英文版： 梦回清华八十年代

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上一篇英文版：从【双乳峰】到【水木清华】火得不行，阅读量已经突破13.8万！

这篇其实更精彩，却只有1.1万，实在太委屈了……

快帮忙转发一下，让它追上第一篇吧！

《追梦人》演唱者：Yu Yang, Tsinghua University, Class of 1985.

Last night, I dragged my tired feet round and round the campus, unable to pull myself away from the past. Again and again, I found myself lingering alone at the edge of 水木清华.

Alone on a moonless night at 水木清华 (April 27, 2025)

Forty years ago, it was also a moonless night. I held her for the first time. Her eyes were closed in quiet anticipation, and a passage from Ernest Hemingway echoed in my mind:

“They were both there, time having stopped, and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.”

So I closed my eyes and, for the first time in my life, dived into the softness of a woman.

The earth did not shake, but we both felt the impact—as our teeth clashed.

I fell in love with her—from a distance, far away, all the way back from the last row of the Grand Auditorium (大礼堂, photographed by me on April 27, 2025)

She was a lovely little thing, and I fell in love with her—from a distance, far away, all the way back from the last row of the Grand Auditorium (大礼堂).

On stage, a freshman girl was giving a speech. Her face was shadowed by the stage lights, and her figure was hidden behind the lectern, but her voice reverberated through the auditorium, and her hand gestures revealed her loveliness.

I fell in love with her, unseen.

She had just entered Tsinghua, while I was already in my sixth year. But life on campus hadn’t always been so romantic. On the contrary, for the first five years, I had been suffering, struggling, often lost—and at times, overwhelmed by quiet desperation.

We had just arrived in Beijing—me (pointing) with a few classmates at the Great Wall, September 1980. One came from the ancient city of Xi’an, another from a small border town near Russia, one from a small town in Sichuan as well, and one from a village in Jiangxi, whose family couldn’t spare even a penny for his education. I came from a Buyi-Miao autonomous county in Guizhou.

On my very first night at Tsinghua, as the lights were turned off for bedtime, we were still wandering between our rooms, buzzing with excitement. Suddenly, a stream of music floated out from one of the rooms, and many of us gathered by the door. In the faint light filtering through the window, I saw a classmate plucking the strings of an instrument that looked like a 琵琶. I had never heard such beautiful notes. I was told it was called a guitar, and the player announced that the piece he was playing was 《阿尔罕布拉宫的回忆》. The names sounded impossibly foreign to me—strange, distant, and full of mystery. Only later did I learn they were Spanish.

Still with my jaw dropped, stunned by his guitar playing, I watched as he pulled out another unfamiliar object—a device that resembled a brick. He pushed a button, and a seductive voice flowed out: “我并没有醉 我只是心儿碎.” Before that, the most romantic voice I had ever heard was “洪湖水呀浪呀嘛浪打浪啊”—from a revolutionary song that, before 1977, had been banned by the government for sounding aimless and unfit for the life-and-death struggle of our never-ending revolution.

A proud former occupant pointing to his dorm room, 317, in 1980. On that very first night at Tsinghua, “阿尔罕布拉宫的回忆” drifted from the leftmost window on the third floor. Later, “我并没有醉 我只是心儿碎” carried us into a sweet dream. But that dream quickly gave way to reality: by the end of the semester, the freshman cohort had failed a total of more than 1,000 exams. (Photographed by me on April 27, 2025)

Later that night, lying in bed, we began comparing our university entrance exam scores. Mine was 403 out of a total of 530 points, and someone claimed a 478—an astronomical and seemingly unreachable number to me. That night, I couldn’t sleep well.

The next day brought more bad news: out of 1,956 freshmen, I was among the bottom 93—the lowest 4.7% in English—and was placed in English Class C. The rest had scored high enough to qualify for Class A or Class B.

In the following week, I discovered that someone had solved every problem in a 300-page Russian math book, while I struggled to finish even a few. Rumors also spread that some students were already writing novels.

We went through a full week of boot camp training, designed to instill the habit of following orders. I had little interest in it—until the final day, when we were finally allowed to shoot. As I pulled the trigger, the entire rifle jumped from my hands and fell to the side. Horrified, I thought I might have killed someone. But to my astonishment, the flag signaled a score of 9.

That entire semester, I lived in fear—afraid I wouldn’t survive the competition among my incredibly talented and knowledgeable classmates. The semester passed quickly, and soon we heard that the freshman cohort had failed a total of more than 1,000 exams.

