Nanjing Requiem

39




I NOTICED that the students liked Alice very much, not because of their fondness for English but because of the way she conducted her classes. Although thirty-seven, Alice was so youthful and vivacious that if viewed from the rear and with a kerchief over her corn-silk hair, you could easily take her for a student, especially when she was among the girls. She often taught them hymns and American folk songs, staged miniature scenes of American life—shopping, asking for directions, visiting the post office, canvassing—and even showed them how to make lemonade, cakes, and fruit pies. One evening in early May, Minnie, Alice, and I took a stroll through campus while talking about how to monitor the students, particularly the few firebrands, so that they wouldn’t run away again or endanger themselves. Alice agreed to often engage them in small talk to follow their concerns. As the three of us were approaching the south dormitory, we saw a crowd in front of the building.

“Yeah, smash her mug!” someone urged. I recognized Meiyan’s rasping voice.

We hurried over and saw two students rolling on the ground. One was a tall girl named Yuting, whose father had been among the six IRC men arrested by the Japanese and had died in prison recently. The other was the mousy girl who’d slid her forefinger across her throat on the night of the emperor’s birthday, mocking the singers of patriotic songs. “Damn you,” Yuting gasped, pulling the girl’s hair. “Tell your dad we’ll get rid of him sooner or later.”

The small girl kicked her assailant aside, rolled away, and scrambled to her feet. “He had nothing to do with your father’s death, all right? You’re going out of your mind.”

“Rip her tongue out of her trap!” Meiyan told Yuting.

The runty girl turned to the crowd. “My dad just designs boats. He only supervises twelve people in his institute. You’ve blamed the wrong man.”

“He builds patrol boats for the Japs,” someone said.

“Yeah, your dad is a stooge,” added another.

“But he has to work to support our family,” the girl wailed, her nose bleeding. “He has no direct contact with the Japs.”

“I’m gonna to finish you off right here!” Yuting yelled, and rushed toward her again.

All of a sudden, the cloudless night became darker, the moon fading away. The whitish boles of the ginkgos and aspens around us disappeared. A handful of yellowish stars blinked faintly, as if the invisible chains connecting them had all at once snapped, scattering them across the sky. Everybody turned silent, awestruck. It took me a while to realize that a full eclipse was under way. Dogs began barking, and a tremendous din rose from the neighborhood in the southwest. Then came the sounds of people beating pots, pans, and basins while firecrackers exploded and horns blared. Every household in the area seemed to be engaged in the great commotion, which threw the girls into a panic. They all stood there listening; some moved their heads this way and that, totally confused. I felt embarrassed by the racket, which showed how backward we Chinese were in understanding this natural phenomenon.

“What’s going on?” Alice asked in a guarded whisper.

“It’s an eclipse,” Minnie said.

“That I know.”

“People believe that some animal in the sky is swallowing the moon, so they’re making all that noise to scare it away.”

Indeed, this was the locals’ way of driving off the mystical creatures, a dragon or a divine hound, who was attempting to eat up the moon. If they’d still had firearms, I was sure they’d have fired volleys of bullets and pellets into the sky. There was simply no way to convince them that the moon’s momentary disappearance was merely due to Earth’s passing between the moon and the sun.

Alice told the girls in her stern contralto voice, “You all see that the Lord of Heaven doesn’t approve of your fighting like wild animals. Now, go back to your dorms.”

Meiyan, who knew English better than the others, told the girls what the teacher meant. At once the crowd dispersed, disappearing into the dark or into the nearby dormitories. A few scraps of paper were fluttering on the ground in the dim light shed through several windows.

Once the girls were out of earshot, we couldn’t help laughing. “You scared the heck out of them,” Minnie told Alice.

“We had to break up the fight. The eclipse came in handy.”

“You’d better explain to them that it’s just a natural phenomenon—that there’s no such thing as a dragon or divine dog.”

“Okay, I’ll speak about it in class tomorrow.”

A couple of minutes later, the moon came out again, bright and golden like a huge mango. In the distance a line of electric poles reappeared with the wires glistening, and the distant din subsided. We headed back to Minnie’s quarters. Alice told us, “I once saw an eclipse in Kyoto, but nobody made a fuss about it. People just went out and watched.”

“That’s why I sometimes wonder how a backward country like China could fight Japan,” Minnie said.

“Do you believe China will win this war?” Alice asked.

“Only in the long run and with international help.”

“I’m sure we’ll win eventually,” I said.

We entered the flower garden encircled by a white picket fence that Minnie had designed a decade before. The air was intense with the scent of lilacs, sweetish and slightly heady. Alice was worried about her job here. Her former girls’ school, sponsored by our denomination, had shut down, and she felt that Mrs. Dennison was always lukewarm about her, probably because it was Minnie who had hired her. Minnie assured her that Jinling needed English teachers and she’d be in demand for a long time, so there was no reason to worry.

“She’s such a pain in the ass,” Minnie said about Mrs. Dennison. “I’m wondering if she’s the empress dowager reincarnated.”

We all cracked up. I said, “Minnie, you must avoid clashing with her. Keep in mind that she’s pushing seventy and will retire soon.”

“I don’t think she’ll ever leave China,” said Alice.

“That’s true,” I agreed, “but she’ll be too senile to interfere with the college’s affairs.”

“Sometimes it’s so hard to control my temper,” Minnie admitted.

“Remember our Chinese saying—a bride will become a mother-in-law one day?”

“I may never have that kind of patience,” Minnie said.

“There’s no way to remove Dennison,” I went on. “All you can do is outlive her. Just don’t provoke that crone.”

Minnie turned to Alice. “Someday I’ll become your crazy mother-in-law and kick you around. Will you still put up with me?”

“Only if you find me a husband first,” Alice replied, poker-faced. “Do you have a grown-up son somewhere?”

We all laughed.