. He was going to give them books and give the a little one suit of clothing or something like that. I can remember the village friends were so upset about this and have to go to school and awful it was. I remember shedding tears for them because they were going to become just like Americans and suffer. There was sort of the Huck Finn spirit, I guess.

MLG: Did you grow up bilingual?

LP: Oh yeah. I was completely bilingual. But, I later lost a lot of my Chinese. But getting back to the story of returning to Y¸ Tao, we planted the tree there then I said I’d like to put up a stone here or something, somekind of memorial thing and indicate who it was for. I asked how much this would be and then I left what I thought was a reasonable amount of money with them. Nothing happened. A year or so later, I didn’t hear anything, so I just assumed that was that. But then someday in the mail, I got a letter with a photograph showing what they had done. They had put up a little stone thing around and they had put up a marker. But they also had indicated how much it had cost which was kind of interesting. I quickly contacted somebody I knew who happened to be in Peking at the time, raised with them to send the money out to Fenchow. I paid this other person in dollars and they changed it into XXXX. Then, I thanked them, but I felt I should do something more than that and therefore I kept thinking about that poor library with almost no books at all. So, I decided to send out a Chinese edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica to the school. About six months later, I got a letter of appreciation in which they said they would carefully preserve the books so that when I and my children came to visit, they’ll be in perfect shape. I’m afraid I didn’t succeed in what I wanted it to do.

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