In memory of Dr. Chingling Tai
致敬愛的戴慶玲老師
Noah Arthur Weber 蔚寧, Class of 2014
Translated by the author and Qiwen Zhu 朱启文
I write from my home on the campus of National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan, where I am studying a Chinese-language master’s degree in Taiwan Literature. Just before I moved here two years ago, Dr. Tai told me that this school was her alma mater. Hers was a very different Taipei from mine—forget Taipei 101, back then most of bustling Xinyi District would’ve been farmland. But now and then she must have admired the gentle Jingmei River flowing through green Muzha, just as I am doing from out my window now.
Many have written biographical sketches of this remarkable woman. A 2007 travel piece in St. Louis Magazine recounts her 1977 trip to the Chinese mainland she considered home, her family having been among those millions who fled the Chinese Civil War and Communist Revolution of the late 1940s. In 2014, on the occasion of her retirement, I wrote a piece for the Prep News detailing her education, teaching, and activism, including her time as the first Asian-American representative for the Missouri Community Service Commission. A recent Prep News article has gathered the reflections of faculty regarding Dr. Tai’s legacy as an educator. I would like to join these teachers in sharing some more personal reflections here; I was in her class every weekday for four years—the only teacher I’ve ever had so much time with.
My first class at SLUH was with Dr. Tai. In neat long columns of five or six sat thirty-one of us—one more than the technical maximum but we joked that overpopulation was befitting of Chinese class. She walked in briskly at the bell, set some things down on her desk and said “Nimen hao”—“Hello (to multiple people)”. I’d heard of “Ni hao” for “Hello” but knew nothing of this mysterious “men” in the middle—she wrote all three characters on the blackboard and high school began.
“This year we will go on a journey together,” she said on that first day, walking over to the second-floor windows that faced the Planetarium and Forest Park beyond. “First, I will walk us to the Science Center. Next, I will lead us into the park.” Then she turned to us. “By the end of the year, I’ll be at the zoo. Whether you follow is up to you. Some of you might still be in this room.”
Her tough love was renowned and rarely let up during class time. If that rowdy room of thirty-one fifteen-year-old boys went too far, we’d find out. Her sentence quizzes required we translate short phrases she read from English into Chinese; if our attitudes had not been right, we’d groan as the sentences grew undiagrammable: “The man—the fat, happy man—asked his son to tell the—long-haired reporter about the golden—the heavy, golden—trophy he won at the—rugby match a few years ago at Christmas.”
But those who knew her best knew she had, as the Chinese saying goes, “A tongue like a knife but a heart soft like tofu” (I think she even taught us that phrase with some recognition). Many students saw that heart on the trips she led to China, which were annual or near annual in the years before I reached Oakland Avenue. In my time at SLUH, her heart came out most in the Chinese language competitions that she led us to around the city. They had become common as more St. Louis schools were setting up Mandarin programs in the early 2010s, usually with Dr. Tai’s help.
Once, when we were carting a keyboard to Clayton to sing at the St. Louis Modern Chinese School, I joked she should let me drive her car. I did not expect her to promptly toss me the keys to her Mercedes Benz. Suddenly terrified, I death-gripped the steering wheel and stayed ten mph under the limit. And there was Dr. Tai in the passenger’s seat, gently singing along to her Whitney Houston CD. “There’s no one better than Whitney,” she said quietly.
At another talent show, she taught me to woo the judges by telling them during my Chinese speech that the first time I saw a Chinese gourd flute hulusi it was “Love at first sight.” As I recall, she wanted me to take the corny humor further, elaborating on how hulusi was like a girlfriend to me. “I think ‘Love at first sight’ is enough,” I replied. I practiced the new four-character idiom before serenading the crowd with my shaky rendition of “Bamboo Under the Moonlight.” To this day, when I read “Love at first sight” in Chinese I think of her acting as matchmaker between me and my gourd flute. In our more recent conversations, Dr. Tai would still ask about my hulusi. My progress in that regard has not been storied, but I managed to croak out my signature song over FaceTime a few years ago for my sole fan.
