The Yellow Papers

by Dominique Wilson

  ‘I’m going to Shanghai.’

  ‘You’ve received orders?’

  Edward shook his head.

  ‘But you’re going none the less?’

  ‘Tonight. I need you to cover for me.’

  Chong Lueng watched the fire. On a newly added log a slater ran back and forth across its width, panicked by the heat, its shield-like plates red from the reflection of the embers surrounding it. Chong Lueng reached out and in a quick movement grabbed the creature, then opened his palm on the grass beside him. The slater scurried off.

  ‘You risk being court-martialled – or shot – depending on who finds you first.’

  ‘Will you cover for me?’

  ‘Why take such a risk?’

  Edward didn’t answer.

  ‘A woman, then. Don’t be a fool, Edward Billings. You, of all of us, will be noticed AWOL.’

  ‘Will you cover for me?’

  ‘No.’

  The men fell silent. Edward rose and paced away from the fire, then back again. If Chong Lueng wouldn’t cover for him, so be it. He’d go anyway.

  ‘What I will do,’ Chong Lueng continued, ‘is go to Shanghai in your place – something in return for what you’ve taught us. I have to go anyway. Quinine. If we don’t get quinine we’ll all die. That will be the official reason. I’ll take three men. We’ll have a better chance of not being noticed than you. I’ll go to my contacts on the black market for medical supplies. While there, I’ll find this woman. Tell me where to look and what you want me to say when I find her.’

  Edward paced the perimeter of the camp, looking out into the night, willing Chong Lueng and his detail to return. They had been gone for twenty-eight hours. Had Chong Lueng found Ming Li? Had he even looked for her? Though Chong Lueng had tried not to show his surprise, Edward knew he hadn’t expected the woman to be Chinese. Did he disapprove? But what if he did find her, and Ming Li refused to leave? What if Xueliang stood in her way? He knew she’d stay if Xueliang refused to leave. No, surely not. She’d have to realise how much better off they’d be. She’d convince Xueliang. Edward shivered; he knew now he had a temperature and should be in sickbay, but he felt responsible for Ming Li. For Chong Lueng and his men. Would Chong Lueng have gone to Shanghai if it weren’t for him? Possibly – medical supplies were a priority.

  ‘Yī bēi kāfēi, Billings dū wèi?’

  Edward took the tin cup the young recruit had brought him. The coffee was bitter but hot, and might stop his shivering. But though it burnt his mouth it didn’t warm him. His head pounded and he felt as if he was about to throw up. He fought through the nausea. He had to keep a lookout for Chong Lueng.

  ‘Help him up. Bloody idiot! Come on, Billings. Get up!’

  Edward looked around. It was still dark and he was lying on the ground – he didn’t even remember sitting down. He was cold – so cold that his teeth chattered. He tried to raise his head but it was too heavy. The medic stood over him, and two of his Chinese orderlies were trying to pull him up.

  ‘Chong Lueng?’

  ‘Not back yet. Are you trying to kill yourself, man? You’re ill. Get him to sickbay,’ he ordered the men.

  Dawn was barely breaking when Edward was pulled from his sleep by voices near his bed. He felt no better, but now instead of shivering he was hot. Covered in sweat. He raised himself onto his elbow. On the bed across from his the medic was working on someone. A Chinese private held a lamp over the man, and another assisted. At their feet was a basin, already half-full of bloody rags. When the medic moved to his trolley of instruments, Edward was able to see the soldier lying on the bed – it was one of Chong Lueng’s men.

  ‘Chong Lueng?’ he called out.

  ‘Sĭ. Suŏyŏu sĭ.’ Dead. All dead.

  ‘Not now, Billings,’ the medic cut in.

  ‘Fun – the woman?’

  ‘I said not now, Billings!’

  ‘Méi yŏu fun. “There is no woman.

