Nanjing Requiem

by Ha Jin

  We turned onto Hanzhong Road and headed east. At the doors of some restaurants stood girls and young women in blue dresses and gingham aprons, with little flowers in their hair, smiling at potential customers who passed by. This was something new. Were they not afraid of the soldiers? Why did their menfolk let them run such a risk? People had to do anything to survive, I guessed.

  When we arrived at the orphanage, Monica Buckley, the American nun in charge of the place, received us. She looked exhausted, her cheeks hollow but her hazel eyes vivid and bright. I’d met her before and knew she was from Pennsylvania and part of the Episcopal mission here, formerly led by John Magee. When we asked about Yulan, Monica said there was indeed a madwoman in the back, but they were not sure of her name.

  We went to the backyard, fenced but open to a street through a door fastened with a bolt and a lumpy padlock. There Yulan stood among a cluster of small boys, jabbering and puffing on a cigarette. At the sight of us she chanted, “Here come the missionary bastards.”

  A barefoot boy said to her, “Show us how a rooster cries.”

  The madwoman bunched her lips and stretched her thin neck. She let out, “Cock-a-doodle-do, cock-a-doodle-do!”

  “That’s nice,” the same boy said.

  Another one asked, “How about a duck?”

  Yulan screwed up her mouth and shrieked, “Qua, qua, qua—ka ka ka ka!”

  That cracked up all the boys. I noticed that one of Yulan’s teeth was missing. Despite that, she was still somewhat attractive, with a heart-shaped face, long hair, clear skin, and a small waist.

  “That sounds more like a goose, too loud and too slow,” the tallest boy said. “Let’s see how a pig does it.”

  The madwoman lifted her face to the sky and squealed, “Oink, oink, oink!”

  “That’s not how a piggy cries,” said another boy.

  Miss Lou shouted at them, “Stop it! Don’t tease her anymore!”

  Yulan turned to the little woman, flapping her long eyelashes. “Nice to see you, Aunt Lou. How’re you doing?”

  “Come with us, Yulan,” I begged.

  “No, you have a big-nosed spy with you. I’m not going with you and her.” She pointed at Minnie.

  “Yulan,” Minnie said, “you know I’d never hurt you.”

  “Liar. All you foreign devils are liars.”

  That made Minnie tongue-tied. She and I stood by as Miss Lou tried to persuade the deranged woman. By now most of the boys had left; only two were still around, one holding a soccer ball under his arm and the other wearing a bamboo whistle around his neck. As Miss Lou patted Yulan’s shoulder and murmured something to her, the madwoman burst into sobs, nodding continuously.

  A few minutes later she left with us. She was quiet now, though her eyes still radiated a fierce light. Minnie told Monica that we were taking Yulan back to Jinling. The nun rubbed her hands together and said, “Oh, that’s good. Something ought to be done for her, poor thing.”

  Minnie flagged down a two-seater rickshaw and let Miss Lou and Yulan take it, saying that we preferred to walk. She also told the little woman to leave Yulan with Shanna when they arrived at Jinling. The rickshaw rolled away and disappeared beyond a crossroads.

  Minnie and I headed west. My left shoulder was sore again, and we both grew pensive. In my mind’s eye arose the scene of willowy Yanying embracing the foreleg of the stone lion while a Japanese soldier punched her in the gut and her little sister, Yanping, bawled.

  “If only we had acted bravely,” Minnie said. “We might’ve saved some of the women.”

  I knew she was thinking of the same event, but I kept silent.

  We began talking about how to help Yulan. I asked, “What should we do about her?”

  “Any suggestions?” Minnie said.

  “We’d better find out whether she still has some relatives here.”

  “She’s an orphan now, Miss Lou told me. Jinling should at least shelter her and take care of her needs.”

  Minnie’s tone of voice allowed no argument, so I didn’t go further. For the time being this might be the only solution.

