The Library of Legends

by Janie Chang

  About the Book

  Reading Group Guide

  The majority of English-language novels set during World War II take place in Europe. What did you know about World War II in Asia before reading The Library of Legends and how did you learn? In school? Through books? TV and movies?

  The Library of Legends is set during a time of great political and social change. What sorts of situations do the educated young adults of Minghua University encounter to make them question their assumptions?

  Chinese culture has honored education and teachers for thousands of years. Discuss how this is reflected in the novel.

  When reading historical novels, especially those set in foreign places, it can be hard to set aside our modern sensibilities. What situations in the book did you find hard to relate to and why?

  What were the situations you empathized with and why?

  At the beginning of the novel, Lian is aloof and cautious about forming attachments. How does she change over the course of the story and what are the factors that contribute to her change?

  The Second Sino-Japanese War displaced an estimated eighty to one hundred million Chinese. How relevant do you feel the themes in this novel are compared to current world events?

  The students of Minghua University endured a great deal of suffering on their evacuation, both physical and mental. Which of the hardships experienced by the characters would you find most difficult to bear?

  In the novel, it’s not just people but also the gods and guardian spirits of China who are leaving their homes. What do you think the author means to say about the impact this war had on China?

  The author was inspired to write The Library of Legends because of her father’s stories about his life as a refugee student traveling with his university during the years of war between China and Japan. The Author’s Notes highlight some (not all) of the incidents and characters that were based on real life. Which of these affected you the most once you knew they were true events?

  There are many categories of historical fiction. The Library of Legends adds an element of fantasy to an otherwise traditional historical novel (one that stays true to events of the past). How do you feel about historical fiction that crosses genres to incorporate fantasy, alternative history, romance, mystery, and so on?

  If the author were to write a sequel to The Library of Legends, which of the characters would you want the story to follow?

  Behind the Book: The Years of War

  Readers always ask which incidents in the novel are based on true events. There is so much in this book drawn from my own family history and family connections.

  My father was only fourteen when he left home for boarding school. After high school, he went on to Nanking University. When war broke out, students who were able to return home did so, but by then many could not even contact their families. Father felt he had to stay with his professors and school no matter what. A university education was his sworn duty to his family. And so when Nanking University evacuated, he left with them.

  He traveled with classmates, professors, school administrators, and servants. They walked beside donkey carts piled high with luggage, lab equipment, library books, and kitchenware. They traveled in a less-than-organized manner, often breaking off into smaller groups depending on what transportation they could find. Sometimes they split up with plans no more definite than to meet at a certain town in a few days’ time. Some students hitched rides, others climbed on trains, but most walked. They stopped wherever it seemed they might be safe for a few days and always tried to carry on with classes.

  Buddhist and Daoist temples could be found in every village and throughout the countryside. They were the most suitable accommodations since temple halls could be used as both classrooms and sleeping quarters. After long hours of walking, the students would sling off their heavy canvas backpacks, unroll straw mats and blankets onto cold stone floors, and settle down to sleep. My father dreaded the Daoist temples because of their giant demon statues, deities with protruding eyes and enormous fangs, painted in bright colors. Sometimes when he woke in the early hours of the morning, my father would open his eyes to a red-painted guardian from the gates of hell glaring down at him. Decades later, he still suffered nightmares of demons trying to drag him into the underworld.

  When he thought back to those days on the road, my father said that to describe what they did as “fleeing” was ridiculous. He estimated they probably covered no more than eight or ten miles a day, a small distance to put between them and an invading army. But somehow through all this, my father never felt as though he was truly in danger. Since he and his classmates all suffered the same hardships, he simply accepted the constant hunger and fatigue. With the self-centered optimism of youth, he believed he and his classmates were safe as long as they obeyed their teachers.

  But from time to time, a student would disappear and there would be rumors that they had slipped away to enlist or had been murdered by the opposing side. The character of the bold and beautiful Wang Jenmei is based on one of my father’s classmates, a young man who was murdered during the journey, drowned in a lake. Decades later, my father still suffered nightmares in which he had been captured by Communist spies (in his dreams it was always the Communists) who were going to murder him.

  The young field medic Daming is based on the wartime experiences of a dear friend of the family, Chi-Han Chou, our uncle Chou. Like Daming, Uncle Chou was not a very good student and thought that going to war would be an adventure. So he and a classmate dropped out and made their way to the front lines to look for the classmate’s uncle, a general. The two young men were only about nineteen at the time, with no real skills, but they could read. So they were given medical manuals and pressed into service. Unlike Daming, Uncle Chou survived the war. He married my mother’s dearest friend, moved to Taiwan, then Seattle, and lived a long and blessed life.

  The story of Duckling is heart-wrenching and sadly true. A friend of the family, James Oliver Bennington, served during World War II as a water tender second class in the US Navy. On one trip, they transported a troop of Chinese soldiers. One of the soldiers brought his daughter with him. She was “the most be-yoo-tiful little girl,” James recalled. The Americans spoiled the child terribly while she was on board, but in the end there was nothing they could do but watch the young soldier march off to war, his daughter riding on his shoulders. I wrote a better fate for Duckling.

