by Iris Yang
Chen Hong nodded, tears wet upon her cheeks.
They parted with backward glances.
Hand-in-hand Jasmine and Xiao Mei dashed toward the church. The sun bathed the city in a rich golden-yellow color. In the warm light, the steeple glowed, giving the illusion of serenity.
Rounding a corner, Jasmine stopped dead in her tracks. Xiao Mei walked right into her and shrieked before her hands curled over her mouth. Several dozen mangled corpses lay in the middle of the street. The men wore blue Nationalist uniforms and caps. With hands tied behind their backs, all had been shot. All shot except for one. A headless body lay at the front of the group; he was dressed in a blue cotton overcoat, apparently an officer. Nearby, his head rested on a barbed-wire barricade that the Nationalist Army had set up. His eyes were closed, his bruised face contorted. His nose and ears had been hacked off. Even in death he was humiliated—a cigarette butt wedged into his clenched mouth.
Jasmine felt sick to her stomach. Was he forced to watch his men being slaughtered? Or was he tortured and decapitated in front of the group? These were surrendered soldiers! She remembered that the middle-aged passenger’s son was an officer. What if he were Auntie Li’s son? She stood transfixed with horror.
Seconds later, as if she’d just awakened from a nightmare, Jasmine tugged at Xiao Mei’s sleeve, and they bolted from the scene.
A block later, a female corpse lay sprawled on the blood-stained ground. She was naked from the waist down. Her coat had been ripped open, her shirt pushed up, exposing her bare breasts. Her stomach had been sliced open, and entrails bulged out of the torn flesh. Her legs were splayed open, a twig jabbed into her. Her face was frozen in the middle of a scream.
Nearby, trampled vegetables were scattered. Three paces away, a bundled-up baby lay face down. Dry blood from a stab wound on her back matted her floral clothing.
Bile rose in Jasmine’s throat, and then she threw up. Dear God! Had the mother seen her baby daughter die? Her knees shook.
Next to her, Xiao Mei also shivered. Holding onto each other, they staggered forward.
Even with her thick coat, Jasmine was trembling as they reached the church. They’d seen nearly a hundred corpses within only a few blocks. The streets and ditches of this fallen city had turned red, as if the sky had been raining blood.
Suddenly, her emotions caught up with her—her parents’ death, the exhausting train ride, the fearful escape, the sadness and grief, the panic. At the front step of the church, Jasmine collapsed, dragging Xiao Mei down with her.
Chen Hong stayed close to the edge of the street, as Jasmine had suggested. But a few blocks after she separated from the two girls, she encountered a group of Japanese soldiers. With nowhere for her to hide, they swarmed her. “Hua gu niang—pretty girl. Hua gu niang,” they chanted. Laughing and jeering, they hauled her into an empty house. “Pikankan—let’s see a woman open her legs.”
She cried and begged. She kicked and squirmed. But the soldiers didn’t care. They stripped off her clothes and tied her to a bed. All day, the dozen took turns raping her. At first, Chen Hong howled. Her ear-piercing screams mixed with the men’s laughter. Soon her voice became raspy and pitiful, muffled by the soldiers’ grunts and taunts. By the time they’d finished with her, the naïve, sixteen-year-old girl had lost her will and her senses. Tears, sweat, and body fluids glued her unruly hair to her face. She looked like a dying animal.
The soldiers scoffed at her. One brushed the strands from her cheeks, exposing her features. He took a picture of her, still bound, as a souvenir. Finally, they untied her and let her go.
But they might as well have killed her. Lacking comprehension, Chen Hong wandered the city streets naked. Blood dripped over her shaky legs. The day was frigid, and the wind had turned the late afternoon jarringly cold. She hugged her arms against her body, shivering. Through purple lips, she mumbled in a lifeless monotone, “Mom. Dad… Mom. Dad…”
“Come here,” an old couple called out when she passed a noodle shop. The woman stepped outside and grabbed her elbow to pull her inside. “Get inside—quickly! It’s dangerous out there.”
