Nanjing Requiem

51

A LICE SENT ME REPORTS about Minnie’s condition to forward to Dr. Wu. The words that follow are hers.

May 8, 1940

(SHANGHAI)

Our trip to Shanghai was peaceful and pleasant. I was told that the USS

Luzon

used to be the flagship of the Yangtze River Patrol, and Admiral Glassford of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet was on it. He was a kind man and came to our cabin twice to see if we were comfortable or needed anything. Minnie was quiet most of the time, and when she spoke, she would blame herself, saying that she had become such a burden to me and others. She seemed clear-minded about her illness and told me that she would recover soon and return to the work she’d left behind. Minnie looked happy at dinner and we shared the table with the admiral.

June 20, 1940

(IOWA CITY)

Our voyage to the States was quite rough. In fact, we boarded the

Empress of Asia

three weeks ago and sailed first for Victoria, British Columbia. We ran into John Magee, who had gone back to China last year to do relief work and was heading home. Minnie seemed at ease in his presence, but she was seasick, which worsened her condition. She told me that if I hadn’t accompanied her, she would have jumped into the ocean. That frightened me, and in some measure she acted suicidal, refusing to eat or drink. Reverend Magee, two other missionary passengers, and I took turns looking after her. We never left her alone.

Yesterday Minnie was admitted to the Psychopathic Hospital of the State University of Iowa. I am staying at a guesthouse nearby. Minnie is under Dr. Woods’s care and has a clean room, which looks out onto a small park, to herself. The doctor diagnosed her case as depression and said that most patients with this condition usually recovered within two months. So we should take heart.

July 9, 1940

(IOWA CITY)

I visit Minnie every day. Together we go out for a walk or call on local churches. We also stroll in a wood, where we do some lovely little devotionals of our own. This afternoon, she asked a nurse to telephone me, saying she wanted me to take her to the train station so we could leave Iowa once and for all. Of course the nurse refused to comply. When I went to see Minnie this evening, she felt ashamed and kept saying, “How could I do such a selfish thing?” I told her that it was over as long as she didn’t do it again.

“I must get well and stop being a burden to others,” she said.

She has been improving. I hope she will recuperate soon so that I can go to Texas and see my parents, but at present I should stay with my friend here.

I just heard from Rebecca Griest of Jinling’s board that they had raised $1,200 for Minnie. This is wonderful. Minnie is constantly worried about spending Jinling’s money on herself. I will share the good news with her tomorrow.

August 13, 1940

(IOWA CITY)

Minnie often says, “I built a wrong home in a wrong place — a home that was shattered easily. I should have known that a home doesn’t have to be a physical entity.” But then she will correct herself, saying, “I mustn’t grumble so much. Millions of Chinese have lost not only their homes but also their families in the war. Compared to them, I’m more fortunate.”

She wants to get well soon so she can return to Jinling. She has little family in America. Her brother wouldn’t come to see her. On the other hand, her hometown, Secor, Illinois, was preparing a big welcome-home reception for her, and they have named August 22 as Minnie Vautrin Day. Minnie knows nothing about this, nor do the folks in Secor know about her nervous breakdown. Dr. Woods thinks that at present it would be too risky for Minnie to return to her hometown, since any excitement might throw her into a deeper depression. I called Secor and explained the situation. The town was disappointed and even wanted to send delegates to Iowa City to see Minnie, but Dr. Woods would not allow that.

August 29, 1940

(IOWA CITY)

Sometimes Minnie is like a normal person, and sometimes she is very depressed. She follows the news of the war closely and is worried about the situations in China and Europe. She asks others to pray for her, saying that she believes in prayers as well as medicine and that she needs to be helped “out of the valley of the shadow.” Yesterday she said she should prepare to return to China for the next academic year. I pray for her every night.

September 26, 1940

(BROWN COUNTY

STATE PARK, INDIANA)

At Dr. Woods’s suggestion, we came to a state park in Indiana a week ago. He believes that the fresh air and the natural beauty of the surroundings will do Minnie good. She enjoys the peace and quiet here. Every morning we walk along the trails in the forest and also along the side of Ogle Lake, where a lot of waterfowl paddle around — they are not afraid of people and will take bread directly from your hand. Minnie likes feeding them.