  For the chapters set in Shanghai, I drew upon my mother’s stories. She was fifteen and at boarding school in Nanking when war broke out. Her father (the real Dr. Mao) rushed there to bring her home. The family of nine (my grandparents, my grandfather’s concubine, four children, his intern, and a maidservant) traveled by riverboat from their hometown of Pinghu to Shanghai’s International Settlement. They were luckier than most because as a doctor, my grandfather could support them. For the next eight years they lived in a two-room flat. My grandfather used the front room as his clinic and at night the family spread out over the two rooms to sleep. My mother slept on the examining table.

  My grandfather had developed a cure for opium addiction, and a bank manager in Shanghai heard about this and sought him out. After my grandfather cured him, the manager began referring all his wealthy friends to my grandfather, whose practice thrived until the war ended and the family could return to their hometown of Pinghu.

  As for my father, he was twenty-eight years old before he saw his family and his hometown again.

  Read On

  An Excerpt from Dragon Springs Road by Janie Chang

  CHAPTER 1

  November 1908, Year of the Monkey

  The morning my mother went away, she burned incense in front of the Fox altar.

  The emperor Guangxu and the dowager empress had both died that week. My mother told me our new emperor was a little boy of almost three called Puyi. A child less than half my age now ruled China and she was praying for him. And for us.

  My mother knelt, eyes shut, rockin
g back and forth with clasped hands. I couldn’t hear the prayers she murmured and did my best to imitate her, but I couldn’t help lifting my eyes to steal glances at the picture pasted on the brick wall, a colorful print of a woman dressed in flowing silks, her face sweetly bland, one hand lifted in blessing. A large red fox sat by her feet. A Fox spirit, pictured in her human and animal forms.

  The altar was just a low table placed against the back wall of the kitchen. Its cracked wooden surface held an earthenware jar filled with sand. My mother had let me poke our last handful of incense sticks into the sand and even let me strike a match to light them. We had no food to offer that morning except a few withered plums.

  The Fox gazed down at me with its painted smile.

  After we prayed, my mother dressed me in my new winter tunic.

  “Stay here, Jialing,” she said, pushing the last knot button through its loop. “Be quiet and don’t let anyone know you’re here. Stay inside the Western Residence until Mama comes back.”

  But three days passed and she didn’t come back.

  WE LIVED BY OURSELVES, just the two of us, in the main house of the Western Residence. I usually slept with my mother in her bed, but I was just as used to spending nights in my playroom. It was out in the erfang, a single-story row of five connected rooms, each with a door that opened onto the veranda that wrapped around the front of the building, steps leading down to a paved courtyard. There were two erfang that faced each other across the courtyard, but the other was derelict, its roof fallen in.

  Whenever Noble Uncle came to visit my mother, I had to leave the main house. She would send me to my playroom and fetch me the next morning after he left. Then our placid life would resume.

  Sometimes Noble Uncle took her away for a day or two, but never for this long.

  ON THE FIRST day of my mother’s absence, I paged through the few books in my playroom, then wandered out to the courtyard to shake more plums from the fruit trees. I pulled off their desiccated flesh and put the pits in my pocket. Using the charred end of a stick from the kitchen stove I drew a checkers board on the paving stones and placed pits in the squares. Morning and afternoon I shook the trees, hoping more fruit would fall so that I could have more pieces for my game.

  After two days, I began eating the plums despite their moldy taste.

  But mostly, I watched and waited for my mother to return.

  The smaller front courtyard had gates that opened out to Dragon Springs Road. Years ago my mother had pushed broken furniture against one corner of the courtyard’s walls, tying wooden legs and chair backs together to steady the stack into a platform we could climb. From this perch we had spied on the world outside.

  The honeysuckle that clambered across the top of the wall was bare of leaves, but the tangle of vines was still thick enough for concealment. Looking down to the left, I could see the front courtyard of the Central Residence, the home where Noble Uncle and his family lived. There was a door in the wall between the two front courtyards, but the only one who ever used it had been Noble Uncle.

  To the right was the street. Standing on tiptoe I peered through the vines, hoping to see my mother’s figure alight from a sedan chair or rickshaw, but all I saw were our neighbors, unwitting and uncaring of my presence.

  Back at the Fox altar I knelt down to pray, rocking on my haunches, gaze fixed on the picture pasted to the wall. My nostrils prickled with the musty fragrance of incense. Please, bring back my mama. But the Fox woman looked into the distance, and the Fox merely smiled.

  “Fox spirits are almost always female,” my mother had said. “They can appear in Fox shape or as beautiful women. They help those who befriend them. Some are especially sympathetic to unfortunate women.”

  Now I wondered at my mother’s words. Did she pray to a Fox because she was an unfortunate woman?

  That night I dreamed that I had wandered out to Dragon Springs Road all on my own, when a dreadful knowledge seized me that my mother had gone away never to return. Fear jolted me out of sleep and into the gray light of early morning. I was utterly alone. I cried and cried, but my forlorn wails went unheeded. Curling up under the quilt, I sobbed myself back to sleep.

