Nanjing Requiem

14

NUMEROUS REFUGEE WOMEN had come and implored us to intervene on their behalf to get their menfolk back from the Japanese military, assuming they were still alive. A few even blamed Jinling for shutting out their husbands and sons — as a result, the Japanese had seized them. One woman condemned us for barring her fifteen-year-old son from the camp and told others, “See, he was made to fall into the Japs’ hands.” Words like those unsettled Minnie, who confessed to me that we shouldn’t have set the age limit at thirteen. If we’d known that the Japanese would arrest all the young males, of course we’d have raised the entry age to fifteen for boys.

I told Minnie not to be troubled by the women’s grumbles. Whenever I heard them complain, I’d say to their faces, “Look, I’m sorry about your loss, but we let in ten thousand of you, five times more than we planned originally. What else do you expect us to do? If we’d taken in more boys, some girls and women would have been kept out.” That shut them up.

I advised Minnie never to show her regret in front of the complainers or they would persist with unreasonable demands. Still, some of the refugee women were so wretched and piteous, unable to survive without their menfolk, that Minnie started preparing a petition. She assigned Big Liu to interview them to gather the needed information. Whenever she had a free moment, she’d drop by his office, which was one of the two inner rooms in the president’ office, and listen to the petitioners’ stories. Their voices, once you’d heard them, would go on ringing in your ears for a long time: “They took my three sons and my husband, and I was too frightened to beg them.” “He was my only son, and I hope he’s still alive and knows how to get back.” “My two grandsons were taken, the only farmhands in our family.” “I have four small children left and also my mother-in-law. I can only beg on the streets.” “My two sons never came back from their business trip, and one of their wives was killed by the soldiers. If they don’t come back, I won’t live anymore.”

I was not in favor of a petition. I said, “Minnie, the Japanese always finish off the men they seize. We know that’s a fact. What’s the sense of begging for mercy from those beasts? It’s like asking a tiger for its skin. We’d better concentrate on the matters at hand.”

In spite of my reservations, I told some women to register their losses with Big Liu as a record. I knew Minnie’s heart was in the right place. Within a week, by mid-January, Big Liu had documented more than 400 cases, with 723 men and boys taken by the Japanese, mostly around mid-December. Among them 390 were businessmen; 123 were farmers, coolies, and gardeners; 193 were artisans, tailors, carpenters, masons, weavers, and cooks; 7 were policemen; and 1 was a fireman. There were also 9 boys, thirteen to sixteen years old. Day after day more women came to Big Liu to have their cases filed.

Big Liu’s hair had grayed considerably, and even his thick shoulders looked hunched when he sat at his desk. He was cheerful and gregarious by nature, but lately he was aloof and taciturn and often lost his temper. He said he had a toothache. When he wasn’t busy, he would absently gaze up at the ceiling and let out deep sighs. I pretended to know nothing about his trouble and didn’t explain to Minnie when she wondered aloud about what was bothering him. I didn’t tell her that his daughter Meiyan was on his mind.

One afternoon, the moment Minnie and I stepped into the main office, Big Liu tossed The New Shen Bao, a major Shanghai newspaper, on the coffee table and said, “Heavens, even the Chinese help the Japanese lie to the world!”

“I saw that piece,” Minnie said. “Hideous.”

I picked up the paper and saw three photographs of Nanjing attached to an article about the Imperial Army’s benevolent deeds here. People looked happy and festive in the pictures, because the capital finally had been liberated from “Chiang Kai-shek’s oppressive regime.” In one photo hundreds of civilians, mostly women and children, knelt in front of Japanese troops to express their gratitude for the bread, cookies, and candies that the soldiers were handing out. The beneficiaries claimed they had never tasted anything so delicious. Beyond them a line of Red Cross flags was flapping, strings of tiny lanterns were bobbing, and an officer was conversing with a shop owner over steaming tea. Another photo showed gentle-faced army doctors curing some old men and women of their blindness, and the patients shouting, “Long Live the Emperor!” all believing it was His Majesty who had restored their sight. The third photo gave a view of an amusement park, in which a bunch of children and two handsome Japanese soldiers with toddlers in their laps were going down a slide together, all laughing with abandon.

Minnie said to Big Liu, “Come, let’s go out for some fresh air.” But he didn’t budge, saying he had a migraine.

So Minnie and I went for a walk outside the campus. She was wearing a thick velvet hat and a woolen cloak while I had on blue cotton-padded jacket and pants, with a purple scarf around my neck. Her calf-high boots were the pair she’d bought in Moscow six years before. It was warm for a winter day, and the sun was sinking beyond the ridge of the hill ahead of us. Rooks were circling in the air and shrieking like crazy, while a pair of white-bellied magpies fluttered their feathers and cackled in the top of an old acacia. Along the road most of the houses were deserted. Some were roofless, destroyed by fire, and some no longer had doors or windows. All the pigsties and sheep pens were empty too. At the foot of the hill perched a small village that showed no trace of life, though it was time for cooking supper. As the two of us walked along, an old peasant, with a wisp of beard and only three or four teeth left in his mouth, appeared, lumbering over from the opposite direction. He carried a bundle of branches as firewood.

“Good day, Principal,” the old man said to Minnie, and came to a stop.

“How are you doing?” she asked, apparently knowing him by sight, as did I.

“No good, just getting by.”

“How’s your family?”

“My wife went away with my son and daughter-in-law to the north of the river. I miss my grandkids terribly.”

“When will they come back?” I asked.

“As long as the Japs are here, they won’t come back. Matter of fact, most of our neighbors lit out too. Only a bunch of old folks stayed in the village to look after the homes.”

“That means the families will come back sooner or later,” Minnie said.

“Hope so.”

The old man left, and we continued west. A few minutes later we entered a small valley, where we came upon a pond two acres wide, around which were many bodies. The water was still pinkish in spite of the recent rain and a creek feeding the marshy pond. More than a dozen corpses floated in it, puffed like logs. I realized this was an execution site.

Most of the dead were men, though there were some women and children too, all with bullet or bayonet wounds. Many of the men had their pants stripped down and their hands bound with iron wire; a few had their necks slashed. One woman, still wearing suede boots wrinkled at the ankles, had a breast cut off and a cartridge case stuck in each nostril. A small boy, stabbed in the tummy and his head smashed in from the side, still held a squashed bamboo basket. Beyond him lay a middle-aged man, perhaps his father, shot in the face and his hands tied with gaiters; his right hand had a sixth finger.

“The Japanese are savages!” I said.

“We should count how many were killed here,” Minnie suggested.

“All right.”

Together we began counting, walking clockwise along the waterside. Minnie used a stick to part the reeds and pampas grass that obscured some corpses, while I recorded our count in my small notebook. Now and then I pinched my nose shut because of the overpowering stench. Minnie wore a surgical mask, which she carried in her pocket whenever she went out nowadays. In total, we found 142 bodies, among them 38 women and 12 children. There might have been more under the water, but it was too muddy to see through.

“A monument should be put up here,” Minnie said.

“There are execution sites everywhere. This one is nothing by comparison,” I replied.

“Still, this should be remembered.”

“Most people are good at forgetting. That’s a way of survival, I guess.”

We fell silent. Then she said, “History should be recorded as it happened so it can be remembered with little room for doubt and controversy.”

I didn’t respond, knowing that in her heart she resented the Chinese fashion of forgetfulness based on the understanding that nothing mattered eventually, since everything would turn into dust or smoke — even memories would fade away. Such an idea might be insightful, but one could also argue that many Chinese seemed to exploit forgetfulness as an excuse for shirking responsibility and avoiding strife. This was probably due to the influence of Daoism, which to Minnie was more like a secular cult. By contrast, she respected Confucianism — instead of indulging in escapism, Confucius advocated order, personal duty, and diligence. Yet to her, Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism were all secular religions. What this country needed was Christianity, she often told me, and I shared her belief.

Suddenly a large silver carp surfaced with a splash and swam away, its back cleaving the water with an expanding V. I said, “Fish must be getting fat in here.”

“And the grass will grow thicker. What a crime!” Minnie said.

Originally we had planned to go all the way up to the ridge of the hill and from there to catch a full view of Mochou Lake beyond the city wall, but now we were in no mood for that anymore. We turned back. On our way down, we discussed how to present the petition to the Japanese authorities and the newly established puppet municipality. I wouldn’t say a negative word about this matter anymore, since it was already under way. We were both against publishing the petition in a newspaper, afraid of incensing the Japanese unnecessarily. In the distance, a squadron of heavy bombers emerged like a school of whales in the waves of clouds, heading back for base after dropping bombs on the Chinese lines in the northwest, where a battle was in full swing.

Minnie said, “I wish the Christians in Japan knew what their countrymen have been doing here.”

“Even if they knew, they might not do anything to stop them,” I said, wondering how my son, Haowen, might have felt when he saw the Japanese euphoria. He must have encountered public gatherings and parades in celebration of the Imperial Army’s victory. Was he heartbroken or crazed by them? Was he worried about us? Did he miss home? Could he still concentrate on his studies? Then I curbed my woolgathering and told Minnie, “I read in newspapers that all of Tokyo had turned out to celebrate the fall of Nanjing. Even small boys tossed their caps into the air, and women wore slogans across their chests, sang and danced in the streets, fluttering the sun-disk flags. Our calamities are their good fortunes.”

“That’s because they were ignorant of the truth.” She’d also heard about the celebrations all over Japan, and that was why she couldn’t stop imagining ways to deflate their jubilation. She had once suggested to the Safety Zone Committee that they rent a plane and drop a ton of truth-bearing pamphlets over Japan. That had brought out peals of laughter from the other foreigners. Lewis even joked that if Minnie could find a plane in Nanjing, he’d fly the mission, and Searle volunteered to be an airborne leafleter.

We stood for a while on the hill slope. From there we could see the Yangtze glittering like lava in the northwest, against the crimson sunset. On the waterway a handful of sampans were sailing upstream almost motionlessly.

15

FOR A WEEK Minnie had been working on a report to Jinling’s board of founders in New York. She was required to keep an official diary that would be mailed to our headquarters in New York at the end of each semester. In addition, she needed to send in a monthly report, so toward the end of each month she would work on the lengthy piece of writing. I wouldn’t trade places with her even if they paid me twice her salary, though I could write and even kept a personal diary. In recent weeks Minnie often showed me her writings, and I could see that she couldn’t be completely candid about what was happening. Besides the politics within our college, the Japanese monitored the international mail. She knew that other eyes, some hostile, would read the pages.

