German Class
(1979-1980)
 
Only after a semester of studies then I was transferred to a German Language Study Class (GLSC), or German Class for short, together with other four classmates of our Department of Mechanics.
 
Among the five of us, three of us kept in contact until 2001 when I moved from Beijing to Hangzhou, a long friendship of about 23 years. I was very sad to have stopped that relations. I wish someday we will resume the friendship.
 
One of the five transferees was a lady much elder than us, therefore I didn't know her anything. I can't remember her now.
 
Mr. Wu Tianyi departed me in 1986 or so when I came back to Shanghai from Beijing. He was teaching at Shanghai Electric Power College. Soon after he left for the U.S. and we lost contacts forever.
 
Dr. Liu is residing in Guangdong and is a CEO of a publicly traded enterprises, and finally, Mrs. Wu is a editor-in-chief of a german car magazine published in China.
 
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There were two classes, one from students enrolled in the 1978 spring season and the other in the 1978 fall semester. I belonged to the later.
 
As I learned later, the GLSC was a program of the Uni to train german language for students who shall be sent to Germany later. The elder lady was one of them, but the rest 4 didn't get that chance.
 
Of course, the GLSC was not the only tunnel to pass through to other countries. In fact, most other colleagues went overseas in one way or other, most to North America, not Germany.
 
Nevertheless, the GLSC gave people a chance to learn a foreign language intensively. During the one-year course period, no other courses were studied, even politics was removed from the program. Starting from pronunciation and ending at speaking, I was happy to know a 2nd language apart from my Russian learned in high school. Although frankly speaking, I knew nothing about the use of these languages. In fact, the whole mission of study at university was very ambiguous - except I knew that one day I may become a scientist, an engineer or even a politician (the last objective was the only purpose why chinese students went to school). But I had no ideas that skills learned at university shall first be used to get a job to earn money to survive and later to prosper in the world.
 
I still can remember vividly the classes, teachers and colleagues in the classrooms, located in the backyard of the campus, close to the laboratory of thermal science.
 
I went up very early, at about 6:30 every morning, to speak German in a fresh air. I have been to every grass field, every corner of the campus to find a proper place to speak out. I don't want to people to watch my reading. Sometime we came together with others.
 
Our books were plumb printed, looked plain but they introduced me to a new world - a world that influenced my life and career forever.
 
The University invited several teachers from west Germany's Ruhr Bochum University. They taught mathematics, physics, german geology, german history and other courses in German.
 
We had two chinese teachers too. Of them was a lady, a very nice lady, patient, tender and excellent in speaking. The male teacher looked very pleasant too.
 
A year passed very quickly. I was redistributed to other department (the Department of Mechanical Engineering) with our remaining three classmates from the Dept of Mechanics whence I came from.
 
But I never stopped learning German ever since, even today.