The Message

by Mai Jia

  Compared to him, his young wife was a piece of work, parading about in her sun hat, dragging a huge Alsatian dog the size of a small pony around with her, and glaring at anyone who had the temerity to walk past, snorting with irritation, as if she were quite the colonial memsahib. No wonder people went out of their way to avoid her.

  Where the pair of them had come from, who they were and what they were doing there, nobody knew, and it was hard to find out. Nobody from the outside was allowed in, and whatever was going on inside the estate was done very quietly, as if it wasn’t happening at all, so it was impossible to know what was afoot.

  In fact, for all that the work took place in silence, the Tan Estate had been completely dismantled. In particular, the two little Western-style buildings at the back had been smashed to smithereens.

  Why?

  They were searching for gold!

  The reason the Japanese devils had requisitioned the Tan Estate in the first place was because they were looking for treasure, but that they’d put a scholar in charge of proceedings seemed more than a little odd. Perhaps they were hoping he would be a decoy. Who would suspect a scholar of having turned treasure hunter, a loving couple of being thieves, silence being used to cover up a robbery? No one. Which was what the Japanese wanted: to stop people from putting two and two together. After all, everyone knew about the gold and silver hidden on the Tan Estate, so if the Japanese turned up openly to steal it, it wouldn’t look so good for their self-styled Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

  Day followed day, months passed, the seasons rolled by and they’d searched everywhere they could think of. Even the gardens had been excavated to a metre or more. They had no idea where to look next. Everything that could be smashed had been smashed; everything that could be dug up had been dug up; the grounds had been thoroughly gone over, every room had been searched inside and out, the pipes and drains had been checked, the walls and trees too, every nook and cranny… They had looked everywhere and found nothing.

  It seemed as if horrible old Mr Tan had taken his gold with him to hell – and now he was about to drag the young wife after him.

  That happened the following year, immediately after the Duanwu Festival. Whether or not the couple had been out to see the dragon-boat racing during the festival or had eaten the traditional sticky-rice dumplings has not been recorded. You’d have thought the scholar would have enjoyed the sight of those handsomely painted longboats honouring the memory of the poet Qu Yuan. We do know, however, that the weather was already hot by then, and that the scholar and his young wife had got into the habit of taking their Alsatian out for an evening runabout beside the lake. They would go out as the sun was setting and return once the moon was high in the sky.

  That evening it was really hot and they headed for where they could be sure to catch the breeze, out on West Lake itself, across the Su Causeway and all the way down to Prince’s Cove. By the time they turned back for home, it was already dark. As they retraced their steps, four men in black, wielding swords, suddenly leapt out from a covered boat anchored by the shore and attacked them.

  The woman and the Alsatian were slashed to death before they could make a sound. The man, for all that he seemed so scholarly and refined, had clearly had a lot of training in martial arts. Armed only with his fan, he was able to dodge and parry so that the four assassins found it impossible to touch him. He was also screaming for help at the top of his voice, which made his attackers nervous. Eventually, he retreated to the water’s edge and dived beneath the surface of the lake, disappearing into the darkness. Thus he was able to escape with his life.

  It was later discovered that none of the woman’s gold jewellery had been taken, so it obviously wasn’t a robbery. The attackers had carefully cleaned up the scene of the crime before they fled, leaving no clues as to their identity. A chunk of flesh was extracted from the jaws of the dead Alsatian, but that too proved unidentifiable. How could the police solve the crime? There was nothing they could do.

  The murderers were still out there – what if next time they used guns? The more the scholar thought about it, the more unbearable it became. His martial arts skills were good, but he couldn’t stop a bullet. He wasn’t going to risk his life in pursuit of this gold. He’d been lucky to survive that first attack and he had no intention of risking his neck a second time.

  Enough!

  That was the end of their hunt for the gold; they left in silence, just as they had come. The Tan Estate had been in beautiful condition when they’d arrived, with its gardens in bloom, but now the entire place was a ruin, inside and out, as if it had been butchered.

  Even though the Japanese devils had now left, they weren’t going to allow anyone else to take possession of the Tan Estate. Plenty of powerful people from within the puppet government came to look at it, but when they saw how badly damaged it was, nobody was interested in taking it over. In the end it was a couple of dozen horses that moved in, stabled in that beautiful place before being sent to the front line, to injury and death.

  The horses didn’t care about the treasure, they just cared about the grass. Within a few months they’d grazed the garden down to bare earth and shat it out. Yet again, the Tan Estate stank to high heaven, but this time nobody bothered to complain, because everyone expected stables to be filthy. It was becoming increasingly difficult to call to mind how lovely the place had been in its prime.

  6

  In March 1940, the collaborator Wang Jingwei established his puppet government in Nanjing. A few months earlier, Division Commander Qian Huyi of the Nationalist Party’s National Revolutionary Army had become famous; every newspaper carried his name and new title, for he had just been made Commander of the puppet regime’s East China Counterinsurgency Corps. People in Hangzhou called him Qian-the-Dog, because he had sold himself body and soul to the Japanese and was nothing but their running dog. Third Brother had deserted at that point. He robbed Qian-the-Dog’s armoury, blew up what he couldn’t take away, and then disappeared with a dozen or so trusted soldiers from his old unit.