She used carbon paper to make an extra copy of the report for Dr. Wu, though without her address we didn’t know where to send it yet. Minnie reviewed the major happenings before and after the fall of the city, including our efforts to help the refugees, the measures we’d taken to protect the school’s properties, the conditions of the neighborhood, and the systematic destruction of lives and homes by the Japanese. She listed some arrests, rapes, robberies, and instances of arson — but they were too numerous to include all of them. Besides, she couldn’t mention too many atrocities in case the Japanese confiscated the letter. She included the abduction of the twelve girls on December 17, but emphasized that six of them had come back unharmed the next morning. She wrote: “We deem that this miracle was wrought by our prayers.”

I thought about telling her my doubts about the six girls’ claim that the Japanese had not molested them, but I had no evidence to back up my conjecture, so I refrained.

Minnie talked with me about the twenty-one “prostitutes.” Should we report that as well? If we did, what should we say? Would the board members in New York understand the situation? I could tell that Minnie was worried about Mrs. Dennison, because the old woman was in New York at the moment, fund-raising for our college, and she had always kept a close watch on Jinling. Mrs. Dennison might make a big fuss about this incident and even publicize it as a scandal, as we could not describe the circumstances in detail without putting ourselves at greater risk with the Japanese authorities.

After we had deliberated, Minnie said to me, “If it’s a mistake on my part, I’ll bear the guilt alone and do more good deeds to atone for it. God is greater than our hearts and knows everything.”

I didn’t fully understand her last sentence and asked, “You mean your conscience is clear?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. But for now I prefer to keep this matter between God and me.”

“If you’re at fault, I’m part of it too. Don’t worry about it. Nobody will say you’re responsible for losing those women. We all know that the Japanese would have seized them one way or another that day.”

Somehow we both felt that some of the abducted women might come back, that it might be too early to fully gauge the weight of the incident. What’s more, we were certain that among the twenty-one women there’d been at least two or three former prostitutes. Deep down, though, we both knew that most of the women were unmarried and innocent. If only we had some information on them. If only we could find a way to bring some of them back. Those young lives had been ruined. No matter how we tried to reason away our responsibility, we were somewhat implicated, since by now everyone knew that Minnie had granted the Japanese permission. I made a mental note to write to Dr. Wu about this incident once I heard from her.

The more Minnie ruminated on this, the more remorseful and distressed she became. I urged her to stop thinking about it. There was so much to worry about at the moment that we mustn’t let our sense of guilt paralyze us.

We decided to focus on the first eleven days of the Japanese occupation, up to December 23, so that Minnie wouldn’t have to mention what had transpired on the twenty-fourth. When the next report was due, she could start from Christmas. Besides her inability to clearly explain her responsibility for the abduction, she was afraid of giving Mrs. Dennison a weapon to use against her. We knew that the only person who cared to scrutinize her report was the old woman, who seemed to hover over Minnie’s shoulder all the time. To appease Mrs. Dennison, Minnie stressed that the refugee camp here was only temporary, that we would try to reinstate the college as soon as possible after the refugees left.

Having written about a few more rape cases and several such attempts that had been stopped in time, Minnie concluded: “I wish we could have prevented all the tragedies, but compared to most of the other camps, our record is exceedingly good.” That was true, yet it didn’t ease her mind.

One of the accomplishments she wrote about was teaching the refugees to line up for food. For weeks the women and girls had crowded the porridge stands, jostling to reach the cauldrons. The lawn had been trampled into puddles of mud, and even the cypress hedges were crushed in places. How marvelous it was to see the women standing in orderly lines at mealtimes now. Minnie also reported that many refugees complained that the porridge was too watery. Obviously there was theft going on in the porridge plant, but as yet we hadn’t been able to find out where. The graft angered Minnie, and she assigned Luhai to keep a close watch on the cooks, but he couldn’t detect the cause. Minnie vowed to get to the bottom of it and questioned the headman of the kitchen personally. The pockmarked man named Boom Chen hemmed and hawed, saying he’d do everything in his power to thicken the porridge, but so far nothing had changed and the refugees kept griping.

Several times our college had offered to run the porridge plant ourselves, yet the local Red Cross people would not let us. Minnie couldn’t understand why they still had profit in mind under such circumstances. If only there was a way to nab the crooks.

The report was at last completed. How should she send it? Minnie said she would ask a fellow missionary going to Shanghai to mail it from there.

16

THE JAPANESE TROOPS grew less violent after the New Year, and some refugees felt things were stable enough that they no longer needed to stay in our camp. By mid-January, we still had seven thousand refugees. Many women believed that only through Minnie’s intervention could they get their menfolk back, so they stuck with us. In late January Minnie and Big Liu presented the petition to the Japanese embassy, where an attaché named Fukuda accepted it and said that some office would give it full consideration. At the same time the puppet municipality, the so-called Autonomous City Government, composed of some bureaucrats and local gentry who had Japanese connections, ordered that all the refugee camps close down by February 9, which in a way eased Minnie’s mind a little because she knew that Mrs. Dennison would hate to see the college remain a refugee camp.

We began persuading the older women among the refugees to go home. Some left, but they came back within two or three days. Many of the refugees had no place to live anymore, for nothing was left of their homes. One woman in her early forties was dragged away by four soldiers; they molested her for a whole night and did not release her until the next afternoon. She came back and begged Minnie never to make her go home again. A woman of sixty-three went back and was caught by two soldiers. She told them she must be as old as their grandmothers; all the same, they knocked her down, raped her, and stomped on her bound feet. She limped back to Jinling the next day, still shaken, and couldn’t stop her tears. Some of the women, shocked and humiliated, wouldn’t speak to anyone after they were back in our camp.

Their stories upset us, and we realized that we could not close the camp in a hurry. Even if we tried hard, there was no way to meet the deadline, which was just a week away. One thing we were clear about now — no matter what, we must never force any woman to leave. We ignored the deadline, giving the excuse that most of the refugees were homeless.

THE DEADLINE had passed, but not a single camp closed down. John Rabe insisted to the officials that there was no way to send the women home without exposing them to molestation by the soldiers, so the matter was dropped. Meanwhile, the Autonomous City Government had been registering all the citizens and refugees, and declared that anyone older than fifteen without an ID certificate would be arrested and jailed. Frightened, people lined up at various camps to go through the registration process. Some living outside the Safety Zone even came a day before and, bundled in overcoats or wrapped in blankets, waited a whole night to get registered. A lot of men feared that this might be another ruse to ensnare the so-called former soldiers and have more of them “mopped up.” Indeed, in the past three weeks the Japanese had seized more than twenty thousand men from various registration sites. Promised leniency and well-paid jobs, those men had stepped out, hoping to make some money for their families, but the Japanese apprehended them all. About three thousand of them were forced into convict labor while the rest were led to execution grounds.

Hundreds of men were coming to our camp, wanting to get registered here, because if they were accused of being former soldiers, some brave women, as instructed by me, would step forward and vouch for them, saying that the men were their husbands or sons. As a result, the officials would be likely to let them pass and give them the ID papers, a one-page document, five by three inches, folded down the middle, stamped with a scarlet seal, and printed with the characters Good Citizen Certificate. On the inside was information about the carrier and also his or her mug shot. The Japanese had been in charge of the registration originally, but it got more and more confusing, and it was hard, almost impossible, for them to tell who was a former soldier, so they left the whole matter in their puppets’ hands. The Safety Zone Committee urged all the refugee camps to participate in the registration as a gesture of “cooperation” with the new municipality. In addition, John Rabe and his colleagues all believed that it would be safer for the refugees to register in the foreigners’ presence, and therefore they told people to get the ID papers now.

Siemens had decided to close its Nanjing office by the end of February, so Rabe would be returning to Germany. His imminent departure caused quite a stir among the camps. He had been nicknamed the Living Buddha and was revered by the refugees. Some people called him Mayor Rabe, but he forbade them to do that, not wanting to antagonize the Autonomous City Government, which was eager to replace both the Safety Zone Committee and the International Red Cross Committee. For days Minnie and I had been thinking about giving him a farewell dinner, but it was impossible to get fresh meat and fish, so we decided to give a tea party instead.

It was like spring on February 17, balmy and cloudless. The refugees at Jinling hung their bedding in the sun while some girls mopped the floors and wiped the windows and doors of the buildings. The whole campus looked lively and colorful — laundered clothes and diapers were spread on evergreen hedges, making the place resemble a thickly settled village. The unkempt sight made me wonder how long the refugee camp would last. If Mrs. Dennison saw this, she might have a stroke.

I made a kind of fruitcake, using minced candied fruit, for the tea party in Rabe’s honor. We also opened the last box of chocolates in our pantry and placed it next to a tray of peeled tangerines and a bowl of canned pineapple. Rabe brought along two stout sausages, which we cut and placed next to a platter of cured duck. In addition to three German businessmen and eight American missionaries, John Allison, the second secretary at the reopened U.S. embassy, attended too. He’d done diplomatic service for five years in Tokyo and Kobe and spoke Japanese. Allison now functioned as the top American diplomat in Nanjing. Oddly, today he was escorted by a Japanese guard, a hulk of a soldier, as if he were under arrest. This was probably because a sentry had manhandled him a fortnight before and several newspapers in the West had reported the incident. Allison had returned to Nanjing six weeks earlier and was still shaken by the horrific condition of the city, particularly by the corpses scattered on the streets, some partly eaten by dogs and birds. He couldn’t understand why the Imperial Army, noted for its discipline, would kill so indiscriminately. The Germans in Nanjing — Rabe, Rosen, Sperling, and a few others — often made fun of his shock, calling him Allison in Wonderland.

On the round table sat a bowl of vegetable salad mixed with cellophane noodles and peanut butter, which all the guests liked. Most of them stood around chatting, with plates and forks in their hands. Big Liu proposed a toast, raising a cup of oolong tea and announcing with a smile: “Even if the Chinese are totally deprived, we still have fine tea.”

