Nanjing Requiem

by Ha Jin

  To my astonishment, I received a letter from Mitsuko in late March. It contained a photograph and a piece of paper stamped with a baby’s handprints and footprints in black ink. Those must be Shin’s. Apparently Mitsuko didn’t know enough Chinese to write a note. The photo showed Shin smiling, with his eyes glittering a little and his mouth widening. He looked happy and healthy. On the back of the picture his mother penned: “Shin, 100 days.” Seeing those words, I couldn’t help my tears. If only I could hold him.

  At night after Fanfan went to sleep, Liya and I sat in our large bed leaning against each other and talked about Mitsuko and Shin. I wondered if we should write to them. “Mom, Mitsuko probably can’t read Chinese,” Liya said. “Maybe we should send her something instead.”

  “But what can we send?” I thought aloud. Besides the difficulty in coming by something nice, I wasn’t sure that the international mail was reliable.

  We stuck to our former decision not to write Mitsuko, because we still had to keep our Japanese relations secret here. If people knew about Haowen’s Japanese wife and child, they might find out where he was and then condemn us as a traitor’s family. As long as the war was going on, we’d better not exchange letters with Mitsuko. On the other hand, I felt uneasy just ignoring her.

  “Do you think you can accept Mitsuko as a member of our family?” I asked Liya.

  “She’s Shin’s mother, so we may not have a choice.”

  I liked her answer. Liya had her father’s head, acute and rational. “Plus Haowen loves her,” I said.

  “I hope I can have a Chinese sister-in-law, though.” Her pointy chin jutted aside while her short nose twitched.

  “You mean Haowen should have a second wife?” I had never liked the custom of polygamy, which was still practiced.

  Liya smiled, displaying an eyetooth. “I don’t know. We’re in the middle of a war and anything can happen.” She drew the toweling coverlet up to Fanfan’s chin and then pulled the string to turn off the light.

  “Sleep tight,” I said.

  Outside the latticed window an owl was hooting. I thought about Liya’s words. What she’d said about a Chinese sister-in-law could be a possibility, but that should be up to Haowen and Mitsuko. According to what I knew about her, she was a good girl and a loving mother. If only I could get to know her. I would try to persuade her to come to live here after the war.

  I SHARED my grandson’s new photograph with Minnie. She observed him carefully and told me, “He has your mouth.”

  “Liya said the same.”

  “If I were you, I’d go to Tokyo this summer.”

  “I can’t get travel papers,” I said, without telling her that I couldn’t afford such a trip either. We used to have a few valuable paintings, but the Japanese soldiers had made off with them, and there was nothing else I could sell to raise the money.

  “What are you going to do, then?” She put her elbow on the glass desktop and looked me in the face, her eyes clear and warm.

  “I’ve no idea.” I sighed.

  “Can’t you write to Mitsuko?”

  “She doesn’t know Chinese, Haowen told me. If my husband were home, he could write to her in Japanese, but I don’t think it’s safe to get in touch with her at this time.”

  “Why not? She’s your family, isn’t she?”

  “You know how crazy people could get here if they knew we have Japanese relations. We have to be very cautious.”

  “Oh, I see. Everything becomes complicated when it happens in China. But if you’re afraid of using your own address, you can use mine and let Mitsuko send her letters to my care. I’ll pass them on to you.”

  “That’s a wonderful idea. It’s so kind of you, Minnie. When Yaoping’s back, we might need your help with the letters that way. Thank you in advance.”

  “No problem. Anything I can do, just let me know.”

  I dared not write to Mitsuko in Chinese, because she’d have to ask someone to translate such a letter and then our family’s connection with Japan would become known. After that conversation with Minnie, I felt even closer to her. I knew that Mrs. Dennison disapproved of her, but I’d do anything to help my friend.