Any student who failed a course had to take a re-exam before the next semester began and lived through their Chinese New Year in fear. If they passed, the score was recorded as 60. If they failed again, it stayed a failure. Four failed subjects meant expulsion.

Back then, getting expelled was a fate worse than death—an unbearable humiliation not only for the student, but for their entire family, even their entire village or clan. In our department, some students eventually chose to end their own lives for various reasons, and many suffered mental breakdowns. I myself was often troubled and had more than a few sleepless nights.

My classmates and I spent the first summer (1981) touring various factories in Beijing, dressed in the filthiest clothes—no better than prisoner uniforms in every meaningful sense. Later, I learned that many students decided they never wanted to work in factories again and switched to economics or other majors for graduate school.

During those first two years, my greatest fear was simply not being good enough for Tsinghua. The university’s policy didn’t help. Rather than support students who struggled in English, the university simply gave up on us. The best teachers were assigned to Class A, the next best to Class B, while the bottom 93 of us in Class C were assigned a teacher who had originally studied Russian. As the demand for Russian declined, he taught himself English well enough to take on the role—a remarkable feat in itself.

In those two years, our English teacher never once spoke English. He simply read aloud from the textbook and explained everything in Chinese. So I never knew how an English teacher at Tsinghua actually spoke English.

In 1982, I fled down the library steps like a thief, fearing imminent pursuit. (Photographed by me on April 27, 2025)



One spring day in 1982, I fled down the library steps like a thief who’d just stolen a book. I rushed to the nearest classroom building, Sanyuan (三院), found a quiet corner, and pulled the “stolen” book out of my schoolbag, hunching over to shield it from anyone nearby. My heart pounded with fear and excitement. I was terrified someone might report me for reading a forbidden book — and that I could be caught at any moment.

Only a week earlier, we had been summoned to the Grand Auditorium (大礼堂) and warned: “Listening to overseas radio stations is 偷听敌台 (illegally listening to enemy broadcasts); reading overseas newspapers, magazines, or books is also against the law.” I was terrified because I had been listening to Voice of America every night before going to sleep. But my longing to touch the forbidden and explore a hidden world enticed me to take the risk.

That afternoon, I read The Story of the Bible—a simplified version of the Bible—non-stop, until my stomach began to growl. For the first time, I felt the thrill of reaching for the untouchable and the wonder of stepping into a forbidden world.

Me in the Library Reading Room, seated at the large tables—donated by our Class of 1985 to honor the library’s pivotal role in shaping our understanding of the world. (April 27, 2025)

In the following few months, I read, on average, one small English book every few days—finishing at least thirty in total. By the end of the semester, my English had improved dramatically. I moved from Class C up to Class B and earned the highest English exam score in the entire department. Later, I won First Prize in an English competition open to all non-English-major college students in Beijing.

That same semester, I earned the highest GPA in my class. Although I never reached the top GPA spot again, it was enough to reassure me — I could hold my own among my peers.

In the spring of 1983, I won First Prize in an English competition open to all non-English-major college students in Beijing.

In high school, we had no standard textbooks. We learned from the Youth Self-Study Series (《青年自学丛书》). When I arrived at Tsinghua, I was startled to find Quotations from Chairman Mao (《毛主席语录》) printed on the first page of some of our textbooks. At the time, those books did little to educate us. That intellectual void was filled by the vast collections housed in the Tsinghua Library (清华图书馆). With its immense holdings, the library shaped me more than anything else during my years at Tsinghua.

The place I visited most often was the English Reading Room on the third floor. I even found copies of The New York Times in the Foreign Languages Reading Room in the Main Building (主楼)—a paper that, ironically, is no longer accessible to the general public in China today.

Our class of 30 students posed in front of the Main Building in November 1981. At the time, The New York Times could be checked out by students to read in the Foreign Languages Reading Room on the fourth floor.

There is a deep misunderstanding in China about the purpose of learning English. For most people—students and educators alike—the goal is to master the language itself. But for me, its value lay not in grammar or fluency, but in the cultural perspective I absorbed through reading—an entirely different worldview embedded in the texts of Western civilization.

We are shaped by what we read, hear, and watch. Learning English is not just about mastering its mechanics; it is about gaining access to a vast body of literature—far greater than in any other language.

Campus planning scheme by Murphy, 1914 (Chinese labels added by me). Source: Murphy Papers, MS 231—Box 4, Folder 4 [1].

