Nanjing Requiem

~ ~ ~

FINALLY BAN BEGAN TO TALK. For a whole evening we sat in the dining room listening to the boy. He said, “That afternoon when Principal Vautrin told me to go tell Mr. Rabe about the random arrests 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. There’s a pond inside the temple, and a lot of carp and bass lived in the water. The monks were all gone except for two old ones who’d been shot dead and dumped into a latrine. The Japanese wanted to catch the fish but didn’t have a net. An officer emptied his pistol into the pond but didn’t hit any fish. Then another one began throwing grenades into the water. In a flash big bass and carp surfaced, all knocked out and belly-up. The Japs poked us four Chinese with bayonets, and ordered us to undress and get into the water to bring out the fish. I couldn’t swim and was scared, but I had to jump into the pond. The water was freezing cold. Luckily, it was just waist-deep. We brought all the half-dead fish to the bank, and the Japanese smashed their heads with rifle butts, strung them through the gills with hemp ropes, and tied them to shoulder poles. Together we carried the fish to their billets. They were large fish, each weighing at least fifteen pounds.

“The soldiers had fried fish for dinner but didn’t give us anything to eat. Instead, they made us pick up horse droppings left by their cavalry with our bare hands. At dusk they took us to an ammo dump to load a truck. More Chinese were there working for them, eleven in total. We carried boxes of bullets onto the truck. When the loading was done, three fellows and I were ordered to go with the truck to Hsia Gwan. I was shocked to see so many houses burned down in that area. Lots of buildings were still burning, and the flames snapped and howled like a rushing wind. The electric poles along the way were blazing like huge torches. Only the Yangtze Hotel and a church stood undamaged. We stopped at a little slope and unloaded the truck. Near the riverbank a large crowd had gathered, more than a thousand people. Some of them were Chinese soldiers and some were civilians, including women and kids. A couple of men in the crowd raised white flags, and a white sheet was dangling from a tree. Beyond the people, three tanks with their turrets like large upside-down basins were standing on the embankment, their guns pointing at the crowd. Near us some Japanese soldiers were sitting around a battle flag planted in the ground, drinking rice wine from a large keg wrapped in straw matting. An officer came over and barked out some orders, but the soldiers at the heavy machine guns did nothing and just looked at one another. The officer got furious. He drew his sword and hit a soldier with the back of it. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Then his eyes fell on us Chinese coolies squatting close by. Raising his sword, he gave a loud cry, charged at the tallest one among us, and slashed off his head. Two squirts of blood shot into the air more than three feet high and the man fell over without a whimper. We all dropped to our knees and banged our heads on the ground, begging for mercy. I peed my pants.

“The soldiers at the machine guns were flabbergasted. Then one of the guns began firing, and the other two followed. In a flash the machine guns posted at other spots started shooting too. So did the tanks. The crowd was swirling around, crying and falling, but the people were trapped. Every bullet cut down several of them. In less than ten minutes they were all mowed down. Then groups of soldiers carrying fixed bayonets went over to finish off those who were still breathing. I was so horrified that I couldn’t stop trembling and crying. One fellow worker grabbed hold of my hair and shook me, saying, ‘Don’t make so much noise — it will draw attention.’ That stopped me.

“We returned with the truck to carry loot for the soldiers, mainly furniture. They didn’t keep all the stuff and threw lots of things into the big bonfire in front of their regimental headquarters. Over the fire were pigs and sheep and quarters of a buffalo skewed with long steel bars, and a couple of boiling cauldrons. The air was full of the smell of roasted meat. That night they locked us in a room and gave us each a ball of rice and a cup of water. The next two days they took us to the area east of the Central University to carry loot for them again. They stripped every house of its valuables and then torched it. One soldier carried a safe cracker, but most times they didn’t use the tool and just blew the safes open with hand grenades fixed to their bottoms, where the iron was thinner. They were very fond of wristwatches and jewelry — those were what they were after. One of them, a young fellow, even took a baby carriage. I couldn’t stop wondering what he’d do with that. He was too young to have kids.

“Afterward, they whisked six of us out farther east to Jurong Town, and we worked there for a whole day, moving artillery rounds and shell casings. In the evening they released us and said we could go home. Dog-tired, we slowly started trekking home in the dark. The first night we covered only ten miles. Along the way every pond and creek had dead bodies in it, humans and animals, and the water had changed color. When we were thirsty, we had no choice but to drink the foul water. Oh, I still can smell the stink of the decaying corpses. Some of them had eyeballs sticking two or three inches out of their faces, probably due to the gas built up inside them. We once came across a young woman’s body with one foot missing, dark blood still oozing out of the stump; on her other foot was a small purple shoe — she had bound feet. Some women were naked from the waist down, stabbed to death after the Japs had raped them. My legs would keep on shaking whenever we passed a pile of corpses.

“Again and again we were stopped by Japanese soldiers. Lucky for us, the officer who had released us wrote a note, so the guards along the way didn’t arrest us and allowed us to come back to Nanjing. One of the fellows, dehydrated from diarrhea, couldn’t walk anymore. We could do nothing but leave him behind on the roadside. He must be dead now. Not far from where we left him, we stumbled into a little boy, two or three years old, sitting at a deserted bus stop and crying from hunger pangs. I gave him a piece of pancake, but before he could eat it, four Japs came and prodded him with their boots. One of them pulled out his dick and started peeing into the boy’s mouth. The boy was crying louder and louder while the Japs cracked up. We dared not watch for long, so we moved on. I’m sure the other three Japs did the same to the boy. He’d be lucky if they didn’t kill him.

“Oh, human lives suddenly became worthless, dead bodies everywhere, some with their bellies cut open, intestines spilled out, and some half burned with gasoline. The Japs killed so many people that they polluted streams, ponds, and wells everywhere, and they themselves couldn’t find clean water to drink anymore. Even the rice they ate was reddish because they had to use bloody water to cook it. Once a Japanese messman gave us some bowls of rice, and after I ate it, I had the taste of blood in my mouth for hours. To tell the truth, I never thought I would make it back and see you folks again. Now my pulse still gallops in the middle of the night.”

While Ban was speaking, I jotted down what he said.

1

MORNING, ANLING,” Minnie greeted me as I was approaching the Central Building, the largest one at Jinling Women’s College. Together we headed for President Wu’s quarters in the Southern Hill Residence, where we were scheduled for breakfast. The late November air was frosty, and I could see wisps of breath hanging around people’s faces when we passed them. A skein of mallards was drifting north, squawking loudly, their wings paddling like tiny oars. Then the whole flock became invisible in the livid sky. The mountainous clouds looked heavy with rain, which meant that no Japanese bombers would come today. So in spite of the cold and damp weather, people would say “Such a nice day” when they met. Overcast skies put everyone in a better mood.

Dr. Wu had been sorting and packing the school’s papers because she was planning to take some of them away with her. A number of our Chinese faculty members had also been preparing to leave. Many staffers had nowhere to go, yet they too were busy, hiding away food and valuables. Minnie hadn’t packed a thing. As the dean of the college, she wanted to remain behind. She told me, “If I lose anything, I might lose all.”

Dr. Wu was waiting for us, in cheerful spirits. On the table were toasted slices of baguette, a bar of butter in a dish, a sauceboat of jam, and a jar of mayonnaise. At the sight of the Western breakfast, Minnie’s eyes twinkled. She said, “Wow, I’ve been eating rice porridge and salted peanuts every morning for weeks. Where did you get these?”

“Madame Chiang gave them to me yesterday,” Dr. Wu answered, adjusting her eyeglasses with her fingertips. She often went to see the first lady, as both of them had been educated in the United States — Madame Chiang had gone to Wellesley and Dr. Wu had earned her PhD in entomology from the University of Michigan. She’d been an executive member of the Women’s War Relief Association headed by Madame Chiang and had held many meetings and rallies to garner support for our army and to solicit donations for orphanages and refugees. Dr. Wu was a minor celebrity, the first Chinese woman who had earned a doctorate in the United States. She was one of the first five graduates of Jinling and had succeeded Mrs. Dennison as its president in 1928, when our government stipulated that all foreign colleges and universities in China must be headed by Chinese citizens. “Sit down. Let’s eat while we talk,” Dr. Wu told us. She was wearing a black silk tunic with a brass button like a huge coin at its neck. Despite being in her late thirties, she looked youthful, with bright vivid eyes and high cheekbones, probably because she wasn’t married and had never been burdened with children and housework.

I poured boiled water from a thermos into three mugs to dissolve the powdered milk and then handed Dr. Wu and Minnie each a mug.

“Thanks,” Minnie said, spreading the toast thinly with both jam and mayonnaise. She took a bite. “Hmm, what a treat! I wish there were eggs scrambled with ham, cheese, and mushrooms,” she said in her slightly accented Mandarin. “How I miss a hearty Midwestern breakfast.”

“Me too,” Dr. Wu said. “I miss bacon.”

We all laughed. I took a sip of the hot milk, which tasted rich and sweetish. I wished I could save my mug for Fanfan, my two-year-old grandson.

Our school’s board of founders in New York had just instructed Dr. Wu to join the Jinling group that had recently moved to Chengdu, in western China, while Minnie Vautrin, as she herself had requested, was to stay behind in Nanjing as the head of our college for the time being. Dr. Wu had asked me, and I had agreed, to remain here and help Minnie run the school. The three of us still needed to make plans for safeguarding the campus. The valuables in our vault would be packed in a huge portmanteau to be delivered to the U.S. embassy. We dreaded being looted by Chinese troops, who were notorious for their unruliness, especially when they were frustrated and desperate.

“The embassy is going to evacuate onto the Panay, I’m told,” Minnie said, referring to a U.S. gunboat.

“That’s all right.” Dr. Wu sloshed her milk and took a mouthful. “It will be safer to put our stuff in their charge.”

“Where should we hide our cash?” I asked.

We all believed that soon no bank would be open in town and there would be widespread shortages. Dr. Wu smiled and suggested that we leave one hundred yuan in the vault and hide the rest, more than four thousand in total, in different places known only to Minnie and me. Minnie asked me, “Isn’t Mrs. Dennison’s silver in the vault too?”

“Yes, what should we do about that?” I said.

“Is it an expensive set?” asked Dr. Wu.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s her wedding silver,” Minnie replied, “a fancy set, probably worth four hundred yuan.”

“Pack it into the portmanteau,” said the president.

Minnie briefed us about the work that the International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone had been doing. That relief association had just been established by some foreigners who were remaining behind despite their embassies’ urging them to leave. The Safety Zone would be a neutral district in the center of Nanjing, in an area of about two and a half square miles, where foreign embassies, consulates, and some mission schools were located; it was meant to provide sanctuary for noncombatants. The city officials supported the foreigners’ effort and had given them eighty thousand yuan in cash and forty-five tons of rice and flour to set up camps for refugees. Thank heaven the rice crop was good in the Yangtze Valley this year. So there was plenty of rice in the city, but trucks were at a premium and often commandeered by the military, and so were unavailable for transporting the promised rations into the neutral zone. Some departing troops would have burned hundreds of tons of rice stored near the riverside in Hsia Gwan if the Safety Zone Committee had not intervened. Generalissimo Chiang had personally offered a hundred thousand yuan to the committee as well, though to date only forty thousand had been delivered. The Japanese authorities, whom the committee had contacted by way of the U.S. embassy, did not respond directly to the proposal concerning the neutral zone but stated that the Imperial Army would “try to respect the district as far as consistent with military necessity.”

The Safety Zone Committee was composed of fifteen men — Americans and Europeans, most of them missionaries, as well as some businessmen and academics. It was chaired by John Rabe, a fifty-five-year-old German and the representative of the Nanjing office of Siemens, the company that had built our city’s telephone system, maintained the turbines of our power plant, and supplied modern equipment for our hospitals. Rabe also ran a small German school, which he would open, together with his home, to the refugees. There were no women on the Safety Zone Committee, because it was understood that its members might have to run unimaginable risks, including confronting the soldiers in person. Two American women, however, were actively involved in the relief work: Minnie Vautrin and Holly Thornton, a widow of forty who was now a naturalized Chinese citizen. Holly, a friend of mine, was a part-time English broadcaster. Both Minnie and Holly were on the Nanjing International Red Cross Committee, which was headed by Reverend John Magee. Some of the American men were on both the Safety Zone Committee and the Red Cross Committee.

Having heard Minnie’s report about the relief work and the prospect of using Jinling as a refugee camp for women and children, Dr. Wu lowered her head, her hair short like an overgrown crew cut and her eyes dim and watery. She turned pensive for a moment, then said to Minnie, “Do whatever you feel is appropriate and necessary. I can’t stop thinking about how badly the foreigners were treated here ten years ago. Now, only a group of foreigners can help the refugees. What a shame.”

Dr. Wu was referring to the attacks by the Chinese army on foreigners in 1927. In March of that year, the troops had gone on a rampage, plundering, burning, and destroying foreign schools and residences. It was believed that the Communists had instigated the violence to frame Chiang Kai-shek and damage his relations with the West. Some soldiers beat up foreigners and assaulted women. A platoon broke into Jinling and carried off several microscopes from a biology laboratory and some staffers’ personal belongings. At Nanjing University six foreign men were shot dead. I remembered how some missionaries had climbed down the city wall and scrambled onto American and British gunboats, which had been laying down a barrage inside the city to keep the Chinese troops from approaching a group of foreigners trapped on a hill. Eventually all the Westerners fled Nanjing, and Minnie and our other foreign faculty members went to Tsingtao and dared not come back to teach. It looked as if that was the end of their mission work here, but some of them returned six months later. Minnie was the very first to come back, eager to complete the construction of a dorm building and the rose garden.

2

MINNIE HAD GONE to the U.S. embassy to deliver the portmanteau when Searle Bates arrived on a bicycle to inspect our camp in preparation for relief work and to collect the Red Cross flags made by some women from the Jinling neighborhood. He was wearing a gabardine coat and work boots, which made him appear more imposing. He was somewhat slight in build, around five foot nine, and nearsighted. He told me that there were plans for nineteen other refugee camps in the Safety Zone, but there was only one other besides our college that would admit women and children exclusively, the one at Nanjing University’s dormitories. Searle also delivered some letters and a bundle of the North China Daily News, a British newspaper some of our faculty members had subscribed to. Since August, when the Japanese began attacking Shanghai, the paper had always arrived in batches, usually two weeks late.

Searle was a history professor at Nanjing University, most of whose staff had just fled inland with the national government. He had a PhD in Chinese history from Yale and spoke Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. My husband had worked with him before the war, so I had known him for years and liked him. I walked with him through the halls, from which we had cleared all the furniture to make room for refugees. I told him that we expected to receive twenty-seven hundred people maximum, figured on the basis of sixteen square feet per person (each refugee would have a two-by-eight-foot space), but we’d feel more comfortable with two thousand. He nodded, smiling, while his craggy face wrinkled a little, a pair of delicate glasses on his bulky nose. He jotted down the numbers in a notebook, his Parker fountain pen shiny in his sinewy hand. As we were crossing the quadrangle, he tilted his head toward the thirty-foot U.S. flag we had spread in its center to indicate to Japanese bombers that this was American property.

“That’s impressive,” he said.

“Gosh, it took us more than a month to make it,” I told him. “It’s hard to find a capable tailor nowadays. At first the man mistakenly placed the stars in the upper right corner of the flag, and he had a lot of trouble getting them to the left.”

Searle chuckled. “What a pretty haven you have here.” He clucked his tongue. Jinling College was known for its lovely campus, planted with many kinds of trees and flowers. Every fall there’d been a flower show here, but not this year.

Suddenly the air-raid sirens went off, wailing like a mourning crowd. People began running for shelter. “We’d better go underground,” I said, and pointed at the chapel, which had a basement.

Searle shook his head. “I won’t bother with it until I see bombs falling.”

I tugged at his sleeve. “Come. Consider this part of your inspection. You should see our air-raid shelter, shouldn’t you?”

“It’s a false alarm.”

There had been so many wrong warnings lately that people tended to ignore the first signal. But at this point the second siren — shorter but more rapid — began howling, meaning you must take cover. More people were hustling away. As Searle and I were going out the front entrance of our college, explosions thundered in the residential area about a mile away to the east, near West Flower Gate, in the old Manchu city now inhabited by the poor. Pillars of whitish smoke were rising over there while a couple of antiaircraft guns roared, shells bursting in the air like black blossoms.

“Let’s get into that,” I said, leading Searle to a dugout nearby. A hail of flak fragments was rustling through the treetops and pelting the roofs. A handful landed at our feet, raising dust.

Inside the cellar some women held babies in their arms, with toddlers sitting next to them. A mother yelled at her children to stop them from peeking out. Two old men seated on folding stools were battling over a chessboard in a corner lit by a bean oil lamp as if this were their regular haunt and they’d been at the game for hours. A smell like deep-fried fish hung in the air.

When Searle and I sat down, I told him about the women seated around us: “They’re so used to the raids now. In the beginning they wouldn’t dare to let out a peep in here, believing the planes had a device that could detect conversations down below.”

