by Ha Jin
Her reasoning made sense, so I encouraged her to buy the land. At such a low price she could sell it and make her money back whenever she wanted. We went to Boren’s three days later and wrapped up the purchase. The man was elated and even called Minnie “the goddess of generosity” when she told him she was acquiring the land for herself. This unnerved her. “Please don’t call me that,” she said, but he merely grinned, showing his square teeth.
48
MONICA BUCKLEY DIED in early February, and the missionary community, regardless of denomination, assembled in the Shigu Road Cathedral for her funeral. The nave had a domed roof and stained-glass windows, which were high and narrow with arched tops, the panes iridescent like peacock feathers. More than two hundred Chinese also attended.
Reverend Wei presided over the ceremony. People stood up and sang the hymn “O Thou Whose Own Vast Temple Stands.” Next, Pastor Daniel Kirk read out Psalm 23. Minnie was moved by the solemn, serene poem, which she said she’d never before thought so sublime. Then a few friends of Monica’s went to the chancel lined with winter plum blossoms to deliver their eulogies and to reminisce about her. Among them was Alice, who had started her missionary career at the same time as the dead woman back in Anhui, though they belonged to different denominations. She told the audience that Monica had often missed her hometown in rural Pennsylvania but never lost sight of her real home in heaven, in God’s mansion, because she believed we were all virtually foreigners or guests on earth. After Alice, a tall American man with graying hair and sagging cheeks spoke. He declared that he’d known Monica for almost two decades, and in spite of her languid appearance, she had a good sense of humor and an extraordinary memory, and she enjoyed telling stories, especially to children. Once he’d told an anecdote from his childhood in which a man got drunk and exchanged his ulster for a puny catfish. A few weeks later he heard Monica telling the same story to a group of small girls but with a more dramatic ending: the man gave away his team of mules and wagon for a salmon, so now he couldn’t go home anymore and had to sleep in the open air with snow falling—he almost froze to death and lost two fingers. What had happened was that Monica had overheard him in the adjacent room when he was telling the anecdote. “Now,” the man concluded, “I hope she will entertain angels up there with all the jokes and stories she can make up with such grace and ease.”
That brought out laughter among the foreigners, while most Chinese remained quiet, bewildered. Indeed, a funeral was a sorrowful, solemn occasion. How come these foreigners wisecracked and gave belly laughs?
After the reminiscences, Searle, his face freshly shaved and his hair combed back, went to the pulpit and delivered a sermon in honor of Monica titled “The Christian Duties in the Time of War.” He spoke in Mandarin about the Japanese annexation of some Asian countries and about their brutalities. I knew that the Japanese kept a watchful eye on him because of his writings about their exploiting the narcotics business, and that they had also demanded that he surrender all the paperwork of the International Relief Committee—including the records of nine hundred cases of murder, rape, and arson within the Safety Zone perpetrated by Japanese soldiers during the first weeks after the fall of Nanjing—but he had told them that Eduard Sperling had taken all the files back to Cologne. Searle talked about the situation in Europe. He said, “Under the threat of a world war, what should we Christians do? First, we must strive to make peace and oppose war. Some of you were here when Nanjing fell two years ago and saw with your own eyes what it was like. Men can be more vicious than beasts of prey if they’re put in the extreme situation of war. No rules will be followed, and all kinds of evil will be unleashed. War is simply the most destructive force we human beings can produce, so we must make every effort to prevent it.
“However, if we survey human history, we can see that there were times when war was unavoidable, even necessary. There have been some wars that can be called just wars. For example, if people take up arms against foreign invaders, can we blame them? Should we attempt to dissuade them from fighting their national enemy? Of course not. Therefore, the Christians in those countries should fight like common citizens and should combine their fulfillment of Christian duties with the survival of their nations. As for those Christians whose countries are aggressors, they should do the opposite—work against war and do their utmost to make peace.”
After hearing Searle’s words, I was sure that the Japanese wouldn’t leave him alone from now on, but he must have become accustomed to dealing with them.