  But I had my reservations because our hands were already full. The madwoman might stir up disturbances and frighten the students, so I kept wondering if there might be a better arrangement. Minnie seemed to have gone out of her way to accommodate Yulan, who was not our responsibility, strictly speaking. Everyone knew that the Japanese had deceived Minnie and would have seized those “prostitutes” one way or another. To care for the demented woman might be to ask for trouble.

  Uneasy about those thoughts, I didn’t let them out. We went to see Shanna when we arrived back at the college. Minnie asked her to put Yulan in a homecraft class, stressing that the woman used to be a refugee at Jinling and ought to remain in our care. To our relief, Shanna gladly accepted Yulan as a student.

  “You did me a huge favor,” Minnie told the young dean.

  “No big deal. I hope she’s a quick learner.” Shanna twisted the end of her glossy braid, in which she seemed to take great pride. She was quite a beauty, with silken skin, a sunny face, and a dancer’s figure, though her eyes were spaced wide apart, which gave her a nonchalant look. Somehow I didn’t like her that much. She seemed vain and capricious, wearing powder all the time, and could be a bad model for some girls and young women.

  Yulan turned out to be good at weaving. She was also literate, knowing enough characters to read newspapers. If she were not insane, Minnie might have let her teach a literacy class. Among the thirty-nine students in the weaving course, she soon excelled as one of the best. She was especially skilled at making stockings and scarves. Once in a while she’d still lose it, yelling at others or wailing without cause, but people thought she was innocuous as long as she wasn’t provoked. Some older women were even fond of her.

  25

  LOCAL AUTHORITIES, uprooted by the war, no longer existed in many areas. According to what refugees told us, guerrillas had caused a good deal of trouble in the country. Villagers were being ground on the millstone, pressed hard from the top and the bottom. If the guerrillas blew up a section of a road, the Japanese would come and order the villagers to repair it within a short period of time. Meanwhile, the guerrillas would warn them that if they did the work, some of them would be executed, so the only thing left for the villagers to do was to pull up stakes and leave, but many of them didn’t have the supplies or funds for travel.

  Most of the guerrillas were backed by the Communists, but some were also remnants of the Nationalist army. They plagued the Japanese occupiers incessantly, doing things like attacking their sentry posts at night and cutting the transport lines to Nanjing. They would also punish farmers who sold rice and other grains to the enemy. The Japanese would occasionally bribe the guerrillas so foodstuffs could be shipped into our city. Every now and then the local newspapers announced that twenty-five thousand yuan had just been paid to the guerrillas, who had agreed to keep all the roads open, so the citizens shouldn’t worry about the supply of rice for months to come. Still, the price of rice kept rising, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether to buy more for the two schools now or to wait for the price to drop.

  Fuel was another problem. We had difficulty getting coal for the winter because only one hundred tons were allowed each dealer. Worse yet, the price was doubled now—forty yuan a ton for the soft and fifty for the hard. We decided to try to get forty tons from a mine near Wuhan for twenty yuan per ton, though we were unsure if the Japanese would let it enter the city. The good news was that the U.S. embassy approved of our plan and agreed to help us bring the coal in.

  Minnie had hired another nurse, so I didn’t have to do anything for the infirmary anymore. I was pleased, though I still had my hands full, supervising the servants and the cooks. Somehow I tended to be at odds with the younger women on the faculty. Many of them complained about my bossiness, and Shanna and Rulian even nicknamed me the Ancient One. Ban, the messenger boy, told me that.

  I often
complained to Minnie that the madwoman, in addition to the four blind girls, was too much of a burden to us. I suggested sending Yulan to the mental asylum funded by the puppet municipality. “The Japanese destroyed her mind,” I said, “so their lackeys should take care of her.” But Minnie wouldn’t listen.

  One afternoon Ban complained to me about the madwoman, and I took him to the president’s office. I said to Minnie, “Yulan is making trouble again.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Tell her,” I urged Ban.