Chen Hong jerked her arm free. She stumbled sideways, lost her footing, and fell. Using all fours, she scrambled to her feet. “I want…my mother,” she said as if she were somewhere outside her body. Ignoring the couple’s urging, she continued to walk down the deserted street in a trance. Her forlorn figure was lost in the twilight.
Before long she was captured by another group of Japanese. She had no will to fight, nor the strength to struggle. She was too weak to scream.
The last thing she saw in this world was a naked man straddling her, preparing to thrust a sword into her chest.
Chapter 7
Strong hands caught Jasmine and Xiao Mei and pulled them to their feet. “Jasmine? What are you doing here? Your parents told me you were in Chungking.” A middle-aged man in a black robe fired rapid questions in accented Chinese. At six feet tall with fair skin and blue eyes, Father John was a priest from the United States. Shaking his bald head, he asked again, “Why have you come back to Nanking now?”
“I was hoping to convince Mom and Dad to leave—”
“Yes, I understand. I tried. Your father is too stubborn. I told him he should at least move to the Safety Zone.” Father John swept his hand, indicating the International Safety Zone signs. White flags lined the front of the church. A nine-foot American flag lay flat on the lawn. Banners with the Red Cross symbol were draped over the door and the windows. “He said he could handle it, stubborn fool. I know he wanted to let the poorest refugees use this place.”
He pulled the girls inside the main sanctuary of the church, which was already packed with people of all ages. “Where are they? I hope he changed his mind. I—”
“Father John!” wailed Jasmine. Tears came faster than she could stop them.
“What…what happened?” he asked. His brow knotted. “Don’t tell me—”
“They are both…” Her voice trailed off. Her body trembled like a leaf in a gale.
“But I just talked to them the day before yesterday.” He turned to the servant girl.
“Last night, four Japanese soldiers came to the house,” said Xiao Mei, nibbling her lip. Then, with barely coherent sentences and a flood of tears, she told the story.
When Xiao Mei was finished, Father John enfolded Jasmine in his arms. “I can’t believe this. I’m so sorry. Your father was such a gentleman. And I never met anyone as graceful as your mother.”
He wiped the tears from Jasmine’s face. His own eyes watered. “I’ll find a couple of men to bury them. Don’t be too sad, child; they’re in a better place now. They wouldn’t want you to carry such grief in your heart.”
He smoothed her hair. “Don’t be afraid, Jasmine. You’re safe here. I promise I’ll do everything in my power to keep you from harm.” He extended his arm and touched Xiao Mei’s shoulder.
“Thank you, Father John,” Jasmine choked.
“No need. Your father and I were best friends. It is my duty to protect you.” Turning around he glanced at the panic-stricken crowd. Even children had fretful looks on their faces; only babies cried haphazardly. He sighed. “Sometimes I feel so powerless. I don’t know if my best will be good enough.”
“How can we help?” Jasmine asked.
“You can speak both Chinese and English—”
“A bit of Japanese, too.”
“Yes, I’m sure you can be a great help.” He rubbed a hand over his bald head. “For now I need someone to organize the soup kitchen. Feeding so many people isn’t easy. There’s a shortage of food. We have to keep a ration system.”
“We’ll do it,” Jasmine said and brushed the residual tears from her cheeks. Pulling her long hair back, she twisted it into a ponytail.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” She lifted her chin, her teary eyes lit with fortitude.
Father John nodded.
Late that afternoon Jasmine
ate dinner with Xiao Mei and several other girls in Father John’s office. She hadn’t had any food for the entire day. Her last meal had been twelve hours ago on the train—the roasted chestnuts she’d shared with the middle-aged passenger. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
In a few gulps she finished half of the rice porridge. She realized she’d forgotten her manners and forced herself to slow down, savoring the warm feeling of food in her mouth. During her eighteen years, she had never tasted anything as pleasing as this bowl of rice porridge.
