by Ha Jin
The city was strictly guarded, and whoever was without a mingto, the ID certificate, would be arrested. The soldiers would strip people of whatever was valuable on them—a pack of cigarettes, a fountain pen, a pocket harmonica, even a brass button from a coat. They also examined men who looked like potential fighters, making them stand at roadsides, shed their jackets and shirts, and spread their arms; if a man had a vaccination mark, they would detain him, believing it was a shrapnel scar. The Japanese seemed apprehensive, especially troubled by the guerrillas, who attacked their sentry posts in the countryside and blocked their transportation routes. Lately so many trains had been derailed that the railroad service had become erratic, and sometimes there was no train to Shanghai three days in a row. What was more troublesome was that the guerrillas fought outside the norms of conventional warfare, harassing small Japanese units day and night, blowing up isolated fortresses, and ambushing convoys. Once in a while artillery bombardments could be heard in the early-morning hours and within five or six miles of the city, as if another siege was impending. Meanwhile, the new regulations allowed few foreigners, much less Chinese, to leave Nanjing, though more Western diplomats had returned.
Near the Japanese embassy an opium den flaunted a banner that read OFFICIAL EARTH. Narcotics used to be banned here, but now anything was legal for sale. Evidently the majority of the goods were loot from outside the Safety Zone. After the soldiers had plundered the houses, the civilians would go in and gut them, taking whatever was useful or salable. For many people, looting had become a way of life, because there were no jobs. The Safety Zone was relatively safe for doing business, so most vendors brought their goods here.
Fukuda received us cordially, but explained that he still couldn’t locate any of the men and boys on the list Minnie had presented to him in late January. A young Japanese woman wearing a flowered kimono and wooden clogs came in, carrying a clay teapot and three cups on a tray. After tea was served, Minnie said to Fukuda, “We’ve just learned that there are many civilians in the Model Prison.”
“Are you sure?” He looked incredulous, his eyebrows locked together.
“Positive.” Minnie went on to speak about Sufen’s son. “He’s her only child and was taken on December fifth. He told her there were many young boys in there.”
Fukuda heaved a feeble sigh, tapping his cigarette over an ashtray in the shape of a flatfish. He said in halting English, “I thought that place was holding only soldiers. Well, we shall investigate. Try to give more physical descriptions of this boy. If he is there, I shall try to help him come out of prison.”
“I’ll let his mother know. Thank you.”
“Miss Vautrin,” Fukuda said with some feeling, his bony face flushing, “I mean to help. I hope you can believe I have been doing my best.”
“Of course I can.”
I knew Minnie didn’t completely trust him. He might be sympathetic to the poor women, but he couldn’t act himself, given his role as an attaché. Besides, there must be a military office in charge of such a matter, but he had just said he was unclear about that when Minnie asked him. Maybe he simply didn’t want to bother or offend the army with our petition. This could also mean he wasn’t deeply involved.
We thanked him again and left the embassy. I was impressed by Fukuda’s courtesy, though Minnie and I were now less convinced that he would bring our petition to his superiors. He was always very officious, as if wearing an impenetrable mask, and seemed unable to feel anything. Never having seen his face fully at ease, I couldn’t even place his age—maybe he was in his late twenties, but he could also be pushing forty.
We headed south along Tianjin Road. Although the area was within the Safety Zone, many houses had been reduced to rubble, and some stood but did not have roofs. Even a good number of electric and telephone poles were gone. Several buildings were no more than skeletal hulks. At the corner of Hankou Road, we saw a rickshaw carrying two soldiers. One of them stopped the vehicle and asked the puller to do something, shouting, “Hao guniang, duo duo you!” At first I didn’t catch it, then I realized he meant: “Good girls, many many there are!” The Chinese man shook his sweaty face and waved, saying he didn’t know where to find girls. Hearing that, one of the soldiers jumped off and began punching him in the chest. “Ow! Ow!” the man wailed. “I just don’t know how to find them! Even if you beat me to death, I won’t be able to say where there’re girls. They’re all gone.”
Minnie strode up to them and I followed her. The instant the other Japanese saw us, he gave a cry, which made his comrade stop short and get back on the rickshaw. Then they both motioned for the puller to proceed. In a flash the vehicle rounded a street corner and vanished.