Back then we paraded around town with her and had a blast. We dragon danced at the Botanical Gardens. We played jazz and The Butterfly Lovers in front of Erin Bode for the Chinese program’s Fiftieth Anniversary. My classmates and I won several showcases under her direction, which gave a few of us the chance to travel to China.
I went to China twice because of Dr. Tai. The first time, she called me at my home to tell me another classmate who had won a talent show could no longer take his reward journey. “Everything is taken care of financially, I just need to know if you have a passport,” she said. The second time, she personally covered most of my costs. That second trip was a homestay exchange at the Nanjing Foreign Language School with three other students, the trip on which my host father gave me the Chinese name I still use, Weining. It also included Dr. Tai’s legendary 36-hour visit to Nanjing; on one weekend she flew in from St. Louis, held a meeting with the school administration, treated us to a fabulous vegetarian banquet at Nanjing’s famous Jiming Temple, and then flew out of town to teach on Monday. Such things felt nearly normal with her.
There are not many high schools in America that boast a library room filled with precious Chinese artwork. Indeed, there are relatively few high schools in America with Chinese programs at all, let alone with roots as deep as the one at SLUH. I am pleased, if not surprised, to hear of the new Ching-ling Tai Fund for Advanced Chinese Language and Culture Studies that Dr. Tai has left behind. And I trust that as SLUH’s next generation of Mandarin students takes advantage of that fund, they will remember that these opportunities are not random.
Meanwhile, the Jingmei River rolls on outside my window. You said we’d go on a journey together, but who knew.
--
我在台北政治大學的家中寫下本文。我如今在這裡攻讀全中文課程的台灣文學碩士。兩年前，在我快要搬到這裡的時候，戴老師曾告訴我這裡是她的母校。她所認識的台北與我認識的很不一樣，別說台北一零一，就連繁華的信義區當時都是田野。但她一定偶爾也欣賞過流經青翠木柵的景美溪水潺湲，就像我現在從窗外看到的一樣。