Searle concluded, “As for those Christians in countries that are not involved in war, like the Americans among you, we must align ourselves only with the weak and the victims, just as our late Sister Monica did for the orphans in Nanjing. This is the only moral stand we should take. The true Christian position should be standing between humanity and the unregarding force.”
The audience liked his sermon, especially the Chinese. The instant Searle had finished, a few people clapped their hands, then stopped short, realizing this wasn’t an occasion for applause.
Reverend Wei gave a closing prayer, imploring God to receive Monica’s soul and to grant her eternal joy. Then everyone stood and sang “O God of Love, O King of Peace.”
After the funeral, Minnie said she hoped that when she died, she could have a similar service, full of warmth and dignity, like the one we had just attended to celebrate the ascent of Monica’s soul. The dead woman must be at peace now.
MISS LOU CAME to the main office the next morning, because some families in the neighborhood had run out of food and their children were starving. I stepped out of the inner room and joined the little woman. Seated in her chair with the unfinished paperwork for student scholarships on her desk, Minnie yawned. “Excuse me,” she said, covering her mouth with her palm. “I get tired so easily these days that I often drop off. And my eyes throb with double vision.” Lately she often joked that she looked sixty and felt eighty.
“You’ve worked too hard,” Miss Lou said. “You need a long vacation.”
“Yes, you owe yourself one,” I agreed.
“I’m supposed to be on furlough in the summer, but it’s unlikely I can do that,” Minnie said. “I’ll have to stay around to take care of things here. Now, Miss Lou, what should we do for your neighbors without food? We must make sure they will at least have a decent meal on the Spring Festival’s Eve.”
“That’s why I came to see you. I’m also wondering if your college has an extra quilt. A poor woman lost her only quilt yesterday afternoon, stolen by a thief who broke into her home. Her husband disappeared and she’s too ill to scratch out a living. Actually, she sewed all her savings, ten yuan in total, into her quilt, so the money is gone too.”
Minnie turned to me. “Do we have enough rice to spare some?”
“Sure,” I answered. The previous fall I’d bought eleven wagon-loads of rice at twenty-five yuan per picul (133.33 pounds), a smart move at two-thirds of the current price, so we could offer some to the destitute. “But we might have given away all the quilts we made last fall,” I said. “I’ll have to check.”
We went to the main dormitory and found no extra quilts. So Minnie turned into her own apartment in the same building and grabbed the one from her bed. “Take this,” she said to Miss Lou.
“You have another quilt for yourself?” the little woman asked.
“I have a duvet and a warm blanket.”
Miss Lou left happy, having said she would come with a wheelbarrow to pick up the rice the next day.
49
IN MID-MARCH Yoguchi informed us that Mr. Tanaka couldn’t get the travel permits for the three of us anymore, because the officer in charge of travel papers, Tanaka’s fellow townsman, had left Nanjing. Also, citizens here, especially the Christians, were discouraged from visiting Japan. The cancellation of the trip disappointed me and aggravated my temper, and my antagonism toward Shanna and Rulian flared up again. If they got on my nerves, I didn’t hesitate to give them a
piece of my mind to let off some steam. I knew they would bad-mouth me behind my back, but I didn’t care. Minnie said I sometimes deliberately picked fights with them. That might be true, but she couldn’t see the main cause: there was this anger seething in me because the canceled trip had dashed my hopes of going to Japan.
Rulian was tolerable on the whole, but I found Shanna insufferable. She was from a well-to-do family and had the extravagant habit of dining out every weekend. She often boasted about the dishes she ordered in restaurants downtown. One day at recess, I overheard her speaking about the Osaka Terrace to a bunch of women in the Homecraft School. “Believe it or not,” she said, “I wanted to puke when I tried sushi for the first time. It tasted like a dead slug in my mouth, especially the tuna. But my friend urged me to go on, and by and by I began to like it. Now I can taste different kinds of sushi. I like the eel most.”
“My goodness, even if they paid me I wouldn’t eat raw fish,” a short woman said.
“It’s actually more nutritious,” replied Shanna.