  The boy, two inches taller than he had been the previous winter but still slight like a rake, said in disgust, “That crazy bitch follows me wherever I go and calls me ‘Little Jap.’ ”

  Minnie looked bemused. “You shouldn’t let this trouble you so much. She won’t hurt you.”

  “She scares me.”

  “Now, come on, she’s thin and small. How can she hurt you?”

  “She calls him a Jap,” I said, “because she has confused him with some soldier.”

  Ban continued, “She always shouts at me, ‘Strike down Little Jap! Go back to your tiny home island.’ ”

  “Try to avoid her,” Minnie suggested.

  “That won’t help. She tells others I did lots of bad things to girls. She also calls me a brazen pimp.”

  I told Minnie, “Some people don’t know her mind was damaged by the Japanese, so they take Ban for a hoodlum.”

  “She’s ruining my reputation!” the boy wailed. “I can’t figure out how I offended her. She threatens me at every turn.”

  “She sees enemies everywhere,” I added.

  “She bullies me,” Ban sniveled.

  “Yes, he’s a convenient scapegoat for her,” I said.

  At last Minnie seemed to consider this seriously. She asked me, “What do you think we should do?”

  “Send her to the mental home.”

  “If that place was decent, we might do that. But you know what the lunatic asylum is like. It’s like a prison—it’s being used as a jail. We can’t just throw her into it. I’ll never let that happen.”

  “But we cannot keep Yulan on campus forever. She gives us too much extra work and makes everybody tense.”

  “I will speak to Shanna about this.”

  “She’s another loony.”

  “Come on, Anling, we can’t just dump Yulan. You know that will go against the grain with me.”

  I exhaled a deep sigh, my cheeks hot. “You’re incorrigible—hopelessly softhearted,” I told her.

  I took Ban away, feeling unhappy because Minnie would speak to Shanna before making any decision about Yulan, as though this were an academic matter. On the other hand, I admired Minnie for sticking to her principles.

  To everyone’s surprise, Shanna also felt uneasy about the madwoman’s presence on campus now, saying that a lot of students had become unnerved by Yulan, that some were teasing her, inciting her to spew obscenities.

  Minnie asked Miss Lou to take responsibility for the crazy girl. The evangelical worker had known Yulan’s mother, who’d died of cirrhosis two years before. Miss Lou agreed to keep Yulan as a helper in relief work since she was dexterous and could sew and knit. As long as she was not provoked, she’d be a fine worker.

  Our college gave food and clothes to the destitute in the neighborhood every season, and the donations would be distributed through Miss Lou, who knew which people were in desperate need, so there should be no problem about Yulan’s keep. We felt relieved and also grateful to Miss Lou.

  26

  ONE MORNING in early October I found Luhai waiting in my office. He looked anxious but was well dressed as usual, wearing a checkered necktie and leather shoes. He took a folded sheet of paper out of his pants pocket and said to me, “I came across this yesterday evening.”

  I skimmed the article. It was a short piece printed on a flyer titled “White Devils, Go Home!” I’d seen similar, though less insulting, writings in recent newspapers—apparently some locals, maybe backed by different political factions, had been campaigning against the foreigners. I put the sheet on the desk and said to Luhai, “Thanks for sharing this.”

  “I’m afraid there might be secret moves against our friends,” Luhai said, his high Adam’s apple bobbing.

  “Yes, we should let them know. I’ll pass this on to Searle Bates.” I knew that most Americans in town frequented the professor’s house.

  Luhai was also worried about how to come by coal for the winter. He had just gotten Minnie’s permission to take down some trees in case the coal from Wuhan didn’t arrive and we had to heat classrooms on the coldest days. The trees on the border of our college’s grounds could be felled by thieves at any time.

