by Ha Jin
“Can’t we get a little good coal from a local seller?” Minnie once asked me.
“There’s no coal for sale anymore, no matter how much we’re willing to pay.”
Every day I wore a pair of woolen pants underneath cotton-padded pants; still, I was chilled to the bone, simply because there was no place and no time I could ever get warm. I’d never felt this cold before. Minnie was also cold all the time. She would warm her fingers around a mug of hot water. Even so, she couldn’t sit in the office for longer than an hour at a stretch. The students suffered more, and some had chilblains on their hands and feet. In class they all crossed their arms, each hand sheathed inside the other sleeve to keep warm. When they wrote, they’d keep breathing on their fingers. We didn’t heat the classrooms yet, having to save the firewood from the felled trees for the coldest days in January. Nowadays the students envied those women in the Homecraft School who could do kitchen duties or take lessons in the four cookhouses, where it was warm.
Minnie would urge me to go out with her, walking as often as possible to quicken the circulation. One morning, as she and I were strolling around, a ruckus broke out at the front gate, and we went over to take a look. “Stop bugging me!” Ban yelled, his shoulder leaning against a stone pillar.
Outside the gate stood Yulan, her arms akimbo, her face smeared with rouge, and her hair combed back into an enormous bun that made her look seven or eight years older. She’d been living with Miss Lou and had snuck back to campus again. “Shame, shame on you, Little Jap. Come out and face justice!” she cried, licking her chapped lips. A crocheted saffron shawl was draped over her shoulders.
“Stinking slut!” Ban cursed.
Minnie went up to the sixteen-year-old boy and said, “You mustn’t let her disturb you like this.”
“She calls me all kinds of names whenever she sees me. Please, Principal Vautrin, give me something else to do so I won’t have to go off campus. I’m scared of her—she waits for me out there all the while.” He then turned to yell at Yulan, “Buzz off, psychopath!”
“Come out, shameless scum!” she shouted, jabbing her forefinger at him while squishing up her face.
“Go fuck yourself!”
“Stop deflowering girls!”
“Go to hell!”
“Monster! You’ll be fried in hell, in a big cauldron of oil!”
“Leave me alone!”
Minnie shook Ban by the shoulder. “You shouldn’t exchange words with her like this. You’re only kicking up a row.”
At this point Miss Lou appeared and pulled Yulan away, while the madwoman went on calling Ban “a pancake-faced Jap.” Hu, a gateman now, asked Minnie whether he should let Yulan in if she came to campus again. “Don’t stop her if she comes for meals,” Minnie told him.
Hu nodded his balding head without another word.
Later Minnie assigned an elderly man to step in for Ban and sent the boy to Shanna to work as a custodian for the Homecraft School, but the trouble with him was far from over. He often clashed with others, wouldn’t listen to Shanna, and even called her a “Japan worshiper” because she used a Japanese facial cream. He seemed particularly fond of fighting with girl students and wouldn’t mend his ways in spite of Shanna’s repeated warnings. As her patience was wearing thin, Shanna declared she’d have him fired sooner or later.
As I mentioned before, I didn’t like Shanna that much; she always called me “Anling,” though I’d told her time and again that she should call me Mrs. Gao. I might be even older than her mother. What’s more, Shanna often wore flowered clothes as if she were a teenager, and she’d hum silly popular songs, such as “I Want You” and “A Boat of Happiness.” As a young lady from Shanghai, she had no idea what a hell Nanjing had gone through last winter.
28
IN EARLY DECEMBER, without informing us beforehand, my son, Haowen, came to see us. He slipped through Jinling’s front gate, wearing civvies—a bowler hat, a peacoat, and suede shoes. He looked slightly taller than he had five years before, perhaps because he was much thinner and more muscular. He walked with a straight back, more like a man, yet his face was no longer bright. He was twenty-seven but looked like he was in his mid-thirties. His dad, sister, and I were all shocked but elated to see him home. At first I was somewhat unnerved, assuming that he had deserted. Then I thought that it was high time for him to quit the Imperial Army, whether it was by desertion or discharge, as long as he was back home. But he said that his hospital unit was on its way to Luoyang, that they let him off at Nanjing to deliver some documents at the army’s headquarters and also to see his parents. Tomorrow he’d have to head north to catch up with his unit.