  Whether it was because he was Third Brother’s former commanding officer or because he was an old friend of Su-the-Arsehole, Qian Huyi (Qian-the-Dog) knew all about the treasure that was supposed to be hidden on the Tan Estate. He was also quite sure that he’d be able to find it – he had Su-the-Arsehole to help him, after all. After Qian Huyi went to work for the Japanese, more than half of his soldiers deserted, so there was no point in being picky, he took everyone he could get, even dyed-in-the-wool criminals like Su-the-Arsehole. Anyway, the latter had thumped himself on the chest and sworn until he was blue in the face that he would definitely find the Tan Estate treasure. So, soon after he took office, Qian Huyi got rid of the stables and had a works division of the ECCC placed at the Tan Estate, with a budget for renovations. This was to facilitate their treasure hunting: they could ‘renovate’ after each area had been searched, and that would prevent anyone from realizing what they were up to.

  It turned out that Su-the-Arsehole didn’t know what he was talking about. All his promises came to nothing. The treasure was never found, and the scope of the renovations grew and grew, until in the end it was all-encompassing; even the glazed tiles on the roof were removed and smashed, one by one, and then had to be replaced. The trees were all uprooted, only to be replanted in a new location; the front courtyard was moved to the rear courtyard, and then vice versa.

  Once everything had been rebuilt, it had to be used for something, didn’t it? Of course it did. The front courtyard could be an officers’ club for the ECCC. After all, the teahouse and accommodation were there already. As for the two little buildings at the back, the Commander wanted to keep them for his own use. The western building would become his private residence, where his family could live, while the eastern building could be used for other purposes: upstairs could provide accommodation for his staff, while downstairs would be perfect for secret meetings with like-minded officials, or indeed for sex.
The sex was all about keeping colleagues on board by giving them a free trick with a whore. A couple of minutes was all it took, and the girls were right there at the officers’ club anyway.

  Opening a guest house on the site of a famous brothel was always going to mean that sooner or later it would be business as usual once again. And indeed, pretty quickly the girls were back, strong wines were being poured for eager customers, and people were partying. The only real difference was that the whole place had been militarized; the men who came for the whores were now all in uniform and carried guns, so most outsiders didn’t dare set foot in there. Even so, there was still a hierarchy: those with rifles had to give way to the men who carried pistols; those in the puppet forces had to give way to members of the Imperial Japanese Army. The officers and men in the Imperial Army weren’t saints: when it came to murder, robbery, rape or pillage, there was nothing that they wouldn’t do.

  Qian-the-Dog was happy to see members of the Imperial Army coming here; if they hadn’t come of their own accord, he would have invited them – that way he wouldn’t need to worry even if the Tan brothers took their complaints to the central authorities in Nanjing. So he threw himself into the business of making his brothel a success and felt sure that the Tan Estate would bring him everything that he wanted in life.

  However, Qian-the-Dog just didn’t have the personal qualities required to sustain such a position for any length of time. In fact, for him, the good times lasted exactly one hundred and twenty-one days, and they came to an end in a massacre late one night.

  What happened that night on the Tan Estate is recorded in many accounts of the history of Hangzhou. I’ve seen dozens of these records and they are all basically the same. The description given in the Gazetteer of Hangzhou is as accurate as any and has a certain literary quality to it. I have excerpted this account:

  On the 22nd June 1940, on a stormy night when the moon was obscured by clouds, the eastern and western buildings in the rear courtyard of the Tan Estate were the site of a series of murders. Qian Huyi and his entire family were killed, nine persons in all, together with two pro-Japanese officials with whom Commander Qian had secret dealings, and the three prostitutes he had hired that night to entertain them. In total, fourteen people lost their lives.

  In both buildings, the blood of the dead poured from the upper floors down to the lower ones, overflowing the lintels of the doors and soaking into the ground outside. For the longest time, the air of the rear courtyard was saturated with the metallic stench of blood and gore.

  Who on earth could have done this?

  On the wall, there was a message written in blood:

  Those who surrender to the Japanese for personal gain deserve to die!

  Those with shamelessly corrupt morals deserve to die!

  Kill! Kill! Kill!

  Clearly, this was the work of resistance fighters.

  Those words were written on the wall of a guest bedroom in the eastern building, using the Commander’s blood – red characters on a white wall and thus exceptionally eye-catching. The corpse of a naked woman was found in the same room as Qian-the-Dog – he had obviously been with a whore that night. The two stark-naked bodies, one male and one female, were at different ends of the room, but their blood had pooled together: it was a shameless sight. Compared to them, the bright red words seemed honourable; not only was their content admirable, but the characters were written in a strong script, by a practised calligrapher – this was not the work of some common criminal.

  I don’t know who first suggested that the words had likely been written by Third Brother – he had, after all, studied painting and he wrote a good hand. Given that he’d been involved in the art world for many years, it wasn’t difficult to find samples of his calligraphy. An expert was asked to check them and duly confirmed that the words had been written by Third Brother.