  37

  TWO WEEKS LATER, Mrs. Dennison, having recuperated, offered to keep the books for Jinling. Minnie was pleased, because no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t balance the accounts. Mrs. Dennison was far better at managing money than Minnie. Yet I grew somewhat apprehensive and wondered why the old woman was so eager to take over the treasury. This could be a step toward her taking full control of the college. As a matter of fact, she had always been the real power here, because the donations we got from the States came by and large through her hands. In addition, most of the deans and department heads of our college had been her students.

  I offered to take Mrs. Dennison downtown, as ever since she’d gotten back she’d been saying that she would love such a trip. She welcomed my idea but preferred a walk to a rickshaw. We set out for the Confucius Temple in the former amusement district in the southern part of the city, each carrying a shoulder bag printed with JINLING WOMEN’S COLLEGE. She was wearing a long silk dress, her arms spattered with freckles. I was amazed that she was in summer clothes because it wasn’t that warm yet. I had on a vest and poplin slacks. The moment we stepped out the front gate, we came face-to-face with a crowd—more than one hundred women were kneeling there, all poor and underfed. Minnie was standing in front of them. They were crying out, “The Goddess of Mercy, help us! Help us, please!”

  “Please get up,” Minnie shouted. “Get up, all of you.”

  “Take pity on us, the Goddess of Mercy!”

  “Give us some work to do!”

  “Help us, please!”

  “Get up, all of you get up!” Minnie shouted again.

  None of them obeyed and all kept begging her, a few even kowtowing.

  “Please get to your feet so we can talk,” she said loudly, “or I’ll go back to my office.”

  At last some of them rose and a few stepped closer. “What’s this about?” Mrs. Dennison asked.

  “I don’t have the foggiest idea,” I answered.

  Minnie said to the women at the front of the crowd, “Why are you doing this?”

  “Principal Vautrin, aren’t you gonna open a shoe factory?” asked a middle-aged woman wearing puttees.

  “Who told you that? We can hardly continue with our current programs.”

  “Please hire some of us, Principal,” a small woman begged. “We all have hungry kids to feed.”

  “There’s no principal here,” Mrs. Dennison said. “We’re a college that has only a president.”

  The women looked baffled, having no idea about the difference between a president and a principal. Minnie told them, “Mrs. Dennison is right. Don’t call me that again. Just call me Miss Hua, all right? We have no plan for any factory. What you heard is a rumor.”

  Seeing that they were still unconvinced, Minnie added, “If a factory opens here in the near future, you all can call me a liar. We’re a college. We’re not supposed to run a factory. Understood?”

  Some of the women turned, starting to move away. Several came over to say hello to Minnie, while Mrs. Dennison stood at a distance from them. She kept glancing their way with a frown, her face colored in blotches.

  Mrs. Dennison and I continued on to Ninghai Road, which the locals called Christian Way for its superb quality. We were very proud of this road, which the city had built especially for our college in 1921, when Jinling was under construction. The private contractor for the campus buildings, Ah Hong, had distrusted the official team of engineers and workmen, afraid that the foundation they were to lay for this street might not be firm enough for his trucks, so he turned to Minnie. She read every word on road construction in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and gave detailed directives, from the type of gravel to the use of a steamroller instead of stone rollers pulled by men. As a result, this road, costing about ten times as much as the one
originally planned, was still intact, whereas other roads built at around the same time had fallen apart within two or three years and had had to be repaved.

  Mrs. Dennison and I headed south toward the Zhan Yuan Garden area, where the Confucius Temple stood. She seemed unhappy about the incident that had just taken place at Jinling’s front entrance, which showed that the Homecraft School might have given these women the wrong impression, since it produced soaps, candles, towels, and umbrellas. The old woman remained silent, which made me uncomfortable. I knew Minnie must have felt embarrassed by the poor women calling her the Goddess of Mercy. To Mrs. Dennison, that must have smacked of idolatry.

  As we walked along Zhongzheng Road, the old woman said finally, “Minnie is outrageous. She shouldn’t have indulged in that kind of personality cult.”