With the immediate danger of failing at Tsinghua behind me, I began to look toward the future—and that was when my hardest years truly began. In every direction I looked, the road ahead seemed bleak.

But I’ll leave that for my next article. For now, let’s enjoy this small step forward and savor a brief moment of happiness at Tsinghua.

We were a roomful of happy mates—“mainly” because we had the only window in Tsinghua where most of the girls had to parade by, many times a day, on their way to and from class.:)

All seven of us went back for the 40th reunion, and

incredibly, we found our beautiful again—the girl who used to pass by our window many times a day, always under our watchful eyes. “The three boys are still waiting—ever more hopefully—outside the girls’ dorm, just as they did more than 40 years ago,” she chaffed us in a wickedly slanderous message to the entire Class of ’85.

《追梦人》演唱者：Yu Yang, Tsinghua University, Class of 1985.

I found most of my happiness in the area around the auditorium, library, and gymnasium. As I wrote this piece, I began to realize that this part of campus had always been its heart and foundation during my years at Tsinghua—just as Murphy originally intended. The earliest buildings were also the most beautiful, blending Western architectural forms with the quiet elegance of a Chinese garden. The 1931 expansion of the library, designed by Yang Tingbao, was a masterstroke. Only recently did I learn that the central and west wings were later additions to the original eastern section—their integration is simply seamless.

In those early years, the library was where Tsinghua students explored the world; the gymnasium—named Roosevelt [2] in honor of the U.S. president whose leadership led to the return of Boxer Indemnity funds that helped establish Tsinghua [3, 4]—was where they built their competitive spirit through sports; and English was the language they used daily, both inside and outside the classroom.

清华建校之初, 曾以”三好学校” 著称: 校舍好, 英文好, 体育好

https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/info/1366/81502.htm

We poured our hearts into it and fought to the very end. (The race was officiated and recorded by our classmate Tang HuaJie on April 25, 2025, during the events leading up to our 40th reunion.)

To compete—and to win—that is the truest expression of the Tsinghua spirit. Even well past the age of 60, we still spontaneously launch into competition whenever we meet. We enjoy giving everything we have and fighting to the very end.

—The End. To be continued in Part 2 soon.

Notes:

[1] The Murphy Papers are stored in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, but I got the design scheme through this article: https://www.scipedia.com/public/Liu_2014c, which is likely the most authoritative source on the history of the Tsinghua Auditorium.

[2] 前馆初建时，称“罗斯福纪念馆”，馆外柱廊内还曾嵌有罗斯福（美国总统）的头像和纪念碑文，解放后被作为国耻残迹彻底清除。前馆建成后，曾是国内最先进的健身房，馆内有篮球场、手球场、80码悬空跑道以及各种运动器械；此外还有暖气、热气干燥设备；特别是附设的室内游泳池，实行池水水源消毒，十分清洁卫生。所有这些设施在当时的中国高校中是仅有的，甚至在美国大学中也不多见，清华人曾长期引以为自豪.

(https://www.tsinghua.org.cn/info/1952/16925.htm)

[3] Excerpt of THE ANNUAL MESSAGE OF THE PRESIDENT (Roosevelt) TRANSMITTED TO CONGRESS DECEMBER 3, 1907 "Chinese Students. This Nation should help in every practicable way in the education of the Chinese people, so that the vast and populous Empire of China may gradually adapt itself to modern conditions. One way of doing this is by promoting the coming of Chinese students to this country and making it attractive to them to take courses at our universities and higher educational institutions. Our educators should, so far as possible, take concerted action toward this end."(网页链接

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1907p1/message-of-the-president)

[4] My personal observation: After the Boxer Rebellion, China was carved up by the Eight-Nation Alliance—each power extracting what it wanted in the form of indemnities, territorial claims, and political privileges. Among them, only the United States—driven by pressure from missionaries, educators, and public figures—came to feel that the punishment was too severe, and had the conscience to return a portion of the indemnity, directing it to be used for educating China’s elites.

Special Thanks:

1. To all my classmates, for graciously allowing me to include some of them in the photos used in this article.
2. To Ms. Li (our beautiful one), for granting me the privilege of quoting her comment and including her in the photo.
3. To Ms. Yu Yang, for allowing me to use her singing—which moves me deeply and brings back memories of my youth at Tsinghua every time I listen.
4. And finally, to all my classmates—for sharing their youth with me at Tsinghua.