4 ideas
Zhang Dafei was a young man from the Northeast whose father, a Shenyang police official, was killed by the Japanese. He joined the Chinese air force, wrote to the teenage Qi throughout the war, and died in air combat in 1945, shortly before Japan surrendered.
Military histories draw displacement as arrows on a map, and that compresses years of civilian flight into a single line. Qi recounts the retreat from Manchuria through Nanjing and Chongqing to Taiwan as a series of lived stages: schools rebuilt in new places, bombing raids, sickness, and families split apart. Read at that scale, the war's real cost shows up in interrupted lives and lost homes, not in battlefield outcomes.
Relocated schools kept teaching during the war, including Nankai Middle School in Chongqing and Wuhan University in Leshan. At Leshan, teachers such as Zhu Guangqian taught English Romantic poetry to students living under air raids. Qi argues that this continuity was a form of resistance, because it kept a cultural inheritance alive when territory could not be held. Her own lifelong vocation in literature grew directly out of this wartime classroom.
The memoir opens at the Julu River in Manchuria, where her father's side was defeated in Guo Songling's 1925 revolt, the start of the family's exile. It closes at Yakou Sea ("Mute Mouth Sea") in southern Taiwan, where the waves crash and then fall silent. The frame turns exile into an arc: grievances that were loud in youth are, by old age, absorbed into a witnessed quiet, and writing becomes the way a defeated, displaced generation speaks before it goes silent.