by Ha Jin
Half an hour later we went to the Practice Hall. To our amazement, we found Miss Lou talking with Luhai. “Thank God you’re back, Luhai!” Minnie cried. “How did you manage to escape?”
“I told an old interpreter that my wife was giving birth and I showed him I had a crippled leg. They saw me walk with a limp, so they checked my knee and let me go after the interpreter spoke with an officer. I owe my life to that old gentleman.”
“What happened to the other fellow, the ‘coal carrier’?”
“They kept him.”
Despite Luhai’s steady voice, I could see that he was shaken, his forehead bruised and his lips livid. Together the four of us went to the gatehouse, then to the cottage nearby where his family lived. Seeing him, his wife wept with joy and said, “I thought they were gonna kill you. Thank heaven you’re back!”
Before Miss Lou left, we prayed together for the safety of the twelve girls and for the life of “the coal carrier.” How earnest our voices were, and how we longed for a miracle.
After that, Minnie and I went to the front entrance. We stayed in the gatehouse that night, catnapping in rattan chairs in case the soldiers came again. A voice kept rising in my mind: “Lord, when will you hearken to our prayers? When will you show your wrath?” From time to time I woke up and heard Minnie muttering “Beasts! Beasts!”
AT THE CRACK OF DAWN the blast of an automobile horn shook me awake. I sat up with a start, my heart palpitating, and I heard a truck moaning away. Minnie got up too. We went out and saw Luhai hurrying over. Together we turned to the main entrance. Some women were shaking the gate and shouting, “Open it, please let us in!”
To our surprise, we found six girls, all carried off by the Japanese the previous night, standing there, their hair mussed and their faces tear-smeared. Luhai unbolted the small side gate at once. “Come in!” Minnie said, and beckoned them. She held the shoulder of Meiyan, Big Liu’s strapping daughter, and told her, “Your parents were devastated when they found you were gone. Thank goodness you’re back.”
The bespectacled girl nodded without speaking. Minnie asked them how they’d been mistreated. They all said that the Japanese had slapped them, pinched their faces, and pulled their hair, but had not molested them otherwise. By that, they meant they hadn’t been raped, as most local girls wouldn’t use the word “rape” bluntly. Minnie was glad to hear that. “What a miracle!” she said, and must have attributed this to our earnest prayers the night before.
I could not believe that the Japanese would let these young girls return without doing something terrible to them, but I kept mum, not wanting to deflate Minnie’s elation. There’d been so many heartbreaking happenings these days that she deserved to be happy for a moment.
Meiyan told the people gathering in her parents’ apartment that the Japanese had sent the other six girls, the better-looking ones, to a hotel where some officers stayed, while the remaining six of them had been put on the truck and sent back. We’d heard that yesterday many high-ranking officers were in town for the victory ceremony.
10
THAT MORNING Liya didn’t get up early as she usually did; she said she had cramps in her abdomen. I felt her forehead and body—she was burning hot. As I carried a mug of tea to her, she said her pajamas were wet. I took a look and found blood and bits of dead tissue in the discharge. She’d miscarried! I told Yaoping to heat a pot of water while I helped Liya undress.
“When did the cramps start?” I asked her.
“Last night.”
“Why didn’t you let your dad know?”
“I thought I’d be all right after a night of sleep. Is the baby gone, Mom?”
“Looks like it. You must’ve run too hard yesterday evening and hurt yourself.”
“I feel like hell.” She sobbed, her eyes shut. “The Japs killed my baby, and I must even the score with them.”
“Hush, let’s worry about how to make you get well soon.” I felt like crying too, but choked the tears back by squeezing my eyes.
“I don’t want to live any more.”
“Stop that nonsense. We need you.”
While Liya was rambling and writhing in pain, I continued working on her. I wrapped the bloody mess in rags and washed and wiped her with a hand towel. I wondered whether the dead fetus had all come out or whether she might need curetting or some other treatment. Under normal circumstances we could have sent for a specialized nurse, but all the OB clinics were closed. I told Yaoping to leave Fanfan with our neighbor and then carry Liya to our school’s infirmary on the back of his Flying Pony bicycle. As father and daughter started out, I followed them, holding Liya’s shoulder with one hand to keep her steady.