Searle chortled, then said, “It’s despicable to keep bombing the residential areas. I’m going to file a complaint with the Japanese embassy.”

“Those pilots must enjoy dumping bombs on civilians,” I said. “The bastards, they should know this is a war crime.”

“If Japan loses this war, some of them will be brought to trial, I’m sure.”

Uncertain about the outcome of the war, I didn’t say another word. I turned to watch an old woman stitching a cloth sole with an awl and a flaxen thread, a piece of adhesive tape wrapped around the tip of her forefinger.

A minute later Searle remarked, “So only the old, the young, and women are here.”

I didn’t respond, knowing that some foreigners had their doubts about the Chinese, especially the elite and the educated among us. Most of those people were gone. But why would so many of them flee upriver with the national government or to the other interior regions? Why wouldn’t they join the army, if not to fight in the trenches, then at least to help bolster the troops’ morale or to look after the wounded and the sick? This war seemed to be fought by only the poor and the weak. That point neither my husband nor I could dispute. These days I hadn’t been able to drive out of my mind the vision of recruits I often encountered in town. Many of them were merely teenage boys from the countryside, emaciated and illiterate, who could hardly fend for themselves. They were sent to the front as nothing but cannon fodder.

After the all-clear siren, Searle rode away, and I headed for the Administration Building. As I approached it, I saw Minnie talking with Big Liu at the entrance. Liu was six foot two and hulking like a basketball player retired long ago. I went over and greeted them.

Big Liu was asking permission for his family to move to our campus. Minnie had been studying classical Chinese with him since last spring and trusted him, so she granted his request. I was glad, because Big Liu was levelheaded and resourceful, knew English, and had taught Chinese to foreigners for many years. It would be good to have him around.

“Thank you, Miss Vautrin,” Big Liu said in a ringing voice.

“Just call me Minnie,” she reminded him.

“Minnie,” he said with a straight face.

We all laughed. Most people in Nanjing called Minnie “Principal Vautrin,” a form of address that seemed to discomfit her a little, though she wouldn’t object if a stranger called her that.

Then Minnie hit upon an idea, and blinking her large brown eyes, she said to Big Liu, “Why don’t you work for us? Our secretary, Mr. Kong, went back to his home village and left hundreds of letters unanswered.”

“You want me to be on your staff?” Big Liu asked.

“Yes, to be our Chinese secretary.”

“For real?”

“She’s in charge now,” I told him.

“Yes, I just offered you the job.” As Minnie was speaking, I heard a thrill in her voice. Evidently she took great pride in her new role.

“Wonderful! I’m delighted, delighted.” Big Liu’s rugged face lit up.

Big Liu, who’d been looking for work in vain, had a teenage daughter and small son to support. He would start the following Monday, with a monthly salary of twenty-five yuan for the time being. That was plenty, compared to the other staffers, since we had all taken a sixty percent pay cut. Minnie now was making fifty yuan a month while I was making thirty. She suggested that Big Liu’s family live at East Court, a group of houses set around a courtyard in the southeast part of campus. It was Minnie, as a construction supervisor a decade ago, who had designed that servants’ residence, which had been built so well that later some Chinese faculty members complained that those quarters were superior to their own. My family was also living at East Court, so the Lius would be our neighbors.

As the three of us were talking, our business manager, Luhai Bai, appeared and waved at Minnie. Despite that impressive title, Luhai mainly handled external business dealings, because it was I who managed most of the logistics on campus. The young man, limping slightly, hurried up to us, a little out of breath. He said, “Madame Chiang has sent us her piano and Victrola.”

“Oh, as gifts?” Minnie asked.

“Yes.”

“Where are they?” I said.

“Some men are unloading them in front of the Music Hall.”

“Let’s go have a look,” said Minnie.

As the four of us headed to that building, which also housed the chapel, I realized that Madame Chiang must be evacuating. This upset me, because it confirmed the rumor about the Chiangs’ secret departure. I wondered if Dr. Wu had known all along about their plan to leave. Would the generalissimo’s withdrawal affect the defending troops? Wouldn’t the soldiers feel deserted? On second thought, I realized that it would be unreasonable to expect the generalissimo to remain on the battle line. If he were killed or captured, it would be catastrophic.

In front of the Music Hall stood a six-wheeled truck and five soldiers smoking self-rolled cigarettes, their overcoats piled on the ground. The piano, a Baldwin, had already been unloaded. Its finish was dull and it looked well used, but the Victrola was spanking new, in an oxhide case and accompanied by a gleaming brass horn and two boxes of records. Minnie lifted the piano’s keyboard cover and tickled out a couple of random notes. “Sounds powerful. This behemoth is what we need for the chapel service,” she said, then motioned to the men. “Please carry it in and put it next to the organ.”

We were glad about the gifts, but I couldn’t think of anyone on campus able to play the piano. Not a single person among us could do that. My friend Holly was a musician, but she was occupied with the radio station. Even Minnie couldn’t punch out a tune. She often said that all her life she had wished she could play an instrument, ideally the cello — as a child, how she had envied the children who could take art and music lessons after school. She seemed to still suffer from the privation in her girlhood (she’d lost her mother at six, and even before her teens had to keep house for her father, a blacksmith in Secor, Illinois), as though this were an illness she couldn’t get over. That’s why, whenever possible, she’d have the underprivileged children in the Jinling neighborhood learn something more than reading, arithmetic, and practical skills, even if it was just a song or a ball game. I admired her for that, for her large heart, which set her apart from the other foreign women on the faculty.

I told Luhai to give the five soldiers each a pack of Red Chamber, the Chinese brand name of Old Mill at the time. These young men might go to the front at any moment, so I wanted to make them happy.

“We’re just out of cigarettes,” Luhai said.

“Go to my home and ask Yaoping for five packs,” I told him.

Minnie said, “Yes, tell Mr. Gao that the boss needs them.”

They laughed, assuming that I ruled the roost at home, which was not true. I love and respect my husband and never impose my wishes on him. It was my job at the college that required me to stay on top of many things and gave others the impression of my being bossy. I told Luhai, “Let Yaoping know we’ll give them back to him as soon as we get a carton.”

Luhai was happy to fetch the cigarettes.

3

AS USUAL, Yaoping started his morning with a pipe, a cup of aster tea, and the local newspaper The Purple Mountain Evening News, which in early December was still full of wedding announcements — parents were anxious to marry off their daughters, assuming that the grooms, and their families, might be able to protect the brides when the Japanese came. Our daughter, Liya, had been up since six thirty and was busy cooking breakfast in the kitchen, while her son, Fanfan, was still sleeping in bed. She was four months pregnant, but her belly wasn’t showing yet and her movements were still nimble. Her father hoped she’d give us a granddaughter, while I preferred another boy. I liked girls, but they would suffer more than boys in this world and needed more protection. As a parent you would worry about them constantly. Yaoping, a quiet man, had been a history lecturer at Nanjing University, but he hadn’t left for Sichuan with the rest of his school, reluctant to be separated from us. In addition, he had low blood pressure, dizzy spells, and arthritis, and he needed to be taken care of, so he couldn’t make the long trek to the interior province. Besides, we felt that we would be safer together at Jinling College, an American school less likely to be attacked by the Japanese soldiers. But my son-in-law, Liya’s husband, had departed with the Nationalist army, in which he served as an intelligence officer.

As soon as I washed up, I went to see Dr. Wu, who was leaving today. She and I were both from Wuchang, Hubei Province, and I had been working for her ever since she became the college’s president.

The campus was deserted. In early September, when school was supposed to start, only two girls had returned, and a month later they both had left. Then some of our faculty members departed for Wuchang, where they resumed teaching a small group of students. Some of our foreign teachers were still in Shanghai after the summer. Dr. Wu was leaving to join another group of our staff and faculty, mainly Chinese, together with some twenty students, who were on their way to Sichuan, where the national government and many universities were to be relocated. At the sight of me, she said, “Anling, I’m leaving the college in your hands. Help Minnie take care of everything here.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

“Write to me as often as you can.” Her face puckered a little as she spoke, as if in a vain attempt to smile.

It was understood that I’d be her unofficial proxy here, because there’d be things that Minnie, as a foreigner, couldn’t handle. As we were speaking, Minnie showed up, panting slightly and her cheeks pinkish, glowing with health. She hugged Dr. Wu and Miss Fan, the petite accountant, saying we would see them again soon. The porters had already loaded the luggage. Without delay we set out for the front entrance of campus, where the truck was waiting.

Minnie and I didn’t go to Hsia Gwan with them, knowing they would tarry hours there before the boat cast off. For the whole morning we were anxious, and not until it began drizzling in the afternoon did we feel relieved, because the rain could deter the Japanese bombers. The boat also carried four hundred boxes of art treasures from the Palace Museum, so it might have been dangerous for Dr. Wu and Miss Fan to be on board. By the next morning they would pass Wuhu. Beyond that small city the enemy planes would be less likely to attack them.

The previous evening Miss Fan had told Minnie and me the combination to the college’s vault, and we took out the cash and hid it in different buildings.

I WAS PLEASED that Holly had just joined our staff and stayed with us after her radio station had been dissolved. She was the only foreigner besides Minnie on campus and could play the piano and organ. This meant that our chapel service could resume as before. Holly was so energetic that she also took part in charity work outside our college. Lately she’d been going to Hsia Gwan to help wounded soldiers in the evenings. Sometimes I went with her, bringing along a couple of newly made garments and bedding. I had trained in a missionary hospital to be a nurse — that’s why I could speak English and would also help out at the school’s infirmary whenever they needed me.

On the evening of December 7, Holly drove Minnie and me to Hsia Gwan in her De Soto coupe. Minnie was shocked and also disturbed, as we had been on our first visit there, by the sight of more than three hundred soldiers lying about in the train station. Most of the men suffered from gunshot wounds, and many had lost limbs. The waiting hall brought to mind a temporary morgue, though moaning kept rising in there and some men cursed their superiors. One man raved “Kill, kill!” while flailing his arms. Most of the wounded were barefoot, which made me wonder who had stripped them of their footwear. Maybe they hadn’t worn real shoes to begin with, since a lot of the troops from the southern provinces had gone to the front wearing only straw sandals.

The three of us began distributing the half-dozen thin quilts we’d brought along. For the moaning ones we could hardly do a thing aside from saying they’d be shipped to the hospital soon. In a corner a man with a wound in the shoulder lay on a string stretcher gazing at Minnie and me. He smiled and said quietly with a Hunan accent, “Don’t let them take me away.”

“You want to stay here?” Minnie asked.

“I’m so tired, still drenched. They carried me through driving rain for three days, all the way from Danyang. So many men died on the road. I have to rest some before going to the hospital.”

I saw a small puddle on the terrazzo floor under his stretcher and realized he must have wet the cotton quilt underneath him. “I’ll be back in a second.” I stepped away and looked around for some dry bedclothes but couldn’t find any. Outside a storage room filled with undelivered parcels, I came across two used hemp sacks and, ignoring who might own them, brought them back. Minnie and I pulled the man’s stretcher a few steps away, placed the sacks beside it, and helped him move onto the makeshift bedding.

“Thank you, thank you,” the man kept saying as Minnie spread the soiled quilt on the stretcher to dry. “It’s so kind of you,” he added, and closed his eyes, as if about to fall asleep.

Minnie wordlessly adjusted his leg while I moved the stretcher alongside him so that he could get on it again once the thin quilt dried a bit. Before we could turn away, he opened his eyes. “I met another good-hearted foreigner,” he breathed, as if he couldn’t see that I had a Chinese face. Then his voice became a little louder. “A Canadian doctor dressed my wound every other day in Danyang. Every time I was in such pain that I yelped like mad, but he never lost his temper and always patted my forehead to calm me down. Once he wiped my face with a warm towel. Before I left, I told him that if I were younger, I would’ve wanted to have him as my godfather. Such a good man.”

I realized that this young fellow might be a Christian. Touching his forehead, Minnie said, “God will help you get well soon.”

I couldn’t say a word. As we stepped away, I wondered how we could console these men without lying to them. Most of them, infested with lice and fleas and depleted of strength, would soon join the yellow soil of China. An upsurge of sadness constricted my chest. Suddenly tearful and stuffy-nosed, I rushed out of the waiting hall to compose myself in the chilly air. Why would God let our land go through such horrendous destruction? Why did these innocent men have to suffer like this? When would God ever show his wrath against the violent aggressors? Those questions, usually lurking in the back of my mind, again cropped up and bewildered me.

Minnie came out and joined me. “This is awful, awful,” she said with a sob in her voice, her cheeks tear-stained. “I never thought it could be so bad.” Her brown hair was tousled a little and her lips twisted as if she were chewing something. In silence I patted her shoulder.

We went back in a few minutes later. A young man, actually a teenager, howled in a childlike voice, “Take me home! I want to see my mom and dad before I die.” His eyes were injured, and his entire face was bandaged save for his mouth.

Minnie touched his head and said, “They’re going to send you home soon.”

“Don’t lie to me! Liar, liar, all of you are liars.”

She turned away while I went to help Holly fill canteens with boiled water that had cooled down. At the far end of the hall, John Magee, the kindhearted minister, was praying. He came here every night to direct a team of young volunteers trying to help these men, and also to administer the last rites for the dying ones.

“Anling.” Minnie beckoned to me from behind a high-backed bench.

I put down the canteen I was filling, went over, and saw, lying on the floor, a man whose right leg had been shot off close to the hip. He was motionless, his gaping wound emitting a foul odor. Minnie whispered to me, “Do you think he’s still alive?”

As I was wondering, his hand twitched as if stung by something. “Apparently he is,” I said.

I bent down to observe his wound. The flesh had begun to rot; it was whitish and oozing pus. Thanks to the cold weather there were few flies, yet I saw four or five tiny maggots wiggling on the edge of the decayed flesh. The stench from the stump was so overpowering that I had to hold my breath. Obviously these men had been left like this for days.

“Do they have a list of their names?” Minnie asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said, surprised by the question.

“I’m wondering if there’ll be a cemetery for these poor men who have sacrificed everything for China.” Minnie turned tearful again.

Deep inside, I knew there might be no list of their names at all. Everything was in such disarray that their superiors wouldn’t bother about these useless men anymore. After they died, who’d be able to tell where their bodies were? Perhaps their parents would receive a “lost in battle” notice. These country lads seemed to have been sent into this world only to suffer and to be used — the spans of their lives depended on how much they could endure.

The more we observed the one-legged man, the more grief-stricken we became. Minnie went up to Holly and asked almost crossly, “Why can’t they cleanse and dress his wound?” She pointed at the man behind the bench.

“They have no medicine here, not even rubbing alcohol or iodine solution,” Holly said.

I was afraid that Minnie might fly off the handle. As I feared, she stepped across to a young woman in a white gown and said, “Look, I know the man over there might be a hopeless case, but why not dress his wound and let him die like a human being?”

“We don’t have any bandages,” the woman answered. “We’re here just to feed them and give them water.”

“So your job is to prolong their agony?”

“I wish I could do more, Principal Vautrin.” The young thing forced a smile, her face careworn and haggard.

“Minnie, it’s not her fault,” I said.

As I pulled her away, Minnie admitted, “You’re right. She’s not even a nurse and must be a volunteer like us.”

“At most she’s a nurse’s aide,” I replied.

“If only our students were still around. Then we could bring over two or three classes. Some of the well-heeled students would donate medicines and bandages for sure.”

“They would,” I said.

I debated whether I should wipe the man’s wound — to get rid of the maggots at least — but I was uncertain whether that would increase his pain. Without any medicine, it might make his wound more infected, so instead I found a newspaper and spread it over his stump.

We left the train station after ten p.m. All the way back, Minnie was withdrawn while Holly and I were talking about the collapse of the Chinese lines. Evidently Nanjing would fall in a matter of days. We were sure there would be more wounded men and refugees pouring into town.

As we approached our campus, Minnie said, “I must take a shower to get rid of the awful smell.”

“I guess you won’t stop thinking about those dying men for a while,” I said.

“Are you a worm inside me, Anling?” Minnie asked, using the Chinese expression. “How can you read my mind?”

Holly chortled, then said, “We may not be able to visit them again.”

Indeed, we would be too occupied in the forthcoming days to go to the train station again.

4

THE BORDERS of the Safety Zone had all been marked by Red Cross flags, though the Chinese army had been building batteries and defense works inside the southern part of the zone. John Rabe had to wrangle with Colonel Huang, an aide-de-camp to Generalissimo Chiang, to get the troops out of the neutral district. The young officer believed that the very sight of the Safety Zone would demoralize the soldiers who “must defend the city to the last drop of blood.” No matter how Rabe argued that from the military point of view it was absurd to set up defenses here, the colonel wouldn’t be persuaded — yet he took off with the general staff a few days later. Rabe joked afterward, “It’s so easy to resolve to fight with others’ blood.”