  “I’m sure she doesn’t like it at all,” I ventured. “Those women embarrassed her.”

  “She ought to feel abashed. Nobody alive should be dubbed a goddess.” Her upper lip puckered as she spoke.

  I didn’t know how to continue and turned reticent again, feeling uneasy because I hadn’t told Minnie about this downtown trip with Mrs. Dennison. Along the street I noticed that some Japanese stores had closed, perhaps because business was bad—their goods were too expensive and couldn’t be shipped out to the countryside. I’d heard that some Japanese shop owners and restaurateurs had left Nanjing. Many who remained followed the practice common in Manchuria of joining some Chinese as business partners or acting as their protectors or liaisons so as to profit without investing any capital.

  We saw a lot of peddlers and small stores, some even selling looted objets d’art—paintings, calligraphy scrolls, marble sculptures, antique bronzes. Mrs. Dennison could not believe her ears when a vendor asked only two yuan for a pair of small Ming vases. She examined the vessels for a long time, turning them this way and that, but finally put them down, perhaps reluctant to let me see her buy purloined things. I told her, “Nowadays only food is expensive.” Indeed, a bony capon sold for two yuan as well.

  The area around the Confucius Temple had again become a marketplace, bustling with people, wheelbarrows, panniered donkeys, and carts drawn by animals. On both sides of the streets a number of buildings remained roofless, some with the top stories gone, but shops were open on the ground floors. There were restaurants, grocery stores, teahouses, opium dens, barbershops, pet stores full of birdcages and aquariums, herbal pharmacies, pawnshops, and even a bathhouse. Anywhere you turned, vendors would shout their wares in singsongy voices. At a street corner a clutch of people stood before a wide bulletin board; today’s newspapers had been tacked to it for those who couldn’t afford to buy one. Beyond the board, the narrow Chinhuai River flowed almost invisibly, its greenish water wrinkled a little by a breeze. On the opposite bank, a few middle-aged women were beating laundry on flat rocks with wooden paddles. A red-roofed boat came through a bridge arch, and on it two gentlemen were playing chess while a teenage boy at the stern rowed with a scull.

  In a small alley, its entrance decked with two strings of tiny sun-disk flags, I noticed a number of brothels, all on the top floors with balconies, some of which, as the photos on their windows showed, employed women from Japan as well. The Japanese prostitutes, though mostly in their thirties and forties, charged twice as much as the Chinese women doing the same work and fifty percent more than the Korean prostitutes. I’d heard of such places but had not expected to see them here. It was Jimmy Pan, the most active official in the puppet municipality, who’d been instrumental in setting up these bordellos. In private the Chinese often argued about his role in this matter, some saying that Jimmy had done the city a service by finding a way to protect the good honest women, while others maintained that he’d sold his soul to the devil and become the number one traitor here. Personally, I believed he should be punished for helping to set up the brothels. A poster once appeared on the city wall announcing that he would be beheaded as soon as our army came back and retook Nanjing. Jimmy Pan had also been a board member of the former International Relief Committee and was actively involved in charity work. He was one of the few officials whom the foreigners could trust. To be fair, he was at most a smalltime traitor, similar to many of the officials in the municipality; the major traitors were those who had been collaborating with the Japanese to form a national puppet government, which was still in the making. Yet however a traitor, minor or major, might try to justify himself, the Nationalists had issued a clear, indisputable definition of treason: insofar as the enemy’s army occupies the land of China, whoever works for them is a traitor.

  By now Mrs. Dennison had recovered from the scene she had witnessed with Minnie, saying, “Amazing, you Chinese can survive anything.”

  “Just a year ago,” I said, “everything here lay in ruins. Every house was gutted and had lost its roof, and many were burned down. Who could have imagined that this district would come back to life so soon?” As I was speaking, anger again surged in me. I had lived in Nanjing long enough to consider it my new hometown.