The room was silent. Everyone was exhausted and anxious. Then a loud commotion erupted in the church’s main sanctuary. Xiao Mei gripped Jasmine’s arm and scooted closer. Fear glazed the young women’s eyes. Father John jumped to his feet as six Nationalist soldiers filed inside, filling the small room. Filthy with mud and dried blood, they looked like homeless people.
The young women gasped.
“Help us, Father!” a man in his mid-twenties begged. With long gangling limbs and a hollow unshaven face, he was taller and older than the rest of the group.
“This is the International Safety Zone for civilians. Soldiers don’t belong here. You’ll bring danger to the noncombatants.”
“Please!” the man said. “The Japs have surrounded the city. We have nowhere to go.”
Jasmine set her bowl down on the wooden desk. She leaned closer to the American. “Please help them, Father John!” Every time she encountered a Nationalist combatant, she thought of her cousin Birch. “The Japanese killed the surrendered soldiers. We saw their bodies.” She turned to Xiao Mei who nodded.
The priest sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.” He walked out of the room, still shaking his head. Minutes later he returned with a stack of civilian clothes. “Sorry, we don’t have anything thicker.”
“These will do. Thank you, Father,” the man said.
The soldiers stripped off their uniforms and the young women turned around while the men changed clothes.
Jasmine remembered seeing the Nationalist Army uniforms on the street and understood what had happened. When they finished dressing, she asked, “Why did Nanking fall so quickly? It lasted only four days!” The question had bothered her all day.
In an ill-fitting outfit, the tall man shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just a sergeant. One day we were told to fight to the last person. The next day we were ordered to retreat.”
“I read what the Defense Commander said two weeks ago. General Tang vowed to live or die with Nanking. His speech was passionate and touching.”
“He left us.”
“What?”
“Yes,” confirmed Father John. “I heard it, too. He was ordered to retreat.”
“Why? Don’t we have enough troops to fight? Shanghai lasted almost four months.”
“We have troops—ninety thousand. But look at us.” The sergeant swept his hand from left to right. “Tell them how old you are,” he spoke to the shortest one.
In gray cotton clothes, with scruffy-looking hair, he looked like a street urchin. “Fourteen,” he answered in a high-pitched voice.
“No way!” the American exclaimed.
Jasmine’s eyes widened. She’d already suspected that these soldiers were young, but hearing their actual age surprised her.
“He isn’t the youngest. There are boys as young as twelve.”
Everyone gasped.
“Yes, there are many new recruits. Some have never fired a single shot. Some were drafted against their will from the countryside. In the battle at Shanghai thousands of soldiers were wounded.”
Father John said, “I’ve seen them, several trainloads from Shanghai.”
“We walked from Shanghai, fighting, retreating,” said the sergeant.
Jasmine shook her head in disbelief. Shanghai was one hundred eighty miles southeast of Nanking.
“Have you heard the Japanese Three-Alls policy?” The lanky man paused, and without hearing an answer, continued. “Kill all, burn all, loot all.”
An exclamation of shock and horror rose from the women and the priest.
“Yes,” he went on. “We’ve seen ghost villages, ghost towns, even ghost cities. The Japs—”
“They’re trying to intimidate the Chinese to surrender,” Father John said. “Bombing is also part of the terror campaign.”
The sergeant gave a sigh of frustration. “Apparently, they’re successful. They must have scared the devil out of someone, otherwise we would not have been ordered to retreat.”
“If you were ordered to retreat, then why are you here?” Jasmine asked.
“It was chaos. Some of us heard the order; others didn’t.”
“My unit never received the word,” said the fourteen-year-old boy soldier. He ran his tongue around his cracked and scabbed lips. “My captain actually shot people that he thought were deserters.”
“Dear God!”
The sergeant explained, “By the time I reached the gate near the river, it was blocked with thousands of troops. Trucks, cars, wagons, junks were everywhere. Even abandoned horses and donkeys! It was hopeless. No one could get through. No boats were left, anyway.”
Jasmine grimaced. Without a boat, the soldiers couldn’t cross the Yangtze River to safety. They had been trapped.
