Nanjing Requiem

by Ha Jin

  Lewis was a sociologist from Chicago teaching at Nanjing University and was also a missionary. He was rather sensitive and frail but always spoke eloquently. Even when conversing with people, he’d speak as if he were giving a lecture, with his hand gesticulating vividly. These days Lewis seemed quite spirited, as if the impending siege had charged him with vim and vigor; he even confessed to Minnie that he enjoyed “all the activities.” I guess he had never found his life so active and purposeful—above all, so intense.

  Minnie invited him to a late lunch in the main dormitory, and I joined them. The food was plain: rice, sautéed mustard greens, and salted mackerel. Lewis, like Minnie, was one of the few foreigners who liked Chinese food. This was an advantage, since all stores had disappeared in town and foreign groceries were impossible to come by; what’s more, it was believed that eating the local food every day could build up one’s immunity to diseases, such as dysentery and malaria. Lewis told us that his effort to organize the ambulance service had collapsed, because the military commandeered automobiles at will. At the moment, he had only two vans that ran. As the secretary of the Safety Zone Committee, he was swamped with work, running around to make sure that basic medical services would be available in every camp.

  While we were eating, Lewis talked about a truce that he and some other members of the Safety Zone Committee had attempted to arrange. The previous day they had proposed a three-day cease-fire, during which the Imperial Army would remain in its positions while the Chinese troops withdrew from the city, so that the Japanese could march in peacefully. In spite of General Tang’s belligerence in public, he was actually anxious to secure the truce. He asked the Safety Zone Committee to send a radiogram to both Generalissimo Chiang and Tokyo through the U.S. embassy, which was on the Panay now. Searle Bates and Plumer Mills, a board member of the Northern Presbyterian Mission in Nanjing, set out with one of General Tang’s aides for the American gunboat anchored upriver a little off Hsia Gwan. The message about the cease-fire was dispatched, and both General Tang and the Safety Zone Committee were waiting restlessly, but Chiang Kai-shek had replied earlier this morning: “Out of the question.”

  “Foolish and crazy,” Lewis said about Chiang’s rejection. “He simply would not consider how many lives a truce would save. Now the city is doomed.” Lewis sighed, his mustache twitching as he chewed. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, the small lenses barely covering his lackluster eyes.

  “He must have meant to save face,” Minnie said. I knew she liked Generalissimo Chiang, who was a Christian and had once come to Jinling’s commencement. I remembered that occasion, when he’d said he converted because the burden on his shoulders was so heavy that he needed God’s succor. I lifted the porcelain teapot and refilled everyone’s cup.

  “Thanks,” Lewis said. “When a city and tens of thousands of lives are at stake, it is insane to worry about one’s own face.”

  “The poor soldiers—they’ll all be trapped like rats,” said Minnie.

  “Chiang Kai-shek should not have attempted to defend this place to begin with. The only explanation for this imbecility is that he desires to get rid of his rivals in the military.”

  All of us knew of his eagerness to diminish his rival General Tang. Chiang’s German advisers had exhorted him not to defend our capital. The terrain around the city was like a sack, its mouth at Hsia Gwan, abutting the south bank of the Yangtze. If the Japanese forces, about 100,000 men in total, attacked from both east and west along the river, they could seize the docks in Hsia Gwan and completely cut the withdrawal route of the thirteen divisions and fifteen regiments defending our capital, about 150,000 men, who could then be squeezed into the “sack” demarcated by the city walls. From a military point of view, it was self-destructive to defend such a place.

  Minnie asked Lewis, “So this morning’s peace is just the eye of the hurricane?”

  “The Japanese will resume attacking any minute.”