“That’s wild,” said a spindly woman.
“You don’t believe me?”
The bell rang, and the women started back for the classrooms. After they were gone, I said to Shanna, “You shouldn’t have talked about fancy Japanese food in front of them.”
She pulled a long face. “They asked me about it.”
“But you’re not supposed to be a salesgirl for Japanese restaurants.” My gorge was rising as I spoke.
“You know what? That place is owned by two Chinese men who’re brothers.” Her nose, the shape of a big clove of garlic, quivered, but she avoided looking me in the face.
“Still, you went too far. Lots of people in Nanjing are starving, while you brag about raw seafood.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“It is my business to stop you from making others feel cheap and abject.”
“Nuts!” She turned and strode away, her hands in the pockets of her flannel jacket.
Exchanges like that often broke out between us. Whenever she went out of bounds, I would let her have it, though I always spoke to her privately. I simply couldn’t tolerate her kind of extravagance and foolishness.
Then one afternoon Shanna came to see Minnie and said she had decided to resign immediately. Minnie was flabbergasted, never having expected that a dean would quit before the semester was over; no matter how she tried to dissuade her, Shanna wouldn’t change her mind. From the inner office I overheard her say, “I’m just sick of all this. My family needs me.” She claimed that her father was bedridden and wanted to see her back in Shanghai.
Minnie could do nothing. Shanna left two days later, and Minnie had to take over the administrative work of the Homecraft School. Although Donna was the dean of the middle school, she needed a lot of help because she didn’t know Chinese and couldn’t even figure out the girls’ names on paper. With the additional work, Minnie had to put in extra hours every day and often didn’t go to bed until early in the morning.
This situation could not continue. If only Aifeng would come back. But her fiancé was still jailed in Tianjin, and she couldn’t leave in the midst of all the efforts to rescue him. Mrs. Dennison came and talked with Minnie about how to bring Shanna back. The old woman was also worried, seeing that it was impossible for Minnie alone to handle so many things. Mrs. Dennison had tried to help, but the bookkeeping and the housing renovation were almost more than she could manage. I hardly spoke a word and, cheek on fist, just listened to them. Having considered the pros and cons, the two leaders decided to send Alice to Shanghai on behalf of Jinling to beg Shanna to come back. “We should have trained more leaders,” Mrs. Dennison said, and sighed.
In fact, a good number of Jinling’s graduates had served as middle school principals throughout China, but none of them would come and work in occupied Nanjing. As soon as Mrs. Dennison left, I burst out at Minnie, “You shouldn’t have made that suggestion!”
“What are you talking about?”
“You shouldn’t send Alice to Shanghai to get Shanna back. That will make the little bitch more insolent and forget who she is.”
“We need her.”
“All right. In that case, I’ll leave when the semester’s over.”
“Come on, Anling, I know you’re unhappy and frustrated. Everybody here has frayed nerves, but we have to work together to survive the hard times and prevent this place from lapsing into a loony bin.”
“I’ll leave. Don’t say I didn’t tell you beforehand.” I stood up and made for the door.
Minnie didn’t take my threat seriously. She must have understood I couldn’t possibly resign, because my family lived on campus and I might not be able to find a safe place elsewhere. She often said I had “an iron mouth but a tofu heart,” using the idiom that refers to a person who is harsh only on the outside. She also lamented that China’s greatest obstacle was not the war or corruption but the so-called face—everyone was afraid of losing face, unwilling to make concessions; as a result, too much energy and time were wasted on trivial matters. For that Chiang Kai-shek had her sympathy, having to save so much face constantly, for both himself and others.
Four days later Alice came back without Shanna, though she’d met with Dr. Wu in Shanghai. The president was on her way to New Delhi to attend a conference, representing Chinese women. Dr. Wu wrote me a letter, chastising me mildly and urging me to help Minnie keep things together on campus. As for Mrs. Dennison, she wrote that we should just humor her and avoid any confrontation. Minnie went to Rulian and begged her to take over a part of the work left by Shanna for the time being. Rulian agreed and also promised her not to bicker with me again. Both she and Minnie ran the Homecraft School.