People raised their cups and drank to Rabe’s health and good fortune back in Germany. To my knowledge, Rabe wasn’t doing well in spite of his hardy appearance. He always carried a vial of insulin and a syringe in his pocket for his diabetes. Because he often had to climb out of bed in the dead of night to repel soldiers who attempted to break into his home or into the small compound of the German school, he’d feel sleepy during the day and nod off at times. Rabe was going to Shanghai first and from there sailing to Genoa, which would take more than four weeks; then he’d head to Berlin by rail. He had no idea what was in store for him back home. He told Minnie and Holly, “I’ll collapse by the time I join my children.”

Minnie apologized to Rabe for such a shabby party, without cheese or wine. We all knew he loved cheese and nowadays often groused to his cook about a cheeseless table. He even missed potatoes.

“This is wonderful and memorable,” Rabe said. “Thank you, Miss Vautrin.”

He had grown thinner lately, but still sported a small paunch. Holly often joked about him in private, “If he was single, I’d chase him to the end of the globe.” I’d say to her, “Oh, come now, he’s too old for you, not a good catch.” Rabe was fifty-five, older than Holly by a good fifteen years.

He and Lewis were quite close, having worked together on a daily basis since November. Lewis admired his large heart, his common sense, and his ability to get things done, while Rabe liked Lewis for his energy and unflagging enthusiasm for whatever he undertook. But the two of them wouldn’t stop chaffing each other. Lewis would call Rabe Rockefeller on account of the grand house, the headquarters of the Safety Zone Committee, where he stayed during the daytime. Whenever his loyal assistants, Han or Cheng, came in to hand Rabe a telegram, Lewis would quip, “From Hitler?”

Now, teacup in hand, Lewis came over and smiled quizzically, crunching popcorn. Rabe swatted him on the shoulder and said, “I know what you’re going to say: Hilter summoned me back. Right?”

“He must have a big job waiting for you,” Lewis said, his face straight. We chuckled, knowing Rabe was a leader of the Nazi Party in Nanjing.

“As a matter of fact, the Führer may not want to see me. Chancellor Scharffenberg was in the embassy the other day and summoned me. He chastised me, urging me to stop tangling with the Japanese. He stressed that what the Japanese were doing here should not concern us Germans, because he believed that the Chinese, once left alone to cope with the Japanese, would cooperate with them. I guess by now even Hitler might be tired of me.”

Minnie raised her teacup and said to Rabe, “John, regardless of your political persuasion, you’re a man I look up to.”

We touched cups with him and each took a mouthful. Then Robert Wilson came over, his balding crown pinkish, and rested his hand on Eduard Sperling’s shoulder. “John, I have something for you,” Bob said. Because the Japanese would let few medical personnel come into the city, for almost six weeks Bob had been the only surgeon in town. He actually lived at the University Hospital so he could work around the clock. His face creased a little as he smiled; he looked frazzled as a result of having to operate on patients day and night. Sometimes his hands got swollen from overwork, yet he had to continue.

“What’s that?” Rabe asked. “I hope it’s not another house. I cannot bring any real estate back to Germany, you know.” There’d been so many houses “given” to him recently that he was sick of them, because the owners also meant to have the properties protected by him, knowing he’d have to leave them behind when his stint here was over.

Bob touched a canvas satchel under the table with the side of his boot. “I have one hundred ampoules of insulin for you — don’t you want them?”

“Good Lord, I’m delighted,” Rabe said. “But don’t you need them for other patients?”

“We only treat people with gunshot and bayonet wounds. I feel like a butcher, doing nothing but cutting and stitching bodies.” He lifted the satchel of insulin, put it on the table, and told Rabe, “Use them soon — they’ll expire in a year.”

“I will. Thanks very much,” Rabe said.

While people were talking, Searle Bates dozed off in a chair in a corner, his veiny hand still holding a teacup. His bumpy Adam’s apple jigged from time to time. Usually he was the most convivial one among the Americans, thanks to his sharp wit and vast learning, but this afternoon he was too exhausted to remain on his feet. These days, besides managing the camps at Nanjing University, he drove a truck to deliver rice and firewood and coal to porridge plants within the Safety Zone, which fed more than two hundred thousand refugees. Because only foreigners could transport the rations without being robbed, Searle and several others had to do the driving. Now none of us disturbed him.

When the party was about to end, Minnie suggested that Allison leave first because he had a Japanese guard in tow, so the diplomat left before the others. Then Rulian came in and, her almond-shaped eyes smiling, whispered to me that some women gathering outside wanted to say farewell to Rabe.

I went up to him and said, “Mr. Rabe, some women in our camp want to say good-bye to you. Can you spare a minute?”

“Okay, I’m coming.” He drained his cup, then followed us to the door. The others were also coming out.

What we saw in front of the Science Building staggered us. More than three thousand women and girls were kneeling on the ground, wailing and begging, “Please don’t go! Please don’t abandon us!”

“Don’t leave us in the lurch!” a voice rang out.

“Don’t stop protecting us!” shouted another.

Rabe was flustered. He approached the front row of the crowd and said, “Please get up.”

But none of the women budged. He bent down a little and said a few more words in English to them; still nobody moved. Then he bowed three times to the crowd in the Chinese fashion. He straightened up and waved at the women and girls, some of whom were crying louder now. He asked Minnie, “What should I do?”

“Say something to them.”

“What can I say? There’s no way I can justify my leaving. If only I could stay like you.” He swallowed, a film of sweat on his broad forehead. Unable to speak Chinese, he turned to the crowd and made another three deep bows.

Still, the crowd wouldn’t get up and many kept crying. Rabe said to Minnie, “I’d better go.”

“Okay, this way. You can use the side gate,” said Minnie.

I beckoned Luhai over and told him to open that small exit for Rabe. Rabe followed him along the roofed path and went out of the yard through a moon gate, leaving his car behind. He had to walk all the way home, as did the other guests.

Afterward Minnie talked about the crowd with me. “I didn’t expect they’d have such deep feelings for John Rabe.”

“Yes, they’re more than grateful,” I said. “Also, they must be scared and want to be protected.”

To many of the women and girls, Rabe must have been like a protective father who had never hesitated to confront the soldiers and even risk his own life. He was more than a hero to the refugees.

17

ONE AFTERNOON in late February, a fortyish refugee woman named Sufen came to the president’s office and said she had spotted her fifteen-year-old son in a labor gang in the Model Prison downtown. Surprised, Minnie asked her, “Are you sure he was your son?”

“Absolutely, he called me Ma and hollered he missed home. Principal Vautrin, please help me — help get him out of jail.”

“Relax. Tell us more about that place.”

That stumped Sufen, who turned tongue-tied.

“How many men are in there?” I asked her, having stepped out of the other inner room, which was my office.

“Hundreds, some wearing burlap sacks like rain ponchos. Some are just teenage boys like my son.” As she spoke, Sufen’s large eyes shone with excitement and her sunburned nose quivered. I knew she had filed her petition with Big Liu.

“What else did your son tell you?” Minnie went on.

“Nothing more. Two guards took them away before he could say another word. I’m gonna wait for him there tomorrow morning.”

“Try to find out something about the other men too.”

“Sure I will.”

“Don’t tell others you saw your son there yet. We must figure out what to do before we spread the word.”

“I’ll do whatever you say.”

I admired Minnie’s discretion. If we broke the news at once, we might bring about a chaos among the petitioners that Big Liu and his team would not be able to handle.

Sufen dragged herself out of the office, her shoulders bent and her knees knocking a little as she walked. I remembered speaking with her weeks ago, and knew that she had come with a group of refugees from Danyang and that her husband was a chef in the Nationalist army, though the man was somewhere in the southwest of China now. That made me feel closer to her because my son-in-law was also in the army. Sufen told me that a shell had landed in her backyard and killed her mother-in-law, who had been feeding a milk goat there. The moment Sufen and her son carried the old woman indoors and covered her with a sheet, word came that the Japanese were approaching. So she and the boy took flight with the other villagers. But before reaching the road that led to a nearby town, they were intercepted by a company of soldiers, who detained all the able-bodied men among them, saying that the Imperial Army needed “many, many hands” and would give them good food and pay them handsomely. Sufen begged an officer to spare her son. He was just a kid, not even fifteen yet, skinny like a starved chicken. “Please, please don’t take him away!” she pleaded, holding both hands together before her chest. But the heavyset officer kicked her and threatened to cut off her ear if she made any more noise. She was too frightened to say another word, and all she could do was give the boy the biscuits and water she carried.

Now the information about her son in the Model Prison, a standard penitentiary built by the Nationalist government but used as a military jail by the Japanese, cast a ray of hope on the petition. It also made me see the reason for Minnie’s insistence on the endeavor. If my son were behind bars, I’d have done anything to get him out. I thought that I ought to be more involved in helping those poor mothers and wives.

Minnie and I wondered if the jail also held other men and boys belonging to some petitioners’ families. She called together Big Liu, Holly, and me and floated the idea of sending scores of women to the Model Prison to see if they could find their menfolk as well. Both Big Liu and Holly thought that this might be too rash and might endanger the women.

I believed that we could make the petition a much stronger case if more men and boys were found in that jail. Maybe we could send over just three or four plain-looking women? I suggested. They all seconded my suggestion.

With the help of Lewis Smythe, Minnie got in touch with Dr. Chu, who had his clinic in the center of downtown and was well connected and eager to help the women get their menfolk back. Most of the foreigners thought highly of this man, though I had mixed feelings about him. He had earned his medical degree from the University of Leipzig and spoke fluent German but very little English. Reverend Magee said Dr. Chu was warm and trustworthy — unlike most Chinese, he never minced his words and always cut to the chase. Despite working for the Autonomous City Government, he had a decent reputation among the locals, partly because he held no official title and spent most of his time seeing patients. Magee had recommended him to several Americans as a family physician. On a windy afternoon in early March, Minnie and I arrived at his office downtown, carrying the six hundred signatures and thumbprints of the petitioners.

To our surprise, Dr. Chu had met with Big Liu two days before and was familiar with the case. He was in his late thirties, with urbane manners. His three-piece suit was baggy on him, though his boots were shiny. He spoke while drumming his long fingers on the glass desktop as if tapping out a telegram. “I went to the Model Prison yesterday and chatted with an officer,” he told us in a low-timbred voice. “The man said that fifteen hundred prisoners were held there as forced labor. Many of them are civilians, and more than forty are young boys. But the officer wouldn’t let me speak to any of them. He feared that his Japanese superior might suspect him of leaking information.”