The nurse examined her and said that the miscarriage looked complete. Even if Liya needed a curettage, the nurse couldn’t help her, never having performed that procedure before. What Liya must do was rest in bed for at least two weeks, as it was generally believed that a miscarriage weakened a woman more than an actual birth, and she should avoid spicy, pickled, and cold food. She must abstain from sex for a whole month. I almost yelled at the nurse, who didn’t know that my son-in-law wasn’t home, to shut up. Liya needed to eat something nutritious, such as eggs, warm milk, chicken, seafood, pork tripe and liver, fresh fruits. Where on earth could we get any of those now?
Somehow I’d kept a small bag of millet and a bottle of brown sugar in my office. I gave those to Yaoping and told him to cook millet porridge and mix in some sugar for Liya. He should also bake some dried anchovies for her and make sure she ate regularly. After putting her to bed, I returned to the refugee camp.
MINNIE ASKED Big Liu to go to the Japanese embassy with her to protest the abduction of the girls. At first, he was reluctant, his eyes blazing behind his glasses. I urged him to keep her company and he agreed. He had a dignified bearing and was tactful in dealing with people, so she might feel more confident if he went with her.
Outside the front gate scores of old women were gathering and begging to be admitted into the camp. The moment Minnie and Big Liu appeared, the crowd calmed down a bit. Minnie came up to Holly and me. We’d been speaking to some older women from the neighborhood, trying to persuade them to go back home so as to save room, if there was any left here, for young women and children.
“But I have no place to go,” a sixtyish woman cried at me.
“Damn it,” another voice shouted. “The Japs assault old women too! Old crones are also humans.”
Minnie told us, “Let them in. But make it clear that they can stay only in the open air.”
“We have more than seven thousand already,” Holly said. “If we take them all, there won’t be an empty spot left on campus.”
“We have no choice now.”
As we began admitting the new arrivals, Minnie and Big Liu started out for the Japanese embassy, a twenty-minute walk. I had gone to that shabby two-story building four years ago, together with my son, Haowen, who had applied for a long-term residency visa for his studies in Japan. He had enrolled in Nippon Medical School two years before and wanted to become a doctor. He was still in Tokyo, though we hadn’t heard from him for more than seven months. Ever since the outbreak of the war, his letters had stopped. Both his father and I were worried about him, but we couldn’t say this to others, especially to our Chinese colleagues. We only hoped he was well and safe. My husband had studied Asian history in Japan and could speak Japanese, but rarely would he use the language. Nobody at Jinling knew about our family’s current connection with Japan except for Dr. Wu, but I was certain that she’d keep this confidential as long as I remained loyal to her.
Around noon, Minnie and Big Liu returned in a car. On their way, they had stopped at the closed U.S. embassy, and a Chinese secretary, who had been paid to stay behind with a couple of local staffers to look after the premises, had assigned a Cadillac to take Minnie and Big Liu to the Japanese embassy so they could arrive in style—the secretary had said that the Japanese were highly sensitive to pomp, so M
innie, as the head of an American college, should impress them with something grand, and therefore a sizable sedan was a necessity for their visit. Seeing the midnight blue car crawling to a halt outside the main entrance, I handed a staffer the half bucket of boiled yams I’d been giving away to starving kids, stepped closer to the gate, and watched Minnie and Big Liu get out of the vehicle.
Minnie gave the Chinese chauffeur a silver yuan, but the man pushed it back and said, “I can’t take money from you, Principal Vautrin.”
“Why not?”
“We’re all beholden to you. If not for you foreigners who stayed behind and set up the refugee zone, all the Chinese here would’ve been wiped out. If not killed by the Japanese, many would’ve starved to death. Miss Hua, please don’t tip me.” He called Minnie by her Chinese name, Hua Chuan, the phonetic translation of Vautrin. He adjusted his duckbill cap to cover his teary eyes and slouched away, still waving his hand as though to shield his contorted face. He climbed into the car, its fender planted with a U.S. flag, and drove away.