  Overnight, Third Brother became famous. Even the events of two years earlier, when the foreign couple had been attacked at West Lake and the wife killed, were now ascribed to him. But nobody knew where Third Brother was or what he was trying to do. Some people said that he’d taken over from his father, that he was nothing but a gangster who made no distinction between robbing ordinary people or fighting against the Japanese, that he would do anything for money, like some kind of demon. Some said that he was still in command of his old Nationalist unit, that he appeared from time to time in the mountains of western Zhejiang province, attacking the Japanese devils and the puppet army, and that he was a national hero. There were others who said that he was a member of the Nationalist Blueshirts and that he was often to be seen in the Shanghai/Hangzhou region, dressed in signature blue shirt and trousers, murdering Japanese devils and Chinese traitors. In other words, he was a secret agent working for the Nationalist Party’s Bureau of Military Statistics. There were also people who said that he was a member of the Communist underground… Well, there were a lot of stories, and the only point of consensus was that Third Brother was a mysterious figure.

  7

  For all that I have been trying my best to conceal it, I am sure that by now my more intelligent and attentive readers will have guessed that Third Brother was Tiger, otherwise why would I have written about him in such detail here? You are quite right, Third Brother was indeed Tiger; today he is an elderly gentleman called Mr Xin, but at that time he was in charge of the Communist underground in Hangzhou.

  And Police Chief Wang Tianxiang started life as Su-the-Arsehole.

  Both of these men changed their names. In the case of Third Brother, it was necessary for his work in the underground. For Su-the-Arsehole, it was because he wanted to escape his past as a cheap crook; he was hoping everyone would forget what a nasty piece of work he was. As to why he changed his name to Wang Tianxiang, it was because he thought it sounded Japanese. Some people really are cheap and nasty through and through. I am happy to say that his children are quite different; they are really lovely people and very patriotic. His daughter, Wang Min, told me that she still won’t have a Japanese object in the house, and the reason she gave for this behaviour (which might otherwise seem a bit excessive) was that this was how she could atone for what her father had done. When I asked her why she didn’t change her surname back to Su, she said she wanted to remember the humiliation her father had caused them and become a proper Chinese person. Her brother took the name Wang Hanmin, the character ‘Han’ meaning ‘Chinese’, so his feelings on the subject could not be clearer. Wang Tianxiang was executed for treason in 1947; the shame of what he did affected not only his children but all Chinese people.

  As my more intelligent and attentive readers will also have guessed, the niece of the Tan Estate’s loyal head butler, who was ‘given’ to Commander Qian Huyi by Third Brother and became Qian Huyi’s concubine, ended up as Warrior. Old Mr Xin confirmed that, so it must be true. The years had turned the delicate, rake-thin and pale-faced young art student into a fat and balding old man, but his memories of Warrior had not faded.

  Old Mr Xin told me that neither he nor the head butler was in any way involved with Warrior’s decision to become Qian Huyi’s concubine – that was entirely her choice. At that time, Qian Huyi’s Nationalist forces were moving to surround and exterminate the Red Army on the border between Zhejiang and Jiangxi provinces; for the Communist Party, the situation was critical and they were desperate to infiltrate Qian Huyi’s headquarters as quickly as possible and gain access to intelligence about this mission. Warrior was already a member of the Communist underground in Hangzhou, having been recruited by a teacher at her school. She now took the initiative and proposed that she get close to Qian Huyi. As a result, she was instrumental in the Red Army being suddenly able to break through the encirclement and move to a place of safety.

  Old Mr Xin said that when the Japanese devils occupied Hangzhou, Qian Huyi led his Nationalist troops into the mountains and announced that he would regroup and launch a counter-attack against the Japanese at the first opportunity. Short
ly afterwards, however, Qian Huyi surrendered to the puppet government, which prompted Third Brother, as he still was, to desert; Third Brother took his soldiers back to Hangzhou and formed an anti-Japanese resistance group, unaffiliated with any political party, its aim being to kill the Japanese devils and their Chinese collaborators.

  Soon after Third Brother had murdered Qian Huyi and his family, Warrior came to see him. Thanks to the old head butler, Warrior and Third Brother had always been friendly; over the years, she had repeatedly encouraged him to join the Communist Party, and now finally he agreed. His unit was immediately enrolled into the Party’s New Fourth Army, but he himself remained in Hangzhou to engage in covert missions. Eventually, as Tiger, he assumed responsibility for the entire Communist underground in the city.

  When he spoke about Warrior, old Mr Xin at times became very emotional. He said that they all owed quite as much to her as to Li Ningyu – both of them were totally loyal to the Party, and in their achievements, in their revolutionary mindset, in their convictions and their fearless self-sacrifice they were models for every underground operative at that time. Of course, ‘Warrior’ was merely her code name in the underground; in real life she was called Lin Yingchun. Her family came from Fuyang in Zhejiang province, and in fact she grew up by the banks of the Fuchun River. She was born in 1919, and when she died she was just twenty-two.