“Do you think there might be a way we can get some of them released?” Minnie asked. I was amazed that he was already involved.

“That’s possible. Try to get more women to participate and send the petition to Shanghai if the Japanese here ignore you. There must be a way to push them.”

“We’ll do that.”

“The prisoners are underfed and malnourished. Some were too ill to work. Maybe you should have some rice and salted vegetables delivered to those recognized by the petitioners.”

“So far only one boy was spotted by his mother,” I told him.

“I’m pretty sure more will be found.”

“We’ll try our best,” Minnie said.

“I’ll do everything I can to help.” He sighed, his eyes dimmed, and his patchy brows drooped.

Dr. Chu was one of the best doctors of Western medicine here, and even some Japanese officers had gone to him for treatment since he had come back to Nanjing a month before. With his help, we hoped that our petition might produce some results.

18

ONE AFTERNOON in mid-March, Minnie and I headed for the garden in the back of campus to look at the double daffodils that were about to unfold. She’d brought the bulbs back from America a decade before and Old Liao had helped to cultivate them. She was fond of flowers, particularly those that bloomed in fall and winter. Passing the small pond, we saw some goldfish, each about a foot long, lying belly-up in the water, and realized they must have been poisoned by soapsuds and night soil. A broken washboard was floating among them. Many women would scrub toilet buckets in the pond. In the beginning we had urged them not to do that, but so many people kept doing it that by now it had become a common practice. The refugees also laundered clothes and diapers in the water. There were three other ponds on campus — one behind the library, another near Ninghai Road and south of the Faculty Residence, and the third before the Practice Hall. But those three were much bigger than this one, and therefore not as polluted.

Although there were 3,328 refugees in the camp now, the 7,000 who were gone had left behind a good amount of garbage and waste. Feces were strewn in the grass and along some hedges, and a group of refugee girls had been collecting them with wicker baskets and small dung forks and piling them behind some buildings. As the weather was getting warmer day by day, the excrement had to be disposed of without further delay or an epidemic might break out. The girls had been digging pits to bury the waste they had collected, but we knew that even this was not a permanent solution. We needed lime, tons of it, to cover the feces and kill the germs, but to date we hadn’t been able to come by any.

“Phew, what a smell,” said Minnie.

“We’d better clean up this place soon,” I said.

“Yes, we must get hold of some lime.”

Without going farther west to see the daffodils, Minnie and I veered back toward the business manager’s office. She wanted to send Luhai to the Safety Zone Committee to ask Plumer, who had succeeded Rabe as its chairman, about the lime they had promised to help us procure.

Rulian turned up as we walked along. The second she saw us she said, “A girl killed herself.”

“Where?” Minnie asked.

“In the Central Building.” That was in Rulian’s charge now, because Holly had been hospitalized for tonsillitis and exhaustion. When I went to see Holly two days earlier, she had wanted to come back to Jinling, saying the hospital was too clamorous, but Dr. Wilson insisted that she stay there for another week. He knew she wouldn’t rest in bed once she returned to the camp.

Together Minnie, Rulian, and I headed for the Central Building. The fragrance of fruit blossoms made the air a little sweetish. Some refugees lazed around in the quad, where the two blind girls brought over by Cola, the young Russian, three months ago, and joined by another two blind ones, piped flutes and sawed away at the two-stringed erhus, learning to play snatches of the local Kun opera.

A crowd had gathered on the second floor of the Central Building. We entered a classroom that held more than sixty women. The room had a strong smell that brought to mind a chicken coop, but I was already accustomed to this odor. Rulian took us to the far end, which was shielded by a sky-blue screen. Minnie and I bent down to look at the dead girl closely — she was in her late teens, a tad homely but with soft skin and abundant hair. She looked pallid; her eyes were closed, her lips dark and parted, and through them I could see sticky blood in her mouth. Her round cheeks were grayish, but her expression was relaxed, as though she were about to yawn. Her short-fingered hand was resting on her chest, which seemed to be still heaving. Next to her clothes bundle, which served as a pillow, was an empty ratsbane bottle; she must have found it in one of the defunct kitchens. A frayed blanket covered the girl’s abdomen, but her legs stuck out, one foot wearing a scarlet woolen sock and the other bare. Although she looked familiar, I didn’t recognize her right away.

“Who is she?” Minnie asked.

“Her name is Wanju Yu,” Rulian answered.

At that, I remembered the girl, who’d been among the twelve taken by the Japanese on December 17, but I didn’t know how to tell Minnie about her in the presence of this crowd.

“Why did she do this to herself?” Minnie went on.

“I’ve no idea,” Rulian said.

“Any of you know why she took her life?” Minnie asked the women standing around.

They all shook their heads. A moment later one said the girl had cried a lot at night, and another added that she had often skipped meals, just sitting cross-legged in the corner like a statue and studying the floor. A thirtyish woman, suckling a baby in her arms, guessed that the dead girl must have been a student because she had often read a thick book alone and also crooned movie songs to herself. Since the first day these women had wondered if she had a cog loose.

I tugged at Minnie’s sleeve and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

We left the room, followed by Rulian. In the hallway I told Minnie, “The girl was pregnant and went to the infirmary a couple of days ago. She wanted an abortion. We told her we couldn’t do that for her because we had no doctor here. We should’ve given her more help, but we couldn’t kill a baby. The nurse and I really don’t know how to abort a fetus.”

“Who was the father of the baby?” Minnie asked.

“Some Japanese bastard.”

“I don’t get it. How did it happen?”

“Remember when the Japs grabbed twelve girls one evening last December?”

“Yes. And six of them came back the next morning.”

“Well, the dead girl was one of the six.”

“But they all said they were unharmed.”

“That’s just what they claimed. How could they admit they’d been raped? How could any of them find a husband if they were known as having been violated by the Eastern devils? Neither they nor their families could bear the shame.”

Stunned, Minnie swayed a little. She put her hand on Rulian’s shoulder, sputtering to me, “Why didn’t you breathe a word about this? Those girls should at least have received medical attention.”

“This isn’t something people would talk about. I thought I’d let you know one of these days, but for a long time I had no evidence to back up my guess. Who could’ve imagined the girl would kill herself?” I lowered my eyes and wished I had informed Minnie after Wanju showed up at the infirmary.

“Where are the other five girls?”

“I don’t think they’re still here except for Meiyan, Big Liu’s daughter.”

Without another word Minnie spun around and clumped down the stairs. She went out alone.

Meanwhile, I called in the janitor Hu and Old Liao. They carried the body to a flatbed cart and hauled it away. Minnie turned up, and we followed the men to the hillside beyond a small orchard. We picked a spot on the slope of a ravine and set about digging.

Hu and Liao dug by turns, and I helped them a little, not being strong enough to dig with a shovel for longer than three minutes. When the grave was almost a foot deep, tubby Hu, his sparse hair stuck to his flat forehead, had started gasping “umph” at every thrust with the shovel. Minnie took over the job. She worked with all her strength, leaning the weight of her body on her right foot on top of the scoop and drawing herself up halfway when tossing out the dirt. She swung the shovel with a rhythm, and her supple movement impressed us. I knew she had grown up in a farm village and done all kinds of work in her childhood. She had also been a basketball player at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she got her BA, so she was “sturdy as a Clyde,” in her own words. Soon she began breathing audibly, yet she applied herself harder. From time to time tears welled out of her eyes and mixed with the perspiration on her cheeks. She was huffing and puffing, while her nose seemed blocked.

“If only we could give her a coffin,” Minnie said a few minutes later, handing the shovel to Old Liao.

“I wish we knew where her folks are,” I said, “so they could take her home.”

Crows wheeled around in the limpid sky, letting out grating cries. Two feral dogs, both spattered with mud, stood nearby, pawing at the ground and touching it with their noses, as though they were planning to dig out the interred girl once nobody was around. This reminded us that we must bury the dead at least two feet deep. Old Liao regretted not having brought along a reed mat in which we could roll up the body.

“Wanju, please forgive us,” Minnie said, as the men laid the girl in the grave. They began shoveling the dirt back into it. I took the shovel when they needed a breather.

After burying her, we stood in silence before the pile of earth for a while. Minnie said, as if to promise the dead, “I will never let this kind of crime happen in our camp again. I’ll do everything I can to protect the girls and women. If I have to fight the soldiers, I will fight. I won’t be a coward anymore.”

I said, “Rest in peace now, Wanju, and forget about this unjust world. I’ll come tomorrow and burn a bunch of joss sticks for you.”

Then Minnie crouched down, no longer able to suppress her emotion. She wailed, “It was also my fault, Wanju. I should have stayed in the compound to stop the Japanese from snatching you away. After you came back, we should have given you more help.” Minnie paused, then continued, “Rest assured, those beasts will be brought to justice. God will deal with them on your behalf.”

I felt so sad that I began weeping too.

Old Liao and Hu helped Minnie up, and together we headed back to campus. Hu was pulling the cart with a leather strap around his shoulder.

We washed our faces in the ladies’ room, then went down the hallway to the president’s office. Big Liu was in there, seated on a sofa and absentmindedly leafing through his small textbook. When we stepped in, he lifted his eyes and peered at Minnie wordlessly.

She sat down and told him about the suicide. He responded calmly, “I heard about it.”

“I’m such an idiot,” she said.

“Don’t blame yourself, Minnie. It was the Japanese who killed her.” His voice was somehow devoid of any emotion.

“I cannot do our Chinese lesson today — my mind is too full.”

“I understand,” he said.

“Don’t go, Anling,” Minnie urged me.

So I stayed, and together we discussed the progress of the petition. Sufen had just reported to Big Liu that she’d seen her son four times now. The boy had told her that the prisoners were sent to tear down houses and build a bridge outside the city, though many of them were too ill to work anymore. They were each given two bowls of boiled sorghum a day, plus a few pieces of salted turnip or rutabaga. Once a week they could have rice. He begged his mother to find a way to get him out soon or he would perish in there. She promised to do that, though she had no idea how. He also asked her to bring him some food, which she couldn’t come by either.