The doctor has stopped the Metrazol treatment because it gave Minnie back pain and made her sore shoulders worse. Without any medical attention at the moment, she seems to continue recuperating.

October 20, 1940

(ALPINE, TEXAS)

We stayed at the Indiana state park for less than a month. Dr. Woods agreed to let me take her to my parents’ home in Texas. This is the only way I can keep watch on her while seeing my parents. Minnie likes the warm weather here and started helping my father in the garden. She wants to be “of some use.”

She often mentions Yulan, the mad girl in Nanjing, and says, “Who could imagine I too would end up unbalanced?” Sometimes she muses aloud, “I’m wondering how the Japanese will get their retribution for what they did in Nanjing.”

December 18, 1940

(ALPINE, TEXAS)

Minnie often claims that she will be confined in a mental hospital for good. She has been preparing gifts for Christmas. She has made a number of friends here, so she wants to surprise them with her gifts. Last week she sold two dozen fancy cards she brought back from China and donated all the proceeds, $12.50, to China Relief. Dr. Woods has instructed that we mustn’t give her any responsibility or remind her of the war atrocities.

January 25, 1941

(ALPINE, TEXAS)

Mrs. Robert Doan of the missionary society came to see Minnie. She found Minnie almost normal, she told me, and left two days later. She and Minnie seemed to have hit it off, and they often laughed when they were together. The other day we dined in a Mexican restaurant and Minnie even ordered her own food, which she hadn’t been able to do since last summer, as it was hard for her to make up her mind about almost everything. Before Mrs. Doan left, Minnie told us not to worry about her, saying she would get well soon and head back to China.

February 2, 1941

(ALPINE, TEXAS)

I was out of town for two days to see my sister’s twins. During my absence Minnie went to an emporium and bought thirty sleeping pills. When I came back, she was in a nasty mood and accused me of abandoning her. I said I had gone to visit my sister for just two days. “See, now I’m back with you,” I told her.

But she wouldn’t trust me. She took out the sleeping pills and popped them all into her mouth. I was horrified, and no matter how I begged her, she wouldn’t spit them out. I had to call for an ambulance to take her to the hospital.

I reported this incident to Dr. Woods immediately, and he urged me to take Minnie to a mental hospital in Indiana. The doctor emphasized that I must not accompany Minnie on the trip alone, so Mrs. Doan will come and together we will head for Indianapolis.

March 5, 1941

(INDIANAPOLIS)

Minnie didn’t enter the mental institution because Mrs. Doan found her another physician, Dr. Carter, who examined Minnie and concluded that she was recovering. The doctor resumed giving her hormone injections. Minnie has been staying in Mrs. Doan’s apartment downtown. In the morning she goes to Mrs. Doan’s office and helps her pack and label parcels to be shipped to China for refugees. In the evening they are together, reading, conversing, and going to the movies. Sometimes I join them. In every way she is getting better.

Mrs. Doan told me this evening that she was going to assign Minnie a more complicated job: selecting and filing articles on missionary education. Minnie likes the idea and feels that this will be a good way to get her mind back completely.

April 20, 1941

(INDIANAPOLIS)

Minnie is confident that she will go back to work at Jinling in the near future. In her letters to her friends she keeps asking everyone to pray for her. Dr. Woods and Dr. Carter both believe that she is recuperating. They are even allowing her to attend the International Convention of the Disciples of Christ in town. She is elated and is preparing to speak briefly on behalf of Jinling.

May 14, 1941

(INDIANAPOLIS)

Today when she was left alone in the apartment of Miss Genevieve Brown, the secretary of the missionary society, Minnie gassed herself by turning on all the jets on the stove. By the time I arrived at the hospital, she had passed away. We had her body shipped to a small church in the suburbs, where the chief pastor is a friend of Mrs. Doan’s. Minnie left a note saying that she ended her life this way because she was sure that she could never fully recover. She also mentioned that she had a will in a safety-deposit box in the bank.

