No way home
Being able to follow one's inclinations and find inner peace in the remaining years of one's life is indeed a great joy. Mme. Wei-wei's present happiness, however, only came to her after she went through all sorts of severe ordeals.
Mme. Wei-wei was born in 1932 in China's Anhui Province into a small family which included only her parents and younger sister, the noted literary critic Yueh Heng-chun. Since her mother always longed for a son, she raised the young Mme. Wei-wei like a boy. Her hair was cut short, and when she began to attend school the other girls didn't want to sit with her. She always played with the boys, and could do everything they could do, such as scaling walls, climbing trees, as well as fighting.
Recalling her early life, Mme. Wei-wei says that since her mother died young, her father became the strongest influence on her outlook. Her father graduated from the National Hangzhou Art College, but due to the turmoil of war he never painted a single picture. Yet he was very much in the avant-garde as a person. When he took his daughters out for a walk he would only talk of sunspots, and never discussed anything trivial. In those times high school girls were supposed to keep their chests wrapped in a cloth. Her father didn't agree and even went to the school and asked the principal why a girl's breasts should be wrapped up when it would be better to let them develop naturally, causing much embarrassment to his two daughters. "Perhaps my character is like my father's: expansive and unrestrained," she reminisces with a smile.
One's destiny, however, is unpredictable, and the unexpected invariably happens when one is least prepared. In 1949, when the chaos of the civil war made it impossible to continue studying, General Sun Liren set up the Young Women's Brigade, which was being sent to Taiwan for training. Mme. Wei-wei and her sister thought it would be fun to go to Taiwan for a few months, after which they could return home. So without their father's knowledge they passed the entrance exams and came to Taiwan. Before long, mainland China fell to the Communist forces, making it impossible to return home. When the trainees heard the news they wept bitterly in the classroom, and from this time onwards they had no choice but to make this distant land their new home. Leaving her home behind during her adolescence has served to mold Mme. Wei-wei's independent character.
Perhaps due to her father's influence, Mme. Wei-wei always enjoyed reading, and was not a bad painter, but there wasn't much reading material available at that time in the training facility of the Young Women's Brigade, which was located in Ahouliao, a remote part of Pingtung County. At that time there were no bookstores, so the books the trainees brought with them from home got passed around until they were falling apart. They even vied with each other to read the Chingchung Bulletin, a periodical published by the military. Because of the lack of leisure activities, the brigade would organize journalism competitions known as "wall newspaper contests." Since she was good at both writing and art, Mme. Wei-wei never missed a chance to participate, and of the three groups competing, her team regularly took first prize.
After she completed her training, Mme. Wei-wei was recruited by the China Youth Corps to be a military training instructor, but she had little interest in supervising students, for whom she had much empathy. One time she really raised some eyebrows at the school when she led the female students in a demonstration against the discipline director in order to protest mandatory military training for young women. She was thoroughly unhappy in her role as a military instructor, so when she met her future husband, Professor Chou Cheng, she immediately decided to get married and be done with the whole business.
Enjoying the splendid sunset of her life without the slightest inhibition, Madame Wei-wei is content with her lot and has found a comfortable rhythm for her life, a custom-made lifestyle which she has slowly refined during her ten years of retirement.