When they had come into campus, Minnie said to Big Liu, “I didn’t expect to see a sympathetic Japanese official today.”
“I still hate their guts,” he grunted.
This sounded out of character, because Big Liu was kindhearted and had once even argued with us that Abraham shouldn’t have attempted to sacrifice his son Isaac to God, saying that at least he, Liu, would never harm a child, never mind butchering one. Intuitively I knew something must have happened to his daughter. Maybe the soldiers had molested her. Minnie asked him, “Why do you hate the Japanese so much? Doesn’t God teach us to love our enemies and even do good to them?”
“That I cannot follow.”
“Don’t you Chinese say ‘repay kindness for injury’?”
“Then what can we repay for kindness? Good and evil must be rewarded differently.”
Minnie didn’t respond and seemed amazed by his argument. I mulled over his notion and felt he might have a point.
Later Minnie told me about their visit to the Japanese embassy. She said, “Vice-Consul Tanaka agreed to assign some policemen to guard our campus. He seemed quite sympathetic.”
“What else did he do?” I asked.
“He sighed and shook his head while listening to me describe the rapes and abductions in our camp. Obviously he was upset and said that Tokyo might soon issue orders to stop those violent soldiers. He told us that General Matsui reprimanded some officers for not keeping discipline among their men, but Tanaka wouldn’t say anything in detail about this.”
“That’s classified information, huh?” I snorted.
“Apparently so.”
Minnie seemed perplexed by my sudden temper, and I did not tell her about Liya’s miscarriage, not wanting to give her more bad news.
LEWIS SMYTHE CAME to our camp the next day and told us more about General Matsui’s frustration. Lewis and Tanaka knew each other well by now. In the beginning, the vice-consul could not believe the atrocities that the Safety Zone Committee had reported to the Japanese embassy every day, sometimes twice a day, but then one afternoon he saw with his own eyes a soldier shoot an old fabric seller who refused to surrender a silver cigarette case to him. Tanaka disclosed to Lewis that General Matsui had wept at the small welcome reception attended by some twenty senior officers and three officials from the embassy. The commander in chief reproved some of the generals and colonels for ruining the Imperial Army’s reputation. “There will be retribution, terrible retribution, do you understand?” he cried out, banging the table with his fist. “I issued orders that no rape or arson or murder of civilians would be tolerated in Nanjing, but you didn’t control your men. At one stroke, everything was lost.”
After the meeting, Tanaka overheard some of the officers in the men’s room say about the top commander, “What an old fogy!” and “He’s too senile, too softheaded now. He should never have re-emerged from retirement.” A colonel at a urinal added, “It’s easy for him to play the Buddha. If we forbade our men to have their way with the Chinese, how could we reward them?”
Tanaka had also told Lewis that the military executed Chinese POWs partly because they had no food to feed so many of them, and they were also unwilling to take the trouble to guard them. If that was the reason, why did they round them up in the first place? Why did they shoot so many men who had never joined the army? Why did they kill so many young boys? They meant to destroy China’s potential for resistance and to terrify us into obedience.
On the morning of December 20, the despicable behavior of the Japanese soldiers continued. Luhai found Minnie and me in the president’s office and said two soldiers had just entered the Faculty House. That was north of the Central Building, only steps away. Together Minnie and I ran over. Climbing the stairs, we heard a female voice screaming. Before Room 218 stood a wiry soldier with his arms crossed, the muzzle of his rifle leaning against his flank. The cries came from inside the room, so Minnie pushed the man aside and went in. I followed, as did three older refugee women, all somewhat stout. There on the floor a soldier was wiggling and moaning atop a girl, whose head was rocking from side to side while blood dribbled out of her nose.
