I never met Teacher Zhou Diyun. According to his daughter’s description, he “was not tall, but had thick eyebrows and large eyes, a high-bridged nose, dark skin, and a forehead and cheekbones that rose slightly. He was one-quarter Indonesian, and my father had the handsome look unique to someone of mixed blood.”
I did not know Teacher Zhou. He began teaching at Nanyang Middle School in the 1950s, by which time I had long since left school and returned to China. More than ten years after his death, through an introduction by my schoolmate Zhu Fei in Kunming, I met Mrs. Zhou, cheerful and humorous, and their daughter, who spoke with great wit. It was May 2001.
They showed me four scrapbooks of newspaper clippings that Teacher Zhou had collected during his lifetime. These were articles he had published in progressive Rangoon newspapers and periodicals during his youth and middle years—poetry, prose, short sketches, commentary, essays, news reports, and more.
I turned the nearly yellowed pages. One vivid article after another passed beneath my fingers and left me amazed. One powerful new poem after another stirred waves in my heart. I could deeply feel a living current of patriotism faintly overflowing from the paper itself.
The four scrapbooks were titled Tower Shadows on the Irrawaddy, Song of Spring, Love of the Motherland, and Returning Sail. Over more than twenty years, Teacher Zhou had condensed them character by character from the hot blood of his youth and the loyal heart of an overseas son. They overflowed with his pursuit of truth, his cheers for new things, his longing for the socialist motherland, his joy when loved ones from the motherland visited Burma, and his enthusiastic praise for the achievements of socialist construction. They contained his ideals and hopes, his happiness and confidence.
Standing beside the Irrawaddy and gazing northward, his heart surging, he wrote “Looking North Toward the Motherland” and “Glory Comes from the Motherland.” He was proud of the newborn motherland and proud to be a Chinese who had stood up. When Premier Zhou visited Burma, Zhou Diyun, then a newspaper reporter, saw him in person and heard him speak. Deeply encouraged, he wrote “Motherland! My Heart Turns Toward You!” When the first mushroom cloud rose over Lop Nur, he shed tears of joy at the success of the motherland’s nuclear test and quickly wrote “The Highest Note of Victory.” His patriotic passion was like surging, fiery magma, from time to time spraying brilliant flames and opening one beautiful poem after another in the Burmese Chinese literary world.
One year, the senior division of Nanyang Middle School held a poetry-recitation contest. Teacher Zhou sat below as a judge and quietly listened to one student recite. He was moved by it. The poem felt familiar and intimate. Suddenly he remembered—wasn’t this his own poem, “Beijing, You Give Me Light and Joy”? This shows that Teacher Zhou’s poetry was welcomed and resonated with students and overseas Chinese readers.
He used many pen names: Beiliu, Zhuque Qiao, Diyun, Haihui, and others. He studied seriously, cared deeply about the motherland, followed the pulse of a rapidly changing age, and wrote many patriotic poems that encouraged overseas Chinese.
In the winter of 1964, he brought his wife and children—a family of eight—back to the motherland he had thought about day and night. This loyal son, born in Indonesia and long resident in Burma, did not complain because the motherland was poor, nor did he feel alien because he was assigned to Kunming. In the Yunnan Daily, he wrote an article titled “My First Spring Festival in the Socialist Motherland.” He said: “I once spent two years in Kunming. Toward her, I hold countless threads of remembrance surpassing even the love of one’s native place. Today, under the care of the people, she must surely be growing more beautiful by the day, more magnificent with each passing day.” Yes, everywhere in the motherland is home. The devoted heart of a wanderer and the pulse of the mother are joined in one line of blood. Motherland—“How could we not love her with all our hearts and never turn away?”
In 1984, Teacher Zhou Diyun’s patriotic passion reached the final punctuation mark of his life. Kunming No. 4 Middle School, where he worked, held a simple and solemn memorial service for him. The Kunming Municipal Committee of the China Zhi Gong Party delivered a eulogy. His literary friends had once praised him: “With one bright brush, we rejoice in his vigor; in the depths of literature and the sea of learning, his name was not in vain.” “Teaching at Nanyang through uncounted autumns, a man of literary grace and poetic talent.”
At last, I came to know a teacher passionately devoted to his country and a Burmese Chinese poet of overflowing warmth and feeling.