57 South Compound, Yenching University
Peiping, China - Oct. 1, 1946Dear Abby,
It was delightful to get that bunch of greetings from Dickinson House. Please thank Miss Blakeley and Miss Hyde- I suppose Mr. Jordan has gone. And please thank Elizabeth for hers of Aug 4 and Miss Coulter for hers of July 12, and Bertha Putnam for hers of July 8. I certainly have happy memories of last year with you all. I was glad to hear that Ruth Lawson had finished her writtens and that Ellen Ellis has a passage for Turkey - she must have arrived by now.
I can not remember whether I dropped Elizabeth a note from Shanghai. We - I and my three travelling companions - reached that city on Aug. 22, and found that there are no passenger boats up the coast, so we had to fly and leave all our trunks behind us to the tender mercies of China Travel Service. We stayed in Shanghai ten day[s] trying to find some better way to manage for the baggage, as we heard wild tales of looting and thieving at the docks. However we reached Peiping Sept 3, and part of the baggage is already here and we expect the rest soon, and nothing has been stolen, so all is well that ends well.
We have had an overwhelming welcome - there is not a shadow of a doubt that we are wanted, and that the fact that we have been willing to return has somehow given our Chinese colleagues new courage. Freshman week began the 8th of Sept. and registration was 11 to 13, so we were here in time for everything - classes first met on Monday the 16th. We shall have about 850 students eventually, but all are not here yet because of the transportation difficulties. 80 students arrived from Shanghai last week, and then the Chinese government decided to copy the U.S.A. and give their G.I.'s free education so they shipped a group of us evidently forgetting that we take no students without entrance exams ; so we had to set some new exams, but only a few passed. Then a bunch of American families of the officers for these Peace Teams arrived, and some of their offspring had to be taken in at Yenching. We had a hard tiem [sic] finding enough course[s] in English to fill up their schedules, as fewer courses are being given in English this year, because the Japs substituted Japanese for English in the high schools during occupation. I can not teach the freshman Biology for that reason. However there is plenty else for me to do.
I am not living in my little house in the Prince's Garden this year, but with a group of other single American women, as that seems the best way to catch on to all that has happened, and also will be more economical. Coal is terrific in price - about $25.00 U.S. money. and it is hard to get, because the Reds have torn up the railroad. We are amazingly comfortable, with excellent food, lots of fruit and fresh vegetables, even some milk and butter from the Yenching dairy, although that should be mostly saved for the T.B. students.
Since the Chinese professors get the same salary that we single women get, they are not finding it easy to live on that sum. Some of the students are very poor, and can scarcely pay the very low board and room fees, which we make low so as not to have only wealth[y] students. The government universities charge almost nothing, so we have that to compete with. But we have reputation enough that we get as many as we want in spite of that.
The campus looks beautiful although a bit unkempt. The Japs took care of nothing. Trees and shrubs have not been trimmed, and that has had to wait while energy went into major repairs. The Japs carried off most of the dormitory beds, so some students had to sleep on the floor for several nights, until we could borrow beds from the U.S. Army. In our Biology Department I am amazed at how much of our equipment has turned up after we thought that we had none. A lot of material, skeletons and birds and preserved animals were taken into one of the government universities in Peiping (which was then run by the Japs), and after V*J Day we got it back again! But sad to say no microscopes - and the new ones have not arrived, so we are using some borrowed from the medical school in the city which does not plan to open until a year from now. So there seems to be some way out of most difficulties.
One of our greatest handicpas is the lack of current literatu[re.] The magazines I subscribed to are arriving in about a month from publication date, and I am passing them all along. There is a reading room for Faculty and another for students, and the shelves are pathetic, a few copies of Time and Life from last year, and one or two Readers' Digest, and scattered Chinese magazines and newspap[ers.] But paper is so scarce and costly in China that their output is nowhere up to prewar quantity. A group of 14 Premedical students who call themselves rather pretentiously the "Truth Fellowship", and have asked me to be their advisor, are translating articles out of any American paper they can find and posting these on the Bulletin Board of one of the halls so that other students may keep more up to date with important events in science, and politics in the world. So I wonder whether you Abby, could add one more good activity to your long list and see if it would be possible to collect the magazines from Dickinson inhabitants when people have read them and send them out to me for these reading rooms and these ambitious literature-starved students and faculty. Our library ought to be doing more about this, but the money has to go into material needed for courses and research work rather than into magazines. Anything would be gratefully received, from highbrow Atlantic Monthly to the New Yorker! , New Republic, Nation, Newsweek, Science News Teller, Scientific Monthly, Time, Life, Readers' Digest, Harper's, Good Housekeeping. I know that these things come through promptly now and without any tax/ I am not sure whether Parcel Post or Book Post is cheaper. If you people can help us in some such way, it will be a bigger boost than you have any idea of.
In spite of Dr. Stuart's appointment as Ambassador, the civil war does not seem to be stopping. In fact we hear that the two sides are planning a clash this wek [sic] at two points, one north and the other south of us. But it does not affect us. Neither side will attack Peiping, so we go calmly on with our work! A lot of our students used to be sympathetic with the Reds, but there are not many now. Sometime later I shall have to write more about the politics. Agnes Chen, a Bryn Mawr Ph.D. in Political Science, lives next door to me and she promises to explain these matters to me sometime. After that I can be more intelligent, She certainly has no use for the present Red tactics., which are blocking all prospects of Chinese progress.
I hope you meet my old student Dorothy Wei in the Zoology Department this year. I met her in Shanghai just before she sailed and was pleased to find her even more attractive than I had remembered. I think the girls will like her.
You can tell from the tenor of this letter that I am feeling very much at home and quite content!
Cordial greetings to all old friends and neighbors,
Sincerely - Alice M. Boring
[visiting professor of zoology at Mount Holyoke College, 1945-1946]