Nanjing Requiem

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 desire 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.

Minnie spoke with Lewis, who helped her compose a letter of protest demanding the immediate release of the six men. The next day she delivered it to Vice-Consul Tanaka at the Japanese embassy, where she learned that the six men were being kept in the prison downtown. Even though they’d been tortured and their feet had been shackled, they still refused to admit any wrongdoing.