by Ha Jin
Minnie slumped in an armchair and cried, “What should we do, Anling?”
I didn’t know what to say. She went on, “Oh, I should never have let them pick the women. This is terrible, terrible!”
“They’d already started grabbing them before you gave permission,” I said.
“That’s not an excuse. How could I be so stupid?”
“Whether you allowed them or not, they were going to take some women. Everybody could see that.”
“Oh, what should I do?”
“It’s not your fault. Come on, Minnie, you mustn’t talk like this now. We must find out what happened to the camp.” Without waiting for her response, I rushed out to check with our staffers in various buildings.
This time we’d lost twenty-one young women.
ALTHOUGH MINNIE JOINED Lewis, Searle, and Plumer for the Christmas dinner, she was in no mood for the holiday. Old Liao had brought over a miniature fir and set it up in her room. Minnie liked the sight of the tree, the lit candles under it, and the Nativity scene arranged by the gardener, yet it didn’t cheer her up. She said she felt drained and powerless in her limbs. At the sight of her, a group of girls asked if the Japanese would come for the other seventy-nine “prostitutes” to make up the number, one hundred, as they had mentioned. She cried out, “Over my dead body they will!” Still, the girls looked unconvinced and frightened, and people wouldn’t stop talking about the women just abducted by the Japanese.
After the holiday Minnie took to her bed for three days, suffering from a sore throat and inflamed eyes. A bone-deep fatigue had sunk into her. She was so weak that she couldn’t even hold a pen. Yet she wanted to write a letter to the Japanese embassy on behalf of several women whose family members had been seized by the soldiers. She had promised to intercede for them, though she told me that she wouldn’t be much help.
13
FIVE DAYS after Christmas, Minnie went to the Japanese embassy and delivered the letter. As soon as she came back, Cola, the Russian man, arrived with two blind girls, one eight and the other ten, both wearing tattered robes and boots too large for them. The younger one held a bamboo flute while the older one carried an erhu, a two-stringed violin. They had performed with a small band at teahouses and open-air theaters to eke out a living since coming to the city the previous summer, but the other musicians in the band had fled and left them behind. Cola chanced on them outside Zhong Hua Girls’ School, took them in for a few days, and found boots and woolen socks for their bare feet. He thought that our camp might be more suitable for them, so he brought them to Minnie, who had no choice but to accept them.
Cola often said he didn’t like the Chinese because some businessmen had cheated him, but he’d told the other foreigners that he might be more helpful here once the city fell. On top of that, he owned an auto-repair business, which was booming even now. He used to believe that the Japanese, or the Greeks of Asia, as they called themselves, should rule China because he thought they could make this country a better place for business. Yet he was horrified by the soldiers’ brutalities and joined the Safety Zone Committee to help the refugees. He could serve as an interpreter since he knew some Japanese.
“Thank you, Miss Vautrin. There’s no way I can keep them,” he said in Mandarin, and pushed the two bony girls toward Minnie’s desk a little. “Only you can give them a home.”
“Jinling has been ruined by the Japanese too.” Minnie turned to the girls and held their small chapped hands, saying, “You’re safe here. Don’t be afraid.”
She then told me to give them the special room in the main dormitory, but I had to attend to a young mother in labor, so Holly led them out of the office, holding their hands as the three of them walked away.
AT LAST Ban began to talk. In the evening about twenty people gathered in the dining room to listen to him. He ate normally now, but he still wouldn’t move around campus and slept a lot during the day.
He said, “That afternoon when Principal Vautrin told me to go tell Mr. Rabe about the random arrest in our camp, I ran to the Safety Zone Committee’s headquarters. As I was reaching that house, two Japanese soldiers stopped me, one pointing his bayonet at my tummy and the other sticking his gun against my back. They ripped off my Red Cross armband and hit me in the face with their fists. Then they took me away to White Cloud Shrine.…”
Three evenings in a row he told his story to different groups of people. Sometimes, while speaking, Ban would break down, weeping wretchedly and flailing his thin arms. He would also tremble from time to time as though someone were about to strike him. We decocted some medicinal soup for him every day, made of dried tuckahoe, wolfberries, mums, and other herbs, to help him sleep well and to restore his wits.