Before the generalissimo departed, he’d had another forty thousand yuan of the promised cash delivered to the Safety Zone Committee with a letter thanking the Westerners for their relief work. Some of the foreigners believed that the Chinese army was just putting up a show to save face, but Rabe didn’t think so. He was fearful that General Tang Sheng-chi, Chiang’s rival of a sort, who had only reluctantly assumed the role of the commander of the Nanjing defense, might sacrifice everything, including the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. Two days earlier the general had had dozens of boats burned to demonstrate that his troops would stand their ground, fighting with their backs to the river.

Rabe protested again to the officers in charge of the artillery units placed inside the Safety Zone and even threatened to resign his chairmanship and dissolve the Safety Zone Committee if the military personnel remained there, because that would give the Japanese a pretext to attack and eliminate the zone. General Tang assigned Colonel Long to work with Rabe, and together they managed to remove the troops. At the news of their withdrawal, we breathed a sigh of relief — our effort to set up refugee camps might not be wasted.

On Wednesday afternoon, December 8, Minnie held a neighborhood meeting, and more than a hundred people attended it, mostly women. Usually such a gathering in the chapel would draw a larger crowd because food was offered afterward, mainly bread and light pastries. Today the attendees were not interested in loaves and fishes; instead, they were eager to find out how soon they could come to Jinling at the time of crisis. For many of them, our college was the only sanctuary they could imagine. Miss Lou, an evangelical worker in the neighborhood, was present at the meeting. The previous day Minnie had allowed this middle-aged woman with intense eyes and a slightly sunken mouth to move into the Practice Hall and take charge of the refugees to be housed there. Miss Lou had no official affiliation with our college, but she was one of the few locals we could depend on. This little woman knew which people in the neighborhood were really destitute, so whenever we wanted to distribute charity, we’d go to her for assistance.

“Principal Vautrin, can I bring my dad with me when I come?” a slope-shouldered woman asked. “He’s bedridden and I can’t leave him behind.”

“Well, we will open our camp only to women and children,” Minnie answered.

A few men booed. One of them complained, “You can’t reject us like this, Principal Vautrin! This is unfair.”

I turned around to scowl at those men, some of whom were ne’er-do-wells, playing chess, cards, and mah-jongg day and night. Some had even snuck onto our campus to pilfer things.

Minnie waved for them to stop. As the hall quieted down, she resumed: “Ours is a women’s college, so it would be inappropriate for us to accommodate men.” She turned to a group of women. “Your menfolk can go to the other camps that take in families.”

“Why separate us?” a female voice asked.

“You won’t be separated for long,” Minnie said. “We’re talking about a matter of life or death while you’re still thinking about how to stay comfortably with your man.”

That cracked up the audience. We all knew that this woman had no children; she had been nicknamed the Barren One. She dropped her eyes, her cheeks crimson.

“Where are those camps that also accept men?” another female voice asked.

Minnie replied, “Wutaishan Primary School, the old Communications Ministry, Nanjing University’s Library, the military chemical shops — practically all the other camps admit families except for the one at the university’s dorms.”

“They’re too far away,” an old woman cried.

My temper was simmering. As I was wondering whether to say something to those selfish people, Miss Lou stood up and turned around to face them, her deep-set eyes steady behind her thick glasses. “Let’s remember who we are,” she said. “Jinling College is under no obligation whatsoever to accommodate any of us, but it offers to shelter us from the Eastern devils. We ought to appreciate what Principal Vautrin and her colleagues have been doing for us.”

“Shut up, little toady!” a male voice shouted from the back.

I stood and began to speak. “This is a chapel, not a cheap tavern where you can swear at will. So stop name-calling or make an exit. As for the men here, don’t you feel ashamed to compete with women and kids for safety? If you cannot fight the enemy and protect your families with arms, at least you should have the decency to leave them in more capable hands, while you look for refuge for yourselves elsewhere.”

That silenced the crowd, and for a moment the hall was so quiet that the distant artillery fire suddenly seemed to rumble louder and closer. After Miss Lou and I had sat down, Minnie continued, “We welcome all women and children, but we will do our best to shelter young women and girls first. That’s to say we encourage older women to stay home if they already live within the Safety Zone.”

“How about boys?” a woman asked from the back.

“Good question,” Minnie said. “Boys under thirteen will be admitted.”

“My fourteen-year-old is still a little kid,” a mother cried.

“But there’re fourteen-year-olds who are almost grown. We have to save room for girls and young women. In your son’s case, you should say he’s thirteen.”

That brought out peals of laughter.

“When can we come?” the same woman asked.

“When it’s no longer safe to stay home. Bring only your bedding, a change of clothes, and some money. No chests or boxes, please.”

At the meeting’s end, Miss Lou, the zealous little woman, read Psalm 70 loudly. She cried out the refrain in a shrill voice: “Make haste to help me, O God.” Then we all stood up and sang the chorus from the hymn “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.” I’d bet that only a few of the attendees knew the words by heart; nevertheless, we all sang with abandon, some holding large hymnals with both hands, and our voices were earnest and strong.

THAT EVENING we received the first group of refugees. Most of them had come from the countryside, and some had trekked all the way from Wuxi, a city more than a hundred miles to the east. The Japanese had not only plundered their villages and towns but also seized young men and women, so people had abandoned their homes and fled to Nanjing, or had tried to cross the Yangtze to reach Pukou, unaware that the Japanese had just captured that area outside Nanjing to cut the retreat route of the Chinese army. The Japanese torched most houses along the way, destroyed whatever they couldn’t use, and had felled thickets and forests within a quarter mile of the railroads to prevent their supply trains from being ambushed. To defend the capital, the Chinese army was also razing civilian homes, especially in the Jurong area; it ordered people to leave their villages and then burned their houses to clear all possible obstructions to its cannons. This created more refugees, and now crowds of them swarmed at the city gates, waiting to be let in.

A woman with salt-and-pepper hair collapsed in front of us, sitting on a boulder and weeping while relating her story. “My daughter and I came to town to sell taros,” she sobbed, “but there was such a big crowd gathering outside Guanghua Gate that I lost her. I thought she’d get through the gate anyway and we could meet inside the city wall, but after I came in, the gate was suddenly closed ’cause the Japs began shelling that area. I waited inside the wall for the whole afternoon and couldn’t go out to look for her. Our home’s already gone, and she wouldn’t know where to go. Oh, my poor child, she’s just eleven.”

Some families came intact, but the men had to go elsewhere to find shelter for themselves. Most of them were willing to do so, grateful that their wives and children were in safe hands. A sleepy-eyed man went up to Minnie and implored her to give his family a little food because they had no money. She told him, “Don’t worry. We won’t let them starve.”

Word had it that the camps that accepted men as well were filling rapidly. We had not expected to receive refugees so soon, and now, on the evening of December 8, more than a hundred were already here. Minnie told ruddy-faced Luhai to set up a soup kitchen that would open the next morning.

5

IT WAS EERILY QUIET the next morning, and for hours few gunshots were heard. The cannonade in the east, south, and west had ceased too. We couldn’t help but wonder if the Japanese had entered Nanjing. That seemed unlikely, since the Chinese troops were still holding their positions. As Minnie and I were discussing the influx of refugees, Old Liao, our gardener, came and handed Minnie a leaflet. He was her longtime friend. Minnie had hired him from Hefei eighteen years ago when she came to Jinling to become its acting president — in place of Mrs. Dennison, who had gone back to the States for fund-raising for a year — because she wanted to create a beautiful campus. “I found this on the west hill this morning,” Liao said in a husky voice, pointing at the sheet, and smiled as if it were just a regular day for him. “There’re lots of them in the bushes. A Japanese plane must’ve dropped them. I don’t know what it’s about but thought you might want to take a look.”

Minnie skimmed it, then handed it to me. The leaflet bore words from General Matsui, the commander in chief of the Japanese Central China Expeditionary Forces. He demanded that the Chinese side capitulate without delay, declaring, “This is the best way to protect the innocent civilians and the cultural relics in the ancient capital.” So we must all lay down our weapons and open the city gates to welcome the Imperial Army. The decree continued: “It is our policy to deal harshly with those who resist and to be kind and generous to noncombatants and the Chinese soldiers who entertain no hostility to our invincible force. Therefore, I order you to surrender within twenty-four hours, by 6:00 p.m., December 9. Otherwise, all the horrors of war will be unleashed on you mercilessly.”

There were fewer than ten hours left before the zero hour. Minnie told Liao, “This is an order from Iwane Matsui, the top Japanese general.”

“Never heard of him. What’s he want?”

“He demands that the Chinese surrender the city to him. What do you think we should do?”

“Well”—Old Liao scratched the back of his round head—“I don’t know. I hope he’ll leave people in peace.”

His answer seemed to amuse Minnie. Unlike the other staffers, Old Liao was untroubled by the coming of the Japanese, though his daughter had left with his grandchildren. We knew he was a timid man, and all he cared about was growing flowers and vegetables. War was simply beyond his ken. Yet Minnie had deep affection for this old gardener, who had a marvelous green thumb — whatever he touched would turn pretty and luxuriant in due time. As he slouched away trailing the grassy smell that always clung to him, I turned his answer over in my head. Maybe he was right to a degree — the common people would have to live, so whoever the ruler was, insofar as he did not interrupt their livelihood, they could accept him. But I stifled this thought, because all the recent Japanese atrocities spoke against such a possibility.

The leaflet from General Matsui might explain the quiet of this morning — the invading force must have been waiting for our side to respond to the ultimatum. I told Minnie this, and she agreed. Lewis Smythe confirmed our hunch when he came later that morning to inspect our medical clinic. Our telephone was already out of service, so he had to come in person. Lewis was surprised that Jinling had so far admitted only three hundred refugees, but he praised our careful planning and also told us that the four Britons and the Danish man on the Safety Zone Committee had just left Nanjing. We shouldn’t worry, though, he assured us, because more people, especially the locals, had begun participating in the relief work.

Lewis was a sociologist from Chicago teaching at Nanjing University and was also a missionary. He was rather sensitive and frail but always spoke eloquently. Even when conversing with people, he’d speak as if he were giving a lecture, with his hand gesticulating vividly. These days Lewis seemed quite spirited, as if the impending siege had charged him with vim and vigor; he even confessed to Minnie that he enjoyed “all the activities.” I guess he had never found his life so active and purposeful — above all, so intense.

Minnie invited him to a late lunch in the main dormitory, and I joined them. The food was plain: rice, sautéed mustard greens, and salted mackerel. Lewis, like Minnie, was one of the few foreigners who liked Chinese food. This was an advantage, since all stores had disappeared in town and foreign groceries were impossible to come by; what’s more, it was believed that eating the local food every day could build up one’s immunity to diseases, such as dysentery and malaria. Lewis told us that his effort to organize the ambulance service had collapsed, because the military commandeered automobiles at will. At the moment, he had only two vans that ran. As the secretary of the Safety Zone Committee, he was swamped with work, running around to make sure that basic medical services would be available in every camp.

While we were eating, Lewis talked about a truce that he and some other members of the Safety Zone Committee had attempted to arrange. The previous day they had proposed a three-day cease-fire, during which the Imperial Army would remain in its positions while the Chinese troops withdrew from the city, so that the Japanese could march in peacefully. In spite of General Tang’s belligerence in public, he was actually anxious to secure the truce. He asked the Safety Zone Committee to send a radiogram to both Generalissimo Chiang and Tokyo through the U.S. embassy, which was on the Panay now. Searle Bates and Plumer Mills, a board member of the Northern Presbyterian Mission in Nanjing, set out with one of General Tang’s aides for the American gunboat anchored upriver a little off Hsia Gwan. The message about the cease-fire was dispatched, and both General Tang and the Safety Zone Committee were waiting restlessly, but Chiang Kai-shek had replied earlier this morning: “Out of the question.”

“Foolish and crazy,” Lewis said about Chiang’s rejection. “He simply would not consider how many lives a truce would save. Now the city is doomed.” Lewis sighed, his mustache twitching as he chewed. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, the small lenses barely covering his lackluster eyes.

“He must have meant to save face,” Minnie said. I knew she liked Generalissimo Chiang, who was a Christian and had once come to Jinling’s commencement. I remembered that occasion, when he’d said he converted because the burden on his shoulders was so heavy that he needed God’s succor. I lifted the porcelain teapot and refilled everyone’s cup.

“Thanks,” Lewis said. “When a city and tens of thousands of lives are at stake, it is insane to worry about one’s own face.”

“The poor soldiers — they’ll all be trapped like rats,” said Minnie.

“Chiang Kai-shek should not have attempted to defend this place to begin with. The only explanation for this imbecility is that he desires to get rid of his rivals in the military.”

All of us knew of his eagerness to diminish his rival General Tang. Chiang’s German advisers had exhorted him not to defend our capital. The terrain around the city was like a sack, its mouth at Hsia Gwan, abutting the south bank of the Yangtze. If the Japanese forces, about 100,000 men in total, attacked from both east and west along the river, they could seize the docks in Hsia Gwan and completely cut the withdrawal route of the thirteen divisions and fifteen regiments defending our capital, about 150,000 men, who could then be squeezed into the “sack” demarcated by the city walls. From a military point of view, it was self-destructive to defend such a place.

Minnie asked Lewis, “So this morning’s peace is just the eye of the hurricane?”

“The Japanese will resume attacking any minute.”

The artillery bombardment of the downtown area started that evening. Huge shells landed near New Crossroads, the center of the city. Then explosions burst out in various places. Time and again shells fell in the Safety Zone, into which the civilians were flocking. All the streets leading to the neutral district were thronged with people carrying their possessions by whatever means they had — wheelbarrows, rickshaws, bicycles, even baby carriages, anything with a wheel on it. Many men bore their things with shoulder poles, and some had bedrolls on their backs. Women held babies, clothes bundles, thermoses. Some old people, too feeble to walk, were carried in large bamboo baskets by pairs of men with long poles. We heard that the camp at the Bible Teachers Training School was already filled to capacity with fifteen hundred people, yet they continued receiving new arrivals. By contrast, Jinling had admitted nearly seven hundred. Numerous families came, but we were adamant about taking in only women and children. Many women, reluctant to be separated from their menfolk, left for the camps that accepted families. Some men cursed Big Liu, Miss Lou, Holly, and me at the front entrance, and one even threw mud on our college’s sign and the steel-barred gate.

Throughout the night refugees kept streaming in. As the other camps were already full, all men now were willing to leave their families at Jinling and seek shelter for themselves elsewhere. Our college was said to be the safest place for women and children, so more and more of them were coming. Our staff, overwhelmed, was aided by dozens of refugee women who offered to help. There were so many arriving that by noon the next day the Faculty House was full, and the Central Building and the Practice Hall were also filling up. Some people, once admitted, wouldn’t go to any of the buildings, instead taking bricks from a construction site nearby to set up their own nests on the sports ground. These rectangular shelters were like giant cooking ranges, covered with pieces of bamboo matting supported by thin beams, which were mostly whittled branches.

In the south machine guns had been chattering without cease since daybreak; in the northeast, where a battle was raging, Purple Mountain was in flames. The smoke often obscured the sun. Time and again bombs exploded somewhere outside the Safety Zone. Japanese bombers were appearing without any alarm being sounded, though once in a while a flak battery or two still fired at them. Whenever a plane flew over our campus, most people would run for cover, but some from the countryside had the false notion that the Safety Zone was bombproof, and they’d stay in the open to watch the planes bombing or strafing something. Luhai and Big Liu had to yell to disperse them into the trenches and dugouts.

All day long, the mother who’d lost her eleven-year-old daughter two days earlier stood behind our college’s front gate, staring at the crowds in hopes of spotting her child. She kept asking people if they’d seen a little girl with bobbed hair and dimpled cheeks. No one had. Miss Lou took a bowl of rice porridge to the woman, who ate it without a word. I thought of having her brought into the campus but decided to let her continue grieving where she was.

6

THE NEXT DAY heavy artillery pounded the city without letup. On campus our staff was unsettled but kept working. Long sheds were being put up between the two northern dormitory buildings, and under them we let vendors sell food to the refugees. Steamed rice was five cents a bowl and shaobing, wheaten cakes no longer dotted with sesame seeds, were also five cents apiece; no one was allowed to buy more than two of each. The local Red Cross had promised to open a porridge plant here, but it had not materialized yet. Some people, without any food or money on them, had to go hungry. By noon on December 11 we had admitted about two thousand refugees, and so far had been able to accommodate them.

While I was serving hot water with a wooden ladle to the exhausted newcomers, John Magee arrived. I let a staffer take over the work and went up to the reverend. “I just came from downtown,” he said to Minnie and me. “It’s horrible out there, dozens of bodies lying in front of Fu Chang Hotel and the Capital Theater. A teahouse got hit, and some legs and arms were hanging in the air, tangled in the electric wires and treetops. The Japanese will be coming in at any moment.”

“You mean the Chinese troops just gave up resisting?” Minnie spoke with sudden anger, her eyes ablaze.

“I’m not sure,” Magee said. “Some of them had appeared in the Safety Zone, looting stores for food and supplies.”

“They just disbanded?” I asked, enraged too as I remembered the suburban villages they had burned in the name of defending the city.