We continued west. Approaching our campus, from a distance we caught sight of John Magee—his jeep stood beside the front entrance. We hurried up to him. At the sound of our footsteps, he turned around, his fedora cocked. “Hi, Minnie and Anling,” he said. “I brought over some powdered milk and a barrel of cod-liver oil.”
“Thanks,” we both said.
Luhai was busy unloading the car. He said, “This is what we need for the kids.”
Minnie told Magee, “The porridge plant has been a small disaster for us. Most of the children here were undernourished, so the dried milk and the cod-liver oil will do them good.”
“We just got a truckload,” Magee said. “I’ll give you some more if there’re still leftovers after we distribute them.”
“Please do. Thanks in advance.”
The reverend drove away, leaving behind a haze of dust and an odor of exhaust. He was driving a new jeep now, bought from a Japanese officer for merely 160 yuan after some soldiers had stolen his old Dodge. We still had the clunker Magee had given us, but it was already dead, not worth fixing anymore, according to Minnie.
Minnie turned to Luhai. “Is there any progress in your investigation?”
“No. I’ve watched the cooks pour rice into the cauldrons every time they cook, but still the porridge is as thin as it was.”
“Don’t we have some beans?”
“Yes, thirty sacks.”
“Add some beans to the rice. That will make the food richer.”
“Good idea. I’ll get them to start doing that tomorrow.”
We had just received the mung beans and navy beans from the Safety Zone Committee. Because of the dropsy caused by malnutrition among some refugees, Plumer Mills had repeatedly asked for the beans and obtained sixty tons from Shanghai. We were pleased with the beans, as well as with Magee’s new contribution. But Minnie wouldn’t let Luhai distribute the powdered milk and the cod-liver oil, perhaps afraid he might give them to his relatives and friends, so she let me handle them, which I was glad to do.
Within a few days most women had stopped complaining about the porridge, since the beans had thickened it to a degree. Still, Minnie couldn’t put the graft in the porridge plant out of her mind, and just the mention of it would make her bristle. If only we could stop the theft.
20
THE NEXT AFTERNOON Dr. Chu came to see us. That morning two women had spotted their husbands in the Model Prison as the men were being herded onto the trucks that took them to work. But the lanky doctor couldn’t offer any heartening news. He crossed his thin legs and said, “I personally delivered the petition to the Autonomous City Government, together with the stack of paperwork, but they said the information was too vague and they couldn’t do a thing.”
“What else do they need?” Minnie asked.
“They want more descriptions of every man.” He blew away the tea leaves in his cup.
“What kind of descriptions?” asked Big Liu.
“Physical features, like height and weight.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “How on earth can the women know how much their husbands and sons weigh now?”
“Just give as many physical descriptions as you can.”
“That means we’ll have to start all over again,” Minnie said.
After Dr. Chu had left, the three of us decided to redo the petition. This would take the four people in Big Liu’s team more than a week, but the effort would pay off even if we could save only one life.
Minnie let a dozen or so older women go to the Model Prison every morning to see if they could find more of their menfolk in the labor gang. She had an official letter written for them, saying that these women would make no trouble and wanted only to catch a glimpse of their husbands and sons. Following Minnie’s instructions, the three women who had spotted their menfolk also went to the Defense Commissioner’s Office to report their discovery and plead for help, but so far there was no official response.
THE CAMPUS, no longer guarded by the Japanese police, was now pretty with blooming flowers—lilacs, magnolias, crocuses, white spirea—and birds kept singing, as if determined to burst their throats with grief. There were so many flowers that once a young Japanese officer came to ask for a bouquet, and Minnie was pleased to get Old Liao to cut a mixed bunch for him. Every day some soldiers would turn up in twos or threes, but few were violent now. They were impressed by our classroom buildings, which combined the Chinese and the Western architectural styles, with high-columned front portals, flying eaves, and gargoyles on the edges and ridges of the roofs. I treated them with courtesy in the hope that one of them might help me find my son in Tokyo. We hadn’t heard from Haowen for ten months and couldn’t stop wondering if he was still alive, but I never went so far as to ask any of the soldiers to help look for him. I hadn’t met one I might trust.