  “I guess,” Mrs. Dennison went on, “this city was destroyed time and again in history, so people here must be accustomed to all sorts of devastations.”

  “True, that may explain why we can survive a catastrophe like this Japanese occupation.”

  The Confucius Temple had been repainted crimson, and even the huge stone lions in front of it and the placards hanging beside its doors had been washed clean. The gateway, with its flying eaves and colored tiles, was decorated with two rows of lanterns, each printed with the character HAPPINESS, below which people hustled to and fro. The Japanese seemed to mean to preserve this shrine and restore its popularity.

  We entered a stationery store on the waterside to see if there was something we could buy for the college. The owner, a fleshy-faced man with a hairy mole on the wing of his broad nose, said delightedly, “Welcome to this hovel. President Dennison, I’m so happy to see you back.” He nodded at her, beaming.

  “Nanjing’s home,” she said. “I’ve nowhere else to go.”

  She was so pleased by his words that she bought a pack of Dearer Than Gold ink sticks.

  I knew she couldn’t use a writing brush, so she had probably purchased them as a present.

  We took a rickshaw back. When we arrived at Jinling, dinner was already over at the dining hall, so we had chicken noodles at my home. After the meal, we drank pu-erh tea while Liya, who knew English, since she had attended a missionary school, read an article in the North China Daily News out loud. It reported that the Japanese army had just captured Guling, a hill-encircled resort town in Jiangxi Province, where foreigners and Chinese officials used to flock to escape the summer heat, though it was unclear how many men our army had lost this time. The Japanese claimed that they had eliminated all five thousand defenders, but that was unlikely, because the Nationalist troops were already familiar with the Japanese tactics and knew how to avoid annihilation.

  Mrs. Dennison thanked me for a wonderful afternoon and evening. I was glad but unsure if this meant she would now treat me better. If Dr. Wu were around, she could mediate between the old president and Minnie, whom she was fond of, but I was only a forewoman and couldn’t possibly perform that function. I just wanted to be on decent terms with Mrs. Dennison. Not only did I need to make sure my family could stay in its safe haven; I also hoped I could calm the old woman if she became upset or angry.

  38

  FIVE OF THE SIX IRC men were released from jail on April 27, thanks to an amnesty in honor of Emperor Hirohito, whose thirty-eighth birthday was two days away. Our part-time math teacher was among those released, though one student’s father was still in jail. The returned men had all been instructed not to talk about their ordeal in prison, or else they would be brought in again. One of them had a broken wrist, and another, his face partially paralyzed, could no longer speak coherently. Yet none of them would disclose what had happened to them, and each one just said he was lucky to come back
alive.

  In private, one told me that the torturers had often tied him to a bench, then stacked bricks on his feet and filled him with water mixed with chili powder until his stomach was about to burst. At first he denied all of the charges, but later he confessed to whatever crime they said he’d committed. He even said that he had helped John Magee and Holly Thornton embezzle relief funds and had single-handedly stolen a military truck, though he didn’t know how to drive. “I just didn’t want to be killed by those savages,” he said, and shook his head, which was afflicted with favus and reminded me of a molting bird.

  “Did they believe what you told them?” I asked him.

  “Perhaps not. They once said I lied to them, so they punched and kicked me till I passed out.”

  “Who beat you, Japanese or Chinese?”

  “Some Chinese running dogs man the torture chamber. Every now and then one or two Japanese officers showed up too.”

  No rally would be allowed on the emperor’s birthday except for those organized officially. To keep the girls preoccupied, Minnie declared April 29 a big cleaning day. Then the Autonomous City Government demanded that we send one hundred people downtown to take part in the celebration of the emperor’s birthday. They didn’t specify that the participants from our campus must be young students, so Minnie believed we should pick a hundred women from the Homecraft School. Mrs. Dennison objected, saying they were not students and must not represent Jinling College. She insisted on sending middle schoolers instead.