有許多人為這位杰出的女人寫過傳記文章。2007年《聖路易斯雜誌》的一篇旅行文章敘述了她1977年的中國大陸之行。她認為那才是她的家鄉，因為她們是那些逃離1940年代末的動亂的數百萬人中的一家。2014年，在她退休之際，我為校報寫了一篇文章，介紹了她的教育背景、教學經驗和社區服務經歷，尤其是她作為密蘇里州社區服務委員會的第一位亞裔代表人的事跡。最近一篇校報文章收集了教師們對戴老師的一些紀念。在此，我想分享一些個人的回憶。那四年除了週末，我每天都在上戴老師的課，我跟她相處的時間遠遠超過了我人生任何其他老師。
我在高中的第一堂課就是戴老師的課。在整齊的五到六人長列中，我們坐了三十一個人。這比原則上的上限多了一名同學，我們便開玩笑說人口過多問題只不過是漢語課的中國特色罷了。她在鈴聲響起時就輕快地走了進來，把一些東西放在她的桌子上向我們說一句「你們好」。在此之前我有聽過「你好」，但對中間這個神秘的「們」字我還一無所知。她在黑板上寫了下這三個字給我們看。高中就這樣開始了。
「今年我們將一起去旅行」，她那天跟我們一邊說著、一邊走到面向天文館和森林公園的窗戶邊。「首先，我將帶你們去科學館。接下來，我將帶領你們走到公園裡。」然後她轉向我們說，「到了學期末，我就會走到公園裡的動物園了。你們是否跟得上，完全取決於你們自己。你們其中應該有一部分人可能還停留在這個課堂裡吧。」
她以她嚴厲的愛而聞名。如果那三十一個十五歲的吵鬧小男孩做得太過火，她不會不讓我們知道。比如她的「句子測試」要求我們把她用英語唸出來的短句翻譯成中文；如果我們對她的態度不對，我們馬上就會看到那些句子變的越來越難懂：「那個男人——那個胖乎乎而且很快樂的男人——讓他的兒子告訴那個長髮記者他覺得他在幾年前的聖誕節的時候在一場——橄欖球——比賽中贏得的金色——金色而且很重的獎杯如何。」
然而一旦你熟悉了戴老師，尤其是課堂外的戴老師，你就會發現她是典型的「刀子嘴豆腐心」（我想她教我們這句話的時候應該有一些認同吧）。在我來到SLUH之前，許多同學就在她帶領的每年一次中國旅行中感覺到了她這顆溫暖的「豆腐心」。而在我自己就讀SLUH的日子裡，最能夠感受到她的溫柔的一面就是在我們參加中文比賽的時候。2010年代初期，由於聖路易斯越來越多的高中設立了普通話課程（通常在戴老師的培養和幫助下）這種漢語水平比賽和才藝表演才變得越來越普遍。
我記得有一次，當我們推著電子鋼琴去學校附近的中文學校唱歌的時候，我開玩笑說讓我來開她的車吧。沒想到她馬上就把她的賓士車鑰匙扔給我。我突然感到很緊張，死死抓住了方向盤，將速度控制在限速十mph以下。戴老師坐在副駕駛座上，輕輕地唱著她的惠特妮休斯頓CD。「沒有人唱得比惠特妮好」，她輕聲說。
在另一個才藝表演中，她教我如何討好評委，讓我告訴他們我第一次看到中國的葫蘆絲的時候就是「一見鍾情。」在我的記憶中，她還希望我進一步發揮這種老套幽默，讓我強調對我來說葫蘆絲就像一個女朋友一樣。「我想 “一見鍾情” 就夠了吧」我回答說。我練習了這個新的四字成語，然後說完了我的小演講以後爲大家顫抖地吹出《月光下的鳳尾竹》。如今，我每次讀到「一見鍾情」四個字都會想到戴老師作為我與葫蘆絲的媒人。在我們近幾年的談話中，戴老師仍然問起我的葫蘆絲。我這十年中在樂器上並沒有過什麼進步，但幾年前我在FaceTime上成功地呱呱吹出我那首「招牌歌」給我唯一的葫蘆絲粉絲聽。
她總是願意帶著我們在大小活動拋頭露面，而且我們玩得很開心。我們在植物園裡跳過龍舞。我們為了慶祝學校中文項目五十週年在當地名人音樂家Erin Bode面前演湊爵士樂和《梁祝》。我的同學們和我自己在她的指導下贏得了幾次才藝展示，這讓我們一些人有機會去中國旅行。
我高中的兩次中國旅行都要感謝戴老師的傾情幫助。第一次，她打電話到我家裡告訴我另一個在才藝表演中獲獎的同學無法參加他的獎勵之旅，多了一個位置。她說「財務上一切都安排好了，我只需要知道你是否有護照。」第二次，她親自承擔了我的大部分費用。第二次旅行是我在南京外國語學校與其他三名同參加的接待家庭交流項目。接待家庭裡的父親給我起了我到現在還在使用的中文名，蔚寧。當然還有傳世經典——戴老師的「南京36小時」。一個週末之內，她從聖路易斯飛過千山萬水，與南外學校管理員舉行了會議，在南京的雞鳴寺請我們吃了一頓美味的素食宴，然後第二天就飛回去，只為了週一早上仍然可以正常教書。非常平凡的一個週末。
在美國，沒有幾所高中的圖書館裡裝滿了珍貴的中國藝術品。事實上，美國有四年中文課程的高中還相當少見，更不用說像SLUH這樣根基深厚的項目了。正是戴老師為SLUH的學生打開了一扇通往中國文化的窗。我非常高興得知戴老師留下了新的高級中國語言和文化研究基金。我相信，當SLUH的下一代的中文學生在得益於更多的機會和資源時，他們會感恩戴老師。
這期間，景美溪在我窗外靜靜漂泊。您當時說過我們將一起去旅行，但誰能知道——