“Get off her!” Minnie rushed up and pulled the man by the collar of his jacket. He was stunned and slowly picked himself up, his breath reeking of alcohol and his sallow cheeks puffed. He forgot to pull up his pants; his member was swaying and dripping semen. The girl, eyes shut, began groaning in pain, a blood vessel on her neck pulsating.
I tugged at the end of the man’s belt, which restored some presence of mind to him. He held up his pants and reeled away, but before reaching the door, he whirled back and stretched out his hand to Minnie, grinning while mumbling, “Arigato, arigato.” She looked puzzled while I wondered why he thanked her. She glared at him with flaming eyes, but he showed no remorse, as if raping a girl was just a small faux pas. Then he offered me his hand, which I didn’t touch either. At this point his comrade came in and dragged him and his rifle out of the room, leaving behind on the floor a silver liquor flask.
“The other bastard raped her too,” a woman told us.
“Get a basin of water for her,” Minnie said, her eyebrows jumping.
“Some of you stay with her today and don’t leave her alone,” I said.
A few women nodded agreement. I picked up the silver flask as a piece of evidence, which we would present to the Japanese embassy.
As two women were helping the girl into her clothes, Rulian came in and said to us, “Some Japanese broke into the northwest dorm.”
“Damn them! Where’s Holly?” Minnie asked.
“She’s in the Library Building. Some soldiers turned up there too.”
The northwest dormitory was behind the Faculty House. When we got there, we saw two soldiers sitting in the dining room, gobbling chocolate chip cookies with a can of condensed milk, which they’d opened with a bayonet. The kitchen door had been knocked off its hinges and was lying on the floor. At the sight of us, the men lurched up and hurried out, one holding the box of cookies and the other the open can. They both wore ropes on their belts for tying up people or animals.
Nobody had said a word during the confrontation. But the soldiers’ actions made me wonder if they were short on rations and hungry. Otherwise, why would they steal all kinds of food from the civilians, even a baked sweet potato and a handful of peanuts? Several times on the streets we had run into soldiers carrying geese, ducks, chickens, and even piglets tied to the tips of their rifles, some of the pigs with their innards ripped out. I hoped that the Western reporters (five or six of them were stranded here and managed to send out articles about the atrocities to The New York Times, The Chicago Daily News, and the Associated Press) would take photos of those savages and of the streets dotted with the bodies of civilians, their faces already black.
AROUND THREE O’CLOCK the next afternoon, a major, lanky and with a bristly mustache, came with six men to inspect our refugee camp. Minnie t
ook them through the buildings slowly, and I knew she hoped that some soldiers would appear so the officer could witness the unruliness of the Japanese troops. We went through the Arts Building, which housed more than eight hundred refugees, then entered the Central Building, which was in Holly’s charge and held more than a thousand. The moment we left that place and were about to cross the quadrangle, Luhai hobbled over (these days he often exaggerated his limp) and said that some soldiers were attacking women in the south dormitory. Minnie invited the officer to come with us, and he agreed. We set off while he and his men followed us, striding south; his hands were clasped behind his back.
In the entryway of the dorm building we heard some Japanese yelling and laughing upstairs. We hastened our steps and bumped into a group at the landing. At the sight of Minnie and the officer behind us, two soldiers let go of the four women they were dragging down the stairs and bolted out of the building. One woman, both hands still gripping the tusk-smooth banister, begged, “Principal Vautrin, please help us! They beat us and forced us to undress in front of kids. Two of them are still up there torturing others.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” Minnie said, and hurried up to the second floor, where a male voice yelped.
Walking down the hallway, we saw a soldier standing at the door of a room like a sentry, holding his rifle with one hand, its butt resting on the floor. The man was about to stop us but caught sight of the officer and his retinue, so he thought better of it. We brushed past him, entered the room, and saw a young woman lying naked on a piece of green tarp, crying and twisting, while a soldier with a full beard was thrusting his hand between her legs and making happy noises. A bayonet stood beside her head. We rushed over and were aghast to find the man’s entire hand buried in the woman’s vagina, beneath which was a puddle of blood and urine. Minnie yelled, “Get off her, you beast! Don’t you have a mother or sister?”
