Nanjing Requiem

27




THANKS to the increased number of new cars in the city, Cola’s auto-repair business was booming. The Russian man had a Korean partner, who managed the garage and the four Chinese mechanics for him while Cola went out to meet people for business every day. He came to Jinling one morning in mid-October and brought along a little hunchbacked girl, who was blind and frail like a bird, wearing a threadbare sweat suit with the cuffs of the shirt and pants all rolled up. He’d found her begging on the streets, he told us, so he’d taken her in.

“Can you keep her here?” he asked Minnie, smiling engagingly. He always smiled like that.

“My, you’ve been collecting blind girls,” she said.

“I hate to see her running around. Any of the soldiers and gangsters can hurt her, you know.”

So we accepted the girl and had her sent to my daughter in the main dormitory. The girl joined the other four blind ones, whom Liya looked after. Cola didn’t stay for tea in spite of Minnie’s invitation. He was busy, having an appointment with some Japanese logistics officers. Apparently he was on good terms with them. I knew that this yellow-eyed fellow liked the Japanese and looked down on us Chinese. He felt that we had little sense of order, didn’t abide by rules and contracts, lacked consistency, and on the whole were unpredictable. He used to tell other foreigners, “You can’t take the Chinese seriously.”

Before leaving, Cola asked for a bunch of marigolds, which Old Liao gladly went to cut for him. Unlike in the years prior to the occupation, our college no longer held its annual show of a thousand pots of chrysanthemums, an event that both Minnie and the old gardener used to work together passionately to arrange. Now we had plenty of surplus flowers.

As we were waiting for Old Liao in the quadrangle, Yulan appeared, wearing rubber boots and a canary rain cape with a hood in spite of the cloudless sky. At the sight of Cola, she stopped midstride, then shouted at the top of her voice, “Bestial Jap, go back to your tiny home island!” She stabbed her fist in the air while stamping her foot. “Wild beast, get out of here!”

Startled, Big Liu and I ran over to her. Before we could reach her, Miss Lou emerged, grabbed the madwoman by the arm, and dragged her away. Yulan, her eyes blazing with hatred, kept yelling, “Motherless Japs, get out of China!” while the little evangelical worker raised her hand to muffle that furious voice. Together they scrambled away toward the front gate. I was amazed by Miss Lou’s strength—she was hauling Yulan away with one hand.

Big Liu and I returned to Minnie and Cola, who knew Chinese and must have sensed Yulan’s hostility. He asked us what that was about. Boiling with anger, I spat out, “That young woman was raped by the Japs and lost her mind.”

“She took me to be Japanese?” Cola asked.

“Apparently so,” Minnie said.

“Good heavens, I’m a Western devil, not an Eastern devil.” He laughed out loud, but none of us responded. Indeed, he was tall and blond, and even his eyebrows were yellow, as were the tiny tufts of hair in his ears.

While waiting for Old Liao, we gave Cola a brief tour through a homecraft class in which the women were weaving blankets. He was impressed and touched the looms and the wool time and again, saying that his mother and aunts in Siberia had done this kind of work too, though they used smaller looms. He got so excited that he stepped on the treadle of an idle machine to see how easily the beams revolved. He also spoke to a few women in Mandarin, asking their opinions on the war looming over Europe. None of them had thought of that; in fact, some of them didn’t even know where Europe was. When we came out of the building, Old Liao was waiting with a bunch of marigolds. He handed it to Cola. Together we headed for the front gate.

We stopped at the nursery, where toddlers were playing a game called Dropping a Hanky. A little girl was running around a circle of kids, holding an orange handkerchief and laughing, while the others were clapping their hands and chorusing a song.

As we were watching the children, Minnie told Cola, “Most of these kids have no fathers anymore.”

“I have to say you’ve been doing a saint’s work,” he said. Then to our amazement, he bowed deeply to her with the golden flowers held before his chest.

“Gosh, what are you doing, proposing to me?” Minnie joked.

“Why not?” he said. “Principal Vaultrin, would you marry me?”

“No, you’re too young for this woman,” Minnie replied.

We all broke up.

Cola went out of the gate, got into his Mercedes with chrome lights and bumpers, and drove away.

After seeing him off, Minnie and I discussed what to do about the five blind girls. I liked them, for they were all cheerful and three of them could knit gloves and hats, and yet I felt they were becoming a burden. Up to now, my daughter had been taking care of them, but Liya might not be able to do this all by herself for long. I said to Minnie, “They’ll be better off if they go to a special school for the blind. We should find a permanent home for them.”

“I’ll write to Shanghai,” she agreed, “to see if they can find a school for the girls.”

“I’m sure there is a place that would like to have them. The girls are quick learners and can earn their own keep.”

Intuitively we both knew we’d better send the blind girls away soon, because if Mrs. Dennison came back, their presence would irritate her. She always emphasized that Jinling must educate the brightest girls in China. We had “to set the bar high for entry” if we wanted to become a preeminent college, ideally China’s Wellesley. The following day Minnie wrote to Ruth Chester, the head of the Chemistry Department who was in charge of the Jinling group in Shanghai, to ask her to look for a school for the five girls.

We felt lucky that we had established the two programs on campus; otherwise the Japanese would have seized the unoccupied classroom buildings and dormitories for military use, as they’d done to some deserted schools in town. On the other hand, we couldn’t help feeling anxious, unable to envision how long the present chaos would last and how the college could ever get back on its feet. Everything seemed to depend on when the Japanese left, which might never happen. They must have meant to make the seized land part of Japan eventually, since the whole purpose of this war was to expand Japanese territory. Was our college gone for good? We were unsure, and the uncertainty tormented us.

Recently more money had been donated by Jinling’s alumnae for setting up a program similar to the Homecraft School, but there was no way Minnie could find more teachers, as most of the educated people had not returned to Nanjing. Minnie said she was glad about the freedom Jinling enjoyed from any government’s restrictions and from the academic rigor of a first-rate college—our two programs could tailor their curricula to suit their own needs. The officials in charge of education in the puppet municipality were supposed to supervise all the schools, but some of them were too ashamed to come and instead would send their minions to do perfunctory inspections. Once in a while, an official or two did show up, but they were all quite lenient and flexible. A few were glad that their daughters had taken the entrance test last fall and been enrolled in our middle school.

IN LATE NOVEMBER the weather turned freezing. The naked branches were coated with hoarfrost in the morning, though water would drip from the trees in the rising sun. The cold weather made it hard for the students, who had to take class in unheated rooms. The coal from Wuhan had arrived two weeks before, but to everyone’s dismay, it wouldn’t burn to give heat. I didn’t know what to do with it and often condemned the dealer representing the coal mine, saying, “He’ll have enough heat in hell.”

“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 f*ck 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.