  Edward fell back onto his pillow. Chong Lueng was dead. Because of him. They had lived side by side for months now, had become friends – as close as men could become in such an abnormal situation – and now Chong Lueng was dead. How would they explain that to his family – his wife? Did Chong Lueng even have a wife? Children? They’d never discussed this. If only he could turn back the clock! And if he could, would he do anything differently? Or was he simply trying to ease his guilt? Guilt and memories – all that was left to those who survived … He mustn’t think that way right now. Another little box. Close it tight and push it down deep.

  But what about LiLi? Was she dead too, or did they simply not find her? No, he refused to think she could be dead. He had to find out for sure – not knowing would drive him insane. He had to go to Shanghai. Find her. Drag her out of there by force, if need be …

  He threw off the sheet and sat up. His head swam and his vision blurred but he fought through it. He stood up but his legs would not support him and he crashed to the floor.

  ‘Bloody hell, Captain! As if I don’t have enough on my plate.’ The medic and his assistant pulled him roughly back onto the bed. He felt the prick of a needle in his leg. ‘That should keep you quiet for a while.’

  When he woke Edward was too ill to go anywhere. He drifted in and out of a semi-conscious daze, barely aware of whether it was night or day, his temperature dangerously high for more than a week. By the time his temperature started to drop word had come through that Tulip Force was being withdrawn. Some of the men – those well enough to go on fighting – had already been sent to Thailand, Burma and Assam, others to India. Edward and those too ill to fight were being sent home.

  17

  The American B-29s droned overhead and the air-raid signal screamed but Ming Li didn’t react – it had become all too common these past few months; since Pearl Harbour nearly three years ago the Americans were out to settle a score. She carefully stepped over the bodies littering the stairs of the building; like many in Shanghai, she too had resoled her shoes with old tyre rubber, but even this had lost what little grip it once had. Her foot slipped and she grabbed the handrail but couldn’t stop her fall, landing on a lower step. A woman curled there abused her. Ming Li ignored her, rising. The back of her coat was wet and when she brushed her hand over it she realised she’d landed in milky white, watery diarrhoea. Cholera. Shanghai was decaying even further. How she hated this building, this street! She’d never get used to the filth and the stench.

  Outside the apartment building the air was just as putrid. With nowhere to go, no money and no work, the people of Shanghai lived, shat and died wherever they could find an unoccupied piece of pavement. Cholera had infested the city and the death rate had risen even further, so that cadavers now lay amongst the living; there was no one to collect the bodies, nowhere to bury them. Many were thrown into the Huangpu where they would join the bodies of those bayoneted by the Japanese, floating amongst the boats, their bellies swelling with gas, slowly decomposing.

  Ming Li rubbed the back of her coat with one of the pieces of rag she kept in her bag for such occasions, then threw the soiled material to the ground. A small girl reached out from a doorway and grabbed the soiled piece of cloth, averting Ming Li’s gaze. I shouldn’t complain, Ming Li thought, looking at the child, then just as quickly recalled her thoughts. Yes, she should complain. No one should put up with what was happening here. She wanted to scream, to rant. She wanted to cry. She was sick of living as she was – as they all were. But she knew she had no choice.

  Since that evening when the Japanese had plastered posters on the walls of her house proclaiming it di chan – enemy property – they’d been living in Xueliang’s third cousin Chihfu’s two-roomed apartment on the fifth floor of this building. The whole building smelt of cabbage and urine, despair and misery, and was begrimed from the soot of endless cooking fires. The water supply was often cut off with no warning, power rations were slashed again and again, and basics such as soap were no longer procurable. In Cousin Chih-fu�
�s two-roomed apartment there were now eleven people: a family of seven – some distant relations of the landlord – lived with them, as well of course as Cousin Chih-fu. P’i Gao, their major-domo, was no longer with them.

  Ming Li wished P’i Gao were here now. She needed his help; Xueliang had not returned home last night. Though this had sometimes happened prior to the Japanese invasion, she’d made him promise always to come home since – she needed to know he was safe.