  Luhai left half an hour later. I liked him better than I had before. I used to think that he was a little callow, probably on account of his young age—twenty-six—but in the past months he seemed to have grown more mature and less talkative. Teachers and students thought well of him, especially the girls, some of whom even had a crush on him, despite his little limp and the fact that he was married and had two small children. Once in a while he spoke at the chapel and taught people hymns. He still talked about how he hated the Japanese. Who could fault him? He’d lost relatives outside Dalian City the previous fall. His cousin, a kung fu master, had defeated a Japanese officer at a sports meet and was celebrated as a local hero. But the next day a platoon of Japanese soldiers went to his home, caught him and his only child, tied them to a tree with iron wire, poured a can of kerosene on father and son, and set them aflame.

  The article left by Luhai attacked the foreign men on the former Safety Zone Committee, claiming that they had conspired with the Japanese to oppress and persecute the Chinese, so the neutral zone had never been neutral. The author cited several examples of the Westerners’ collaboration with the invaders, such as disarming the Chinese soldiers and then handing them over to the Imperial Army, attending its celebratory ceremonies and concerts, and teaching Japanese in Christian schools. The article claimed that some of these foreigners often visited the Japanese embassy and even feasted there while making evil plans against China, and that, more outrageously, they’d made a huge profit from selling food to the refugees despite the free rations they had obtained from the former municipality. It was a fact that a white face could serve as a pass and a guarantee of personal safety here. The article singled out Lewis Smythe as a key collaborator, claiming that he’d met with the Japanese officials as often as twice a day. It also highlighted an incident at the police academy when 450 cadets were “betrayed” by the white men. “Those young officers were well equipped with German-made rifles (not handguns), and even their uniforms, helmets, and brass-buckled belts were German in style,” the author wrote. “We all knew how strong and well trained those men were. If they had put up a fight, they could at least have resisted the enemy to earn the precious time for the Chinese army to withdraw fully, or for more of them to break away. But the American missionaries lied to those men and said that the Japanese had granted them clemency, so they all laid down their weapons and capitulated. Later, we saw the Japanese take them through the streets. Most of them were stronger and better fighters than their captors, but they were disarmed and roped together, given the illusion of safety. All had their hands up in the air, and they were marched to the riverside and mowed down by machine guns so that the Japanese could dump them into the water without bothering to bury them. Fellow compatriots, who should be blamed for their stupid deaths and for our tragedy? The American missionaries, who are not our friends but a gang of double-crossers.”

  I wondered whether the Communists were behind this article, since they were also eager to see the Americans leave.

  When I showed Minnie the flyer, she was not disturbed, having seen this type of attack before. That evening she called on Searle. I accompanied her because I wanted to thank him personally for saving my husband’s life. Yaoping had been depressed ever since we received our son’s letter, and I had
urged him to go out and meet some people to ease his mind, so he’d begun frequenting Nanjing University and had even resumed teaching a course in Manchu history there. A week ago, as soon as his class was over, a group of Japanese soldiers arrived and grabbed hold of him, saying he could speak their language and must serve as a part-time interpreter. Obviously someone had ratted on him. As they were dragging him away, Searle appeared and blocked the door, insisting that Yaoping was on the faculty, so as the provisional head of the History Department, he could not release the lecturer to anyone. The leader of the group cursed Searle, but he wouldn’t give in. Finally the Japanese became so angry that they pushed both Searle and Yaoping down the stairs. Seeing the two men lying on the landing, Searle groaning and Yaoping unconscious, they left without him. These days my husband stayed home, too frightened to go to the university again, though he promised he would resume teaching in a week or so.

  When Minnie and I arrived at Searle’s, we found both Lewis Smythe and Bob Wilson in the historian’s spacious study, which was full of the fragrance of incense but topsy-turvy, books and framed photographs scattered around and the walls bare. The previous day the Japanese police had ransacked Searle’s home because they suspected that he had contributed to a book just published in London about the war atrocities in Nanjing and other southern cities. Minnie had disclosed to me that Searle did write under a pseudonym a portion of What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China. The police found few of the documents and eyewitness statements they were seeking, because Searle had deposited the materials in the U.S. embassy.