I told Liya to sit at the front door with Fanfan in case someone barged in. Yaoping took Haowen into the inner room while I let down all the window curtains.
It was already twilight and the marketplace had closed; there was no way I could get groceries for a decent meal. I hurried to the poultry center and bought five eggs from Rulian, saying I had an important guest and needed her to do me a favor, since the eggs were not for sale. For dinner I steamed some salted dace on top of rice, fried a bowl of peanuts, sautéed napa cabbage with dried anchovies, and scrambled the eggs with scallions. Yaoping had begun restocking his liquor cabinet since he resumed teaching, though most of his wines and liquors were fake. When the table was set, I told Liya to bolt the door, and then we all sat down to the best meal I had cooked since the fall of the city.
Haowen poured rice wine for everyone and said, “Dad and Mom, forgive me for causing you so much pain and anxiety. I came home just to see if you’re well. At present, there’s no way I can do anything to make your life comfortable, but when the war is over, I’ll do my best to be a dutiful son.”
Waving his narrow hand, his father said, “No need to talk like that. Let’s just enjoy a quiet meal.”
“I’m so happy to see you home, son,” I said, with tears in my eyes. “We can’t give you a better dinner, but we will when you come back next time.”
“Brother, let’s touch cups,” Liya proposed.
We all took a drink of the wine, which tasted thin and watery. Haowen dipped a chopstick into his cup and gave Fanfan a drop of the wine. The child liked it and wanted more. That made us chuckle. Liya told her brother, “Don’t give him any more. You’ll make him drunk.”
So I poured some water into a wine cup and dropped in a tiny lump of crystal sugar. Whenever Fanfan wanted another drink, Haowen would give him a drop of the sweet water in place of the dark stuff we’d been drinking. The boy cried out, “White wine, more.” That made us laugh again.
My husband and son went on talking about the war as we ate. Now and again I would put in a word. Yaoping felt that China, poor and backward, couldn’t possibly win this war, but Haowen thought differently.
“In fact, the morale is very low among the Japanese troops,” he said.
“Why so? Haven’t they already occupied half of China?” his dad asked.
“But Japan doesn’t have the manpower to control all the territory it has seized. What’s worse, its army has suffered horrendous casualties and cannot replenish the reduced units. The Japanese did not expect China to resist so stubbornly.”
“You mean they cannot find enough soldiers?” I asked.
“Yes. They’ve been recruiting men from Korea, Taiwan, and other places, but those are not experienced troops. The army is much weaker now.” Haowen’s eyes sparkled as he spoke, reminding me of the boy he used to be. He put a shriveled peanut into his mouth and continued, “Originally they planned to finish the war in three or four months, but now they don’t even know how to bring it to an end. China is like a vast swamp into which they’ve been sinking deeper and deeper, though they’ve kept winning battles. The longer they fight, the harder it will be for them to pull out. The soldiers miss home and complain nonstop. It’s difficult for the officers to keep discipline. As a matter of fact, Japan might turn out to be a loser if this war drags on for to
o long. The politicians and top generals in Tokyo simply don’t have a clue how to make an end of it.”
“They should have made plans for all the possible ways to end it before they started it,” Yaoping said. “That’s common sense.”
“Human beings can be stupider than animals, which are never afflicted with megalomania,” Haowen added.
“Brother, what will you do after the war?” Liya asked, her cheeks glowing with a red sheen raised by the wine.
“I haven’t completed my degree yet. Maybe I will return to medical school.”
I knew he meant to rejoin his wife, but I made no comment. Yaoping sighed and said, “The Imperial Army is too savage. I’m afraid the two countries will remain enemies for a long time.”