He got better a few weeks later but still dared not step out of the compound of our college. Minnie told Luhai to assign him only domestic chores.
TWO
The Goddess of Mercy
14
NUMEROUS REFUGEE WOMEN had come and implored us to intervene on their behalf to get their menfolk back from the Japanese military, assuming they were still alive. A few even blamed Jinling for shutting out their husbands and sons—as a result, the Japanese had seized them. One woman condemned us for barring her fifteen-year-old son from the camp and told others, “See, he was made to fall into the Japs’ hands.” Words like those unsettled Minnie, who confessed to me that we shouldn’t have set the age limit at thirteen. If we’d known that the Japanese would arrest all the young males, of course we’d have raised the entry age to fifteen for boys.
I told Minnie not to be troubled by the women’s grumbles. Whenever I heard them complain, I’d say to their faces, “Look, I’m sorry about your loss, but we let in ten thousand of you, five times more than we planned originally. What else do you expect us to do? If we’d taken in more boys, some girls and women would have been kept out.” That shut them up.
I advised Minnie never to show her regret in front of the complainers or they would persist with unreasonable demands. Still, some of the refugee women were so wretched and piteous, unable to survive without their menfolk, that Minnie started preparing a petition. She assigned Big Liu to interview them to gather the needed information. Whenever she had a free moment, she’d drop by his office, which was one of the two inner rooms in the president’ office, and listen to the petitioners’ stories. Their voices, once you’d heard them, would go on ringing in your ears for a long time: “They took my three sons and my husband, and I was too frightened to beg them.” “He was my only son, and I hope he’s still alive and knows how to get back.” “My two grandsons were taken, the only farmhands in our family.” “I have four small children left and also my mother-in-law. I can only beg on the streets.” “My two sons never came back from their business trip, and one of their wives was killed by the soldiers. If they don’t come back, I won’t live anymore.”
I was not in favor of a petition. I said, “Minnie, the Japanese always finish off the men they seize. We know that’s a fact. What’s the sense of begging for mercy from those beasts? It’s like asking a tiger for its skin. We’d better concentrate on the matters at hand.”
In spite of my reservations, I told some women to register their losses with Big Liu as a record. I knew Minnie’s heart was in the right place. Within a week, by mid-January, Big Liu had documented more than 400 cases, with 723 men and boys taken by the Japanese, mostly around mid-December. Among them 390 were businessmen; 123 were farmers, coolies, and gardeners; 193 were artisans, tailors, carpenters, masons, weavers, and cooks; 7 were policemen; and 1 was a fireman. There were also 9 boys, thirteen to sixteen years old. Day after day more women came to Big Liu to have their cases filed.
Big Liu’s hair had grayed considerably, and even his thick shoulders looked hunched when he sat at his desk. He was cheerful and gregarious by nature, but lately he was aloof and taciturn and often lost his temper. He said he had a toothache. When he wasn’t busy, he would absently gaze up at the ceiling and let
out deep sighs. I pretended to know nothing about his trouble and didn’t explain to Minnie when she wondered aloud about what was bothering him. I didn’t tell her that his daughter Meiyan was on his mind.
One afternoon, the moment Minnie and I stepped into the main office, Big Liu tossed The New Shen Bao, a major Shanghai newspaper, on the coffee table and said, “Heavens, even the Chinese help the Japanese lie to the world!”
“I saw that piece,” Minnie said. “Hideous.”