By now more women had participated in the petition: in total 704 had filed. We decided to take the list to Dr. Chu and hoped he would present it to the office in charge of such a matter.

19

MINNIE AND I SET OUT to see Fukuda at the Japanese embassy with the petition. The moment we turned onto Shanghai Road, we saw that numerous ramshackle stores, mostly built of used plywood and corrugated iron, had emerged on both sides of the street. Many of them were just small stalls manned by one person. There were all sorts of things for sale and barter: door planks, windows, lamps, cast-iron stoves, furniture, stone hand mills, utensils, musical instruments, clothing, used books, and magazines. As for food, there were baked wheaten cakes, fried twists, tofu, vegetables, eggs, pork, and pig offal, all five or six times more expensive than before the occupation. I bought a smoked chicken for seven yuan for Liya, who had been weak after her miscarriage, often coughing and sweating profusely even without exerting herself. “This is like eating silver,” an old woman kept saying, watching the vendor wrapping up my purchase in a piece of oil paper. I made no reply and felt that money might get more devalued anyway, so it was better to spend it now.

The city was strictly guarded, and whoever was without a mingto, the ID certificate, would be arrested. The soldiers would strip people of whatever was valuable on them — a pack of cigarettes, a fountain pen, a pocket harmonica, even a brass button from a coat. They also examined men who looked like potential fighters, making them stand at roadsides, shed their jackets and shirts, and spread their arms; if a man had a vaccination mark, they would detain him, believing it was a shrapnel scar. The Japanese seemed apprehensive, especially troubled by the guerrillas, who attacked their sentry posts in the countryside and blocked their transportation routes. Lately so many trains had been derailed that the railroad service had become erratic, and sometimes there was no train to Shanghai three days in a row. What was more troublesome was that the guerrillas fought outside the norms of conventional warfare, harassing small Japanese units day and night, blowing up isolated fortresses, and ambushing convoys. Once in a while artillery bombardments could be heard in the early-morning hours and within five or six miles of the city, as if another siege was impending. Meanwhile, the new regulations allowed few foreigners, much less Chinese, to leave Nanjing, though more Western diplomats had returned.

Near the Japanese embassy an opium den flaunted a banner that read OFFICIAL EARTH. Narcotics used to be banned here, but now anything was legal for sale. Evidently the majority of the goods were loot from outside the Safety Zone. After the soldiers had plundered the houses, the civilians would go in and gut them, taking whatever was useful or salable. For many people, looting had become a way of life, because there were no jobs. The Safety Zone was relatively safe for doing business, so most vendors brought their goods here.

Fukuda received us cordially, but explained that he still couldn’t locate any of the men and boys on the list Minnie had presented to him in late January. A young Japanese woman wearing a flowered kimono and wooden clogs came in, carrying a clay teapot and three cups on a tray. After tea was served, Minnie said to Fukuda, “We’ve just learned that there are many civilians in the Model Prison.”

“Are you sure?” He looked incredulous, his eyebrows locked together.

“Positive.” Minnie went on to speak about Sufen’s son. “He’s her only child and was taken on December fifth. He told her there were many young boys in there.”

Fukuda heaved a feeble sigh, tapping his cigarette over an ashtray in the shape of a flatfish. He said in halting English, “I thought that place was holding only soldiers. Well, we shall investigate. Try to give more physical descriptions of this boy. If he is there, I shall try to help him come out of prison.”

“I’ll let his mother know. Thank you.”

“Miss Vautrin,” Fukuda said with some feeling, his bony face flushing, “I mean to help. I hope you can believe I have been doing my best.”

“Of course I can.”

I knew Minnie didn’t completely trust him. He might be sympathetic to the poor women, but he couldn’t act himself, given his role as an attaché. Besides, there must be a military office in charge of such a matter, but he had just said he was unclear about that when Minnie asked him. Maybe he simply didn’t want to bother or offend the army with our petition. This could also mean he wasn’t deeply involved.

We thanked him again and left the embassy. I was impressed by Fukuda’s courtesy, though Minnie and I were now less convinced that he would bring our petition to his superiors. He was always very officious, as if wearing an impenetrable mask, and seemed unable to feel anything. Never having seen his face fully at ease, I couldn’t even place his age — maybe he was in his late twenties, but he could also be pushing forty.

We headed south along Tianjin Road. Although the area was within the Safety Zone, many houses had been reduced to rubble, and some stood but did not have roofs. Even a good number of electric and telephone poles were gone. Several buildings were no more than skeletal hulks. At the corner of Hankou Road, we saw a rickshaw carrying two soldiers. One of them stopped the vehicle and asked the puller to do something, shouting, “Hao guniang, duo duo you!” At first I didn’t catch it, then I realized he meant: “Good girls, many many there are!” The Chinese man shook his sweaty face and waved, saying he didn’t know where to find girls. Hearing that, one of the soldiers jumped off and began punching him in the chest. “Ow! Ow!” the man wailed. “I just don’t know how to find them! Even if you beat me to death, I won’t be able to say where there’re girls. They’re all gone.”

Minnie strode up to them and I followed her. The instant the other Japanese saw us, he gave a cry, which made his comrade stop short and get back on the rickshaw. Then they both motioned for the puller to proceed. In a flash the vehicle rounded a street corner and vanished.

We continued west. Approaching our campus, from a distance we caught sight of John Magee — his jeep stood beside the front entrance. We hurried up to him. At the sound of our footsteps, he turned around, his fedora cocked. “Hi, Minnie and Anling,” he said. “I brought over some powdered milk and a barrel of cod-liver oil.”

“Thanks,” we both said.

Luhai was busy unloading the car. He said, “This is what we need for the kids.”

Minnie told Magee, “The porridge plant has been a small disaster for us. Most of the children here were undernourished, so the dried milk and the cod-liver oil will do them good.”

“We just got a truckload,” Magee said. “I’ll give you some more if there’re still leftovers after we distribute them.”

“Please do. Thanks in advance.”

The reverend drove away, leaving behind a haze of dust and an odor of exhaust. He was driving a new jeep now, bought from a Japanese officer for merely 160 yuan after some soldiers had stolen his old Dodge. We still had the clunker Magee had given us, but it was already dead, not worth fixing anymore, according to Minnie.

Minnie turned to Luhai. “Is there any progress in your investigation?”

“No. I’ve watched the cooks pour rice into the cauldrons every time they cook, but still the porridge is as thin as it was.”

“Don’t we have some beans?”

“Yes, thirty sacks.”

“Add some beans to the rice. That will make the food richer.”

“Good idea. I’ll get them to start doing that tomorrow.”

We had just received the mung beans and navy beans from the Safety Zone Committee. Because of the dropsy caused by malnutrition among some refugees, Plumer Mills had repeatedly asked for the beans and obtained sixty tons from Shanghai. We were pleased with the beans, as well as with Magee’s new contribution. But Minnie wouldn’t let Luhai distribute the powdered milk and the cod-liver oil, perhaps afraid he might give them to his relatives and friends, so she let me handle them, which I was glad to do.

Within a few days most women had stopped complaining about the porridge, since the beans had thickened it to a degree. Still, Minnie couldn’t put the graft in the porridge plant out of her mind, and just the mention of it would make her bristle. If only we could stop the theft.

20

THE NEXT AFTERNOON Dr. Chu came to see us. That morning two women had spotted their husbands in the Model Prison as the men were being herded onto the trucks that took them to work. But the lanky doctor couldn’t offer any heartening news. He crossed his thin legs and said, “I personally delivered the petition to the Autonomous City Government, together with the stack of paperwork, but they said the information was too vague and they couldn’t do a thing.”

“What else do they need?” Minnie asked.

“They want more descriptions of every man.” He blew away the tea leaves in his cup.

“What kind of descriptions?” asked Big Liu.

“Physical features, like height and weight.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “How on earth can the women know how much their husbands and sons weigh now?”

“Just give as many physical descriptions as you can.”

“That means we’ll have to start all over again,” Minnie said.

“Probably it will be worth it, considering more women have sighted their menfolk in the jail. I know those officials might want to dodge this case, but you shouldn’t give up so easily.”

After Dr. Chu had left, the three of us decided to redo the petition. This would take the four people in Big Liu’s team more than a week, but the effort would pay off even if we could save only one life.

Minnie let a dozen or so older women go to the Model Prison every morning to see if they could find more of their menfolk in the labor gang. She had an official letter written for them, saying that these women would make no trouble and wanted only to catch a glimpse of their husbands and sons. Following Minnie’s instructions, the three women who had spotted their menfolk also went to the Defense Commissioner’s Office to report their discovery and plead for help, but so far there was no official response.

THE CAMPUS, no longer guarded by the Japanese police, was now pretty with blooming flowers — lilacs, magnolias, crocuses, white spirea — and birds kept singing, as if determined to burst their throats with grief. There were so many flowers that once a young Japanese officer came to ask for a bouquet, and Minnie was pleased to get Old Liao to cut a mixed bunch for him. Every day some soldiers would turn up in twos or threes, but few were violent now. They were impressed by our classroom buildings, which combined the Chinese and the Western architectural styles, with high-columned front portals, flying eaves, and gargoyles on the edges and ridges of the roofs. I treated them with courtesy in the hope that one of them might help me find my son in Tokyo. We hadn’t heard from Haowen for ten months and couldn’t stop wondering if he was still alive, but I never went so far as to ask any of the soldiers to help look for him. I hadn’t met one I might trust.

Some of the men admitted to us that the war was a mistake — China was too enormous for Japan to occupy. They had all learned about this country in history textbooks — about its big apples and pears, its vast soybean fields, its rich minerals, and its pretty girls, but they had not imagined that it was such an immense land; it was also much poorer than they’d thought. Many of them had believed that once Nanjing was captured, the war would be over and they could go home; that was why they’d fought with such a blind vengeance. Everyone had wanted to finish off the enemies at the first chance, but now they could no longer envision the end of the war. One man even said that Japan should have been content with the Korean Peninsula and Manchukuo and should have stopped its aggression there. “We swallowed more than we could digest. We got too greedy,” he told us with a toothy grin. A lieutenant, a Christian, had come twice to deliver soap, towels, and biscuits for the refugees. Once we took two junior officers to the camp’s kindergarten, where toddlers were playing noisily, and Minnie told them that these children no longer had fathers. The two men murmured, “We’re sorry, really sorry for them.”