After dinner, we sat at the tea table and resumed talking. Haowen was holding Fanfan and made him laugh now and again. The boy was as happy as if he had known his uncle for ages. Haowen tickled him and raised him above his head, and the three-year-old also straddled his neck for a horse ride. I could see that Haowen would be an indulgent father when he had his own children. Even before his teens, he would say he wanted to have a wife and three kids when he grew up. He had been born to become a family man and must love Mitsuko dearly.
When Fanfan fell asleep and Liya carried him to the other room, Haowen took something wrapped in a piece of tissue paper out of his inner breast pocket. “Mom,” he said, “I had nothing to bring you. Here’s a little keepsake.”
I opened the paper and found a gold bangle, smooth and solid. “You don’t need to do this,” I told him.
“Dad,” he said, turning to Yaoping, “I’m sorry I don’t have anything for you.”
“Forget about that. I’m happy just to see you safe and well. Bring Mitsuko home next time.”
“I will.”
As I was observing the bangle, I saw a tiny character, Diao, engraved on the inner side of the bracelet. My heart sank. I dropped the thing on the table with a clunk and asked, “Haowen, did you steal this from someone?”
“No, how … how can you say that?”
“It must belong to a Chinese with the family name Diao. Did you also join the Japanese in looting?” I got angrier as I spoke.
“Mom, you misjudge me. I only treat patients. There’s no way I could loot homes and rob my own people.” His face went misshapen as if something were stinging him.
“Then how come this bangle has the word ‘Diao’ engraved on it?”
“Let me take a look.” He picked it up and observed it, amazed by the character that he obviously hadn’t noticed before. He put it down. “I don’t know where it was from originally. It was an interpreter who gave it to me.”
“Is he Chinese?” his father said.
“Yes, the fellow had malaria and I took good care of him. You know the Japanese—they’d get rid of him like trash if he couldn’t get up from the sickbed within a couple of days.”
“What’s his surname?” I asked.
“Meng.”
“See, this bangle must’ve belonged to someone else,” I said.
“Meng gave it to me as a token of gratitude because I saved his life. I have no idea where he got it.”
“This might be ill-gotten,” I continued.
He looked tearful, then closed his eyes. “I’m cursed, cursed,” he muttered, his upper lip curled a little. “Even my mother rejects my present.” He sighed, lowered his head, and covered his forehead with his palm.
Pity and love stirred in my chest. I said, “All right, Haowen, I’ll keep this. But you must promise me that you’ll never rob anyone or steal from the civilians.”
“Do you think I could act freely like the Japanese? Heavens, the Japs treat me as a Chink, they don’t trust me. I’m cursed, cursed! I’m a pariah no matter where I go.” He stood up and went into the kitchen to wash his face at the sink. He blew his nose loudly.
Yaoping pursed his lips, then said to me, “Let’s treat him as our child, our only son. Can’t you see he’s miserable?”
I remained speechless and put the gold bangle away. Beyond any question, Haowen was good-natured and ill-used by the Japanese, but I didn’t want him to take advantage of his own people. Before I turned in, I said to him, “Keep in mind you’re a Christian. God will make us answer for what we did in this life.”
“I’ll remember that, Mom.”
That night he and his dad stayed in the inner room while I joined Liya and Fanfan in the other room. Haowen left before daybreak to catch the train.
29
ALTHOUGH THE MAIL was slower nowadays—sometimes it took several weeks to receive a letter sent within China—still its delivery was reliable. The Japanese had left the postal system in the southern provinces in Chinese hands, because it operated at a huge deficit, 120,000 yuan a month according to Minnie. In her official report to our New York board, Minnie said she was full of respect for the Chinese postal workers because we still received domestic mail every day.
I’d been in touch with Holly. She always sounded cheerful and had moved around, doing relief work. At present she was in Henan Province, where millions of people had become homeless because a dike along the Yellow River had been breached by the Nationalist army as a means to deter the advance of the Japanese forces. I had also been in correspondence with Dr. Wu and briefed her once a month about what was going on here. She was in Chengdu now, leading a large group of Jinling’s staff, students, and faculty. Once in a while she wrote to Minnie, who would share the letters with me. In the most recent one President Wu expressed her gratitude to Minnie for keeping the two programs in operation, but she wondered about the possibility of reopening the college in the fall.