For months Minnie had been expecting to hear from Jinling and to be invited back to China. The only letter that she received was two weeks ago, from her niece in Michigan, who was willing to take her in and care for her. Evidently someone had made an agreement with her niece, which Minnie construed as a means of abandoning her. After reading her niece’s letter, Minnie smirked. She was too proud to become a responsibility to others.

May 16, 1941

(INDIANAPOLIS)

We held a funeral for Minnie yesterday afternoon. Six people attended. The chief pastor read Psalm 23. No hymn was sung, since there were just the six of us. Mrs. Doan spoke briefly, saying: “Minnie Vautrin is also a casualty of war atrocities. She fought courageously and fell as a fighter.” I wish Mrs. Doan had said “as a hero.”

Minnie’s will was opened this morning. She had some savings in a Shanghai bank, 710 yuan in total, which she gave to Jinling as a fund for a scholarship. Also she donated to our college the 1.3 acres of land she bought last year. At the bottom of the will she had penned: “Jinling Forever!”

52

HALF A YEAR after Minnie’s death, the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States went to war with Japan. The Japanese confiscated our college and deported Mrs. Dennison, Donna, and Alice. Our campus became a cavalry barracks for some years.

My family moved to a suburb, and Liya and I did odd jobs to get by. My husband, Yaoping, didn’t return until the Japanese were defeated. He’d lost half his teeth. In the meantime, my son-in-law came back once to see his wife and son, but he fled to Taiwan with the Nationalist army before the Communists seized power in 1949. Afterward he sent Liya a letter via Hong Kong and told her to remarry, for he couldn’t come back to the mainland anymore. He implied that he would form a new family in Kao-hsiung. “Life would be too short for such an indefinite wait,” he wrote. Liya took to her bed for weeks, though two years later she married a shop clerk and has lived an uneventful life since.

Owing to his past connections with the American professors, my husband was classified as an unreliable person by the Communists, but he remained at Nanjing University as a lecturer, unscathed by political shifts. Big Liu was not so lucky. When Searle Bates was leaving China in the spring of 1950, dozens of Chinese saw him off at the side entrance of the university, and Big Liu cried out in front of everyone, “Searle, come back someday. We will miss you!” Those words were reported as evidence of his reactionary outlook, and seven years later he was labeled a rightist who constantly dreamed of the day the American imperialists would take over China. For that he suffered bitterly for decades.

Ban also had rotten luck. He fled Jinling with Luhai and Meiyan and joined the Nationalist army in Hunan Province. He was captured by the Communists in the civil war and sent back to Nanjing, where he was made to labor at a brick kiln. I saw him once in the summer of 1951—he was tall but bent like an old man and had a gray widow’s peak, though he was not yet thirty. He called me Auntie and I only nodded, too sad to say a word. Probably luckier than him, both Luhai and Meiyan died in the war. He was killed by Japanese artillery, and she was shot dead by a sniper while she was rescuing a wounded soldier. Although she was named a martyr, her father still had to suffer by virtue of his closeness with the foreigners.

Times have not affected Miss Lou that much. She worked at the orphanage left by Monica for a few years and later, after the Communists took over the country, became a kindergarten teacher.

Dr. Wu didn’t leave with the Nationalists for Taiwan despite their repeated urging. For that, she was reinstated by the Communists as the head of our school, which later became part of Nanjing Normal College. She was respected as a dignitary, and I resumed working for her.

After the Japanese surrendered, a portion of my diary was serialized by Nanjing Daily as evidence of the Japanese war atrocities. For that I was known as the Chinese woman who helped Minnie Vautrin run the Jinling refugee camp. In the summer of 1947, the Nationalist government interviewed me and then sent me to Tokyo as an eyewitness at the war crimes trials. For the first time I set foot in Japan.

All the hearings were conducted in a large white building, and each session was attended by more than a thousand people. The Chinese side hadn’t made a lot of preparations for the trial, assuming that as victors we could punish those war criminals at will, whereas the Japanese side was well prepared. Each defendant had two lawyers assigned to him, one American and the other Japanese. Most Japanese lawyers didn’t raise a peep, but the American lawyers were loud and arrogant and would even ridicule the witnesses as if we were the ones on trial. As a result, the judges threw some of them out of court.