“It’s hard to tell,” Magee replied. “Some of them are still fighting.”

He told us that a good part of Hsia Gwan was on fire. The Communications Ministry building, which had cost two million yuan to construct and, with its magnificent ceremonial hall, was the finest in the capital, had been gutted and torched. The Chinese army was destroying whatever they couldn’t take with them. They had set fire to many houses and buildings, including the generalissimo’s summer headquarters, the Military Academy, the Modern Chemical Warfare School, the agricultural research laboratories, the Railway Ministry, the Police Training School — all were burning. Probably it was their way of venting their rage, since by now they knew that Chiang Kai-shek and all the generals were gone.

As John Magee was speaking, a stooped man wearing a felt hat with earflaps and holding a walking stick turned up, leading a small girl with his other hand. “Please let us in?” the man asked in a listless voice.

“This place is only for women and children,” Minnie said.

The man smiled, his eyes gleaming. He straightened up and said in a bright female voice, “I am a woman. Look.” She took off her hat, pulled a bandanna out of her pocket, and wiped her face to get rid of the dirt and tobacco tar. We could now see that she was quite young, in her mid-twenties. Although her angular face was still streaked, her neck seemed longer now and her supple back gave her a willowy figure.

We let her and the little girl in.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Yanying,” she said. “This is my kid sister, Yanping.” She threw her arm around the girl.

Yanying told us, “Our town was burned by the Japs. They took lots of women and men. Our neighbors Aunt Gong and her daughter-in-law were tortured to death in their home. My dad told us to run. Our brother was too scared to travel in broad daylight, so my sis and I came without him.”

Minnie sent them to Holly in the Central Building. Then George Fitch appeared, wearing a corduroy coat and smoking a cigarette with a holder that resembled a small curved pipe. He looked exhausted, his hair messy and his amber eyes damp. Fitch was the head of the YMCA in Nanjing and the administrative director of the Safety Zone Committee; he had been born in Suzhou and spoke the local dialect so well that some Chinese mistook him for a Uighur. He told us that hundreds of Chinese soldiers had gone to the University Hospital camp to surrender. Many men dropped their weapons and begged the staff to let them in; otherwise they’d break into the buildings. He was sure that more soldiers, thousands of them, would come into the Safety Zone for protection, and this might get the committee into serious trouble with the victorious Japanese, so Magee and Fitch wasted no time and set off together for the hospital camp. Viewed from the rear, spindly Fitch seemed more stooped today, while Magee was stalwart with a sturdy back. Minnie said to me, “I hope no Chinese soldiers come to Jinling for refuge.”

“There won’t be any room left for them anyway,” I said.

That evening three buildings on campus were already filled, while the others continued taking in new arrivals. The Arts Building, the last one in reserve, was just opened. The Red Cross still hadn’t set up the porridge plant. The soup kitchen we had put together two days ago could meet only a fraction of the need. Minnie had proposed that we assemble the porridge plant by ourselves, but the local Red Cross people, who controlled the staffing of the kitchens and the distribution of some rations, insisted that they build the porridge plant. Apparently there was money to be made in this. Infuriated by their concern with profit under such circumstances, Minnie again sent Luhai to the local Red Cross headquarters to ask for permission.

THE NEXT MORNING it was quiet, as though the battle was over. We wondered if the Japanese had breached the city walls and gained full control of Nanjing. Word got around that the Chinese defense had collapsed after Japanese units had scaled the city walls and then dynamited them open in places. Soldiers swarmed in, shouting “Banzai!” and waving battle flags, but met little resistance. Big Liu said he’d seen the streets in the Aihui Middle School area littered with bodies, mostly civilians and some children — other than that, the downtown looked deserted.

For the whole morning Minnie scratched the nape of her neck continually. She felt itchy and sticky all over. She’d slept with her clothes on several nights in a row and hadn’t taken a shower since her visit to the wounded soldiers at the train station five days before. She hadn’t been able to sleep for two hours straight without being woken by gunfire or emergencies she had to cope with in person. Whenever she was too tired to continue, she’d take a catnap, and luckily she’d always been able to fall asleep the moment her head touched a pillow. If the battle was over today, she said she’d draw a hot bath and sleep for more than ten hours.

I was a light sleeper and had spent most of the night at the gatehouse and in different buildings. Thank God I was in good health and needed only three or four hours of sleep a day; still, I had underslept. Sometimes when I was too exhausted to continue working, I’d go into a storage room in the Practice Hall and doze off in there. These days my head was numb, my eyeballs ached, and my steps were unsteady, but I had to be around the camp. There were so many things I had to handle. My husband and daughter joked that I had become “homeless,” but they could manage without my help.

Late in the afternoon Minnie wanted to go to the riverside to look at the situation. Big Liu offered to accompany her, yet she told him, “No, you’d better stay.” Holly volunteered to go with her too, but Minnie said, “You should be around in case of emergency. Let Anling keep me company. No troops will hurt two old women.” In fact, I was fifty, one year younger than Minnie, but she looked like she was in her early forties, while my hair was streaked with gray, though I hadn’t lost my figure yet.

So I set out with her in a jeep, a jalopy given to us by Reverend Magee. Minnie was driving, which impressed every one of us, because she seemed clumsy with her hands and, unlike Holly, was not the kind of woman who could handle a car nimbly.

“Let’s hope this car won’t break down,” said Minnie. Indeed, the jeep was rattling like crazy.

“I wish I could drive,” I said.

“I’ll teach you to drive when the war is over.”

“Hope I won’t be too old to learn by then.”

“Come on, don’t be such a pessimist.”

“Okay, I might take you up on that.”

We dropped into the headquarters of the Safety Zone Committee and found John Rabe, Searle Bates, and Eduard Sperling there. They looked glum and told us that the Chinese army had been withdrawing. In fact, just three hours earlier, Sperling, a German insurance broker, had returned from the Japanese lines, where he had offered to negotiate a cease-fire on behalf of the Chinese army. But General Asaka, Emperor Hirohito’s uncle, had rejected the proposal, saying he meant to teach China a bloody lesson. He intended to “soak Nanjing in a bloodbath,” so that the Chinese could all see what an incompetent leader Chiang Kai-shek was.

More appalling was the story Rabe told us. The previous day, General Tang had received Generalissimo Chiang’s order that he organize a retreat immediately. Tang’s troops were already in the thick of battle, so it was impossible to withdraw them. If he carried out the order, it would amount to abandoning his army. He contacted the generalissimo’s headquarters to double-check with Chiang, who was adamant and reiterated the message, dictating that he must execute the retreat to preserve his army and cross the river without delay. Tang couldn’t even pass the order on to some of his troops. Besides having lost their communications equipment, some of the divisions had come from remote regions, such as Guangdong, Sichuan, and Guizhou, and spoke different dialects, so they couldn’t communicate with one another or relay instructions. Worse still, earlier that morning the Japanese fleet was steaming upriver. The Chinese army’s route of retreat would be completely cut off soon, since we had no warships to repulse the enemy’s navy. Desperate, General Tang approached the Safety Zone Committee and pleaded with the foreigners to intervene on China’s behalf for a three-day cease-fire. Eduard Sperling started out early in the afternoon, trudging west toward the Japanese position and raising a flag made from a white sheet and inscribed TRUCE & PEACE! in Japanese by Cola, a yellow-eyed young Russian man. Sperling carried the weight of our capital on his roundish shoulders in hopes of preventing further bloodshed.

General Asaka, the button-nosed prince wearing a patch of mustache that made him look like he had a harelip, received Sperling and spat in his face. He drew his sword halfway and barked, “Tell the Chinese that they have brought death on themselves. It’s too late for them to employ a peace broker like you. If they want peace, hand Sheng-chi Tang over to me first.”

“Please inform General Matsui of our request,” Sperling pleaded again.

“I am the commander here. Tell Sheng-chi Tang that we won’t spare even a chicken or dog in Nanjing.”

So Sperling returned to report back to General Tang. The emissary was in such a hurry that he sprained his ankle and had to use a stick to walk. By this time, some of the defending troops must have heard of the withdrawal order and had begun pulling out, but many units were isolated, fighting blindly with their flanks open, doomed to annihilation.

A prolonged silence followed Rabe’s account of the failed effort for a cease-fire. I wanted to weep but took hold of myself, covering my face with one hand. I could hardly breathe.

“An army in flight collapses like a landslide,” Searle said to Minnie, using the Chinese idiom.

“Chiang Kai-shek should be held accountable for this catastrophe,” she huffed.

“Yes, he should be court-martialed,” said Sperling.

“The problem is that he’s the judge in his own court,” Rabe added in a bantering tone, fingering the strap of his binoculars. In spite of his attempt at levity, he sounded grim.

Searle had to leave for the temporary hospital established the week before at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The city government had given the International Red Cross Committee, of which both Searle and Minnie were members, fifty thousand yuan for setting up hospitals, but even with such generous funding there was no way to staff them. Searle had yet to figure out how to get hold of some medical personnel and couldn’t stop grumbling about the Chinese doctors who had fled. At the moment only one surgeon, Robert Wilson, a recent graduate of Harvard Medical School, remained in town, and he’d been working around the clock at the Nanjing University Hospital. Minnie and I went out with Searle and then headed for our jeep. The two of us got in the car and pulled onto Shanghai Road, driving northeast.

The moment we turned left onto Zhongshan Road, which led to Yijiang Gate, the route to Hsia Gwan and the wharves, we were struck by a horrific sight. The entire city was fleeing toward the waterside. Every street we passed was strewn with uniforms shed by our soldiers. Both sides of the road were lined with burned vehicles, artillery pieces accompanied by boxes of shells, and heavy machine guns still tied to dead donkeys. A pack of mules stood loaded with parts of an antiaircraft gun and ammunition, too confused to move. A roan horse, still saddled, was neighing toward the clouds as though it were being attacked by some invisible beasts of prey. The soldiers were swarming north, mostly empty-handed but some still wearing enamel rice bowls on their belts. The street was littered with helmets, rifles, pistols, canteens, Czech machine guns, knapsacks, swords, grenades, overcoats, boots, small mortars, flamethrowers, short spades, and pickaxes. Beside a brass bugle lay a pig’s head, its snout pointing skyward but both ears missing. As we were approaching the International Club, the street was so jammed with overturned automobiles, three-wheeled motorcycles, animal-drawn carts, and electric poles and tangled wires that it was impossible to drive farther. So we decided to walk. We veered right, pulled into the compound of the German embassy, and parked our jeep there with permission from Georg Rosen, the hot-tempered secretary of political affairs and one of the three German diplomats remaining behind. Unlike his colleagues, Rosen was half Jewish and not allowed to wear a swastika.

Minnie and I headed north on foot to see whether our army still controlled its route of retreat. The Metropolitan Hotel appeared, swathed in smoke and flames. The instant we passed it, a squad of soldiers ran up to us, still bearing arms. The nine men, all wearing straw sandals, stopped in front of us, dropped their rifles, and, with hands clasped before their chests, begged Minnie to accept their capitulation as though she were a conqueror as well. Their leader, his face tear-stained, pleaded with Minnie, “Auntie, please save us!”

That flustered her, and I intervened, telling her, “They must think every foreigner has access to sanctuary. Poor fellows, all abandoned by their officers.” As I was speaking, tears streamed down my face. I was so sad that I doubled over sobbing.

Patting my head, Minnie said to the men in Mandarin, “We are not entitled to accept your weapons. If you want to stay in town, go to the Safety Zone, where you can find protection.”

The men waggled their heads as if they were too frightened to move back in that direction. They did an about-face and ran away, leaving their guns behind. Minnie picked up a rifle, which was quite new; its stock bore these characters: “This embodies your people’s blood and sweat.” Those words were instructions from the generalissimo, engraved on many weapons in the Nationalist army. Minnie, her thick eyebrows knotted, dropped the gun and sighed.

Still wiping my eyes, I told her, “In this country a peasant’s lifetime’s earnings can buy only a rifle. Imagine all the equipment they have abandoned — what a horrendous waste.”

“Yes. Lewis said he had seen some heavy cannons left on the outskirts of the city that had never been fired.”

We continued toward the gate. It was gut-wrenching to see the entire area destroyed, most of the buildings and houses burned down and some still smoldering. After passing the British embassy, with Yijiang Gate already in view, we were too exhausted to push farther and realized that it would be impossible to get beyond the city wall to see what it was like on the riverside, so we stopped. In the distance, on both sides of the gate, blocked by sandbags and machine guns, strings of men were scaling the fifty-foot-high wall with ropes, fire hoses, and connected ladders. The top of the wall and the two-story pavilion on it were dotted and blurred against the smoky sunset by the scramblers. From the way the crowds were moving, we could tell that the piers must still be in Chinese hands. We turned back and headed for the German embassy.

Dusk was falling and a few bats were flitting around, zigzagging like ghostly butterflies. We had to slog against the crowds; Minnie was ahead of me, jostling and shouting, “Let us pass! Let us pass!” People were so desperate that some cursed us for moving against the human torrents. Suddenly automobiles began honking and guards, waving Mauser pistols but dressed in civvies, shouted, “Make way! Make way!”

Those unable to move fast enough were shoved aside by the guards. Following them came two long cars. “Look, General Tang!” Minnie told me, pointing at the lean-faced man in the back of the second Buick. The general hung his head as if nodding off.

As we were observing the commander of the Nanjing defense, a half brick hit his car, followed by a voice yelling, “Bastard, fuck your ancestors up to eight generations!”

The brick left only a powdery spot on the side window, and without a word the guards glared at the swearing man, then went ahead to clear the obstacles. A few minutes later we lost sight of the two sedans after they made a left turn. General Tang must have had his own way to cross the river when it was dark.

7

ARTILLERY POUNDED the southern and western parts of the city throughout the night of December 12. After two a.m. I returned to the inner room in the president’s office to steal a moment of sleep. Bursts of machine-gun fire broke out now and again. With my coat on, I dozed off in an armchair. In a semiconscious state, I saw Chinese soldiers scrambling onto junks, sampans, and rafts on the Yangtze while Japanese planes were strafing them. Some of the boats caught fire and some were overturned, dumping thousands of men into the roiling water. Some of them were dog-paddling and some clinging to boards and poles, while others sank, screaming for help.

Then an explosion woke me. “What a catastrophe,” I muttered, shaking my head. I sat up, fumbling my feet into my shoes. I reached out for the floor lamp, then realized there was no electricity anymore — our college had a generator, but it hadn’t started producing power yet. Tears blurred my eyes as I stood and made for the door.

While I was plodding to the front gate, the eastern sky was already aglow with rust-colored clouds, and all was quiet on campus. Luhai greeted me and said that groups of Chinese soldiers had passed by, some begging for civilian clothes. The men at the gate had given them whatever they could spare.

Along the front wall were clumps of uniforms tossed over by the soldiers, and there were also some rifles, daggers, and cartridge belts. We gathered the clothes and set fire to the pile. As for the weapons, I told Luhai to drop them into the pond behind the Library Building.

When it was light, scores of neighbors appeared at the front entrance, begging the guards to let them in. Minnie went over and told them through the steel bars of the gate that since their homes were already within the Safety Zone, they would be safe and should give the space to the refugees who had no place to stay. The neighbors groused some more, then left unhappy. A few men who had offered to work started swearing, because we could use only two of them as water carriers. Jinling had its own well for tap water, but drinking water had to be delivered to the people who stayed in the open. By now the camp was full, with more than twenty-five hundred refugees.

On December 13, the day that the Japanese took full control of the city, the porridge plant, a doorless shanty about seventy feet long, was finally set up beside the sports ground. It sold porridge to those who could afford it, at three cents a bowl, but it also gave free meals to those without money. The refugees went to the food stands building by building, one group after another. Even so, at mealtimes, crowds swarmed there with bowls and mess tins in their hands. That outraged me, and I couldn’t help yelling at them. Breakfast lasted more than three hours, until half past ten. After that, the kitchen staff could take a breather for two hours and then would serve porridge again in the midafternoon. They provided two meals a day for the camp.

When breakfast was under way, many women washed laundry and toilet buckets at the four ponds on campus, mothers now and then calling to their children. A bunch of boys ran around as if eager to explore this new place, a few small girls following them. For the rest of the morning the camp was quiet, but around noon a clamor broke out at the front gate. “Japs, Japs are coming!” a boy hollered. Minnie and I went over and saw an officer slapping Luhai, and a soldier, rope in his hands, about to tie him up.

“Stop! Stop!” Minnie shouted, and hurried up to them. “He’s our employee.”

The squat lieutenant turned to her in amazement, saying something none of us could understand. He then motioned dismissively to the soldier behind him, and the man let Luhai go.

As the platoon of soldiers was moving away, a voice called out, “Save me, please!”

We rushed over and recognized Hu, the janitor of the Library Building, his arms clutched by two soldiers, one of them carrying Hu’s new serge parka in the crook of his elbow. Minnie grasped Hu’s belt from behind and forced the two soldiers to stop in their tracks. “He works for us,” she shouted at the stocky officer. “Coolie, coolie, you understand?” Her brown eyes were smoldering with rage. “You cannot arrest people without any charge.”