The president wrote about the homecraft program and the middle school:
I understand that under the circumstances these two programs are the only possible arrangements. In fact, I am pleased that at least the Homecraft School, a fraction of our college, is still in place. But the middle school you are running should be only a temporary operation, and eventually it will have to be replaced by something like our former college. Mrs. Dennison wrote the other day that she was painfully concerned about the disintegration of our college and hoped we would make every effort to bring it back. In principle, I agree with her that the restoration of the college must be our goal, on which we should concentrate our effort. At the same time, I am also aware that as long as the Japanese occupy Nanjing, it will be unlikely we can realize such a goal. Damn the Imperial Army, they have destroyed everything and thrown us back to square one. These days I have often dreamed of our campus and Nanjing. How I wish I were with you again.
Dr. Wu also wrote Minnie that Mrs. Dennison would return from her yearlong furlough in the States, so we were pretty certain that the old woman would come back to Jinling. Had she been here the winter before, she might have remained behind like Minnie and opposed setting up the two current programs on campus: she’d always maintained that Jinling must grow into a top women’s college, well known internationally, so as to attract more funding.
Minnie and I agreed with President Wu that the middle school should be closed in due course, but for the time being it met the locals’ needs and there was no reason to dissolve it. More than four hundred girls had sat for the entrance test the previous fall and only a third of them were admitted, placed in four grades. For that and for the quality courses we offered, Jinling still commanded a fine reputation in Nanjing.
In her reply to President Wu, Minnie gave two reasons why restarting the college in the near future would not be feasible. First, we wouldn’t have enough freshmen, because in times like these few families would send their girls to Nanjing for college. Second, we would need a stronger faculty with college teaching experience, which again was unavailable. Minnie even asked Dr. Wu to encourage some of Jinling’s faculty members to return to Nanjing. Recently some foreigners, mostly American academics and missionaries, had arrived, but after speaking with our students and looking around, none of them had any desi
re to stay. Minnie added in her letter: “It was so easy for them to talk without committing themselves, and I have no choice but to depend on the Chinese faculty I assembled from the highways and byways. They are good enough for our current programs but will be inadequate for college teaching.” I totally agreed with her.
The Homecraft School had Dr. Wu’s blessing, though we had started it not long ago, in 1934, as a two-year program. Mrs. Dennison must have groused to Dr. Wu about our two ongoing programs and insisted that Jinling must excel in higher education again. Before taking her furlough the previous year, the old woman had even talked about starting some master’s programs here. Minnie had been lukewarm about that, though she’d never objected to it.
She had her letter to Dr. Wu delivered to Bob Wilson and asked him to mail it from Shanghai, where he’d go that Saturday. After the messenger left, Minnie resumed working on the accounts. Somehow, hard as she tried, she couldn’t balance the books for October. A twenty-six-yuan difference was still there. If only we could hire a bookkeeper, but that was impossible. The capital used to have all types of professionals, and yet nowadays you couldn’t find a decent accountant. Small wonder that even the Japanese complained that they didn’t have enough capable Chinese to run the government. Big Liu often said he wished his daughter, Meiyan, had studied accounting.
The messenger returned at noon and said that some people belonging to the International Relief Committee had been apprehended. Minnie telephoned Searle and Lewis and found out that the arrests were prompted by a murder at the Japanese embassy. Someone had slipped poison into a samovar there the day before; two guards died and several people were hospitalized, including a diplomat. The police rounded up some Chinese employees and interrogated them. Then they went to the IRC and arrested six of the leaders, all of them Chinese, on the grounds that they had participated in anti-Japanese activities. Now the police declared that these men were involved in the murder. Lewis and Searle were certain that none of them had had anything to do with it and that the Japanese were just exploiting the case as a pretext to disband the relief organization. One of the six IRC men was a part-time math teacher here, and three of them had their daughters in our middle school. The girls begged Minnie to intercede for their fathers.