  The next morning, I lay on the pallet bed with all my clothes on, quilt pulled over my head, trying to keep warm. The plate on the floor taunted me with reminders of chicken and sticky rice steamed in lotus leaf packets, the scent of garlic and sesame oil still clinging to the leaves. My stomach ached, a harsh kneading that twisted my insides. I tried chewing on a lotus leaf, but when I tried to swallow, the tough fibers made me retch and I spat them out.

  Finally, I went outside to get a drink from the well in the courtyard. I knelt beside its low stone wall and pushed aside the wooden lid. I tossed in my tin cup, heard it splash in the dark depths, and pulled on the rope, hand over hand as my mother had taught me. I took care not to lean too far over the stone rim, as she’d always cautioned, and replaced the lid. I didn’t want to end up as the ghost of a drowned girl, dank hair hanging over my face, luring victims to share my fate.

  It won’t be long now, a voice behind me said. People are coming. I can hear them up the road. The voice was high pitched, the words pronounced precisely.

  I swung around. An animal with tawny red fur yawned, showing a pink tongue and sharp white teeth. It looked like one of the stray dogs that sometimes came into Dragon Springs Road, but it was sleek, not mangy, with a plume of a tail. A fox. Its eyes shone amber yellow, dark centers with flecks of green in their depths. Its snout was long and elegant, its paws neat and stockinged in black. Then it vanished.

  Startled, I dropped my cup and toppled over, my back against the well. Had I fallen asleep and dreamed the creature?

  Then I heard voices. Unfamiliar voices. Voices shouting commands, voices shouting in reply.

  I hurried through the bamboo grove to the front courtyard and climbed up the pile of furniture. Next door, the gates stood wide open. There was excited laughter and chatter from the street, and then a woman’s voice called out in stern tones.

  “Silence! Show respect for the spirits in our new home!”

  The chatter ceased immediately.

  “All the doors and windows are open, Old Mistress.” A sturdy man in plain blue servant’s garb came out from the main courtyard to face the entrance gate. “Any spirits who wanted to leave should be gone now.”

  “Does everyone have something to carry?” A male voice, deep and jovial. “We mustn’t enter our new home empty-handed.”

  A man stepped over the threshold of the entrance gate. An exuberant smile lit his round face. His long queue gleamed with the same dark shine as his satin skullcap, and he carried a bundle of books under his arm.

  The old woman by his side wore her white hair scraped severely into a bun, her forehead covered by a wide band of black silk. She carried a pair of scrolls and tottered in on tiny feet. Then two younger women stepped into the entrance courtyard. One had a rounded, smiling face and a rounded belly; she held a basket of fruit against her hip. The other was tall and pale, with pursed lips that gave her a dour expression; a panel of embroidered fabric hung over one thin arm.

  A young man and a girl followed. The young man carried a small lacquerware box, the girl a covered basket. She was tall, nearly as tall as my mother, with hair dressed in two heavy braids looped with ribbons on either side of her head, glossy and thick. Her padded winter tunic of dark blue flannel just reached her ankles.

  Then came a female servant holding a little boy by the hand. Two more female servants entered, gazing around and up, but they didn’t see my face peering from behind the vines.

  “Lao-er, where’s our lucky orange tree?” The jovial voice belonged to the round-faced man. He stood at the threshold of the inner gate, ready to enter the main courtyard. “Go, go. Plant it!”

  The servant who had first spoken pushed the entrance gate open wide and wheeled in a barrow. On the barrow were gardening tools and a small orange tree, its root ball boun
d inside a muddy burlap bag. The small procession crossed through the inner gate and into the main courtyard. More handbarrows and workers followed, loaded down with furniture and belongings.

  My mother wasn’t among those parading in and out.

  Back in the courtyard, I shook one of the plum trees at the edge of the bamboo garden. Four aged fruits fell from its branches. I scooped what I could into my hands and ate it all, not caring about the grit that covered the plums. I spat out the pits and arranged them on my checkerboard.

  A scraping noise sent me scuttling into the playroom, the sound of the gate between the two front courtyards opening. I waited, kneeling by the window. Through the carved latticework of the window shutters, I saw a figure enter the courtyard. It was the girl.

  For a moment she vanished from sight as the path took her through the bamboo trees, then she appeared again, following the path through the rockery and under the garden arch. She took her time, pausing to look at a rock, a striped bamboo trunk, the carved stone of the arch. She gazed around the courtyard and the buildings that enclosed it, the two-level main house at the far end of the courtyard, the erfang where I was hiding, the derelict erfang opposite, the bamboo garden she had just come through. She climbed the steps to the veranda of the main house and peered through the carved lattice windows, into the rooms where my mother and I had lived. Then she walked back down the veranda steps and paused to look down at the plum pits lying on the makeshift checkerboard.

  Show yourself to her, the voice said.

  I blinked at the Fox who had appeared beside me. I reached my hand out to touch, to feel whether it was real. The creature gave me a small lick, a raspy warm sensation that gave me courage.

  “Who are you?” I whispered.

  Your mother burned incense to a Fox spirit, it said. Don’t you remember?

  My mother had been fond of telling stories about Fox spirits. “Are you a good spirit or an evil one?”