  She wanted to believe there was some simple explanation, that he hadn’t made it back in time for curfew and so had stayed somewhere safe, but every instinct told her this was something more serious. She wondered if P’i Gao was still alive somewhere. She hoped so; they owed him so much. It was thanks to him that Xueliang had been allowed to leave the house unharmed – P’i Gao had bribed the Japanese soldiers handsomely. When Ming Li, waiting in the street, had seen him and Xueliang but not MeiMei, she’d fought and scratched and bitten both men as they tried to restrain her from returning to the house.

  ‘She’s not there, Mistress, she wasn’t in the house. I swear it. She’s a smart girl, she probably ran off when she saw them coming.’ But Ming Li hadn’t believed him. ‘I’ll go look for her. I will find her – I swear I’ll find her for you. Before nightfall you’ll have your daughter back.’ And he’d kept his promise.

  Since that day, Ming Li trusted P’i Gao completely. She knew he would never let any harm come to her, or to those she loved. She’d trust him with any of their lives.

  Then one morning they’d woken up and P’i Gao was not there. Xueliang believed he’d gone to the countryside to join the Red Army. He’d become disillusioned with the Kuomintang, Xueliang had explained, and probably found the Communist Party’s reforms more appealing.

  Ming Li hurried along the footpath, keeping her gaze lowered, ignoring the pleas for water from those lying in the street. One of the horrors of cholera was the intense dehydration and unbearable thirst that accompanied it within hours of becoming sick. The only merciful thing about the disease was that it killed quickly. Ming Li had heard the rumours that blamed the Americans for the cholera, rumours that they’d dropped germ-releasing bombs all over China. Others said it was the Japanese who’d done this, that they were dropping bombs carrying plague-infested fleas, infecting reservoirs with typhoid and releasing pests in the agricultural areas not occupied by their troops.

  But of all the rumours that circulated about the Japanese, the one that worried Ming Li most was that they were performing medical experiments on their prisoners. She didn’t want to imagine what might be done to Xueliang if taken prisoner. She knew now how active he was in the resistance – since P’i Gao’s disappearance Ming Li had refused to be kept in the dark about her husband’s activities.

  ‘It’s my country too,’ she’d whispered one night when they were sure everyone in the room was asleep. ‘Do you think I don’t feel anything when I see Japanese soldiers bring their families to see our dead, strolling amongst the bodies as if at an exhibition? When I see their children searching the bodies for souvenirs? I too am suffering. I too am starving. I could get killed tomorrow, but better to die doing something to fight back, than to die like a pig at the slaughterhouse. Please, Xueliang, let me help!’

  In the end he’d agreed, but only under his conditions.

  ‘You will only do exactly what I tell you – nothing more, nothing less. And you will only do what I tell you. Never obey anyone else, no matter who they say they are. Promise me, my Li. No one is to be trusted, do you understand?’

  Since then he’d given her small jobs – a message to deliver, a parcel to pick up. She knew he was trying to keep her safe, but she hungered for more important work.

  When she reached the New Asia Hotel on the corner of North Szechuen and Tiendong roads, she stood diagonally across the street from it, afraid to get too close. It had been owned by the Chinese before the war, but was now occupied by the Special Service Corp of the Japanese Military Police. It swarmed with Japanese soldiers and was feared by everyone, for the horrors of Japanese interrogations were well known. She stepped back from the road, blending into the crowd, waiting, watching. She knew the likelihood of seeing Xueliang was almost non-existent, but she didn’t know what else to do. She waited for an hour. Two. Japanese soldiers entered the building, Chinese prisoners at gunpoint. Others came and went, drones to an art deco hive. Still Ming Li waited.

  ‘You’ve someone in there?’

  Ming Li turned. A young man stood beside her, ragged and streetwise.

  ‘I don’t know. My husband’s missing. I thought …’

  ‘Maybe. But you won’t find out anything now. Wait till seven. That’s when they move everyone out.’

  ‘Where to?’

  He shrugged. ‘They say to a water purification unit in Harbin, in Manchukuo.’

  ‘You don’t believe it?’

  The young man looked away. ‘Who knows what to believe? I’m just telling you – come back at seven.’

  ‘But the curfew?’

