Reunion reckoning

What a difference 33 years make! gathering of my college class was full of happiness, but more importantly, it was an embodiment of the dramatic changes country has witnessed

I was not yet 16 when I first met them, and in the four ensuing years they became the elder sisters and brothers I never had.

I'm talking about my undergraduate class, which reconvened last weekend after a separation of 33 years.

"The Class of 78", as we call it in Chinese, is a misnomer. It refers to the year we entered college rather than the one we graduated. Well, we actually do have another word for the English equivalent, which is jie and tends to be mixed up with ji. Anyway, the correct translation should be "the Class of 82", but I'll use "78 Ji" in this column to avoid confusion and also as a shorthand for "the freshmen class of 78".

The "78 Ji" of the Foreign Languages Department of Hangzhou University, now part of the more prestigious Zhejiang University, had an enrollment of about 250 students. A third of us have since emigrated overseas, possibly facilitated by our language ability.

As the reunion was arranged at short notice and did not fall on a holiday such as Christmas, those outside China, with two exceptions, were unable to join us. But they had mini-reunions of their own. The party in Bayside, New York, seemed big enough to fill a house.

Small class

Speaking of class size, I remember we were divided into 12 classes and the class I was in, Class 2, had 22 students. We spent an inordinate amount of time together, not only attending classes but going to movies, picnics and sightseeing as a group. This was possible because there were very few "big lectures" we could elect.

The graduate school in University of California at Berkeley, which I attended a decade later, was about the same size, 270 or so. But for every course I took, I had different classmates, which made the sibling-like bonding impossible.

This and one's age. As a teenager one has very different notions about friendships. Suffice to say, they tend to be more long-lasting. Inadvertent as it might have been, some of them wielded deep influence on me in shaping my personality and my aesthetics in my formative years. And I'm forever thankful.

The biggest jolt is the change in appearance, or the lack thereof in some cases. One classmate who used to look like a rock star, lean and almost gaunt, now has taken on the physique of a respected professor. Overall, we men have aged 33 years, give or take, while women seem to have matured at about half the rate.

A major surprise is girls from Suzhou, who have retained their youthfulness to such a remarkable degree that Hebe, the Greek goddess of youth, must have blessed that city or be hiding among its canals and gardens.

Another revelation is the loyalty in employment. Many have been working for one employer all their careers. Some made a few adjustments in the early years of graduation and then worked until their retirement without shifting gears again. To members of the young generation who hop from job to job, we must look doggedly conservative.

The two common jobs among us are teaching and international trade, both of which use our language proficiency. Not only do my schoolmates teach English across China, but a few of them do it in the United States and Africa.

Hot trend

School reunions have been a popular subject in homegrown movies. Two of China's recent blockbusters, Lost in Hong Kong and Goodbye, Mr. Loser, both feature an encounter with former classmates as a key plot device. The male protagonist, as it goes, had his eye on a beautiful fellow student, but being the nerd type, he lost her to the jock. Now he has regained enough confidence to win her back.

It may sound melodramatic, but there is some truth to this scenario. With the country upgrading its communication and transportation infrastructure at breakneck speed, reunions of this kind have become commonplace - our long-overdue gathering was facilitated by WeChat and several fellow students with extraordinary leadership skills - and, with them, the possibility of finding something (or someone) one had missed out in the first round. There's a joke that school reunions are homewreckers.

If it were a 10-year anniversary, the dynamics might have lent to such temptation. But 33 years have mellowed us. Three marriages came out of our small class of 22, marriages that were the envy of everyone when the glimmer of attraction was first known. Of course there were dashed hopes and fruitless pursuits, but overall we seem to have settled in a good balance, emotionally and otherwise.

As one of the youngest in class I was the messenger who carried Cupid's arrow, so to speak, back and forth. (There was no texting back then, or even telephones in our dorm building.) So I had a ringside seat to some of the exchanges of sparks.

In the post-dinner party this time, there was quite a lot of flirtation, mainly by the alpha males who have kept their bodies fit. It was all in the spirit of fun.

Memory can be selective. I proposed a game for our small class, for which everyone must recount one incident about other classmates. It turned out the protagonists in the stories had all forgotten what had stuck in others' minds. They didn't recall a single detail.

Two of them mentioned that I was reading a book by Stanislavsky, the godfather of method acting, and added they had a hunch I would swerve to showbiz. I swore to Buddha I had never touched such a book. Anyway, now I have something to defend myself with if grilled about my credentials as a director trapped in the body of a critic.

Someone gave an impromptu speech, thanking Deng Xiaoping and his reform policy for changing the course of our lives. The audience got a little fidgety for that touch of over-politicizing. But deep in our hearts, we agreed with him.

We were the first batch to receive a college education after the tumultuous years. Our paths have run parallel with the course of country, its growing prosperity and occasional bumps. If you compare the before-and-after photos, we look older but we have more self-assurance.

Contact the writer at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 12/04/2015 page30)