On my way back from the infirmary one afternoon, I bumped into Luhai, who came from the opposite direction, limping a little and wearing an octagonal cap, a herringbone blazer, and scuffed oxfords. He stopped, and we talked about some matters in the camp. Our staff had given tickets for free meals to most of the thirty-three hundred refugees, but Luhai still couldn’t find the leak in the porridge plant. The headman blamed the cooks for pilfering small quantities of rice at every meal, while a few of them pointed at him as the number one thief. To Luhai, every one of them seemed bent on stealing from the mouths of the poor women and undernourished children. This bad news made my blood boil again. If only there were a way to nab the crooks!

I believed that Boom Chen, the headman, must be guilty of the theft, because the man lived like a spendthrift, smoking Big Gate cigarettes and wearing a spiffy woolen jacket, which was unnecessary for the warm springtime. Whenever I bumped into this beefy swaggerer, he would greet me loudly in a tobacco-roughened voice, as if we had known each other for years, as if I ought to appreciate what he’d been doing for us. Minnie had once asked him to submit to her a thorough report on how the rations were used, but he’d claimed that he was illiterate, rolling his bovine eyes and simpering as though to insinuate that he need not receive instructions from her. Yet every once in a while I would see him lounging around reading a newspaper or a chivalric novel, so I was convinced he must be a fraud.

Luhai and I discussed a girl who had been snatched by the Japanese from the front gate three days before. Minnie had been away from campus and Holly wasn’t around when it happened either, so nobody had dared to stop the two soldiers. Later, Minnie lodged a protest with the military headquarters in Nanjing, but there was no trace of the girl, who we all knew was unlikely to come back. Minnie had admonished the whole camp time and again about loitering at the front entrance, but some of the younger girls had ignored or forgotten her admonition and went there to chitchat with new arrivals and passersby. A few even donned colorful clothes. Worse, Meiyan also went to the front entrance, with large scissors beneath her jacket. When we discovered that, we let Big Liu know immediately. He’d kept her home ever since. Two girls had already been carried off from the front gate. If anyone hung around there again, Minnie declared, she would expel them from the camp. That at last stopped them.

While Luhai and I were talking, a commotion broke out beyond the sports ground, and a crowd assembled outside the sprawling porridge plant. What was going on? We went over to have a look.

As we walked, I heard a female voice yell, “Parade her!”

“Yeah, take her through the streets,” a man cried.

“Tie a placard about her neck.”

“Cut her hair too.”

A ragged voice begged, “Sisters and brothers, please let me go! I won’t do it again.”

I recognized Sufen’s voice and quickened my steps. Then I saw the poor woman, her face pinched, standing in the middle of the crowd, her eyes watery and her hair mussed. She hung her head low like a criminal, quaking a little. Now and again she lifted her hand to wipe her dripping nose. Luhai went up to them and asked, “What’s going on?”

Tilting his pockmarked face, Boom Chen answered, “We finally caught a thief. This woman volunteered to do kitchen duty today, but she stole rice.”

“The evidence is there.” A fiftyish man pointed at a green mug on a stool, filled with the unpolished grain.

“No wonder our porridge has been so watery,” a woman said.

“We mustn’t let her get away with this!” rasped a sharp female voice.

“Denounce her publicly now, then parade her,” a small woman added, wielding her fist.

“Please, sisters and brothers!” Sufen wailed. “Don’t hurt me. I never did this before. My son’s in jail. He’s starving and begged me to bring him some grub. I have no money and no clue where to get it.”

“Liar!”

“We all know no matter how hungry we are, we must never stoop to theft,” a stout woman said.

“She must’ve stolen other stuff too.”

“Don’t just wag your tongues and waste your breath. Let’s haul her to the front yard.”

“Whoa, hold on,” Boom Chen broke in. “We shouldn’t take this matter into our own hands. Why not send her to the camp’s leaders?”

“No, we must teach her a lesson,” another female voice insisted. “We must stop the leak in the kitchen or our meals will get thinner and thinner.”

As I was about to intervene, though uncertain if I could save Sufen from their hands, Minnie appeared suddenly and said loudly, “Stop acting like a mob. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

At once the crowd quieted down. Minnie continued, “This poor woman, Sufen Yan, has a fifteen-year-old son in the Model Prison. That’s a fact I know. He has begged her time and again for food. She told me that, but we have no extra rations to spare and can’t help him. Some of you here are mothers. Can you eat your two meals a day in peace while your children are starving?”

“No, I cannot,” I said.

Nobody else answered, and some dropped their eyes. Minnie went on, “Sufen, tell me, did you take the rice?”

“I did, Principal Vautrin. I am sorry.”

Minnie turned to the crowd. “She was wrong to steal from the kitchen, but you all should use your brains to think about the thin porridge. Could it be possible for her alone, with that little mug, to make so many cauldrons watery? There must be a big thief somewhere in the kitchen. We mustn’t blame it on this poor mother who just filched a morsel for her hungry child.”

Sufen started sobbing wretchedly, and people looked at one another as if to see who among them was a big-time thief. I glanced at Boom Chen, who smirked at no one in particular.

“Sufen,” Minnie continued, “I’ll let you have that mug of rice this time, but you must promise never to steal again.”

“Principal Vautrin, if I do it again, let a hundred thunderbolts strike me dead!”

“Hee hee hee hee!” somebody tittered. Then the whole crowd erupted into laughter.

A few women went up to Minnie, saying she was absolutely right — there must be a big rat in the porridge plant.

After the crowd had dispersed, Luhai suggested to us that Sufen stop doing kitchen duty in case someone might use her to muddle the investigation. Minnie agreed and decided to send her to the feces-collecting team if she still wanted to do volunteer work.

21

IN RECENT MONTHS the local Red Swastika Society, “the Society of Dao and Virtue,” had been active in relief work. A Chinese private charity organization formed in the early 1920s and grounded in Daoism and Buddhism, it now had millions of members all over the world. The society’s philanthropic efforts had reached the Soviet Union and Japan (after earthquakes), and it had offices in Tokyo, London, and Paris. It urged its members to learn Esperanto. Lately its Nanjing branch had become a main workforce coordinated by the International Relief Committee, which had been established to replace the Safety Zone Committee in mid-March. The local Red Swastika had admitted hundreds of new members and was occupied with burial work. Every member of the society wore a large swastika at the center of his chest when doing his job. The emblem was a Buddhist symbol, the arms of its cross bent left instead of right, and it had nothing to do with the Nazis, but some Japanese soldiers seemed to associate it with Germany and treated these Chinese workers with a little courtesy. To endure the overpowering stench of decaying bodies, many of the men drank cheap liquor before they set about their detail, usually four or five as a team. If possible, they would burn a sheaf of sacrificial paper, donated by some temples, for the dead, especially for the old. In most cases the workers just covered the corpses with lime and a layer of earth in mass graves. According to its records, which Minnie and I had seen on our visit to the main office, from the middle of January to the end of March, the Red Swastika had buried 32,104 bodies, at least a third of them civilians. The men of the Advance Benevolence Society (Chong Shan Tang) had also been interring the dead. Up to early April, they had buried more than 60,000 corpses in the city and its outskirts, about twenty percent of whom were women and children. Some other organizations were also engaged in the burial work. Every week new mass graves were dug as the existent ones filled up. Yet by far the largest burial ground was the Yangtze, into which the Japanese had dumped tens of thousands of bodies.

Several times Minnie had asked the Red Swastika men to bury the dead at the pond west of our campus, but they said they were too busy picking up corpses in the city and at the major execution sites to worry about those scattered in the suburbs. Two weeks ago they’d been given permission to inter twenty thousand bodies in Hsia Gwan, and that job alone would take them more than a month, since they could bury at most seven hundred a day, bringing the corpses together and laying them away in mass graves. So not until late April did a group of workers go to the pond in the valley, collect the dead, fish some bodies out of the water, and clear that area.

At Jinling some of the young women refugees were also busy burying, not human remains but human feces — they’d been gathering all the excrement, putting it in ditches and pits, and covering it with lime. I could detect the decrease of the foul odor in the air, and the camp felt cleaner every day. I was very pleased about their work. One bright morning toward the end of April, when I ran into the leader of the feces-collecting team, a tall twentyish woman with a pair of long braids, I told her, “Take it easy. As long as you girls can bury everything in two weeks, it will be fine.”

“We want our campus to be clean and beautiful,” she replied in a clear voice.

I appreciated the possessive adjective she used—“our”—and said to her, “At the end of the day, all the girls on your team can take a shower.”

“That’s great. Thank you, Mrs. Gao.” Her eyes gleamed.

We had just put up a shower house for the refugees, who hadn’t washed for months. It was Minnie who had insisted on installing these facilities despite some opposition among the staffers. The women and girls here loved the shack, in which there were twenty-six spray nozzles along the walls. Some of them were amazed that they could adjust the temperature of the water by themselves. Yet due to the large number of refugees, one could use the facility only once every other week.

A FEW NIGHTS LATER Boom Chen, the headman of the porridge plant, was killed by bandits. His extravagant lifestyle must have convinced them that he’d stolen a large amount of the refugees’ rations, so they demanded that he share his goods with them. He denied that he had appropriated any rice and offered to help them steal our car instead. But when they snuck onto campus at night and got into the rattletrap, they couldn’t start the thing however hard they tried. They smashed the windshield and called Boom Chen names, saying he’d pay for this. They broke into his home and searched around for rice, but didn’t find any. They tied him to a chair and grilled him. He confessed he’d just sold his cache and remitted the money to his parents in Tianjin City. He promised to get two thousand pounds of rice for the bandits in the near future, but they ran out of patience and one of them plunged a knife into his chest.

That was what his wife had told us. The woman was somewhat silly and let the whole thing slip.

The camp had just received some wheat and barley, so the rice porridge, mixed with beans and the other grains, was finally thick enough for a pair of chopsticks to stand in a bowl of it, which was the conventional standard of quality porridge. Nobody griped about the meals anymore. Luhai swore up and down that it was the hand of Providence that had helped us get rid of the big rat, but for Minnie the denouement had come too late. She also said that the penalty was way too severe, because she didn’t believe in capital punishment.