One day in mid-August, as I was approaching the courthouse with a group of Chinese eyewitnesses, a thirtyish woman in a white kimono appeared with a young boy and bowed to me. Instantly I recognized her, so I stepped away from my colleagues and took her aside. Mitsuko kept bowing while saying in accented Mandarin, “Mother, here’s your grandson.”

Tears gushed out of my eyes, but I dared not speak much. She pushed Shin forward and told him, “Say ‘Grandma.’ ”

“Grandma,” he mumbled, a little worm of wrinkles on his forehead.

I squatted down and hugged and kissed him. He even smelled like his father. “Do you go to school?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“In what grade?”

He didn’t get the question, but Mitsuko put in, “Second.”

“When’s your birthday?”

His mother answered, “December fourth.”

“I will remember that, Shin,” I said, and kissed him between the eyes.

The hearing was to resume at one thirty, just a few minutes away. A Chinese official came out of the foyer and beckoned me to enter the court. What should I do? By no means could I let others know I was meeting my family members here. I was representing all the Nanjing women brutalized by the Japanese army and couldn’t possibly acknowledge Mitsuko and Shin overtly now. That would have amounted to inviting disaster. On the spur of the moment, I took off the gold bangle from my wrist and handed it to Mitsuko. “Haowen wanted you to have this,” I said, clasping her hand with both of mine. “Please don’t come to this place again. It’s not safe.”

Without waiting for her response, I veered and headed for the courthouse, my legs shaking. I had no clue where exactly we were staying, because all the Chinese eyewitnesses were semiquarantined, traveling as a group between the courthouse and the hotel, a wooden villa on the Sumida River. Otherwise I would have let Mitsuko know where we might meet again.

Several American missionaries were in Tokyo for the war crimes trials as well: Searle, Reverend Magee, Dr. Wilson, and Holly Thornton. I was happy to see them, though I was gloomy after meeting Mitsuko and Shin.

“What’s wrong?” Holly asked me one evening. “You look so blue.”

“I’m kind of under the weather,” I said. “This humidity really gets to me.”

“The hearings must’ve gotten to you a lot too.”

“I can’t sleep well these days.”

I dared not confide in Holly, whose eyes crinkled up at the corners as she observed me. Unlike Minnie, she might not be that discreet in spite of her good nature.

The Chinese side had little material evidence to support our charges because during the war nobody had expected to face these criminals at such a trial. But thanks to the conscientiousness of the Americans — particularly the Safety Zone Committee’s paperwork kept by Searle, the photographs shot by Magee, and the medical records filed by Wilson — and also thanks to some secret reports about the Nanjing atrocities that the German embassy had dispatched to the Nazi government, the court could make a fair assessment of the crimes perpetrated by the Imperial Army. Magee disclosed to me that he’d brought along the footage he’d shot, but the court wouldn’t accept the films as evidence. In truth, the U.S. government meant to downplay the trial and avoid antagonizing the Japanese populace so that Japan would become a staunch anticommunist country. Among the twenty-five major war criminals on trial, only seven received the death penalty.

When the judge asked Iwane Matsui whether he was guilty, he muttered that he was not. Still, the moment the death sentence was announced, the top general, skeletal and bespectacled now, sobbed and collapsed in his seat, unable to stand up. His bald head was bobbing. Two tall guards wearing white helmets and “MP” armbands stepped forward, pulled him up, and hauled him out of the courtroom.

We left Tokyo on a balmy morning in late August. As we walked out of the hotel and headed for the sedans that were taking us to the airport, I caught sight of Mitsuko and Shin again. They stood at the side of the gate, she wearing an apple-green cheongsam that set off her curvaceous figure, while he had on a white shirt and navy blue shorts. Behind them was a large bonsai in a stone planter, and beyond them seagulls were sailing above the turquoise river, letting out cries. Mother and son waved at me almost timidly while my colleagues and the officials turned to watch. There was no way I could go up to Mitsuko and Shin, so I just nodded at them. Slowly I climbed into a car. As we pulled away, I covered my face with both hands.

That was the last time I saw them.