It was a quiet morning, except for the constant stream of passenger cars entering the gate, something you did not see 40 years ago. Mao's statue was still standing, but none of my classmates was to be seen. In a flash I was thinking that we must have missed the meeting, until I spotted Leon with his camera walking from the campus.
Compared with the first day of school when 30 new students were gathered to form Class 78-3 on 26 March 1975, that day we saw only 23 people, adding Paul and a former instructor/husband of our classmate. Quite a number of classmates could not make it due to various personal reasons.
Perhaps because we all increased in age and size, the campus seemed small. The well-known Denhui Lou looked dilapidated, needing at least one coat of paint, whereas our Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures was converted into an archive of campus personnel records. New constructions and developments were either across the road or somewhere else in the city. While it was all true, I still could not help wondering why the cash-rich university could at least try to preserve the original campus.
A delicious welcome banquet finally lifted my spirits. Like human life, a university needs to have its stages of life too: once it has developed new branches and extended locations, the old campus tends to be like any parents' houses: familiar but dated.
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