  The artillery bombardment of the downtown area started that evening. Huge shells landed near New Crossroads, the center of the city. Then explosions burst out in various places. Time and again shells fell in the Safety Zone, into which the civilians were flocking. All the streets leading to the neutral district were thronged with people carrying their possessions by whatever means they had—wheelbarrows, rickshaws, bicycles, even baby carriages, anything with a wheel on it. Many men bore their things with shoulder poles, and some had bedrolls on their backs. Women held babies, clothes bundles, thermoses. Some old people, too feeble to walk, were carried in large bamboo baskets by pairs of men with long poles. We heard that the camp at the Bible Teachers Training School was already filled to capacity with fifteen hundred people, yet they continued receiving new arrivals. By contrast, Jinling had admitted nearly seven hundred. Numerous families came, but we were adamant about taking in only women and children. Many women, reluctant to be separated from their menfolk, left for the camps that accepted families. Some men cursed Big Liu, Miss Lou, Holly, and me at the front entrance, and one even threw mud on our college’s sign and the steel-barred gate.

  Throughout the night refugees kept streaming in. As the other camps were already full, all men now were willing to leave their families at Jinling and seek shelter for themselves elsewhere. Our college was said to be the safest place for women and children, so more and more of them were coming. Our staff, overwhelmed, was aided by dozens of refugee women who offered to help. There were so many arriving that by noon the next day the Faculty House was full, and the Central Building and the Practice Hall were also filling up. Some people, once admitted, wouldn’t go to any of the buildings, instead taking bricks from a construction site nearby to set up their own nests on the sports ground. These rectangular shelters were like giant cooking ranges, covered with pieces of bamboo matting supported by thin beams, which were mostly whittled branches.

  In the south machine guns had been chattering without cease since daybreak; in the northeast, where a battle was raging, Purple Mountain was in flames. The smoke often obscured the sun. Time and again bombs exploded somewhere outside the Safety Zone. Japanese bombers were appearing without any alarm being sounded, though once in a while a flak battery or two still fired at them. Whenever a plane flew over our campus, most people would run for cover, but some from the countryside had the false notion that the Safety Zone was bombproof, and they’d stay in the open to watch the planes bombing or strafing something. Luhai and Big Liu had to yell to disperse them into the trenches and dugouts.

  All day long, the mother who’d lost her eleven-year-old daughter two days earlier stood behind our college’s front gate, staring at the crowds in hopes of spotting her child. She kept asking people if they’d seen a little girl with bobbed hair and dimpled cheeks. No one had. Miss Lou took a bowl of rice porridge to the woman, who ate it without a word. I thought of having her brought into the campus but decided to let her continue grieving where she was.

  6

  THE NEXT DAY heavy artillery pounded the city without letup. On campus our staff was unsettled but kept working. Long sheds were being put up between the two northern dormitory buildings, and under them we let vendors sell food to the refugees. Steamed rice was five cents a bowl and shaobing, wheaten cakes no longer dotted with sesame seeds, were also five cents apiece; no one was allowed to buy more than two of each. The local Red Cross had promised to open a porridge plant here, but it had not materialized yet. Some people, without any food or money on them, had to go hungry. By noon on December 11 we had admitted about two thousand refugees, and so far had been able to accommodate them.

  While I was serving hot water with a wooden ladle to the exhausted newcomers, John Magee arrived. I let a staffer take over the work and went up to the reverend. “I just came from downtown,” he said to Minnie and me. “It’s horrible out there, dozens of bodies lying in front of Fu Chang Hotel and the Capital Theater. A teahouse got hit, and some legs and arms were hanging in the air, tangled in the electric wires and treetops.
The Japanese will be coming in at any moment.”

  “You mean the Chinese troops just gave up resisting?” Minnie spoke with sudden anger, her eyes ablaze.

  “I’m not sure,” Magee said. “Some of them had appeared in the Safety Zone, looting stores for food and supplies.”

  “They just disbanded?” I asked, enraged too as I remembered the suburban villages they had burned in the name of defending the city.

  “It’s hard to tell,” Magee replied. “Some of them are still fighting.”