The officer looked at the Red Cross badge on her chest as though unable to make head or tail of it. Then he waved at the two soldiers, who released Hu.

“Save me too, Principal Vautrin!” another voice cried. That was from a boy named Fanshu, who was also being dragged away. He was struggling to break loose while still holding a basketball under his arm.

We ran toward Fanshu, but a soldier spun around and held out his rifle, its bayonet pointed at Minnie. She had no choice but to stand there watching them pull the boy away, together with three other Chinese men we didn’t know, though one of them looked strong, like a soldier. Fanshu worked for an old American couple who had just left town. He was supposed to stay and watch over their property, but he had snuck here to play basketball. He was merely fourteen, though tall and big for his age, so the Japanese caught him as a potential soldier.

“Thank you for rescuing me, Principal,” Hu said, bowing to Minnie and showing his splotched scalp. “I spent a whole year’s savings on that parka they robbed me of.”

“Damn them!” Minnie stamped the ground, puffs of dust jumping up around her feet. “Ban, Ban, where are you?”

“Here, I’m here.” Ban, a skinny boy of fifteen, who was our messenger, came over.

“Go tell Mr. Rabe that the Japanese took people from our college.”

“I don’t speak foreign words, Principal.”

“Mr. Han, his secretary, knows English. Let him translate for you. Ask them to come and help us stop the soldiers.”

Ban broke into a trot, sticking out his elbows as he ran, his police boots too big for him. He was short for his age, about five foot one. I wondered if it was wise to send him on the errand, but I didn’t share my misgivings. Even if Rabe was notified, what could he do? Such random arrests must have been happening everywhere in the city.

Around two p.m. Rulian arrived; she was nicknamed Lady Fowler thanks to her love of Emily Brontë and because she kept our domestic fowls. She panted, “Some Japs are on the hill.” She pointed at a hillside to the west, beyond our Poultry Experiment Center, which was in her charge.

“Do you think they’ll break into the fowl house?” Minnie asked her.

“Sure they will.”

“Let’s go have a look,” I said.

Minnie had to remain at the front gate, so Luhai, Holly, and I hastened west with Rulian. I looked askance at the young woman; she was wearing a countrywoman’s dark blue jacket, her smooth face smeared with soot. She was thirty-one and comely, but had deliberately made herself look dirty and diseased. She even walked slightly bandy-legged to reduce her height. Yet there was no way she could conceal her prettiness altogether. I wanted to tease her by saying she couldn’t possibly rusticate herself so rapidly, but I refrained.

Chickens, ducks, and geese were squawking like mad in the poultry center. We entered the enclosure and saw two soldiers there, one gripping a goose by the neck, the bird treading the air in silence, and the other man chasing a long-tailed rooster. He tripped and almost fell in an attempt to catch the cock, which landed on top of a shelf, shaking its red and black feathers while peering at him with one eye. The man cursed the rooster and spat on the ground.

“Hey, hey,” Holly shouted, “they’re not for food!”

The soldiers stopped and came up to us. The taller one pointed at a hen and rapped out some Japanese words none of us could comprehend. Then the shorter one said in Mandarin, “Eat … chicken … meat.”

“No, no,” I said, glad he knew some Chinese. “These are for experiments, not like the birds raised by your mothers. Don’t eat poison, all right? If you eat any of them, you will bleed from every orifice.”

“Poison?” the man asked, then mumbled something to his comrade. They both looked puzzled.

“Yes.” Rulian pointed at a line of brown bottles along the wall, containing herbs and medicines for poultry diseases.

The short man again spoke to his comrade, who then dropped the goose and kicked a terra-cotta water bowl. Together they strode out, blustering as if cursing their rotten luck.

The four of us smiled, because the fowls were all healthy. “My goodness, ‘you will bleed from every orifice,’ ” Holly said to me. “You must’ve scared the heck out of them.”

Rulian giggled. Without delay we went back to the camp, where rice porridge was being doled out to the refugees for the afternoon meal.

Ban hadn’t returned yet, and Minnie was worried. The headquarters of the Safety Zone was just a stone’s throw away, and he should have come back long ago. We couldn’t help but wonder if he had run into trouble. The boy was an orphan, whose keep in a nearby orphanage had been paid by our college for years before we hired him, so he was more than just an employee to us.

After the refugees had finished their meal, we went to the dining hall to have supper. Most of us hadn’t eaten anything since the morning. Minnie and Holly collapsed onto chairs, saying they preferred a nap to food. They closed their eyes, ready to drop off.

“Please, you ought to eat to keep going,” I said, placing a bowl of porridge in front of Minnie. I moved a plate of fried soybeans closer. As I was getting another bowl for Holly, Luhai rushed in.

“Minnie,” he said, “some Japanese broke into the house where we store our rations.”

“Did they take the rice?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“What did they tell you?” I said.

“They just punched me.” While speaking, he rubbed his bruised cheek.

The three of us went out with Luhai. The house in question was across the street from the front gate, and the rice was actually not ours. It was the Red Cross workers manning the porridge plant who’d left the ninety sacks in there, about twenty thousand pounds of rice. If the Japanese took the grain, the refugees here would starve. Approaching the house, we saw a lamp wavering at its entrance. A soldier barred our way, shouting in stiff Mandarin, “Stop! Stop there!”

“This is our college’s house!” Minnie cried back, and tried to push in. Then a young officer with a short beard came out of the room that held the rations. Minnie fluttered a small U.S. flag at him and said, “The rice is American property. You can’t have it! Get your men out of here. Are you in charge?”

The officer didn’t understand her; he turned around and said something to the men behind him. Two of them came up and shoved the four of us away. Then the officer pulled out his Yamato sword, cutting the air right and left while screaming as if he were performing onstage. The blade whirred and whistled. Frightened, none of us dared step closer again.

Without delay we went down Ninghai Road to the Safety Zone headquarters, which was just steps away. John Rabe was there alone, wearing a steel helmet like an officer. On his desk were some old issues of Ostasiatischer Lloyd, a small German-language newspaper published in Shanghai. Minnie asked him if Ban had come to inform him of a random arrest at our college. “I didn’t see him,” Rabe said, puzzled and wringing his plump fingers.

“Oh God, I hope he didn’t fall into Japanese hands!” Minnie said.

“He didn’t show up here at all?” I asked Rabe.

“No. I’ve been here since nine a.m.”

“I should never have sent him out,” said Minnie.

Holly described the rice situation. Rabe replied, “Maybe I should go and talk to them. Let’s hope we still can reason with those hoodlums.”

As Rabe stood up, ready to head out, the telephone rang and he picked it up. I was amazed that his phone still worked. The call was from Rosen at the German embassy; he said that squads of Japanese soldiers were at Rabe’s home and his German school, about to break into the compounds. Some of them were brandishing torches and threatening to toss them onto the properties if the gates remained shut. Rabe’s home and the small school sheltered hundreds of his Chinese friends, neighbors, and servants’ families in addition to many refugees, so he had to run.

Before leaving, Rabe called over Cola, the Russian who knew some Japanese. Young Cola wrote a short official letter for us to take back so we could show it to the soldiers occupying the house where the rice was stored the first thing the next morning.

Cola had grown up in Siberia, where his ancestors had done business with the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese for generations. He had lived in our city for almost a decade, and children called him “the yellow-haired Russian.” He told us that the Japanese had arrested thousands of men suspected of being stragglers and deserters from the Chinese army and had raped hundreds of women in the southern and eastern sections of the city, where streets were strewn with dead bodies. There were also Japanese “fire squads” torching houses and buildings in different areas. Worst of all, some soldiers killed the women they raped to avoid being identified by them to the military police later on; in fact, there were very few policemen in town at the moment. Reports of atrocities within the Safety Zone had come nonstop for a whole day, but Rabe had been unable to contact the top officers of the invading force. We could only hope that the military would soon be able to control the soldiers who were running amok.

“I don’t think those brutes would kill and rape without their officers’ consent,” Holly said.

“The army certainly hasn’t bothered to rein them in,” Cola agreed.

“Who could have imagined such brutalities?” Minnie said.

“What should we do?” Holly asked.

“Nothing I can think of.” Cola shrugged.

When we returned to campus, we saw dozens of women sitting back to back in the front yard, along the cypress hedges. The buildings were already too packed to take in any more people, but more continued flocking to the camp. Agitated by the disappearance of Ban and wanting to pray for him, Minnie said good night to us and headed back to her apartment.

8

IT WAS MILD and sunny the next morning. Watching the refugees in the quad, I was grateful for the warm weather, which felt like October. This would make the uprooted people less miserable on the road or in the wilderness, since they had nothing to protect themselves from the elements. Never had I imagined that our fortified capital could be smashed so easily, like a ceramic vat hit by a mallet. In the north, artillery fire surged and ebbed, rumbling amid smoky and blazing clouds. There was still fighting in the Hsia Gwan area, and the Japanese warships were shelling the remaining Chinese troops and sinking boats and rafts that attempted to cross the river. Around Jinling, rifles crackled from time to time.

Early in the afternoon Holly and I went out to the Drum Tower area, a short walk to the northeast. She had not returned home three nights in a row and was afraid that her house might have been plundered, though she had thumbtacked an American flag to the front door and sealed it with a poster from the U.S. embassy. As we walked along Shanghai Road, many Japanese flags were flying from the houses and buildings, flapping like laundry. A few banners made of white cloth even declared, LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!

“Those people will do anything to save their skin,” Holly grunted.

“They must be terrified,” I said.

“I’m a Chinese citizen too, but I won’t say a good word about the Japanese brutes.”

“You have a foreign face, Holly. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t dare to step off campus without your company.”

We turned into the small alley alongside the eastern border of the Safety Zone. Seven or eight houses on the street had been razed, set on fire after being looted. Holly’s home was among them, and her car was gone too. A young man, bayoneted twice in the chest, lay dead on his side below the brick wall of her yard, his back naked, his hair scorched, and the exposed side of his face eaten by dogs. He looked like a stranger to Holly. “Savages, worse than beasts!” she cursed the soldiers, and broke into tears, wiping her face with the end of her scarf.

“Holly, I’m sorry,” I murmured, and wrapped my arm around her.

The neighborhood was very quiet; you couldn’t hear any noise, not even the tiny chirps made by the sparrows that used to live in many of the roofs. Then a Siamese cat jumped out of a coal shack in the next-door neighbor’s yard and meowed forlornly, as though starved. Brushing away her tears, Holly said, “I guess this is it. Now I have no place to go.”

“You can always stay with us,” I said. That was hardly an invitation, since she was already indispensable to our school. She wasn’t just the only other foreigner on campus but was also, as a musician, needed for the chapel services. Besides, she’d been helping our nurse care for the sick and the women expecting or in labor.

When we returned to the campus, about four hundred men, women, and children were at the front gate, begging Luhai and Miss Lou to let them in. All the women wore white terry cloth over their hair; apparently they were from the countryside. A few old men were sucking on long pipes. I was somewhat surprised, because by now we were known as a camp for only women and children, and most men wouldn’t come to seek refuge anymore.

Minnie said to the villagers, “We accept only women and kids.”

“Please, we can’t go elsewhere,” a thirtyish man begged.

“Most of the other camps take in families. You should try them,” I told him.

“We dare not walk anywhere,” an older man said, donning a skullcap, the type called a melon-rind cap. “If the Japanese devils see us, they’ll kill us and grab our wives and daughters.”

A girl in her mid-teens shuffled over, wearing a pair of bandages on her forehead like two miniature crosses standing together, one taller than the other. “Please let me in, Aunties,” she wailed to Holly and me as we were still standing outside the gate. “I’m the only one left in my family.” She burst into tears.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Some Japs broke into the deserted building where we stayed last night, and they cut down my dad and brothers. Then they stripped my mom and me and started torturing us. I screamed, so they punched me again and again until I lost my voice and blacked out. When I came to, I saw my mom’s body in the room. She couldn’t take it anymore and hit her head on the doorjamb and killed herself.”

Minnie had come out of the gate by now. I realized that the girl had been raped and told her, “You must get treated. I’ll get someone to take you to the University Hospital.”

“I can’t walk anymore. If not for these good-hearted folks, I couldn’t have made it here.”

“Then you can come in,” I said.

After telling a staffer to take the girl to our infirmary, Minnie decided to lead the rest of them to the university camp. Holly offered to go along, but Minnie told her to stay because John Magee had just left and we needed at least one foreigner on campus to deter the soldiers.

Nanjing University was about a fifteen-minute walk from our college, and Minnie led the crowd away with a small U.S. flag in her hand, while I brought up the rear, bearing a Red Cross flag. Passing the closed American embassy, we saw two Japanese soldiers coming from the opposite direction and hee-hawing while prodding a reedy boy ahead of them with rifles. The teenager pushed a barrow that had a large wooden wheel ringed with steel. It was loaded with booty — a stack of dried salt fish, a bundle of potato noodles, a jar of duck eggs still in brine, a wall clock, and a trussed pregnant sheep, still bleating. The soldiers each had about a dozen silver bracelets, watches, and gold rings affixed to their belts. All the women in the procession lowered their heads until the soldiers passed.

When we arrived at the university, we found George Fitch, who had been managing the large camp there with Searle, squatting under a bulky linden, his head in both hands. “Hey, George, what’s the matter?” Minnie asked.

He raised his bony face, his eyes watery and somewhat bloodshot. “The Japanese took away two hundred men just now,” he told her.

“Were they surrendered soldiers?”

“No, many of them were civilians.”

“They just took whoever they wanted?”

“They ordered them to undress and checked their shoulders and hands. If there was a mark like something left by a knapsack or a rifle, they took the man. But most of the poor fellows were coolies who had to work with tools and carry stuff around, and of course they had marks on their shoulders and calluses on their hands. The Japanese arrested practically all the young men. There was no way to reason with them. Oh, Minnie, this is horrible, as if we still live in the Dark Ages.”

“What are they going to do to them?”

“Finish them off, I’m sure.”

“I guess they just want to kill to terrify the Chinese.”

“Also to wipe out all the able-bodied males.” He sniveled and blew his nose into a piece of straw paper.

Minnie said, “Maybe we shouldn’t have offered protection to those Chinese soldiers in the first place. Some of them were reluctant to give us their weapons, but we were so foolish that we promised them more than we can deliver.”

“I’ve thought about that too. With firearms they could at least have defended themselves.”

As we were speaking, a group of Japanese soldiers emerged, two of them dragging a scrawny man onto the lawn. I recognized Chang, who used to be a librarian at the university and now worked in the refugee camp as a file clerk. They meant to take him away, but he refused to go with them.

We all stood up to watch. The leader of this group, a lieutenant, ordered a new recruit to stab Chang. The young soldier hesitated, but the officer barked out orders again. The man charged at Chang, whose cotton-padded overcoat was so thick that the bayonet didn’t go through. Realizing they meant to kill him, Minnie and George hustled toward them to intervene. I followed, but the soldiers blocked us. Then, to our astonishment, Chang undid his buttons and dropped his coat on the ground, facing his attacker with just his thin jacket on, his sparse goatee wet with snot. The lieutenant again yelled at the young man, who rushed toward Chang with a wild shriek and stabbed him through. The clerk’s legs buckled, but his eyes were still fixed on his killer. Then he fell, blood pooling around him.

We were so stunned that for a while nobody could move or say a word. Then the troops marched away, and people gathered around Chang, who was breathing his last. “Revenge, revenge,” he mouthed.

He died within a few minutes. I had known this wispy moonfaced librarian by sight and heard he had a fiery temper, but I’d never thought much of him.

Having left the four hundred refugees with George Fitch, Minnie and I headed back. She panted a little as she walked, her gait ponderous but steady.

“I wonder why God let this happen to us Chinese,” I said. “What did we do to deserve this? Why doesn’t God punish those heartless men?” Just that morning I’d heard that a nephew of mine, my cousin’s seventeen-year-old son, had been seized by the Japanese the night before. His parents were distraught but dared not go out and look for him.

“God works in his own ways, hard for us to fathom,” Minnie said, but not convincingly.

Our ancient city, noted for its beauty and cultural splendor, had become hell overnight, as if forsaken by God. I couldn’t stop wondering whether there’d be retribution in store for the ruthless soldiers and their families. No one could brutalize others like this with impunity in the long run, I was sure.

That night, Searle Bates and Plumer Mills slept in our main dormitory and the Arts Building, respectively, while Lewis Smythe kept Luhai company at our gatehouse. Before turning in, the husky Plumer wept and cursed again, his heavy-jawed face scrunched and his hair damp with sweat. He suffered from pain in his chest caused by being hit twice by the Japanese with rifle butts that morning when he had attempted in vain to prevent them from taking thirteen hundred Chinese soldiers out of the police headquarters. A group of American missionaries had disarmed those men and promised them personal safety, but all the poor fellows had been dragged away and executed in the afternoon. Fifty policemen guarding the Safety Zone were also rounded up and shot for letting the Chinese soldiers enter the neutral district. With the three American men in our camp we felt a little more secure. Minnie stayed with Miss Lou in the Practice Hall, which was more than two hundred yards away from the nearest building, tucked in the southeast corner of campus, while I was in charge of the main dormitory. The college’s two policemen still patrolled, but in plainclothes. In addition, an old watchman, lantern in hand, would make rounds throughout the night.