Some of the men admitted to us that the war was a mistake—China was too enormous for Japan to occupy. They had all learned about this country in history textbooks—about its big apples and pears, its vast soybean fields, its rich minerals, and its pretty girls, but they had not imagined that it was such an immense land; it was also much poorer than they’d thought. Many of them had believed that once Nanjing was captured, the war would be over and they could go home; that was why they’d fought with such a blind vengeance. Everyone had wanted to finish off the enemies at the first chance, but now they could no longer envision the end of the war. One man even said that Japan should have been content with the Korean Peninsula and Manchukuo and should have stopped its aggression there. “We swallowed more than we could digest. We got too greedy,” he told us with a toothy grin. A lieutenant, a Christian, had come twice to deliver soap, towels, and biscuits for the refugees. Once we took two junior officers to the camp’s kindergarten, where toddlers were playing noisily, and Minnie told them that these children no longer had fathers. The two men murmured, “We’re sorry, really sorry for them.”
On my way back from the infirmary one afternoon, I bumped into Luhai, who came from the opposite direction, limping a little and wearing an octagonal cap, a herringbone blazer, and scuffed oxfords. He stopped, and we talked about some matters in the camp. Our staff had given tickets for free meals to most of the thirty-three hundred refugees, but Luhai still couldn’t find the leak in the porridge plant. The headman blamed the cooks for pilfering small quantities of rice at every meal, while a few of them pointed at him as the number one thief. To Luhai, every one of them seemed bent on stealing from the mouths of the poor women and undernourished children. This bad news made my blood boil again. If only there were a way to nab the crooks!
I believed that Boom Chen, the headman, must be guilty of the theft, because the man lived like a spendthrift, smoking Big Gate cigarettes and wearing a spiffy woolen jacket, which was unnecessary for the warm springtime. Whenever I bumped into this beefy swaggerer, he would greet me loudly in a tobacco-roughened voice, as if we had known each other for years, as if I ought to appreciate what he’d been doing for us. Minnie had once asked him to submit to her a thorough report on how the rations were used, but he’d claimed that he was illiterate, rolling his bovine eyes and simpering as though to insinuate that he need not receive instructions from her. Yet every once in a while I would see him lounging around reading a newspaper or a chivalric novel, so I was convinced he must be a fraud.
Luhai and I discussed a girl who had been snatched by the Japanese from the front gate three days before. Minnie had been away from campus and Holly wasn’t around when it happened either, so nobody had dared to stop the two soldiers. Later, Minnie lodged a protest with the military headquarters in Nanjing, but there was no trace of the girl, who we all knew was unlikely to come back. Minnie had admonished the whole camp time and again about loitering at the front entrance, but some of the younger girls had ignored or forgotten her admonition and went there to chitchat with new arrivals and passersby. A few even donned colorful clothes. Worse, Meiyan also went to the front entrance, with large scissors beneath her jacket. When we discovered that, we let Big Liu know immediately. He’d kept her home ever since. Two girls had already been carried off from the front gate. If anyone hung around there again, Minnie declared, she would expel them from the camp. That at last stopped them.
While Luhai and I were talking, a commotion broke out beyond the sports ground, and a crowd assembled outside the sprawling porridge plant. What was going on? We went over to have a look.
As we walked, I heard a female voice yell, “Parade her!”
“Yeah, take her through the streets,” a man cried.
“Tie a placard about her neck.”
“Cut her hair too.”
A ragged voice begged, “Sisters and brothers, please let me go! I won’t do it again.”
I recognized Sufen’s voice and quickened my steps. Then I saw the poor woman, her face pinched, standing in the middle of the crowd, her eyes watery and her hair mussed. She hung her head low like a criminal, quaking a little. Now and again she lifted her hand to wipe her dripping nose. Luhai went up to them and asked, “What’s going on?”
Tilting his pockmarked face, Boom Chen answered, “We finally caught a thief. This woman volunteered to do kitchen duty today, but she stole rice.”
“The evidence is there.” A fiftyish man pointed at a green mug on a stool, filled with the unpolished grain.
“No wonder our porridge has been so watery,” a woman said.
“We mustn’t let her get away with this!” rasped a sharp female voice.
“Denounce her publicly now, then parade her,” a small woman added, wielding her fist.