I picked up the paper and saw three photographs of Nanjing attached to an article about the Imperial Army’s benevolent deeds here. People looked happy and festive in the pictures, because the capital finally had been liberated from “Chiang Kai-shek’s oppressive regime.” In one photo hundreds of civilians, mostly women and children, knelt in front of Japanese troops to express their gratitude for the bread, cookies, and candies that the soldiers were handing out. The beneficiaries claimed they had never tasted anything so delicious. Beyond them a line of Red Cross flags was flapping, strings of tiny lanterns were bobbing, and an officer was conversing with a shop owner over steaming tea. Another photo showed gentle-faced army doctors curing some old men and women of their blindness, and the patients shouting, “Long Live the Emperor!,” all believing it was His Majesty who had restored their sight. The third photo gave a view of an amusement park, in which a bunch of children and two handsome Japanese soldiers with toddlers in their laps were going down a slide together, all laughing with abandon.
Minnie said to Big Liu, “Come, let’s go out for some fresh air.” But he didn’t budge, saying he had a migraine.
So Minnie and I went for a walk outside the campus. She was wearing a thick velvet hat and a woolen cloak while I had on blue cotton-padded jacket and pants, with a purple scarf around my neck. Her calf-high boots were the pair she’d bought in Moscow six years before. It was warm for a winter day, and the sun was sinking beyond the ridge of the hill ahead of us. Rooks were circling in the air and shrieking like crazy, while a pair of white-bellied magpies fluttered their feathers and cackled in the top of an old acacia. Along the road most of the houses were deserted. Some were roofless, destroyed by fire, and some no longer had doors or windows. All the pigsties and sheep pens were empty too. At the foot of the hill perched a small village that showed no trace of life, though it was time for cooking supper. As the two of us walked along, an old peasant, with a wisp of beard and only three or four teeth left in his mouth, appeared, lumbering over from the opposite direction. He carried a bundle of branches as firewood.
“Good day, Principal,” the old man said to Minnie, and came to a stop.
“How are you doing?” she asked, apparently knowing him by sight, as did I.
“No good, just getting by.”
“How’s your family?”
“My wife went away with my son and daughter-in-law to the north of the river. I miss my grandkids terribly.”
“When will they come back?” I asked.
“As long as the Japs are here, they won’t come back. Matter of fact, most of our neighbors lit out too. Only a bunch of old folks stayed in the village to look after the homes.”
“That means the families will come back sooner or later,” Minnie said.
“Hope so.”
The old man left, and we continued west. A few minutes later we entered a small valley, where we came upon a pond two acres wide, around which were many bodies. The water was still pinkish in spite of the recent rain and a creek feeding the marshy pond. More than a dozen corpses floated in it, puffed like logs. I realized this was an execution site.
Most of the dead were men, though there were some women and children too, all with bullet or bayonet wounds. Many of the men had their pants stripped down and their hands bound with iron wire; a few had their necks slashed. One woman, still wearing suede boots wrinkled at the ankles, had a breast cut off and a cartridge case stuck in each nostril. A small boy, stabbed in the tummy and his head smashed in from the side, still held a squashed bamboo basket. Beyond him lay a middle-aged man, perhaps his father, shot in the face and his hands tied with gaiters; his right hand had a sixth finger.
“The Japanese are savages!” I said.
“We should count how many were killed here,” Minnie suggested.
“All right.”
Together we began counting, walking clockwise along the waterside. Minnie used a stick to part the reeds and pampas grass that obscured some corpses, while I recorded our count in my small notebook. Now and then I pinched my nose shut because of the overpowering stench. Minnie wore a surgical mask, which she carried in her pocket whenever she went out nowadays. In total, we found 142 bodies, among them 38 women and 12 children. There might have been more under the water, but it was too muddy to see through.
“A monument should be put up here,” Minnie said.
“There are execution sites everywhere. This one is nothing by comparison,” I replied.
“Still, this should be remembered.”
“Most people are good at forgetting. That’s a way of survival, I guess.”
We fell silent. Then she said, “History should be recorded as it happened so it can be remembered with little room for doubt and controversy.”