THE NEXT DAY the Japanese went on looting, burning, arresting men, and attacking women in town. Luckily, it was uneventful at Jinling, except that early in the morning a soldier came from the house across from the front gate with four coolies and dropped two sacks of rice with loud thumps. We were pleased that the Japanese had finally let our camp use the grain and didn’t sell the rice back to us. Some soldiers had seized rations from the camp in Magee’s charge and then sold them back to the porridge plant there “at a discount”—wheat flour was two yuan for a fifty-pound bag and rice five yuan for a two-hundred-pound sack.

Since daybreak, more refugees had been coming to Jinling. Although the buildings were all packed, we still accepted the new arrivals, now that they wanted nothing but a place to stay. Most of them just lounged on the lawns or the sports ground. Looking at the refugees around her, Minnie said she was even more convinced that she’d made the right decision to remain behind. I felt the same. Again the Lord’s words rose in my mind: “Thine is the power and the glory.” That seemed to have new meaning to me now, like a promise.

I recited that line, and Minnie nodded solemnly in agreement.

Around midafternoon, Rulian came and reported that some soldiers had gone into the South Hill Residence. Minnie, Big Liu, and I set out at once for that manor, taking the path that cut a diagonal through a bamboo grove. The second we stepped into the building, we heard laughter from the dining room on the left. Three Japanese were sitting at a table drinking apple juice and spooning compote directly from an eight-pound can. Beyond them the door of the pantry was open, the padlock smashed. Minnie went up to them and shouted, “You can’t do this!”

They all stood up and made for the door, holding the juice bottles and two large floral-cloth parcels, seemingly frightened. Once out of the building, they veered east and dashed away, their calves wrapped in leggings.

As I wondered what was inside the two parcels, Minnie said, “They seem like young boys who know they did something wrong.”

“Some of the Japanese are quite young indeed,” Big Liu said, and pushed up his glasses with his knuckle. He looked frazzled; he suffered from insomnia these days and often complained of a headache.

“Do you think they were hungry?” I asked both of them.

“They could be,” he answered.

“I wouldn’t mind if they came just to eat and drink something, but they must let us know in advance,” Minnie said.

Big Liu shook his bushy head and spoke as if to himself. “They really love American party food.”

Minnie chuckled. I liked Big Liu for his sense of humor as well as for his levelheadedness. Sometimes when he said something funny, he himself didn’t realize it — which made it more deadpan. We went upstairs and found the door of a small storage room ajar. Inside, half a dozen suitcases were cut open or unzipped, all ransacked, women’s clothing scattered around. One of the bags belonged to Mrs. Dennison and another to Donna Thayer, a biology teacher who was in Shanghai at the moment. There was no way to find out what had been stolen, so we closed the suitcases and placed them next to four intact ones sitting behind a tall bookshelf loaded with pinkish toilet tissue. There we saw Dr. Wu’s varnished pigskin chest opened and gutted, but again we couldn’t tell what had been taken.

When we were back at the quadrangle, Minnie saw John Magee speaking to Luhai. Suddenly a burst of gunfire came from the southwest, and everybody stopped to listen until the fusillade subsided.

We went up to Magee and Luhai. The reverend said to Minnie, “I just heard that the Panay was sunk by Japanese warplanes.”

“Good Lord, what about the people on the boat?” she asked.

“Three were killed and more than forty wounded — most of the casualties were sailors.”

“The staff of the embassy is okay?”

“Apparently so. They were rescued.”

My mind began spinning, because Jinling’s portmanteau containing papers, foreign currencies, and Mrs. Dennison’s wedding silver had been aboard the gunboat. I hoped that the trunk was safe and still in the care of the embassy’s staff. If the silverware was lost, Mrs. Dennison might go bonkers. She disliked Minnie, though she was decent to me, mainly because Dr. Wu kept me under her wing. From her first days at Jinling, Minnie must have known that the founding president viewed her as a rival, perhaps because Minnie was bold enough to assume the acting presidency, which no one else dared take, and also because her ability as a leader might pose a threat to the old woman, who demanded loyalty only to herself from the faculty, staff, and even students. Yet Minnie and I agreed that Mrs. Dennison had always regarded Jinling as her home and had dedicated herself to the college. It was this devotion that united the two of them.

ABOUT TEN O’CLOCK the next morning, more than a company of Japanese troops came to search for Chinese soldiers. Minnie told the commander, a tall man with hollow cheeks, that this camp sheltered only women and children. The head officer, who must have been a colonel and was accompanied by two bodyguards and an adjutant, wouldn’t listen and declared that the Safety Zone Committee had broken its promise to provide sanctuary only for noncombatants, so now the Imperial Army was entitled to weed out all the hostile remnants. True enough — in its original proposal, the committee had claimed that the area would be “kept from the presence of armed men and from the passage of soldiers in any capacity.” But when the letter for the Japanese authorities was composed, none of the committee members had been able to imagine such a turn of events: thousands of Chinese soldiers would come and implore them to save their lives. The foreigners accepted them after collecting their weapons, assuming that the Japanese would follow the common practice in war of treating the capitulated men with basic humanity. Now, in the name of eliminating the former soldiers, the conquerors began to seize whomever they suspected might be a potential fighter.

The search started with the Science Building, and the Japanese wanted to go through every room. If a door was locked and the key was not available right away, a soldier carrying a hefty ax would smash the lock. My heart was hammering as we followed them around. In the second-floor office of the Geography Department were stored six hundred cotton-padded garments for the Chinese troops, made by the neighborhood women the previous fall. Minnie and I had decided to keep them because we believed that the refugees might need winter clothes. Now those jackets and pants could be criminal evidence. How should we explain if they were discovered? Could we say that the Chinese army had forced us to make them? If the Japanese found the clothes, I’d have to step up and invent an excuse before Minnie could respond. She was such a poor liar that they would see through her.

Fortunately, the officer did not insist on searching the room containing the clothes first when Minnie offered to take the men directly to the attic, which sheltered two hundred women and children. The refugees up there seemed to have distracted the soldiers, since on their way down they forgot to go left and search the offices on the second floor.

As we came out of the building, one soldier grabbed hold of a water carrier we’d just hired. The poor man was too petrified to holler for help; his buckets were overturned and his shoulder pole smudged with mud. The soldier slapped him across the face and sneered in Mandarin, “Serviceman, huh?”

“No, no,” Minnie intervened. “He’s a coolie, our waterman. Damn it, he’s already over forty, how can he be a soldier?”

A junior officer ripped open the man’s collar to look at his left shoulder. Luckily no mark was on it, and they let him go. The fellow was so shaken that he tore away without a word, leaving behind the buckets, the carrying pole, and the two buttons from his jacket, all dropped in the wet mud.

Minnie and I followed the Japanese. As we were approaching the front entrance, a small group of soldiers appeared, pulling away a young boy, the repairman Tong’s nephew, who had often come to campus to do odd jobs. Minnie hurried over and blocked their way. “He’s our errand boy, not a soldier,” she cried, having hit upon the job title for him on the spur of the moment.

The interpreter, a soft-faced Chinese man in a trench coat, told the Japanese what she had said. One of them stepped over and shoved Minnie in the chest with his fist. The tall officer shouted something at him, and the man yelped “Hai!” and stood at attention. So the boy ran away to join his uncle. The officer scribbled a note and handed it to Minnie. The interpreter told her, “You can show this to other groups if they come in to search again.” She thanked the officer, then seemed to flinch suddenly. She turned and whispered to me, “There’re machine guns everywhere.” Her chin pointed at the front entrance.

I looked and caught sight of six of them propped on both sides of the front wall. I shivered as I realized that the Japanese had meant to shoot if a commotion took place here.

After the officer and his entourage had gone out the front gate, we saw a squad of soldiers passing by with four Chinese men strung together by iron wire around their upper arms. One of them wasn’t wearing pants, his legs spattered with blood. We went over to the entrance to take a closer look but weren’t able to tell if the captives were former soldiers, although the youngest of them couldn’t have been older than sixteen. The group proceeded in single file toward the hillside in the west, and ten minutes later came a volley of gunfire — all those men were executed.

“They shot people like that — without a trial or any evidence of crime?” Minnie said.

I realized that the Japanese felt justified in treating us in any way they wanted. A lot of people must have expected this would happen. That must be why they had scrambled away before the Japanese arrived.

More refugees had been let in. By now Jinling held more than four thousand. The newcomers recounted horrifying stories: Plundering, rape, bloodshed, and arson had taken place everywhere in the city and its suburbs in the past three days. Some girls who hadn’t reached their teens yet had been snatched away from their parents. In the east and south dark smoke kept rising — thousands of houses and stores had been torched to get rid of the evidence of pillage. Some soldiers would rob pedestrians of whatever they had on them: money, food, cigarettes, coats, fountain pens, even hats and gloves. An old woman told us, “A Jap yanked my brass thimble off my finger. He must’ve thought it was a ring or something. I showed him it was just for sewing, but he couldn’t understand. Such a half-wit, he almost broke my finger.” One of our janitors, a man with a catlike face named Jian Ding, sat on his heels and wouldn’t stop weeping, no matter how people tried to console him, because his fifteen-year-old son had been taken that morning.

That evening, on the way to the Safety Zone’s headquarters, Minnie and I saw a stake-bed truck with double tires rumbling by. It carried a dozen or so teenage girls, who called out, “Help us! Save our lives!” One of them wore an eyeshade. Some had blackened faces and cropped hair, which still hadn’t been able to disguise them from the soldiers.

We froze in our tracks, watching the vehicle until it disappeared. I closed my eyes, my eyeballs aching, while Minnie pressed the sides of her neck with both hands and groaned, “God, when will you show your anger?”

We went to see Rabe to find out if he’d heard about Ban. He had no news for us.

9

ON THE MORNING of December 17, small groups of Japanese soldiers popped up on different parts of the campus, grabbing women and girls. There’d been more than thirty rape cases in our camp. Emergencies had sprung up continually, forcing Minnie and me to run around together to confront the soldiers. By now we had admitted more than six thousand refugees. All the buildings were packed, and most classrooms brought to mind train stations crowded with stranded passengers, while the people in the open were noisy, especially the children, milling around like at a temple fair. We were worried about how to maintain sanitation and feed so many. The porridge plant was totally inadequate.

Minnie had persuaded Searle to open another dormitory at Nanjing University for newcomers and to ensure that a foreign man would stay there at night. Between four and six that afternoon, she and I led two large groups of women and children there; we also had a seventeen-year-old girl sent to Dr. Wilson — this young wife, five months pregnant, had been raped by a bunch of soldiers and had miscarried. A donkey cart shipped her to the hospital, followed by her shrieking mother-in-law.

When we returned from our second trip to Searle’s new camp, we found Holly chatting with Miss Lou at the door of the main dormitory. We joined them and entered the dining hall in that building. Supper was dough-drop soup with soybean sprouts in it. Most of the staff had not eaten anything since breakfast, as we often skipped meals during the day. On the table were cruets of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and oil thick with chili flakes. While we were eating, a boy rushed in and panted, “Principal Vautrin, lots of Japs are on campus, beating up people.”

“Where are they exactly?” Minnie asked.

“On their way to the dorms in the north.”

We all put down our bowls and went out. It was getting dark, and the air was smoky — some houses nearby must have been burning. A flock of rooks cawed lustily in treetops, while women’s and children’s shrieks were rising from the west and north. Bang, bang, bang, bang! Three Japanese were pounding the front door of the Central Building with their fists. Minnie went up to them, but before she could say a word, a bespectacled soldier said to us in broken Mandarin, “Open this.”

“I have no key,” Minnie told him.

“Soldiers in there, enemy of Japan.”

“No soldiers, only women and children.”

Minnie produced the note written by the officer the day before, but the man glanced at it, then tore it three times and dropped the pieces to the ground. He turned to speak to the other two men. One of them came up and slapped Minnie, Holly, and me while yelling something we couldn’t understand. He then shoved Miss Lou and nearly sent her to the ground. Holly muttered in English, “Bastard!” Her eyes were teary and her bulky nose twitched. A pink-fingered handprint surfaced on her left cheek.

“Open this,” the man wearing glasses insisted.

At this point rectangular-faced Rong, the assistant business manager, arrived. With my ear still buzzing and hot from the slap, I asked him, “Do you have the key?”

He shook his creased forehead. “I don’t. Usually we don’t lock this door from outside.”

Minnie said to the soldiers, “We really don’t have the key.”

The man blinked behind his glasses and ordered Rong in a cry, “Open it!”

“I don’t know how.”

At that, the soldier punched Rong in the face. The other two began beating and kicking him too. One of them kept smirking while he slapped Rong, as if having some fun with him. Then he raised his rifle, the bayonet pointed at Rong’s throat.

“Stop, stop!” Minnie said. “All right, let’s use the other door.” She pointed at the side of the building, then led them away to that entrance. We followed them. I glanced at Rong, who was trembling and swallowing, his swollen eyes almost sealed.

To our bafflement, once the three soldiers entered the building, they looked through a few rooms perfunctorily and didn’t even bother to go up to the top floor. Within five minutes the search was done. As we stepped out the side door, we saw another two soldiers pulling three Chinese men away, their hands tied behind their backs. I recognized the captives, who were all our employees. Minnie rushed over and said, “They work for us.”

“Chinese soldiers, enemy of Japan,” one of the captors declared.

“No, no, they’re gardeners and coolies,” she countered, and then pointed at Jian Ding. “He’s our janitor and just lost his fifteen-year-old son to your Imperial Army.”

That didn’t help matters. The soldiers continued dragging the men away. Wide-framed Ding somehow made no protest, as if he didn’t care where they were taking him.

The bespectacled soldier motioned for us to follow them, and together we headed to the front entrance, beyond which human shadows were moving.

Outside the gate, I saw more than forty Chinese kneeling on the side of the street, a few weeping. Rulian and Luhai were among them, though Luhai was on his feet, speaking and gesticulating to a soldier. Two squads of Japanese stood around, most of them toting rifles and one holding a bloody-tongued German shepherd on a leash. A cross-eyed sergeant came over and demanded, “Who is the head of this place?” His interpreter translated the question.

“I’m in charge.” Minnie stepped forward.

As they were speaking, more of our staffers were escorted over and made to kneel down. Three soldiers came up to us and grabbed Rong, Miss Lou, and me, dragged us to the crowd, and forced us to our knees. Why are they rounding us up? I wondered. Are they taking over the school? What are they going to do to us and to the refugees? Where are Yaoping, Liya, and Fanfan? A wave of dizziness came over me, and I nearly keeled over; I grasped Miss Lou’s arm to steady myself.

The sergeant asked Minnie to identify all the employees among us. She named several and told him their duties. As she continued, she stalled time and again; apparently she couldn’t remember the names of all these people, especially the part-timers hired in the past few days. One of the servants, young and straight-shouldered, was quite burly. Minnie stopped in front of him, unable to come up with his name. If the man had already given the soldiers his name, she mustn’t name him randomly. As she was deciding, they took him to the other side of the street and made him kneel down.

“His name is Ban!” Minnie cried at the sergeant. That was a smart choice — surely nobody among us had the same name as our disappeared messenger boy.

Luhai said, “He’s our coal carrier.”

“Shut up!” The sergeant punched him in the chest. Then two soldiers clutched Luhai’s arms, dragged him away, and forced him to his knees next to the “coal carrier.”

At this point a jeep pulled over. Off jumped three Americans: Lewis Smythe, George Fitch, and Plumer Mills, the vice chairman of the Safety Zone Committee. At once the troops surrounded the new arrivals, lined them up, and began searching them for pistols, which none of them had.

When the search was finished, George said, “Wir sind Missionare,” to which the sergeant didn’t respond. George said again, “Nous sommes tous americains.”

“Oui, je sais.” The sergeant chortled, his squinty eyes blinking.

The two of them carried on an exchange in broken French for a few moments, but George didn’t look pleased. Meanwhile, a pair of flashlights kept shining at the other foreigners’ faces, forcing them to shut their eyes. George told his American colleagues, “They want us all to leave right away.”

Then more than ten soldiers rushed up and pushed the Americans into the jeep. Two men clutched Minnie’s arms and forced her into the passenger seat, but she scrambled out, throwing up her hand and shouting at the sergeant, “Damn it, this is my home! I have nowhere to go.”

“Me either!” Holly cried out, gripping the top of the tailgate and refusing to get in the car. “My house was burned down by your Imperial Army, and I’ve become a refugee, still waiting for you to make reparations.” Her eyes widened fiercely and her face flushed with rage.

George interpreted their words loudly to the sergeant, who then ordered all the foreign men to leave at once.