In mid-May the Autonomous City Government ordered that all the refugee camps close down by the end of the month. At the same time, the Japanese embassy invited the foreigners working in the camps to dinner. At first Minnie was reluctant to go, but on second thought, she felt it might be an opportunity to exchange views with the officials and earn their sympathy. She brought a copy of the petition to the dinner in hopes of presenting it to the top diplomat there.

Consul-General Okazaki didn’t show up at the banquet, which was hosted by Tanaka and Fukuda and attended by John Allison and some American missionaries, including Minnie and Holly. Tanaka spoke about the necessity of shutting down the camps and praised the foreigners for what they’d been doing for the refugees. Minnie presented the petition to the vice-consul, who riffled through the paperwork and agreed to look into the matter. His promise was welcomed by a round of loud applause from the guests. All the camp workers among them agreed to close down the refugee camps. Minnie was grateful for her colleagues’ support, which could be viewed as a favor in return for Tanaka’s promise.

Three days later we heard from Tanaka. He said that Sufen’s son and four of the eight men identified by the women would be released from jail within a week, but the other four men, according to the prison’s files, were associated with the Chinese army and had to remain in prison. Minnie countered, “Look, our information shows that those men are completely innocent.”

“Miss Vautrin,” Tanaka said, “I’ve done my best. The prison agreed to let your women come and see whether their husbands and sons are there. I believe that more of them will be liberated.”

Minnie didn’t press him further and instead fixed a time for the women to visit the prison. Hanging up, she looked elated. I was delighted too. We hugged for half a minute.

After five months’ struggle, at last there was some progress. We hoped this might lead to the release of hundreds of men and boys. Minnie looked into Big Liu’s office to tell him the good news, but he was not there. Together we went out and strolled around campus for a while.

When we returned half an hour later, we found Big Liu smoking in the hallway. He told us, “Someone from the Quaker Mission came and said there was a mad girl in their hospital. He said she was from our college.”

“What’s her name?” asked Minnie.

“No idea.”

“What should we do?” she asked me.

“Maybe we should go have a look,” I said.

“All right, let’s go.”

The two of us hailed a rickshaw and set out for the small hospital in the south, outside the former Safety Zone, which had been terminated a fortnight before. As we rode along Paolou Lane, four Chinese planes suddenly appeared, flying east to bomb the airfield near Jurong. Immediately antiaircraft guns started shooting at them, drawing blazing arcs. The Japanese flak artillery was weaker than our army’s, though their planes were much more effective at intercepting Chinese bombers. This was the third time our planes had flown over Nanjing since last December. Some people watched them glide away with beaming faces, but no one made any celebratory sounds.

“Hope they’ll destroy some Japanese aircraft,” I said.

“I only hope they’ll return to base safely after their mission,” responded Minnie.

Our air force, small though it was, must have been emboldened by the recent success in the Xuzhou area, where our army had thwarted the Imperial Army’s offensive and forced it to retreat. Newspapers in Nanjing had reported the regional defeat as “a regrouping” of the troops, but we had learned the facts from the radio — the Chinese army had sent sixty-four divisions into battle, too large a force for the Japanese to fight.

The Quaker Mission’s hospital was in an abandoned school building, which looked boxy but neat, giving an impression of being half deserted. On arrival, we were taken to the second floor. The deranged woman, wearing a flannel shirt and a black silk skirt, was kept in a small room with a south-facing window. She was skinny and in her early twenties, with bedraggled hair, a wide forehead, and a thin-lipped mouth. At the sight of us, she rolled her elongated eyes and chanted, “Here come the American spies.”

“What’s her name?” Minnie whispered to a nurse.

“She told us different names — sometimes she’s Aiyu Tan and sometimes she’s Manyu Fu. Last week she said she was from Manchuria, but this week she claims to be a local girl.”

“Then how could you believe she was from our school?” I asked.

“She often mentions Principal Vautrin.”

“What did she say about me?” asked Minnie.

“You don’t want to hear it.” The nurse shook her graying head.

“She looks familiar, though,” I said.

“She does,” Minnie agreed. “I think I’ve met her. She might have been one of the twelve girls taken by the soldiers last December.”

“Yes, I remember her,” I said. “But I don’t think she was one of the six who came back. She must be from this area — her accent shows. Miss Lou introduced her to me, and I saw her making origami creatures. She was good at it. Her name is something like Yulan.”

At that, the madwoman stopped mumbling, then snickered and touched her small chin with her fingertips. She cried out, “I’m not Yulan. Yulan’s dead, sold by the American missionaries and murdered by the officers.”

“What officers are you talking about?” I asked.

“Japanese colonels.”

The madwoman went on muttering something unintelligible. What should we do? Should we bring her back to Jinling? Minnie and I stepped aside and talked it over. We decided to wait and contact Miss Lou; we should identify the demented woman first and then see what to do. Nowadays there were so many unhinged people that you couldn’t possibly take care of every one of them.

We told the nurse to keep a good watch on Yulan and that we would return to see her soon.

MISS LOU CAME the next evening and confirmed that Yulan was from a local neighborhood. Her father, a widower, had been an electrician and had joined the group assembled by John Rabe five months ago to restore the city’s power service; later, when the job was done, the Japanese shot the man together with forty-two others. A few days before the arrival of the Japanese, at a neighbor’s suggestion, Yulan’s father had sent her to our camp and even dropped off a bag of rice — fifty pounds — and a jar of fish paste as rations for the girl. Miss Lou was certain that Yulan had been taken on December 24 last year, among the twenty-one “prostitutes.” The young woman had been helping a refugee family wad a quilt with used cotton in the Arts Building when the soldiers burst in and grabbed her.

Astonished, we regretted not having brought the madwoman back. The following afternoon Minnie and I went to the Quaker Mission’s hospital again, but to our dismay, Yulan was no longer there. The medical personnel said she’d snuck out but left word with a patient that she was going to see her cousins in Wuhu. That didn’t make much sense, because that city was already occupied by the Japanese and her relatives might no longer be there.

“Please notify us if she surfaces again. She’s from our school,” Minnie said to the gray-haired nurse.

“We’ll do that, Principal Vautrin.”

“By the way, she called me names, right?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say? Tell me. I won’t mind.”

“She said you’d sold her to the Japanese for two hundred yuan. Don’t take it to heart. We all know that was drivel.”

Minnie’s face stiffened and she didn’t utter another word. I said to the nurse, “Let us know if you hear anything about her.”

Without further delay we left the hospital. Minnie kept quiet the whole way as if lost in thought.

DURING THE FOLLOWING DAYS we were occupied with disbanding the camp and persuading the refugees to go home. Many women, especially those with small children, had left. On the other hand, owing to the disappearance of the other camps, some young girls came to our college begging to be admitted. We accepted them temporarily, so there were still more than one thousand refugees on campus. Many of those women expected their menfolk to return and so didn’t leave, and some went to the Model Prison every morning to plead with the officer in charge.

One afternoon in late May, Mr. Tanaka came in person and told us that some thirty men and boys would be released from the prison. We were dubious because the four men and the boy he had promised would be released before were still in jail.

“How can I believe you?” Minnie asked him. “The women are frustrated and angry. The boy’s mother comes to my office every day to see why he’s still there. I’m afraid some of the women might call me a liar behind my back.”

“Why should I lie to you?” Tanaka said, his dyspeptic face puckering. “This time the prison will let them out. It’s final, period.”

He sounded so sincere that we were convinced. Minnie thanked him, bowing a little. He added in a toneless voice that he wished there were more civilians qualified for release.

We shared the good news with Big Liu, Holly, Rulian, and Miss Lou, and everybody was thrilled, although we didn’t spread the word further right away, not wanting to get the women’s hopes up again and because we had no list of the names. Minnie reminded us that we shouldn’t celebrate too soon. I exhaled a sigh of relief, saying, “Thirty lives saved is worth any effort. Minnie, you were right about the petition from the outset.”

My tone of voice was so earnest that it cracked everybody up. Big Liu said, “Anling, you owe me a good dinner.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied.

That night I mentioned Tanaka’s visit to Yaoping. My husband knew the vice-consul personally and said the man was reliable and would make good on his promise. In fact, we’d all heard that last December Tanaka was almost attacked by some Japanese soldiers who threatened to burn their embassy, because Tanaka had reported their brutalities to Tokyo.

22

IT WAS ALREADY beastly hot by the end of May, the air muggy and stagnant. The sun beat down on everything relentlessly, fueling the internal fire in every creature. Sometimes I saw the soldiers on the streets sweating so much that their uniforms were dappled with wet patches. Some of them, heat-raddled, would unconsciously scratch their throats as they walked, as if they were having difficulty breathing. I hoped it would get hotter and hotter so the semitropical heat Nanjing was famous for might drive them away. The Japanese didn’t know what they had bargained for and would have to live in this “furnace” for many years before they could acclimate themselves. I bet a lot of them would have heatstroke and sweat rash this summer. Surely the heat would get rid of some of them just as it had killed thousands of Mongols centuries before.

The hot weather, however, made the children in our camp comfortable, especially small boys who scampered around barefoot — some didn’t have even a stitch on, not in the least bothered by the mosquitoes that were becoming ubiquitous. As Minnie and I were standing outside the Faculty House, a clamor went up on the side of the pond behind the Central Building. A naked boy, six or seven, had been caught by a group of women who were attempting to force him into a new pair of pants. “I won’t, I won’t!” he hollered, kicking and struggling to break loose. Around them, people were laughing, some whooping and clapping their hands. His mother yelled at him, “Don’t you feel ashamed? You’re too big to run around like a wild animal! If your dad were here, he’d spank the pee out of you.” But the boy kept bawling and resisting and finally managed to get away, still buck naked.

“Goodness, that boy has lots of lung power,” a woman said.

“He should join a church choir,” another told his mother.

Minnie had just presented nine pairs of children’s shoes to some mothers who were about to leave the camp. They’d definitely have a hard time breaking their kids of going around barefoot. Or perhaps they shouldn’t trouble themselves about that at all. When the cold weather set in, the children would automatically wear shoes. I didn’t mind seeing the boys barefoot, but I thought they ought to wear something to cover up their weenies. I said to Minnie, “There should be a law forbidding anyone older than six to go naked in public.”

