My father was only fourteen when he left home for boarding school. After high school, he went on to Nanking University. When war broke out, students who were able to return home did so, but by then many could not even contact their families. Father felt he had to stay with his professors and school no matter what. A university education was his sworn duty to his family. And so when Nanking University evacuated, he left with them.

He traveled with classmates, professors, school administrators, and servants. They walked beside donkey carts piled high with luggage, lab equipment, library books, and kitchenware. They traveled in a less-than-organized manner, often breaking off into smaller groups depending on what transportation they could find. Sometimes they split up with plans no more definite than to meet at a certain town in a few days’ time. Some students hitched rides, others climbed on trains, but most walked. They stopped wherever it seemed they might be safe for a few days and always tried to carry on with classes.

Buddhist and Daoist temples could be found in every village and throughout the countryside. They were the most suitable accommodations since temple halls could be used as both classrooms and sleeping quarters. After long hours of walking, the students would sling off their heavy canvas backpacks, unroll straw mats and blankets onto cold stone floors, and settle down to sleep. My father dreaded the Daoist temples because of their giant demon statues, deities with protruding eyes and enormous fangs, painted in bright colors. Sometimes when he woke in the early hours of the morning, my father would open his eyes to a red-painted guardian from the gates of hell glaring down at him. Decades later, he still suffered nightmares of demons trying to drag him into the underworld.

When he thought back to those days on the road, my father said that to describe what they did as “fleeing” was ridiculous. He estimated they probably covered no more than eight or ten miles a day, a small distance to put between them and an invading army. But somehow through all this, my father never felt as though he was truly in danger. Since he and his classmates all suffered the same hardships, he simply accepted the constant hunger and fatigue. With the self-centered optimism of youth, he believed he and his classmates were safe as long as they obeyed their teachers.

But from time to time, a student would disappear and there would be rumors that they had slipped away to enlist or had been murdered by the opposing side. The character of the bold and beautiful Wang Jenmei is based on one of my father’s classmates, a young man who was murdered during the journey, drowned in a lake. Decades later, my father still suffered nightmares in which he had been captured by Communist spies (in his dreams it was always the Communists) who were going to murder him.