I felt sorry about the trouble I’d brought about and told Minnie that I wouldn’t lose my temper again.
Mrs. Dennsion was also frustrated by the loss of Shanna. Despite fretting about the Homecraft School, the old woman knew we had to pull the program through the academic year. To calm everybody down, she gave a party at her place, to which all the faculty and many staffers were invited.
Minnie arrived later than the others, having had to accompany a group of visitors through a class that taught how to preserve duck eggs with mud and lime. In the living room of Eva’s bungalow hung a long horizontal scroll that read SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDER. This was something new, added by Mrs. Dennison. The Chinese faculty members praised the calligraphy in the scroll. “Sturdy like trees and fluid like floating clouds,” one enthused. “August and masterful,” another echoed. Most of them assumed that it was a quotation from Confucius, since the sage had also said something about cultivating yourself and putting your household in order as the first step toward governing a state. I knew that those words were from the book of Isaiah, but I made no comment.
Everybody enjoyed the buffet dinner, and I felt conciliatory and spoke with Rulian at length. When we were eating apples and honey dates for dessert, Donna brought out a bunch of letters addressed to Jinling that had just arrived. She opened them one by one and read the contents out loud to the room. Most of the letters were from people interested in the relief work, expressing their admiration and good wishes. A few inquired about China missions. One, however, was written by a high school sophomore in Camden, New Jersey, and it impressed everybody. The writer, Megan Stevens, knew about Minnie Vautrin’s deeds and declared that Minnie was her hero. The girl said she would learn stenography and improve her typing skills because she dreamed of becoming Minnie’s secretary someday.
“Listen to this.” Donna went on in a lilting voice: “ ‘Last month our town’s paper published an article on what you did, and the people of our church all know about you. You are a great woman, a model for young girls who want to follow the way of the Lord. We all love you.’ ”
“My, you’re an international celebrity, Minnie,” Alice said.
“Come on, don’t embarrass me.”
In the postscript Megan asked: “Is it tru
e that a missionary woman is not allowed to marry? My parents told me that, but I am not convinced. Besides serving God, I also want to have a family and children.”
“That’s so sweet,” Donna said, and put the letter on the octagonal dining table.
“Maybe we should give her an interview,” Minnie quipped. “We could use a secretary like her if she’s good.”
“We’d better not,” Mrs. Dennison snorted to no one in particular. “We mustn’t indulge in a personality cult.”
Minnie’s thick eyebrows shot up. Possessed by a sudden fit of anger, she burst out, “Why don’t you say idolatry?”
“It does smack of that. A human being should not aspire to become the Virgin Mary or a bodhisattva.” Mrs. Dennison stared Minnie in the face.
“You simply cannot abide anyone who’s doing better than you. You’re envy personified.”
“At least I’ve never used personal notoriety to keep our college as a refugee camp.”
“Who made those poor women come here—me or the Japanese?”
Without waiting for Mrs. Dennison to answer, Minnie walked away. I kept stealing peeks at the old woman, whose face was changing colors, now pink, now chalky, and now yellow, while everybody remained silent. The air was so charged that I felt a bit queasy. Minnie went into the kitchen and stayed there awhile, then slipped out the side door.
50
A VERY QUALIFIED APPLICANT named Yan Ning accepted the dean’s position at the Homecraft School and would come to Nanjing in late April. She had a good deal of experience in this kind of adult education in Fujian Province. We felt a bit relieved. As long as we could get through this semester, there’d be a whole summer for us to look for qualified teachers and administrators.
One morning in early April (three days after the national puppet government headed by Jingwei Wang had been installed in Nanjing), I received a note from Mrs. Dennison that said she wanted to see Minnie and me at once. I went to Minnie’s place in the main dormitory and then together we headed out to Eva’s bungalow. Light fog swayed over the treetops while the warm, moist air dampened the birds’ tumultuous songs. A rain frog rattled like a broken bellows. We chatted as we walked, disturbing some warblers, which took off, darting away.