“So, I turned back and tried to find a different way. We—several dozen of us—even considered surrendering.”
She sucked in her breath. “But you didn’t…”
“We talked about it,” the sergeant stuttered, ashamed. “Then we heard ‘Jiu ming! Help us!’ and saw a group of Japs dragging four girls from a school. The dirty bastards stripped off their clothes and tied them to a wooden barricade in the middle of the street and…” He dropped his chin to his chest. When he spoke again, his voice cracked. “Dozens of Japs lined up…eager to take their turns. We were hiding in a nearby building. The girls cried. The bastards laughed. The sound drove us crazy. We had no choice but to try to stop them, so we fired.”
“What happened? Did you save the girls?”
“No. There were too many Japs.”
“How did you get away then?”
“Most of us didn’t.” A muscle twitched in his chin. “The place had been bombed and gutted. Three of us escaped to another building by crawling on a beam. They chased us, but then the oddest thing happened.” He looked over at a teenager with acne.
“Our unit was hiding in that building,” the teenager said. “We’d already decided to put down our weapons. We were cut off from retreat. We were hungry, thirsty, worn out. Some of us were sick or wounded. We thought, you know, maybe the Japs would give us food and water if we gave up. About fifty of us walked out with hands raised. I missed it—I was taking a leak.”
The sergeant added, “The Japs probably thought it was everyone, so they didn’t search the building.” His Adam’s apple slid up and down. “They surrounded the disarmed soldiers then tied their hands behind their backs. They lined them up on the street and…”
Jasmine could hear the undisguised anguish in his voice. Her heart constricted in her chest.
The lanky man took a shuddering breath before continuing. “They mowed down the entire group with machine guns. We watched… There was nothing we could do. There were only three of us. We had rifles but no bullets left.”
Tears came to his eyes. “Hell! I’ll never get their screams out of my head as long as I live. Afterward, the bastards kicked the bodies to make sure they were all dead and stabbed anyone who was still alive.”
His face collapsed in grief. “When everything was quiet, we heard it again—the girls crying from the barricade. Apparently, while this group of Japs was killing the prisoners, another group had found the girls and…”
Jasmine paled. She felt Xiao Mei tighten her grip on her arm.
“We should have shot the girls while we had the chance. We should have put them out of their misery. They died anyway. But what they went through…” He threw back his head and released a roar of rage and frustration. His righ
t hand balled into a fist and thumped against his thigh.
Despair descended upon everyone inside the tiny office. Outside gunshots and explosions came and went. Fire illuminated the sky.
Finally, the young man with acne said, “I saw them leaving the building several hours later.” He pointed to the sergeant. “So I ran after them.”
“Two more joined us along the way.”
Jasmine felt sympathy for the young soldiers. Their commanders had clearly abandoned them in their hour of need. Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, had left Nanking four days before the attack. General Tang, the Defense Commander, vowed to live or die with Nanking. But he, too, had fled as soon as the invasion started, leaving tens of thousands of soldiers behind without a way to defend themselves.
Moved by the plight of the soldiers, she picked up her half-full bowl of rice porridge and handed it to the lanky man. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Lu Ping.” He nodded his thanks, took a sip, and passed it to his companions.
Xiao Mei and the other young women followed with whatever they had left in their bowls.
“Where are you from?” asked Jasmine.
“Northeast. My home is gone, though.” Lu Ping’s eyes were bright with tears, and he swallowed hard to hold them back. “The Japs burned our house and killed everyone in my family: Grandpa, Mom, Dad, two younger brothers, three sisters, my wife, and…my unborn child.” He dragged his hand down his face as if to wipe away his pain.
Jasmine’s heart ached. She understood his grief. The image of her own parents lying in a pool of blood flashed through her mind. “I’m so sorry,” she croaked.
The priest sighed and placed a hand on Lu Ping’s shoulder. “I’d better talk to the other members of the International Committee. I’ll see what we can do to help the trapped soldiers.”
Chapter 8