  He laughed and pointed to those curled in the doorways. ‘You think they’ve got somewhere to go to during curfew? It’s up to you, lady. But if you want to know if your husband’s in there, come back at seven.’

  By six-thirty she was back opposite the hotel. She found a space along the wall and sat down on the footpath between two refugees. More people joined them; apparently the time for moving prisoners was no secret. Soon the whole footpath was crowded.

  Ming Li leant back against the wall and closed her eyes. She thought of her house before the Japanese had commandeered it – a pleasant memory to block out the present. She remembered the sumptuous rooms, the meals they used to have, the people who’d visited. In her mind she went through the clothes she used to wear. Had she really been that elegant woman who dressed in silks and satins? That graceful hostess to Xueliang’s business associates? She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d felt young. She did remember, though, the pride she’d caught in Xueliang’s gaze when he’d looked at her then – the same pride she’d seen in Edward’s gaze …

  No, she mustn’t think of Edward. What sort of a woman was she, thinking of her lover when her husband was missing, and probably a prisoner of the Japanese? But Edward represented a different life, a time when she could laugh and flirt and feel passion. Love even. Did she love Edward? She’d known, back then, that she could not have spent a day without seeing him, without being with him. To be apart would have been intolerable. But was that love? Or only passion? How long had it been since she’d felt passion? Would she ever again? Love and passion were so hard to imagine when each day you fought simply to survive. And yet, there were nights when—

  Someone stepped on her foot and she cried out and opened her eyes. The traffic had lessened as curfew neared so that now only official vehicles were on the road. A cattle truck came down from Szechuen Road, turned into Tiendong and stopped outside the hotel.

  The crowd stood up, suddenly alert.

  Japanese soldiers, bayonets fixed, formed two lines from the hotel entrance to the truck, facing out. Then nothing.

  Finally more soldiers came out, between them a cluster of prisoners. Ming Li pushed her way towards the edge of the footpath. The group of prisoners was too dense; she couldn’t see if Xueliang was amongst them.

  A young woman cried out and pushed past her, ran across the street towards the prisoners. One of their group answered, shaking his head and yelling at her to go back. As the woman neared the hotel one of the soldiers aimed his gun and fired. No one moved. She lay in the middle of the road, her blood slowly oozing over the bitumen. A Japanese barked a command, the soldiers jabbed the prisoners onto the open back of the truck. The truck u-turned, then turned again into Szechuen Road. As it passed the corner, Ming Li saw Xueliang, head bowed and bloodied, holding on to the railing.

  Ming Li sat on the floor of the toilet, unpicking a seam of her coat. From between the lining and the coat she pulled out the remai
ns of her jewellery collection. There was little left – a pair of gold earrings, a gold pendant and chain, and a gold and jade bracelet. She knew she would get very little for them, even though they had been expensive gifts. She’d kept those until last, hoping not to have to sell them, each a memory of another lifetime.

  She picked up the earrings, remembering the furore they’d caused when found as part of her bride price. Xueliang had wanted a traditional wedding, and had followed the Three Letters and Six Etiquettes ritual, which included a bride price. But the ritual was never meant to include a gift to the bride. Her mother had thought them for herself at first, and was attaching them to her ears when her father read the note included in the box – they were meant for Ming Li. Later, Xueliang had told Ming Li that he’d wanted her to have them as a message that, although he was following tradition, he was also a man with modern ideas.

  The pendant and chain he’d put around her neck one hot afternoon as she sat breastfeeding their week-old child. She had withdrawn into herself since the birth, tormented by conflicting emotions – shame at not giving Xueliang a son, awe and even pride at the perfect little being she had produced. When Xueliang had looked at the child after her birth, the baby had burped and made a milky bubble.

  ‘A worthless girl with no manners,’ Ming Li had said, but Xueliang had laughed.

  ‘We’ll have many boys yet. An older sister will help look after them.’

  A few days later he’d come up behind her as she breastfed the child, and he’d slipped the chain around her neck and whispered I’m so proud of my wife and daughter. She’d realised then that she not only respected Xueliang, but loved him as well.