Several rifles were trained on the three men, who climbed into the jeep. Lewis waved to assure us that everything would be all right. Slowly they pulled away.

The sergeant cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted at George’s back, “Au revoir!”

Two of his men yipped delightedly.

As soon as the vehicle disappeared, women’s cries and muffled screams came from inside the wall. Through the gate I saw some Japanese hauling people toward our campus’s side exit. The small ironclad gate there was always locked, so it must have been forced open. I looked around and caught sight of machine guns posted at the windows across the street. For some reason the soldiers at the front entrance suddenly withdrew, taking with them only Luhai and the hefty “coal carrier,” and then trucks started revving their engines beyond the southern wall—kakh-kakh-kakh-kakh. I realized that the Japanese had held all the responsible staff here while other soldiers were seizing people inside the campus. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a machine gun still propped there, and I dared not move a muscle, my heart beating in my throat.

We were still kneeling, some sobbing. For a long time no one stirred. I glanced at Minnie and Holly, whose heads sagged, their eyes nailed to the ground.

Then Big Liu ran over, shouting, “Minnie, Minnie, they took some people from East Court.”

“Who are the people?” She got up to her feet.

“I can’t say for sure.”

At that, I jumped up and raced away, my head in a whirl. Some people followed me while I was running and running, my steps as unsteady as if I were treading clouds. I hoped nothing had happened to my family.

Everything was topsy-turvy in my home, tables and chairs overturned and the floors scattered with utensils, books, shoes, tableware, and laundered clothes. All the paintings were gone from the walls, and nobody was there. “Oh, I’m sorry, Anling,” Minnie said. Her voice suggested she assumed that all my family had been taken.

In spite of my fitful sobs, I told myself that Liya was coolheaded, and they might still be somewhere on campus. It never pays to get upset ahead of time.

I didn’t see any trace of struggle — nothing was smashed or crushed — so there was a possibility that my family had escaped abduction. But where were they?

Then my husband and Liya, with Fanfan in her arms, appeared in the doorway. “Mom” was all she could say. Her oval face was ghastly pale and her eyes flared. Her bangs and brow were wet with perspiration.

“They almost caught us,” Yaoping told me, shaking his grizzled head.

“Thank God you’re safe,” Minnie said.

Liya told us that the instant they heard the commotion on campus, they slipped out of East Court and ran into a ditch behind an apartment house under construction, hiding among the refugees there. I closed my eyes, held my hands together, and said, “Lord, thank you so much for returning my family to me!”

Then Big Liu’s wife came and wailed, “They took Meiyan, our daughter!” The small, round-faced woman pressed her right flank with her hand as though in severe pain. Her husband was behind her, wordless and in shock, his lumpy face bathed in tears and sweat.

The girl was fifteen and used to be a good helper in the kindergarten. We had no idea how to console her parents. If only we hadn’t been held at bay by the soldiers and had been able to stay on the campus to stop the abductors. Now what could we say to Big Liu and his wife? I glanced at Minnie, who seemed to be struggling with the same question but couldn’t find words. No matter what, she must say something.

Finally she announced: “I’ll go to the Japanese embassy first thing tomorrow morning. They must return our people immediately.”

No one responded.

I left with Minnie to look at the other parts of campus and to make sure that the south exit was locked again. At the Central Building we ran into Rulian and two women staffers. They told us that in total twelve girls had been taken, and all the refugees in the building were terrified. I noticed Yanying, the young woman who had arrived a week ago in disguise as an old man, patting her little sister Yanping’s back and whispering to the girl. The child couldn’t stop crying, probably because what had just happened reminded her of the havoc back home. Around us, several voices were cursing and wailing. Minnie and I couldn’t stop our tears either. What’s worse, we didn’t even know most of the names of the abducted girls.

Half an hour later we went to the Practice Hall. To our amazement, we found Miss Lou talking with Luhai. “Thank God you’re back, Luhai!” Minnie cried. “How did you manage to escape?”

“I told an old interpreter that my wife was giving birth and I showed him I had a crippled leg. They saw me walk with a limp, so they checked my knee and let me go after the interpreter spoke with an officer. I owe my life to that old gentleman.”

“What happened to the other fellow, the ‘coal carrier’?”

“They kept him.”

Despite Luhai’s steady voice, I could see that he was shaken, his forehead bruised and his lips livid. Together the four of us went to the gatehouse, then to the cottage nearby where his family lived. Seeing him, his wife wept with joy and said, “I thought they were gonna kill you. Thank heaven you’re back!”

Before Miss Lou left, we prayed together for the safety of the twelve girls and for the life of “the coal carrier.” How earnest our voices were, and how we longed for a miracle.

After that, Minnie and I went to the front entrance. We stayed in the gatehouse that night, catnapping in rattan chairs in case the soldiers came again. A voice kept rising in my mind: “Lord, when will you hearken to our prayers? When will you show your wrath?” From time to time I woke up and heard Minnie muttering “Beasts! Beasts!”

AT THE CRACK OF DAWN the blast of an automobile horn shook me awake. I sat up with a start, my heart palpitating, and I heard a truck moaning away. Minnie got up too. We went out and saw Luhai hurrying over. Together we turned to the main entrance. Some women were shaking the gate and shouting, “Open it, please let us in!”

To our surprise, we found six girls, all carried off by the Japanese the previous night, standing there, their hair mussed and their faces tear-smeared. Luhai unbolted the small side gate at once. “Come in!” Minnie said, and beckoned them. She held the shoulder of Meiyan, Big Liu’s strapping daughter, and told her, “Your parents were devastated when they found you were gone. Thank goodness you’re back.”

The bespectacled girl nodded without speaking. Minnie asked them how they’d been mistreated. They all said that the Japanese had slapped them, pinched their faces, and pulled their hair, but had not molested them otherwise. By that, they meant they hadn’t been raped, as most local girls wouldn’t use the word “rape” bluntly. Minnie was glad to hear that. “What a miracle!” she said, and must have attributed this to our earnest prayers the night before.

I could not believe that the Japanese would let these young girls return without doing something terrible to them, but I kept mum, not wanting to deflate Minnie’s elation. There’d been so many heartbreaking happenings these days that she deserved to be happy for a moment.

Meiyan told the people gathering in her parents’ apartment that the Japanese had sent the other six girls, the better-looking ones, to a hotel where some officers stayed, while the remaining six of them had been put on the truck and sent back. We’d heard that yesterday many high-ranking officers were in town for the victory ceremony.

10

THAT MORNING Liya didn’t get up early as she usually did; she said she had cramps in her abdomen. I felt her forehead and body — she was burning hot. As I carried a mug of tea to her, she said her pajamas were wet. I took a look and found blood and bits of dead tissue in the discharge. She’d miscarried! I told Yaoping to heat a pot of water while I helped Liya undress.

“When did the cramps start?” I asked her.

“Last night.”

“Why didn’t you let your dad know?”

“I thought I’d be all right after a night of sleep. Is the baby gone, Mom?”

“Looks like it. You must’ve run too hard yesterday evening and hurt yourself.”

“I feel like hell.” She sobbed, her eyes shut. “The Japs killed my baby, and I must even the score with them.”

“Hush, let’s worry about how to make you get well soon.” I felt like crying too, but choked the tears back by squeezing my eyes.

“I don’t want to live any more.”

“Stop that nonsense. We need you.”

While Liya was rambling and writhing in pain, I continued working on her. I wrapped the bloody mess in rags and washed and wiped her with a hand towel. I wondered whether the dead fetus had all come out or whether she might need curetting or some other treatment. Under normal circumstances we could have sent for a specialized nurse, but all the OB clinics were closed. I told Yaoping to leave Fanfan with our neighbor and then carry Liya to our school’s infirmary on the back of his Flying Pony bicycle. As father and daughter started out, I followed them, holding Liya’s shoulder with one hand to keep her steady.

The nurse examined her and said that the miscarriage looked complete. Even if Liya needed a curettage, the nurse couldn’t help her, never having performed that procedure before. What Liya must do was rest in bed for at least two weeks, as it was generally believed that a miscarriage weakened a woman more than an actual birth, and she should avoid spicy, pickled, and cold food. She must abstain from sex for a whole month. I almost yelled at the nurse, who didn’t know that my son-in-law wasn’t home, to shut up. Liya needed to eat something nutritious, such as eggs, warm milk, chicken, seafood, pork tripe and liver, fresh fruits. Where on earth could we get any of those now?

Somehow I’d kept a small bag of millet and a bottle of brown sugar in my office. I gave those to Yaoping and told him to cook millet porridge and mix in some sugar for Liya. He should also bake some dried anchovies for her and make sure she ate regularly. After putting her to bed, I returned to the refugee camp.

MINNIE ASKED Big Liu to go to the Japanese embassy with her to protest the abduction of the girls. At first, he was reluctant, his eyes blazing behind his glasses. I urged him to keep her company and he agreed. He had a dignified bearing and was tactful in dealing with people, so she might feel more confident if he went with her.

Outside the front gate scores of old women were gathering and begging to be admitted into the camp. The moment Minnie and Big Liu appeared, the crowd calmed down a bit. Minnie came up to Holly and me. We’d been speaking to some older women from the neighborhood, trying to persuade them to go back home so as to save room, if there was any left here, for young women and children.

“But I have no place to go,” a sixtyish woman cried at me.

“Damn it,” another voice shouted. “The Japs assault old women too! Old crones are also humans.”

Minnie told us, “Let them in. But make it clear that they can stay only in the open air.”

“We have more than seven thousand already,” Holly said. “If we take them all, there won’t be an empty spot left on campus.”

“We have no choice now.”

As we began admitting the new arrivals, Minnie and Big Liu started out for the Japanese embassy, a twenty-minute walk. I had gone to that shabby two-story building four years ago, together with my son, Haowen, who had applied for a long-term residency visa for his studies in Japan. He had enrolled in Nippon Medical School two years before and wanted to become a doctor. He was still in Tokyo, though we hadn’t heard from him for more than seven months. Ever since the outbreak of the war, his letters had stopped. Both his father and I were worried about him, but we couldn’t say this to others, especially to our Chinese colleagues. We only hoped he was well and safe. My husband had studied Asian history in Japan and could speak Japanese, but rarely would he use the language. Nobody at Jinling knew about our family’s current connection with Japan except for Dr. Wu, but I was certain that she’d keep this confidential as long as I remained loyal to her.

Around noon, Minnie and Big Liu returned in a car. On their way, they had stopped at the closed U.S. embassy, and a Chinese secretary, who had been paid to stay behind with a couple of local staffers to look after the premises, had assigned a Cadillac to take Minnie and Big Liu to the Japanese embassy so they could arrive in style — the secretary had said that the Japanese were highly sensitive to pomp, so Minnie, as the head of an American college, should impress them with something grand, and therefore a sizable sedan was a necessity for their visit. Seeing the midnight blue car crawling to a halt outside the main entrance, I handed a staffer the half bucket of boiled yams I’d been giving away to starving kids, stepped closer to the gate, and watched Minnie and Big Liu get out of the vehicle.

Minnie gave the Chinese chauffeur a silver yuan, but the man pushed it back and said, “I can’t take money from you, Principal Vautrin.”

“Why not?”

“We’re all beholden to you. If not for you foreigners who stayed behind and set up the refugee zone, all the Chinese here would’ve been wiped out. If not killed by the Japanese, many would’ve starved to death. Miss Hua, please don’t tip me.” He called Minnie by her Chinese name, Hua Chuan, the phonetic translation of Vautrin. He adjusted his duckbill cap to cover his teary eyes and slouched away, still waving his hand as though to shield his contorted face. He climbed into the car, its fender planted with a U.S. flag, and drove away.

When they had come into campus, Minnie said to Big Liu, “I didn’t expect to see a sympathetic Japanese official today.”

“I still hate their guts,” he grunted.

This sounded out of character, because Big Liu was kindhearted and had once even argued with us that Abraham shouldn’t have attempted to sacrifice his son Isaac to God, saying that at least he, Liu, would never harm a child, never mind butchering one. Intuitively I knew something must have happened to his daughter. Maybe the soldiers had molested her. Minnie asked him, “Why do you hate the Japanese so much? Doesn’t God teach us to love our enemies and even do good to them?”

“That I cannot follow.”

“Don’t you Chinese say ‘repay kindness for injury’?”

“Then what can we repay for kindness? Good and evil must be rewarded differently.”

Minnie didn’t respond and seemed amazed by his argument. I mulled over his notion and felt he might have a point.

Later Minnie told me about their visit to the Japanese embassy. She said, “Vice-Consul Tanaka agreed to assign some policemen to guard our campus. He seemed quite sympathetic.”

“What else did he do?” I asked.

“He sighed and shook his head while listening to me describe the rapes and abductions in our camp. Obviously he was upset and said that Tokyo might soon issue orders to stop those violent soldiers. He told us that General Matsui reprimanded some officers for not keeping discipline among their men, but Tanaka wouldn’t say anything in detail about this.”

“That’s classified information, huh?” I snorted.

“Apparently so.”

Minnie seemed perplexed by my sudden temper, and I did not tell her about Liya’s miscarriage, not wanting to give her more bad news.

LEWIS SMYTHE CAME to our camp the next day and told us more about General Matsui’s frustration. Lewis and Tanaka knew each other well by now. In the beginning, the vice-consul could not believe the atrocities that the Safety Zone Committee had reported to the Japanese embassy every day, sometimes twice a day, but then one afternoon he saw with his own eyes a soldier shoot an old fabric seller who refused to surrender a silver cigarette case to him. Tanaka disclosed to Lewis that General Matsui had wept at the small welcome reception attended by some twenty senior officers and three officials from the embassy. The commander in chief reproved some of the generals and colonels for ruining the Imperial Army’s reputation. “There will be retribution, terrible retribution, do you understand?” he cried out, banging the table with his fist. “I issued orders that no rape or arson or murder of civilians would be tolerated in Nanjing, but you didn’t control your men. At one stroke, everything was lost.”

After the meeting, Tanaka overheard some of the officers in the men’s room say about the top commander, “What an old fogy!” and “He’s too senile, too softheaded now. He should never have re-emerged from retirement.” A colonel at a urinal added, “It’s easy for him to play the Buddha. If we forbade our men to have their way with the Chinese, how could we reward them?”

Tanaka had also told Lewis that the military executed Chinese POWs partly because they had no food to feed so many of them, and they were also unwilling to take the trouble to guard them. If that was the reason, why did they round them up in the first place? Why did they shoot so many men who had never joined the army? Why did they kill so many young boys? They meant to destroy China’s potential for resistance and to terrify us into obedience.

On the morning of December 20, the despicable behavior of the Japanese soldiers continued. Luhai found Minnie and me in the president’s office and said two soldiers had just entered the Faculty House. That was north of the Central Building, only steps away. Together Minnie and I ran over. Climbing the stairs, we heard a female voice screaming. Before Room 218 stood a wiry soldier with his arms crossed, the muzzle of his rifle leaning against his flank. The cries came from inside the room, so Minnie pushed the man aside and went in. I followed, as did three older refugee women, all somewhat stout. There on the floor a soldier was wiggling and moaning atop a girl, whose head was rocking from side to side while blood dribbled out of her nose.

“Get off her!” Minnie rushed up and pulled the man by the collar of his jacket. He was stunned and slowly picked himself up, his breath reeking of alcohol and his sallow cheeks puffed. He forgot to pull up his pants; his member was swaying and dripping semen. The girl, eyes shut, began groaning in pain, a blood vessel on her neck pulsating.

I tugged at the end of the man’s belt, which restored some presence of mind to him. He held up his pants and reeled away, but before reaching the door, he whirled back and stretched out his hand to Minnie, grinning while mumbling, “Arigato, arigato.” She looked puzzled while I wondered why he thanked her. She glared at him with flaming eyes, but he showed no remorse, as if raping a girl was just a small faux pas. Then he offered me his hand, which I didn’t touch either. At this point his comrade came in and dragged him and his rifle out of the room, leaving behind on the floor a silver liquor flask.

“The other bastard raped her too,” a woman told us.

“Get a basin of water for her,” Minnie said, her eyebrows jumping.

“Some of you stay with her today and don’t leave her alone,” I said.

A few women nodded agreement. I picked up the silver flask as a piece of evidence, which we would present to the Japanese embassy.

As two women were helping the girl into her clothes, Rulian came in and said to us, “Some Japanese broke into the northwest dorm.”

“Damn them! Where’s Holly?” Minnie asked.

“She’s in the Library Building. Some soldiers turned up there too.”

The northwest dormitory was behind the Faculty House. When we got there, we saw two soldiers sitting in the dining room, gobbling chocolate chip cookies with a can of condensed milk, which they’d opened with a bayonet. The kitchen door had been knocked off its hinges and was lying on the floor. At the sight of us, the men lurched up and hurried out, one holding the box of cookies and the other the open can. They both wore ropes on their belts for tying up people or animals.