“Please, sisters and brothers!” Sufen wailed. “Don’t hurt me. I never did this before. My son’s in jail. He’s starving and begged me to bring him some grub. I have no money and no clue where to get it.”
“Liar!”
“We all know no matter how hungry we are, we must never stoop to theft,” a stout woman said.
“She must’ve stolen other stuff too.”
“Don’t just wag your tongues and waste your breath. Let’s haul her to the front yard.”
“Whoa, hold on,” Boom Chen broke in. “We shouldn’t take this matter into our own hands. Why not send her to the camp’s leaders?”
“No, we must teach her a lesson,” another female voice insisted. “We must stop the leak in the kitchen or our meals will get thinner and thinner.”
As I was about to intervene, though uncertain if I could save Sufen from their hands, Minnie appeared suddenly and said loudly, “Stop acting like a mob. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
At once the crowd quieted down. Minnie continued, “This poor woman, Sufen Yan, has a fifteen-year-old son in the Model Prison. That’s a fact I know. He has begged her time and again for food. She told me that, but we have no extra rations to spare and can’t help him. Some of you here are mothers. Can you eat your two meals a day in peace while your children are starving?”
“No, I cannot,” I said.
Nobody else answered, and some dropped their eyes. Minnie went on, “Sufen, tell me, did you t
ake the rice?”
“I did, Principal Vautrin. I am sorry.”
Minnie turned to the crowd. “She was wrong to steal from the kitchen, but you all should use your brains to think about the thin porridge. Could it be possible for her alone, with that little mug, to make so many cauldrons watery? There must be a big thief somewhere in the kitchen. We mustn’t blame it on this poor mother who just filched a morsel for her hungry child.”
Sufen started sobbing wretchedly, and people looked at one another as if to see who among them was a big-time thief. I glanced at Boom Chen, who smirked at no one in particular.
“Sufen,” Minnie continued, “I’ll let you have that mug of rice this time, but you must promise never to steal again.”
“Principal Vautrin, if I do it again, let a hundred thunderbolts strike me dead!”
“Hee hee hee hee!” somebody tittered. Then the whole crowd erupted into laughter.
A few women went up to Minnie, saying she was absolutely right—there must be a big rat in the porridge plant.
After the crowd had dispersed, Luhai suggested to us that Sufen stop doing kitchen duty in case someone might use her to muddle the investigation. Minnie agreed and decided to send her to the feces-collecting team if she still wanted to do volunteer work.
21
IN RECENT MONTHS the local Red Swastika Society, “the Society of Dao and Virtue,” had been active in relief work. A Chinese private charity organization formed in the early 1920s and grounded in Daoism and Buddhism, it now had millions of members all over the world. The society’s philanthropic efforts had reached the Soviet Union and Japan (after earthquakes), and it had offices in Tokyo, London, and Paris. It urged its members to learn Esperanto. Lately its Nanjing branch had become a main workforce coordinated by the International Relief Committee, which had been established to replace the Safety Zone Committee in mid-March. The local Red Swastika had admitted hundreds of new members and was occupied with burial work. Every member of the society wore a large swastika at the center of his chest when doing his job. The emblem was a Buddhist symbol, the arms of its cross bent left instead of right, and it had nothing to do with the Nazis, but some Japanese soldiers seemed to associate it with Germany and treated these Chinese workers with a little courtesy. To endure the overpowering stench of decaying bodies, many of the men drank cheap liquor before they set about their detail, usually four or five as a team. If possible, they would burn a sheaf of sacrificial paper, donated by some temples, for the dead, especially for the old. In most cases the workers just covered the corpses with lime and a layer of earth in mass graves. According to its records, which Minnie and I had seen on our visit to the main office, from the middle of January to the end of March, the Red Swastika had buried 32,104 bodies, at least a third of them civilians. The men of the Advance Benevolence Society (Chong Shan Tang) had also been interring the dead. Up to early April, they had buried more than 60,000 corpses in the city and its outskirts, about twenty percent of whom were women and children. Some other organizations were also engaged in the burial work. Every week new mass graves were dug as the existent ones filled up. Yet by far the largest burial ground was the Yangtze, into which the Japanese had dumped tens of thousands of bodies.
