A shout from students at the front of the convoy made everyone strain to look ahead. They were within sight of Zhongmiao Village. Bathed in sunrise, whitewashed houses hugged the shoreline of a wide green lake. Small boats moved through rippling water, fishermen setting out for a day’s work. The village looked tranquil, untouched.

BY THE SHORES of Chaohu Lake, Zhongmiao Village was only a four-hour walk from the city of Hefei, a distance that now seemed to the students quite a reasonable distance for a day’s travel. Behind the village were hills covered in forests. The students learned there were scenic caves and hot springs nearby, and some were already making plans for excursions.

Their new lodgings were in a factory at the western corner of the village. Minghua 123 called it their “factory campus.” The owner had stripped out all the equipment and moved his manufacturing business to safety farther inland. The government then took it over to house universities. It was undeniably ugly, a collection of drafty buildings arranged around a large work yard of brown earth packed down as hard as concrete, the entire area enclosed by a brick wall topped with shards of broken glass. As if to compensate, the factory stood on a rise with a magnificent view of the lake.

Two warehouses, still smelling of raw cotton, would be their classrooms. Minghua 123’s library went into the third and smallest warehouse. Now emptied of machinery, the long factory building became both barn and storage room. The kitchen and dining hall were just large enough for their needs. At the far end of the yard were the workmen’s quarters, a dozen bunkhouses laid out in two rows on either side of a boardwalk, bathhouse at one end, outhouses at the other. These buildings now formed the men’s dormitory.

The large triple courtyard house, once the owner’s, was for faculty, families, and the female students. The traditional halls felt comfortingly familiar, tugged at memories of childhood holidays with elderly grandparents, of crossing courtyards to knock on an indulgent auntie’s door. Even the factory owner’s undistinguished rock garden, second-rate by any reckoning, offered solace.

There was no way to partition the warehouses into classrooms, so professors lectured as quietly as possible, their students sitting huddled in a circle around them, some on low stools, most on cold bare concrete.

One night a student chalked some words above a bunkhouse door: Hall of Idle Pastimes. The indignant residents soon scrubbed it off, but a day later, each bunkhouse sported a name. Hall of Contemplation, Moon Viewing Pavilion, Gallery of Refined Pleasures. Names that echoed memories of homes and gardens left behind. Someone nailed a wooden plank to the first bunkhouse, giving the boardwalk between bunkhouses a name: Scholars’ Lane.

The ugly oblong of industrial ground bolstered Minghua 123. A month of routine and studies, of feigning normal school days, while trying to forget they lived in exile.

Chapter 13