the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan in 1949, they took many influential Chinese intellectuals with them, including Ssu-Nien Fu and Shih-Chiu Liang. Fu was the president of NTU until December 1950 when he died of heart disease. The president of NTNU was Chen Liu, a renowned educator. Liu was able to recruit some distinguished faculty members from Beijing Normal University (BNU) to move with him to Taiwan in 1949, owing largely to his good relationship with BNU. These faculty members were resettled either at NTU or NTNU. Among those were Shih-Chiu Liang (English), Ming Kao (Chinese), and Liang-Kong Yang (Education).
A number of famous scholars from NTU, including Shih Hu and Mu Ch’ien, also gave lectures at NTNU. Mei-Chi Hu, Ch’ien’s wife, was a classmate of Hwa-Wei at NTNU in the Department of Education. Professor Mu Ch’ien and his wife, despite the large difference between their ages, had a happy marriage. In his later years, Professor Ch’ien lost his eyesight, and his wife, Mei-Chi Hu, worked as his assistant, becoming essential to her husband’s scholarly work in history and philosophy. Many of the later publications of Professor Ch’ien were the result of his dictation, recorded and edited by his wife.
Interested in civil engineering, Hwa-Wei originally applied for NTU’s College of Engineering. At that time there was a unified college entrance examination on the same day for all colleges in Taiwan, except NTNU. To improve his chance of college admission, Hwa-Wei also participated in NTNU’s entrance exam, using it as a backup. It turned out that Hwa-Wei’s math score for the unified examination was not good enough to get him into his dream school to study engineering. His NTNU test, however, was successful. Thus, Hwa-Wei ended up in the Department of Education at NTNU. Due to his father’s influence, Hwa-Wei was interested in education and even dreamed about becoming a secondary-school principal.
There were no more than three thousand faculty and students in Hwa-Wei’s first year at NTNU. In addition to free boarding and tuition, each student also received an annual set of uniforms and a regular monthly allowance. Hwa-Wei was happy to see the reduced financial burden for his parents and felt more comfortable about not being able to go to NTU for civil engineering.
NTNU was known for its strong faculty and vigorous academic requirements. It was NTNU where Hwa-Wei started his continuous and systematic education. To Hwa-Wei, the four years at NTNU have had a tremendous impact on him and his career.
At NTNU, Hwa-Wei, thin and tan, was quiet, but he was polite and got along well with others. Not being a bookworm, he was not a very good student, however. Hwa-Wei devoted many of his free hours to extracurricular activities and joined a variety of organizations, but none based on any specialty or particular strength.
One such organization was the school’s drama troupe. The ineloquent and ordinary-looking Hwa-Wei was very active as the group’s stage manager. He became an indispensable troupe member, busy with making room reservations, preparing costumes, and managing props and stage sets. As time grew closer to a play’s opening, he became even more engaged. For example, when the sound of a storm was needed during a performance, Hwa-Wei would lead the effort of providing the live sound backstage using pots and pans.
At the time, the NTNU drama troupe was very famous among the universities in Taipei. As one of the backbones in the troupe, Hwa-Wei was highly capable, always putting the backstage area in perfect order with minimal effort. People enjoyed working with him and admired his hard work and dependability.
At the NTNU drama troupe, Hwa-Wei had two good friends, Ching-Jui Pai and Hsing Lee, who both later became influential film directors, with a huge impact on Taiwan’s movie industry. Ching-Jui was an art major and started school the same year as Hwa-Wei; Hsing, two years ahead of Hwa-Wei, was also a student in the Education Department. Knowing Hwa-Wei was working backstage always made the two friends feel relieved while performing onstage. They knew that Hwa-Wei was reliable and dedicated; he never made mistakes in backstage management when in charge of lighting, sound effects, and scene changes.
Large in voice and body, but with an old head on a pair of young shoulders, Hsing Lee was the head of the drama troupe and took care of the others just like an older brother. In contrast, Ching-Jui Pai, originally from northeast China and nicknamed Little Pai, was small and ordinary looking. His personality was humorous, straightforward, and unrestrained. Despite the differences in temperament, the three friends made a good team and often planned activities together. Having no money for drinking, or even for tea, did not prevent them from one or two sumptuous meals, usually a bowl of beef noodles, a well-known night snack in Taiwan.
Hsing Lee became famous in the 1960s for his film Beautiful Duckling and has been regarded since then as the representative of “healthy realism” and as the godfather of the Taiwan film industry. Ching-Jui Pai also gained fame in the Taiwan film industry for Lonely Seventeen, after returning from Italy, where he studied film and media. Combining the two famous directors’ family names, their peers jointly nicknamed them Lee Pai, one of the acclaimed ancient Chinese poets.
The two film directors stayed very close friends after their college years. Hsing Lee always gave a hand to Ching-Jui Pai, who had bad luck with his personal life and career, and passed away at the age of sixty-six. Hsing Lee is still very active in Taiwan’s film industry as the president of the Taiwan Film Association. Over the years, Hsing Lee has been a member of the selection committee for the Golden Horse Awards—Taiwan’s equivalent to the Academy Awards—and he himself was honored with the Golden Horse Life Achievement Award in 1995.
Despite their different life paths, Hwa-Wei and the two film directors maintained a good relationship. Every time Hwa-Wei visited Taiwan, the three friends always gathered together for drinking and talking, as if they were back in their college days.
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NTNU produced many distinguished alumni during the 1950s. Chin-Chu Shih, former deputy minister of education of Taiwan, was a student of good character and fine scholarship from Hwa-Wei’s class. Other classmates of Hwa-Wei, such as Chen-Tsou Wu, Hong-Hsiang Liu, Hsien-Kai Shen, and Wen-Chu Yin, became renowned university professors or high school principals. Another classmate, Ming-Hui Kao, after having earned his doctorate in the United States, returned to Taiwan and later served as a vice-general secretary of the Nationalist Party.
Other classmates whose superior leadership skills impressed Hwa-Wei are Chih-Shan Chang and Ping-Yu Yan. Chang and Yan, both university presidents in their later years, were leaders of the China Youth National Salvation Corps (CYNSC), which in 2000 changed to its current name of China Youth Corps. During their college years, they teamed up with Hwa-Wei in organizing summer combat training camps for college and high school students in Taiwan. Hwa-Wei still remembers his active years in CYNSC, serving as the captain of the Summer Youth Naval Battle Camp his first year, and the chief of the Lanyu (Orchid) Island Expedition Team during his second year.
As a college student, Hwa-Wei stayed busy with extracurricular activities. He was one of the leading members of the Education Departmental Student Association. In addition to serving in NTNU’s drama troupe, Hwa-Wei was involved in student publications, including a campus wall newspaper and a student literary magazine.
The wall newspaper was composed of a large sheet of poster paper on which articles and essays were written using Chinese brushes. While the design of the newspaper was created by Hwa-Wei, the news articles and essays were drafted by Hui Chen, a talented Chinese literature major. The two were also responsible for the student literary magazine, which gained quite a reputation on campus.
For the magazine, Hui served as the editor and Hwa-Wei assumed typing, publishing, and distribution responsibilities. Unfortunately, the brilliant editor Hui was not able to employ his full literary talent after he moved to the United States. He was diagnosed with melancholia, a mental disorder characterized by severe depression, guilt, hopelessness, and withdrawal. He eventually died in a tragic suicide, jumping from the forty-fifth