Rulian, smiling and clucking her tongue, came and joined us, followed by a puff of midges that began circling around our heads. We talked about the men and boys promised to be released. Would Tanaka have lied to us? Minnie was certain that he’d been in earnest; otherwise he wouldn’t have come in person to deliver the news. We also discussed how to help those refugees who had no home anymore, and those who did but couldn’t support themselves and their children. Our college had received some small funds recently, and Minnie had been giving them away to a few women who didn’t have any means of livelihood. She gave each person five or six yuan with which they might start a small business, like a little laundry, or a tea stand, or a stall selling fans, soaps, incense, pencils, and candles.

There was so much to talk about that we decided to go to the main office and resume conferring there. Seated at the president’s desk and on straight-back chairs, we began reviewing the cases of the women and girls in need of support. A few days earlier, Minnie had proposed to the International Relief Committee the plan for a summer school for one hundred “students,” a kind of professional training program, which would be called the Homecraft School, the same as the one we used to run for the local peasant girls whose parents were too poor to give them a formal education. Minnie had kept the proposal on a small scale because she didn’t want the campus to continue resembling a refugee camp, but now evidently there were many more who had nowhere to go and therefore our plan had to be expanded to include them. After considering some cases, we figured that there’d be more than two hundred refugees remaining here. For them, some educational program would have to be formed to justify their presence at Jinling.

In addition, Minnie had agreed to take in eighty young women from the Dafang camp, which was shutting down. All together there would be about three hundred refugees on campus, though they’d be called “students.”

“Well,” Minnie said, “it looks like we’ll have to reinstate our Homecraft School, in combination with a kind of folk school.”

Rulian and I agreed, because we also wanted to help the refugee women achieve literacy. By “folk school,” Minnie had in mind something like the public education programs popular in northern Europe, which she had visited in the summer of 1931. She’d been impressed by the folk schools in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, where people would attend the adult classes a few months a year, studying sciences, literature, arts, and practical skills without the burden of earning grades or taking exams. In those small countries people went to that type of school just to improve themselves and enrich their lives. Since that trip, Minnie had often talked about how to adopt that model in our country, where only fifteen percent of the populace could read. Ironically, now we had an opportunity.

The next day the camp was closing, and most of the women and girls were leaving. Some slung their bedrolls over their backs, and some carried their belongings with shoulder poles. I admired the husky ones among them, who would become good farmhands back in their villages. Many of them came to thank us for their six months’ stay at Jinling, which was an experience they cherished. Around ten a.m., a large crowd assembled before the Central Building to say good-bye to Minnie. She hurried out to meet them.

At the sight of her, the four hundred women and girls sitting on the ground in a semicircle rose to their knees. Rulian stood up and shouted in a strong voice, “The first knock!”

The crowd kowtowed, their heads touching the ground.

“The second knock!” Rulian cried out again, and the crowd repeated the same act. Unlike them, Rulian, our Lady Fowler, was on faculty, but she acted as if she too were leaving.

“Get up, get up, please!” Minnie shouted, standing in the middle of the semicircle and gesticulating, her palms upward and her fingers wiggling, but nobody listened to her. Holly stepped aside and joined me. I was watching with my hands crossed on my abdomen, wondering how in the world Rulian had become their leader.

“The third knock,” she chanted, and the crowd kowtowed again.

“Rulian, tell them to get up!” Minnie pleaded.

By now the crowd had begun crying in mixed voices, “Good-bye, the Goddess of Mercy!”

“Long live our savior, Principal Vautrin!” a voice called out.

The crowd repeated in unison, some swaying their heads from side to side.

“Long live our Goddess of Mercy!” the same voice went on.

All of them shouted together again.

Dumbfounded, Minnie didn’t know what to do. I saw Luhai standing in the back of the crowd and smiling, a cigarette tucked behind his ear. He seemed to be relishing this sight.

Minnie took a deep breath and addressed the crowd loudly: “All right, get to your feet now. I have something to say.”

They began picking themselves up, some rubbing their knees and some lifting their bedrolls. “Although you are leaving today,” Minnie began, “you have all stayed here for several months and have become part of the Jinling family. Remember our motto: ‘Abundant Life.’ From now on, wherever you go and whatever you do, you must carry on the Jinling spirit to cherish and nurture life and to help the needy and the underprivileged. You must also remember that you are Chinese and the fate of your country rests on the shoulders of every one of you. As long as you do not despair, as long as you all do your share to serve China, this country will survive all misfortunes and will grow strong again.

“When you have an opportunity, do come back to see us. The gate of Jinling will always be open to you.” She had to stop because a rush of emotion choked her.

I stepped forward and cried to them, “Now, you all go home to be loving mothers, devoted wives, and filial daughters. Good-bye, everyone, God bless you all.”

As the crowd was dissolving, Minnie grabbed hold of Rulian, whose face was filmed with perspiration. “Why did you let them do that?” Minnie asked her.

“They made me lead them — they wanted to express their gratitude. What else could I do?”

Holly and I went up to them. “Minnie, it’s over,” Holly said. “You handled it perfectly.”

“They made me uncomfortable, as though they turned me into an idol.”

“Come now,” I spoke up, “we all know they love and respect you.”

“But they should show that kind of love and respect only to God,” Minnie said thoughtfully.

“God’s spirit is embodied in humans,” I continued sincerely.

Holly giggled and slapped Minnie on the shoulder, saying, “Our Goddess of Mercy, what a wonderful title. I wouldn’t mind if they dubbed me that. I’d do my darnedest to live up to it.”

Minnie reached out and gave Holly’s ear a tweak. “Ouch!” Holly let out.

“I hate to see them confuse humanity with divinity,” Minnie said. “It’s not right to be called a goddess while I’m doing mission work.”

The previous week Miss Lou had told us that a woman of eighty-seven in the neighborhood, blind as a bat, would at night sit in the lotus pose and pray to Minnie’s photograph, wishing the American principal a hundred years of life so that she could help and protect more poor women and girls. Many Chinese cannot think of divinity divorced from humanity. Indeed, for them anyone could grow good and better and eventually into a god or goddess.

23

THE NEWS that thirty-four men and boys had been released from the Model Prison was carried by two papers run by the Autonomous City Government, which hoped to show the Chinese that it was making every effort to protect the citizens. Most of the reunited families were about to head back for the countryside, where their homes used to be. We thought about throwing a tea party for them, but then the anxious faces of those women, more than six hundred of them, whose menfolk remained unaccounted for, got the best of us.

The next morning Sufen and her son came to say good-bye. The scrawny boy, short for fifteen, had a man’s face, which was sallow and scabbed in places, a little knot of wrinkles on his forehead. He just repeated what his mother told him to say—“Thank you, Principal Vautrin, for saving me.” He seemed still in shock, unable to speak a full sentence on his own. His eyes were dull and kept blinking as if he couldn’t see clearly. Even when others around him smiled or laughed, his face showed no response. He wore a white collarless shirt that had short sleeves and several holes, and long mud-colored shorts, which displayed his calves, thin like broomsticks. Seeing his big toes peeking out of his tattered canvas sneakers, Minnie gave him a pair of new cloth shoes that looked like they would fit his feet. He took them with both hands and, on his mother’s instructions, mumbled, “Thank you very much.” I felt sad for him, knowing it would take a long time for him to recuperate. Mother and son were going back to their home village near Danyang, though Sufen wasn’t sure if their house was still there.

By early June all the refugee camps had been closed, and some foreigners were leaving. John Magee was returning to the United States by way of Shanghai after twenty-eight years of service in China. His Nanjing International Red Cross Committee had been dissolved months earlier, and most of its members were gone. The reverend was anxious to leave because the Japanese military hated him, particularly for the hospital he had managed — a number of foreign reporters had visited it and published photos of victims of the war atrocities in newspapers in the West. What the authorities didn’t know was that Magee owned a 16mm movie camera and had shot some footage of the Japanese atrocities last December. The eight reels of films had been sewn into an overcoat by us and smuggled out of Nanjing by his fellow missionary George Fitch in late February, when he left for the States. Magee would have been detained, even killed, if the Japanese military had known about the films. In early June he left with Mr. Tanaka in the same railroad car, so no police bothered him.

HOLLY TOO WAS LEAVING. She came to say good-bye. I had never suspected that we’d part company so soon. My husband was napping in the inner room while Liya was out with Fanfan. When we sat down, Holly said, “I’ll leave early next week.”

“Why?” I asked in surprise, sipping chrysanthemum tea. “What makes you want to go? Did someone mistreat you?”

“The camp is shut down and I’m no longer needed here.”

“Nonsense, you can teach for us in the fall. We don’t have a music teacher yet, and I’m sure you’re the most qualified person. When the college reopens, they’ll let you continue teaching here.”

“I don’t want to make trouble for Minnie — the ex-president will be mad at her if she finds me here.”

“Even though Mrs. Dennison doesn’t like you, she’s smart enough to see that you’re useful, indispensable, to Jinling. She won’t let her personal feelings interfere with the college’s business. She’ll do anything to make this school stronger. Does Minnie know you’re leaving?”

“I told her last night, and we argued a bit.”

“About what?”

“About how to live in China. Minnie takes Nanjing as her hometown now and can hardly imagine living elsewhere. She loves this city and this college. But for me home can be anyplace and I don’t need a hometown. To be honest, I no longer hate the soldiers who burned my house. I’m leaving for Hankou in four days.”

“You’re crazy! Isn’t a battle about to break out there?”

“That’s why I’m going.” She tilted her head, which glistened with luxuriant ginger hair, and smiled with her mouth widened. Her eyes were shiny and bold.

“You don’t like Nanjing anymore?” I asked.

“After I lost my house, I realized that my life was entwined with the Chinese, whether I like it or not. This is my adopted country and I’ll serve where I’m needed most.”

“I admire your large heart, Holly.”

“The admiration is mutual.”

“Write to me when you have time.” I wanted to say more, but an upsurge of emotion overcame me.

“I will,” she said.

Liya came back with my grandson in her arms, panting a little. I took Fanfan and put him on my lap. He was still sleeping, his lips parted. I told my daughter to cook noodles with leeks for Holly and me. The two of us started to chat again, over a bowl of mulberries.