Nobody had said a word during the confrontation. But the soldiers’ actions made me wonder if they were short on rations and hungry. Otherwise, why would they steal all kinds of food from the civilians, even a baked sweet potato and a handful of peanuts? Several times on the streets we had run into soldiers carrying geese, ducks, chickens, and even piglets tied to the tips of their rifles, some of the pigs with their innards ripped out. I hoped that the Western reporters (five or six of them were stranded here and managed to send out articles about the atrocities to The New York Times, The Chicago Daily News, and the Associated Press) would take photos of those savages and of the streets dotted with the bodies of civilians, their faces already black.

AROUND THREE O’CLOCK the next afternoon, a major, lanky and with a bristly mustache, came with six men to inspect our refugee camp. Minnie took them through the buildings slowly, and I knew she hoped that some soldiers would appear so the officer could witness the unruliness of the Japanese troops. We went through the Arts Building, which housed more than eight hundred refugees, then entered the Central Building, which was in Holly’s charge and held more than a thousand. The moment we left that place and were about to cross the quadrangle, Luhai hobbled over (these days he often exaggerated his limp) and said that some soldiers were attacking women in the south dormitory. Minnie invited the officer to come with us, and he agreed. We set off while he and his men followed us, striding south; his hands were clasped behind his back.

In the entryway of the dorm building we heard some Japanese yelling and laughing upstairs. We hastened our steps and bumped into a group at the landing. At the sight of Minnie and the officer behind us, two soldiers let go of the four women they were dragging down the stairs and bolted out of the building. One woman, both hands still gripping the tusk-smooth banister, begged, “Principal Vautrin, please help us! They beat us and forced us to undress in front of kids. Two of them are still up there torturing others.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Minnie said, and hurried up to the second floor, where a male voice yelped.

Walking down the hallway, we saw a soldier standing at the door of a room like a sentry, holding his rifle with one hand, its butt resting on the floor. The man was about to stop us but caught sight of the officer and his retinue, so he thought better of it. We brushed past him, entered the room, and saw a young woman lying naked on a piece of green tarp, crying and twisting, while a soldier with a full beard was thrusting his hand between her legs and making happy noises. A bayonet stood beside her head. We rushed over and were aghast to find the man’s entire hand buried in the woman’s vagina, beneath which was a puddle of blood and urine. Minnie yelled, “Get off her, you beast! Don’t you have a mother or sister?”

Startled, the man pulled out his hand and rose to his feet, still smiling with his lips quivering. The woman, moaning in agony, closed her eyes and turned her head to the wall, a small birthmark below her right ear. Her body reminded me of a large piece of meat ready for cutting, except for the spasms that jolted her every two or three seconds.

When the major came in, Minnie shouted at him, “Look at what your man did to her!” She pointed at the woman on the floor. I was so enraged that for a moment my vision blurred.

The officer stepped over and looked at the woman’s mutilated body. He then turned to the perpetrator and slapped him across the face while yelling something. The bearded soldier stood straight, sweating all over but not daring to wipe his face with his hands, from one of which drops of bloody liquid dripped onto the floor. Then, to our bewilderment, he muttered something apologetically, sidled away to grab his rifle, which was leaning against the wall, and ambled to the door. Before he could get out, a junior officer called to him and handed him his bayonet. Meanwhile, a middle-aged woman covered the victim with a tattered blanket.

Is that all? I wondered. They let him get away like that?

“Why did you let him go?” Minnie asked the officers.

The interpreter, also an officer, told her, “Our commander scolded him. You saw, he also punished him.”

“But no more punishment?” she said. “How come you didn’t even take down his name?”

“There’ll be more disciplinary action, of course.”

“How can you identify the man?”

“We know him. Not many men wear a beard like that. He’s nicknamed Obstetrician.” The interpreter grinned at us lasciviously, displaying his buckteeth. I throttled my impulse to spit in his face, and averted my eyes to suppress my tears and revulsion.

The mutilated woman groaned again, holding her sides with both hands. Minnie told three women to accompany her to the infirmary. Then she furiously said to the major, “I’m going to file a protest with your embassy.” We all knew they had let the perpetrator go.

The officer nodded without a word, his face dark and slightly lopsided. He waved at his men, and they followed him out of the room.

That evening, twenty-five policemen were sent over by the Japanese embassy. Their leader handed Minnie a letter from Vice-Consul Tanaka, which said that Jinling must treat these men well, providing for them charcoal fires, hot tea, and refreshments throughout the night. Minnie sighed. Where on earth could we get those things? Besides, we didn’t need so many policemen. Four would be enough to keep the marauding soldiers away. Looking at these men, some of whom seemed quite rough and could easily frighten the women and children, we wondered if they were real police. Probably they were just a bunch of regular troops assigned to the embassy for guard duty. We had no option but to accept them.

By now the camp had more than eight thousand refugees, and it seemed certain that more would come.

11

EARLY ON THE MORNING of December 22, Miss Lou informed us that the policemen from the embassy had assaulted two girls in the Practice Hall the night before. Five of them had dragged the girls out of the building and raped them beyond an oval flowerbed encircled with serrated bricks. We were shocked and outraged, but we were caught and couldn’t see a way out. We needed the police to deter the soldiers and had to handle this matter discreetly; nevertheless, Minnie would protest to Tanaka. By now more than seventy women and girls had been raped in our camp alone, and Minnie had submitted a report on those cases to both the Japanese embassy and the Safety Zone Committee.

Around ten a.m., Minnie and Big Liu again went to the U.S. embassy to ask to be driven to the Japanese embassy, where they would present another protest. But they didn’t find Tanaka there and left word with Consul-General Katsuo Okazaki that we didn’t need so many policemen — six would be enough. Okazaki, who was also the diplomatic adviser to General Matsui, promised Minnie he’d pass both the message and the protest letter on to the vice-consul, though he was in a hurry to catch the train to Shanghai, where he’d been residing since last fall.

This time the Cadillac didn’t send Minnie and Big Liu back to our college, because the chauffeur feared that the Japanese might take away the car. Any vehicle driven by a Chinese without a foreigner in it was subject to confiscation. So Minnie and Big Liu walked back from the U.S. embassy, which was less than a mile from Jinling.

I was outside the front entrance bandaging a woman’s neck when Minnie and Big Liu returned. The woman had been stabbed seven times by two soldiers but was still breathing. I planted a Red Cross flag on the horse cart on which she was lying before it set off for the University Hospital. Minnie told me that they’d seen more destruction in town, that Chef Wang at the U.S. embassy had lost his father to a knot of soldiers who had also plundered the old man’s small collection of antique coins. Minnie went on, “Who could imagine such atrocities! I’m wondering if there’s a home in this city that hasn’t been looted.”

“We shall settle accounts with them someday,” Liu said through his teeth.

Never had I seen him so full of hatred. I didn’t know how to respond.

Minnie wondered if we should drop in to see John Rabe at the Safety Zone Committee’s headquarters and find out if there was news about Ban and the six girls taken five days before. We headed for 5 Ninghai Road, which was nearby, a grand templelike house with wide windows and glazed roof tiles, owned by the former foreign minister Chun Chang and now used as the main office of the Safety Zone Committee.

We found Rabe sobbing at his desk, his bald head in both hands. He was a cheerful man who loved jokes and wisecracks, and I had never expected to see him so distraught.

“What’s the trouble, John?” Minnie asked, and sat down.

“Oh, damn the Japs, they killed my workers. They lied to me and promised to give them good pay, so I went and found fifty-four men for them.”

“How many did they kill?”

“Forty-three.”

We were stunned, knowing that Rabe had agreed to help the Japanese restore the city’s power service and had drummed up some experienced electricians and engineers for them. Those men worked day and night, repaired the turbines, and got the facilities running again. Once the electricity was back, the Japanese tied up most of them, dragged them to the riverside, and shot them, claiming that they had served the Chinese government.

“Don’t they need the experienced hands to maintain the power supply?” Minnie asked Rabe.

“That’s what I thought too, so I promised my workers personal safety plus good pay. Now how can I face their parents, their widows and children? People will believe I sold the men for some favors from the Japanese. Damn the Japs, they’ve lost their minds and simply can’t stop killing.”

Rabe hadn’t heard anything about Ban and the six girls. On his desk lay a swastika flag beside a typewriter, on which was an unfinished letter. Whenever Rabe went out to confront the Japanese, he’d carry the flag and sometimes flutter it at the soldiers committing crimes. He would cry “Deutsch” and “Hitler,” but even that failed to serve as a deterrent. Rabe had telegraphed the Führer before the fall of our city, imploring him to intervene on behalf of the Chinese. He even bragged to the Americans, “Just one word from Hitler and the Japanese will behave.” But so far the supreme leader had not responded to his request.

“My worst fear,” Rabe told us, “is that if one Chinese man in the Safety Zone kills a Japanese soldier for violating his wife or daughter, then the entire neutral district will be bathed in blood. That would end all our relief efforts.”

“I’m worried about that too,” Minnie agreed.

Thank God no Chinese man here had been bold enough to do that. Part of the reason for this was that no Japanese soldier would rape alone but would always be covered by at least one other man. They would loot in groups as well.

On our way back to Jinling, Big Liu said to Minnie, “The Japs kill, rape, and burn just because they can.” Again his eyes glowed as if he were crazed.

I knew that his daughter Meiyan must have been harmed, but in Minnie’s presence I didn’t say anything. She still believed that our prayers had worked a miracle — six of the girls had returned unharmed.

THAT EVENING the same twenty-five policemen came to our camp again. We were unsure if the consul-general had passed our message on to Tanaka. Minnie talked with Holly and me, and we all thought it wise to accommodate the police, whose presence here would at least keep the soldiers away. Minnie managed to persuade the policemen to stay outside the campus. From now on, a potbelly stove would be fired for them in the house across the street from the front entrance, and there was also tea, sunflower seeds, and bean-jam pies made by our college’s kitchen. These things seemed to please the policemen some. Maybe they wouldn’t sneak into campus to molest women again. Minnie believed that Tanaka had rebuked them.

By December 23 the camp had ten thousand refugees. In fact, we’d lost count, unable to keep track of the traffic anymore, so the number could have been larger. The Arts Building alone housed more than a thousand now. When Rulian said that the attic of that building held about three hundred people, Minnie got apprehensive but didn’t insist on calculating the numbers, since there were also people who would leave without notifying us. When it rained or snowed all the refugees crowded indoors, and many had no place to lie down at night, so they just sat on the stairs and in the corridors. During the daytime a lot of them lounged outside, content to take a spot somewhere. Minnie used to live in a three-room apartment, but now she had only one room and let the other two rooms be used by tens of women with small children. She told me that sometimes in the middle of the night she was awakened by crying babies and got annoyed, but as far as I could see, she would always greet the mothers pleasantly the next morning.

Our greatest difficulty was feeding so many refugees. There was never enough rice. To make matters worse, some people would get two helpings while others had nothing to eat for a whole day. When the porridge stands opened, many women would swarm over — pushing and elbowing others, they wouldn’t bother to stand in line. For days Holly, Miss Lou, and I, together with some young staffers, had tried teaching the refugees to form lines at mealtimes. We had made some progress in this, having assigned many young refugee women to take charge of lining up others outside the porridge plant.

Tickets for free food were issued to those who had no money, and more than sixty percent of the refugees received free meals. Still, some didn’t have the strength to reach the porridge cauldrons. Our staff sewed red tags on their sleeves so they could go to the heads of the lines when the afternoon meal was served. In this way they could at least have one meal a day.

12

TO EVERYONE’S SURPRISE, Ban, the messenger boy, returned early on the morning of December 24. I took him back to his quarters at East Court. Minnie joined me to find out what had happened to him. But Ban, seated at a table in the room that he shared with three others, wouldn’t talk. He’d lost a good deal of weight and looked skeletal, his eyes sluggish and his nose clogged. Bundled in a threadbare overcoat cinched around the waist by a straw rope, he was more like a scarecrow, and time and again he convulsed with wheezing coughs. “Please give me some solid food!” he begged. “I’m still starving.”

We had given him only some porridge for fear of hurting his stomach. I said, “You must eat liquid food for a day before you can have anything solid.”

He didn’t seem to recognize some of us, though he knew me for sure. He just looked at everyone with large dazed eyes. Minnie touched his forehead, which was damp with sweat. “He must be running a temperature,” she said.

“He must’ve gone through a lot,” I added.

“Let him rest well and don’t assign him any work for the time being,” Minnie told me, then turned to Ban. “You’re home now. Let us know if you need anything, all right?”

The boy grinned without a word, but as Minnie and I were leaving, he lifted his hand and waved. That was something he wouldn’t have done before.

We went to the main office to make plans for Christmas. As we were talking and Minnie was jotting down our ideas on a notepad, a group of Japanese soldiers headed by a colonel appeared. She let them into the office and asked a servant to serve tea. A scrawny teenage boy, hired temporarily as a messenger, told me that there were at least a hundred soldiers outside the front gate. I whispered to Minnie, “Lots of them are on campus now.”

Why had so many of them come today? I pulled the errand boy aside and told him to run to the Central Building and the dormitories to inform the staffers about the soldiers’ presence — they must make sure that young women and girls all kept a low profile. The boy set out straightaway.

As soon as the Japanese delegation sat down, the chunky-faced colonel introduced himself as a vice chief of the Logistics Department of the Sixth Division, commanded by Tani Hisao, the ruthless general we Chinese called Tiger Hisao. The colonel said they needed our cooperation. A Chinese interpreter, a fat man in his mid-forties, was translating for him, while three junior officers sipped tea. Minnie said, “I’ll be glad to help if what you want is reasonable.”

The officer cackled and continued, “We intend to keep better discipline among our men. After the fall of Nanjing, our troops became unruly for a short while, mainly because the soldiers had lost many comrades in the battle on Purple Mountain and couldn’t stop carrying out vengeance. Now that they’ve calmed down, it’s time to establish order and peace in this city. We’re going to start the entertainment business and need some women.”

When the interpreter finished translating, Minnie said firmly, “We don’t have that kind of women here.”

“According to our information,” the colonel continued, “there are some streetwalkers in your camp. We came to collect them and will give them licenses so they can entertain men and also make a living.”

“I’m not aware of any prostitutes among the refugees.”

“We can recognize them easily. Don’t worry about that. Besides, don’t you think this will be an effective way to protect good and honest women like this one?” He pointed at me. That set my heart pounding. “Truth be told,” he went on, “our soldiers are all strong young fellows and need women to release their tension, so to set up a professional service will be the ultimate solution. Don’t you think?” His cat eyes crinkled into a smile.

To my surprise, the heavy-lidded interpreter paused after rendering the officer’s words, then added, “Miss Vautrin, this is an order. It’s no use to argue.” He coughed, touching his mouth with the back of his hand.

I was worried but dared not put in a word. Did they really intend to open brothels by hiring some women? I’d heard of that sort of service organized by the Japanese military, but how could they decide who was a hooker? On second thought, I remembered seeing several painted faces among the refugees, especially two women who always jostled for position at a porridge stand or cut in line, and who still glossed their lips, penciled their eyebrows, and powdered their cheeks every day. Worse, their perfume smelled like rotten vegetables. Those two in their garish satin robes might even be willing to return to their former walk of life if they could make money.

The colonel was waiting. What should Minnie say? She looked at me inquiringly, but I lowered my eyes, at a loss about what to do. Could these men really distinguish prostitutes from other women? What if they made a mistake or took some innocent ones on purpose?

Finally Minnie said, “I don’t know how you can figure out who did that type of work before.”

The officer gave a barking laugh. “Don’t worry about that. We’re experienced in this matter and can identify them pretty accurately.”

“How many women do you plan to have for your entertainment business?”

“Many, the more the better, but one hundred from your camp.”

“I don’t think there are that many former prostitutes here.”

“We insist, because we know how to identify them.”

“On one condition, though — the women must be willing to continue to do the work.”

“Of course, they’ll be well paid besides.”

“In that case you can pick them.”

Suddenly a female voice shrieked outside, then screams and shouts came from every direction. While we were talking, the troops had broken into the camp to seize women. Minnie and I both realized in horror that the colonel had been detaining her while his men were at the devil’s work. How could we stop them? The door was blocked by two junior officers, one of them with a face scarred by shrapnel.

Minnie stood up, went to the window, and looked outside. I stepped across the room to join her. We could see the soldiers hauling away young women, all of whom seemed to have fine figures and relatively good looks. Some were crying and struggling to break loose, while one with an angular face hugged the foreleg of a stone lion in front of the Arts Building, screaming and refusing to let go. A soldier punched her in the gut twice, knocking her off the stone animal, and pulled her away. A little girl with two tiny brushes of hair behind her ears followed them, hollering madly, but two older women restrained her. I recognized the young woman, Yanying, and her little sister, Yanping.

Minnie spun around and sputtered to the colonel, “This is abduction. I’m going to protest to your superiors.”

He smirked contemptuously, one side of his mouth tilting up. He said, “As you wish.” With a toss of his head and a sweep of the kid gloves in his hand, he strutted out of the office, followed by his underlings. The interpreter waved at Minnie, shaking his double chin and unable to say a word as he turned toward the door.

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.