A trek into history

On Feb 19, 1938, a group of about 300 university students and 11 professors started off from Changsha, Central China's Hunan province, marching toward Kunming, Southwest China's Yunnan province, 1,600 kilometers away.

During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45), the Lugou Bridge Incident (also known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident) occurred on July 7, 1937, and as a result, Beiping (as Beijing was known at the time) and Tianjin fell to the Japanese invaders. In defiance of the occupying forces, Peking, Tsinghua and Nankai universities, located in the two cities, chose to move to China's interior to continue providing higher education despite the war. By November 1937, more than 1,400 students and 148 teachers had arrived in Changsha, where the three universities merged into Changsha Temporary University.

However, as the Japanese army began to approach Changsha, authorities again decided to move the university, this time further inland. Kunming was the destination chosen. Here, Changsha Temporary University transformed into the National Southwest Associated University, or Xinan Lianda, an institution like no other and which continued until 1946.

In Changsha, some students decided to join the army to fight against the Japanese. The others, heading for Kunming, were divided into a few groups. Female students, male students in poor health and most of the teachers traveled by rail and sea.

Another group, about 300 male students and 11 professors, formed the "Hunan-Guizhou-Yunnan Marching Brigade" and spent 68 days traveling across a long distance through three provinces, mainly on foot.

Eighty years later, in early April 2018, Yang Xiao, 36, carrying a 42-liter backpack, started his 41-day trek from Changsha, tracing the brigade's footprints. Three years later, his book To the Finest School I Know, documenting his journey, has finally arrived at bookstores across the country.

About 700 pages, Yang narrates the brigade's journey in detail, based on books, diaries, newspapers, periodicals and historical records he collected, as well as interviews he conducted with brigade members, their descendants and people who were familiar with Xinan Lianda.

Interwoven with this historical line is the record of his own trek－the current look of the mountains, rivers, roads, villages and towns that the brigade passed by, the sounds and smells of the land, people that he encountered, and his feelings and thoughts along the route.

A former journalist specializing in in-depth feature stories, Yang quit his job in the media in early 2016.After a year spent producing videos, he found he still preferred writing compared with other new media formats, but features did not satisfy him anymore. He aspired to write a book. He had two topics in mind, but in early 2018, following his research on the Chengdu-Kunming Railway, he found a more interesting topic, Xinan Lianda.

Graduating from Nankai University, Yang knew a little of Xinan Lianda. There were already many books and studies about it. To those who wanted to know about the university, Yang recommended Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution by US historian John Israel, a tome he read thoroughly before starting the trek.

His journalistic habits urged him to interview people connected with the legendary school and, in Kunming, he met Zhang Manling, author of Xinan Lianda Xingsilu ("the spirits of Xinan Lianda").Zhang suggested that he should write a book about the trek, that is, "how they got there", an area of the remarkable story which few books had covered.

After some in-depth research, Yang immediately embarked on the journey to "outflank himself and create himself", especially in the internet age, when procrastination prevails and overthinking often stymies people's actions－not to mention that making such a journey on foot these days, more often than not, is the preserve of certain extreme sports types and self-proclaimed adventurers.

By walking and writing, he tried to understand the trek's influence on the intellectuals in the brigade, while at the same time, with the long walk, he was trying to find a solution to his own anxiety, deal with his relationship with life and to become a real writer.

"The creation of this book allowed me to understand the concept of family and homeland," he says.

In the opening chapter of the book, Yang quotes Israel, saying" (During the early war years in particular) before cynicism and disillusionment set in, seeking the truth was the very reason for going to Kunming".

He further writes, "But this doesn't mean they (brigade members) were not struggling. I am curious that, apart from legends, what their daily life was like. What were their hobbies and prejudices? How did they understand and deal with the crisis of both the country and themselves? How did they shape their emotional structure? On their way to Kunming, they came into contact with people of different ethnic groups in Southwest China every day. So, how did this interact with their previous understandings of 'nation' and 'people'?"

But Yang does not provide straightforward answers in the book. Instead of offering analysis or a narrative that leads to any certain conclusions, he tends to present historical details and describe his observations.

"Talking about nonfiction writing, anthropologist Xiang Biao said that it should 'increase the weight of description, and let the reader decide'. I realized that this is a method that I have always used in writing," Yang said during a book event in late May.

Xinan Lianda evolved out of Changsha Temporary University, so "temporary" sets the underlying mood for the book.

"Because it was temporary, it could change or dissolve anytime, but with certain decisions and actions, a temporary university ultimately became a legendary university that ran for eight years," Yang tells China Daily.

As a result, he spends seven chapters describing the temporary university, how students and professors reached Changsha, their struggles and anxieties, and their daily lives.

As a writer who stresses the importance of context, especially in a time when 140-word micro blogs and short videos have become mainstream media products, by piecing together information from diaries, letters, historical records, newspapers, periodicals and books, Yang creates a vivid historical context of Changsha in late 1937.

Readers can envision the simple meals eaten by the students and professors (cold porridge for breakfast, boiled cabbage and radish with several slices of meat for lunch), their dormitories (shaky wooden floors and stairs, dimly lit and humid), daily activities (walks, sightseeing, chats, lectures, sheltering at the sound of an air-raid siren, and so on), as well as the streets, restaurants, billboards and products of the era.

Meanwhile, through first-person description, Yang presents the current site of the temporary university, creating a sense of time and space intermingling.

"Long-form writing allows readers to immerse themselves in a certain context to better understand a particular situation from different perspectives," Yang says.

As Changsha became increasingly dangerous, the brigade was formed and marched toward Kunming. Professor Wen Yiduo told the students: "You are especially privileged people; you should take a look at the lives of ordinary people."

They climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and sometimes slept side by side with coffins－even spending the night in a supposedly haunted house. They woke up at dawn and slept late, sometimes seeing off the threat of bandits in between. They sang, danced and played cards. One student, Liu Zhaoji, collected more than 2,000 folk songs along the way, and another, named Zha Liangzheng, would tear the page out of an English dictionary after he had memorized its content.

They finally reached Kunming, lean and tanned, looking very much like the soldiers returning home after defeating the Japanese army in Taierzhuang, Shandong province.

In the book, as Yang's trek continues, his anxieties are gradually disclosed, that is, "the seemingly everlasting adolescence" of a generation born between 1978 and 1985.

Growing up at a time when the country's economy has soared, Yang says his generation tends to believe that everything will last, so that they wasted a lot of time trying different things without knowing what they really wanted to do.

"But if we really want to 'create' something and want to have our own 'lifelong cause', it needs strong minds, endurance and a joint mental and physical effort," he writes.

Traveling the 1,600 km, followed by the sorting of voluminous materials related to Xinan Lianda and then a period of writing that lasted from September 2018 to March 2021, the three-year project finally provides an answer to Yang's biggest question: What am I going to do?

"Now I can call myself a real writer."