  He told us that a good part of Hsia Gwan was on fire. The Communications Ministry building, which had cost two million yuan to construct and, with its magnificent ceremonial hall, was the finest in the capital, had been gutted and torched. The Chinese army was destroying whatever they couldn’t take with them. They had set fire to many houses and buildings, including the generalissimo’s summer headquarters, the Military Academy, the Modern Chemical Warfare School, the agricultural research laboratories, the Railway Ministry, the Police Training School—all were burning. Probably it was their way of venting their rage, since by now they knew that Chiang Kai-shek and all the generals were gone.

  As John Magee was speaking, a stooped man wearing a felt hat with earflaps and holding a walking stick turned up, leading a small girl with his other hand. “Please let us in?” the man asked in a listless voice.

  “This place is only for women and children,” Minnie said.

  The man smiled, his eyes gleaming. He straightened up and said in a bright female voice, “I am a woman. Look.” She took off her hat, pulled a bandanna out of her pocket, and wiped her face to get rid of the dirt and tobacco tar. We could now see that she was quite young, in her mid-twenties. Although her angular face was still streaked, her neck seemed longer now and her supple back gave her a willowy figure.

  We let her and the little girl in.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Yanying,” she said. “This is my kid sister, Yanping.” She threw her arm around the girl.

  Yanying told us, “Our town was burned by the Japs. They took lots of women and men. Our neighbors Aunt Gong and her daughter-in-law were tortured to death in their home. My dad told us to run. Our brother was too scared to travel in broad daylight, so my sis and I came without him.”

  Minnie sent them to Holly in the Central Building. Then George Fitch appeared, wearing a corduroy coat and smoking a cigarette with a holder that resembled a small curved pipe. He looked exhausted, his hair messy and his amber eyes damp. Fitch was the head of the YMCA in Nanjing and the administrative director of the Safety Zone Committee; he had been born in Suzhou and spoke the local dialect so well that some Chinese mistook him for a Uighur. He told us that hundreds of Chinese soldiers had gone to the University Hospital camp to surrender. Many men dropped their weapons and begged the staff to let them in; otherwise they’d break into the buildings. He was sure that more soldiers, thousands of them, would come into the Safety Zone for protection, and this might get the committee into serious trouble with the victorious Japanese, so Magee and Fitch wasted no time and set off together for the hospital camp. Viewed from the rear, spindly Fitch seemed more stooped today, while Magee was stalwart with a sturdy back. Minnie said to me, “I hope no Chinese soldiers come to Jinling for refuge.”

  “There won’t be any room left for them anyway,” I said.

  That evening three buildings on campus were already filled, while the others continued taking in new arrivals. The Arts Building, the last one in reserve, was just opened. The Red Cross still hadn’t set up the porridge plant. The soup kitchen we had put together two days ago could meet only a fraction of the need. Minnie had proposed that we assemble the porridge plant by ourselves, but the local Red Cross people, who controlled the staffing of the kitchens and the distribution of some rations, insisted that they build the porridge plant. Apparently there was money to be made in this. Infuriated by their concern with profit under such circumstances, Minnie again sent Luhai to the local Red Cross headquarters to ask for permission.

  THE NEXT MORNING it was quiet, as though the battle was over. We wondered if the Japanese had breached the city walls and gained full control of Nanjing. Word got around that the Chinese defense had collapsed after Japanese units had scaled the city walls and then dynamited them open in places. Soldiers swarmed in, shouting “Banzai!” and waving battle flags, but met little resistance. Big Liu said he’d seen the streets in the Aihui Middle School area littered with bodies, mostly civilians and some children—other than that, the downtown looked deserted.

  For the whole morning Minnie scratched the nape of her neck continually. She felt itchy and sticky all over. She’d slept with her clothes on several nights in a row and hadn’t taken a shower since her visit to the wounded soldiers at the train station five days before. She hadn’t been able to sleep for two hours straight without being woken by gunfire or emergencies she had to cope with in person. Whenever she was too tired to continue, she’d take a catnap, and luckily she’d always been able to fall asleep the moment her head touched a pillow. If the battle was over today, she said she’d draw a hot bath and sleep for more than ten hours.

