One Pleasure Remains

Hua Chung is a Chinese refugee university. Driven from Wuchang to Kweilin by Japanese bombers, it now carries on deep in the hills of southern Yunnan Prov ince. From that inflation-blighted remote ness, a Chinese-American couple recently sent the U.S. an eye-opening report. It appears in the current Atlantic Monthly.

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P:At Hua Chung it is impossible to buy a book or subscribe to a periodical. Most of the students do not own a single textbook.

P:The scant supply of electric power makes physical and chemical experiments all but impossible, even with the equipment and materials salvaged in flight.

P:Not a few teachers, unable to make both ends meet, have gone into business on the side. One professor helps his wife run a restaurant; another sells typewriter ribbons and razor blades. The more adventurous speculate in cotton yarn, dyes and other articles of value.

Despite the hardships, the Atlantic's authors have some hopeful things to report.

Ruth Earnshaw, Philadelphia-born wife of Professor Lo Chuan-fang: "Out here we sometimes indulge in the notion that we college teachers are the forgotten men and women of the war. Those of us who feel that the reasons for which we entered the profession are still valid are deter mined to stick it out. . . . We know that China's war is not solely against the Japa ese; it is almost equally against ignorance and poverty, and our battle on the education front will go on long after the last shot is fired at the invader." Professor Lo (University of Chicago, Ph.D.): "When a boy comes to you for guidance . . . when a girl wants your advice . . . when some extracurricular de mand is made upon your time and energy to help students solve their peculiar social problems and religious perplexities, then you feel you are serving a generation of hopeful, intelligent, and unspoiled youth, who may yet create a new order out of the chaos that we and our parents have brought into the world.

"Mencius, the ancient Chinese political philosopher, once said that the training of men of talents was one of the pleasures of a superior man. That pleasure still remains with the refugee professor in spite of war and poverty."

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