I didn’t respond, knowing that in her heart she resented the Chinese fashion of forgetfulness based on the understanding that nothing mattered eventually, since everything would turn into dust or smoke—even memories would fade away. Such an idea might be insightful, but one could also argue that many Chinese seemed to exploit forgetfulness as an excuse for shirking responsibility and avoiding strife. This was probably due to the influence of Daoism, which to Minnie was more like a secular cult. By contrast, she respected Confucianism—instead of indulging in escapism, Confucius advocated order, personal duty, and diligence. Yet to her, Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism were all secular religions. What this country needed was Christianity, she often told me, and I shared her belief.
Suddenly a large silver carp surfaced with a splash and swam away, its back cleaving the water with an expanding V. I said, “Fish must be getting fat in here.”
“And the grass will grow thicker. What a crime!” Minnie said.
Originally we had planned to go all the way up to the ridge of the hill and from there to catch a full view of Mochou Lake beyond the city wall, but now we were in no mood for that anymore. We turned back. On our way down, we discussed how to present the petition to the Japanese authorities and the newly established puppet municipality. I wouldn’t say a negative word about this matter anymore, since it was already under way. We were both against publishing the petition in a newspaper, afraid of incensing the Japanese unnecessarily. In the distance, a squadron of heavy bombers emerged like a school of whales in the waves of clouds, heading back for base after dropping bombs on the Chinese lines in the northwest, where a battle was in full swing.
Minnie said, “I wish the Christians in Japan knew what their countrymen have been doing here.”
“Even if they knew, they might not do anything to stop them,” I said, wondering how my son, Haowen, might have felt when he saw the Japanese euphoria. He must have encountered public gatherings and parades in celebration of the Imperial Army’s victory. Was he heartbroken or crazed by them? Was he worried about us? Did he miss home? Could he still concentrate on his studies? Then I curbed my woolgathering and told Minnie, “I read in newspapers that all of Tokyo had turned out to celebrate the fall of Nanjing. Even small boys tossed their caps into the air, and women wore slogans across their chests, sang and danced in the streets, fluttering the sun-disk flags. Our calamities are their good fortunes.”
“That’s because they were ignorant of the truth.” She’d also heard about the celebrations all over Japan, and that was why she couldn’t stop imagining ways to deflate their jubilation. She had once suggested to the Safety Zone Committee that they rent a plane and drop a ton of truth-bearing pamphlets over Japan. That had brought out peals of laughter from the other f
oreigners. Lewis even joked that if Minnie could find a plane in Nanjing, he’d fly the mission, and Searle volunteered to be an airborne leafleter.
We stood for a while on the hill slope. From there we could see the Yangtze glittering like lava in the northwest, against the crimson sunset. On the waterway a handful of sampans were sailing upstream almost motionlessly.
15
FOR A WEEK Minnie had been working on a report to Jinling’s board of founders in New York. She was required to keep an official diary that would be mailed to our headquarters in New York at the end of each semester. In addition, she needed to send in a monthly report, so toward the end of each month she would work on the lengthy piece of writing. I wouldn’t trade places with her even if they paid me twice her salary, though I could write and even kept a personal diary. In recent weeks Minnie often showed me her writings, and I could see that she couldn’t be completely candid about what was happening. Besides the politics within our college, the Japanese monitored the international mail. She knew that other eyes, some hostile, would read the pages.
She used carbon paper to make an extra copy of the report for Dr. Wu, though without her address we didn’t know where to send it yet. Minnie reviewed the major happenings before and after the fall of the city, including our efforts to help the refugees, the measures we’d taken to protect the school’s properties, the conditions of the neighborhood, and the systematic destruction of lives and homes by the Japanese. She listed some arrests, rapes, robberies, and instances of arson—but they were too numerous to include all of them. Besides, she couldn’t mention too many atrocities in case the Japanese confiscated the letter. She included the abduction of the twelve girls on December 17, but emphasized that six of them had come back unharmed the next morning. She wrote: “We deem that this miracle was wrought by our prayers.”