  I was a light sleeper and had spent most of the night at the gatehouse and in different buildings. Thank God I was in good health and needed only three or four hours of sleep a day; still, I had underslept. Sometimes when I was too exhausted to continue working, I’d go into a storage room in the Practice Hall and doze off in there. These days my head was numb, my eyeballs ached, and my steps were unsteady, but I had to be around the camp. There were so many things I had to handle. My husband and daughter joked that I had become “homeless,” but they could manage without my help.

  Late in the afternoon Minnie wanted to go to the riverside to look at the situation. Big Liu offered to accompany her, yet she told him, “No, you’d better stay.” Holly volunteered to go with her too, but Minnie said, “You should be around in case of emergency. Let Anling keep me company. No troops will hurt two old women.” In fact, I was fifty, one year younger than Minnie, but she looked like she was in her early forties, while my hair was streaked with gray, though I hadn’t lost my figure yet.

  So I set out with her in a jeep, a jalopy given to us by Reverend Magee. Minnie was driving, which impressed every one of us, because she seemed clumsy with her hands and, unlike Holly, was not the kind of woman who could handle a car nimbly.

  “Let’s hope this car won’t break down,” said Minnie. Indeed, the jeep was rattling like crazy.

  “I wish I could drive,” I said.

  “I’ll teach you to drive when the war is over.”

  “Hope I won’t be too old to learn by then.”

  “Come on, don’t be such a pessimist.”

  “Okay, I might take you up on that.”

  We dropped into the headquarters of the Safety Zone Committee and found John Rabe, Searle Bates, and Eduard Sperling there. They looked glum and told us that the Chinese army had been withdrawing. In fact, just three hours earlier, Sperling, a German insurance broker, had returned from the Japanese lines, where he had offered to negotiate a cease-fire on behalf of the Chinese army. But General Asaka, Emperor Hirohito’s uncle, had rejected the proposal, saying he meant to teach China a bloody lesson. He intended to “soak Nanjing in a bloodbath,” so that the Chinese could all see what an incompetent leader Chiang Kai-shek was.

  More appalling was the story Rabe told us. The previous day, General Tang had received Generalissimo Chiang’s order that he organize a retreat immediately. Tang’s troops were already in the thick of battle, so it was impossible to withdraw them. If he carried out the order, it would amount to abandoning his army. He contacted the generalissimo’s headquarters to double-check with Chiang, who was adamant and reiterated the message, dictating that he must execute the retreat to preserve his army and cross the river without delay. Tang couldn’t even pass the order on to some of his troops. Besides having lost their communications equipment, some
of the divisions had come from remote regions, such as Guangdong, Sichuan, and Guizhou, and spoke different dialects, so they couldn’t communicate with one another or relay instructions. Worse still, earlier that morning the Japanese fleet was steaming upriver. The Chinese army’s route of retreat would be completely cut off soon, since we had no warships to repulse the enemy’s navy. Desperate, General Tang approached the Safety Zone Committee and pleaded with the foreigners to intervene on China’s behalf for a three-day cease-fire. Eduard Sperling started out early in the afternoon, trudging west toward the Japanese position and raising a flag made from a white sheet and inscribed TRUCE & PEACE! in Japanese by Cola, a yellow-eyed young Russian man. Sperling carried the weight of our capital on his roundish shoulders in hopes of preventing further bloodshed.

  General Asaka, the button-nosed prince wearing a patch of mustache that made him look like he had a harelip, received Sperling and spat in his face. He drew his sword halfway and barked, “Tell the Chinese that they have brought death on themselves. It’s too late for them to employ a peace broker like you. If they want peace, hand Sheng-chi Tang over to me first.”

  “Please inform General Matsui of our request,” Sperling pleaded again.

  “I am the commander here. Tell Sheng-chi Tang that we won’t spare even a chicken or dog in Nanjing.”

  So Sperling returned to report back to General Tang. The emissary was in such a hurry that he sprained his ankle and had to use a stick to walk. By this time, some of the defending troops must have heard of the withdrawal order and had begun pulling out, but many units were isolated, fighting blindly with their flanks open, doomed to annihilation.