Nanjing Requiem

4




THE BORDERS of the Safety Zone had all been marked by Red Cross flags, though the Chinese army had been building batteries and defense works inside the southern part of the zone. John Rabe had to wrangle with Colonel Huang, an aide-de-camp to Generalissimo Chiang, to get the troops out of the neutral district. The young officer believed that the very sight of the Safety Zone would demoralize the soldiers who “must defend the city to the last drop of blood.” No matter how Rabe argued that from the military point of view it was absurd to set up defenses here, the colonel wouldn’t be persuaded—yet he took off with the general staff a few days later. Rabe joked afterward, “It’s so easy to resolve to fight with others’ blood.”

Before the generalissimo departed, he’d had another forty thousand yuan of the promised cash delivered to the Safety Zone Committee with a letter thanking the Westerners for their relief work. Some of the foreigners believed that the Chinese army was just putting up a show to save face, but Rabe didn’t think so. He was fearful that General Tang Sheng-chi, Chiang’s rival of a sort, who had only reluctantly assumed the role of the commander of the Nanjing defense, might sacrifice everything, including the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. Two days earlier the general had had dozens of boats burned to demonstrate that his troops would stand their ground, fighting with their backs to the river.

Rabe protested again to the officers in charge of the artillery units placed inside the Safety Zone and even threatened to resign his chairmanship and dissolve the Safety Zone Committee if the military personnel remained there, because that would give the Japanese a pretext to attack and eliminate the zone. General Tang assigned Colonel Long to work with Rabe, and together they managed to remove the troops. At the news of their withdrawal, we breathed a sigh of relief—our effort to set up refugee camps might not be wasted.

On Wednesday afternoon, December 8, Minnie held a neighborhood meeting, and more than a hundred people attended it, mostly women. Usually such a gathering in the chapel would draw a larger crowd because food was offered afterward, mainly bread and light pastries. Today the attendees were not interested in loaves and fishes; instead, they were eager to find out how soon they could come to Jinling at the time of crisis. For many of them, our college was the only sanctuary they could imagine. Miss Lou, an evangelical worker in the neighborhood, was present at the meeting. The previous day Minnie had allowed this middle-aged woman with intense eyes and a slightly sunken mouth to move into the Practice Hall and take charge of the refugees to be housed there. Miss Lou had no official affiliation with our college, but she was one of the few locals we could depend on. This little woman knew which people in the neighborhood were really destitute, so whenever we wanted to distribute charity, we’d go to her for assistance.

“Principal Vautrin, can I bring my dad with me when I come?” a slope-shouldered woman asked. “He’s bedridden and I can’t leave him behind.”

“Well, we will open our camp only to women and children,” Minnie answered.

A few men booed. One of them complained, “You can’t reject us like this, Principal Vautrin! This is unfair.”

I turned around to scowl at those men, some of whom were ne’er-do-wells, playing chess, cards, and mah-jongg day and night. Some had even snuck onto our campus to pilfer things.

Minnie waved for them to stop. As the hall quieted down, she resumed: “Ours is a women’s college, so it would be inappropriate for us to accommodate men.” She turned to a group of women. “Your menfolk can go to the other camps that take in families.”

“Why separate us?” a female voice asked.

“You won’t be separated for long,” Minnie said. “We’re talking about a matter of life or death while you’re still thinking about how to stay comfortably with your man.”

That cracked up the audience. We all knew that this woman had no children; she had been nicknamed the Barren One. She dropped her eyes, her cheeks crimson.

“Where are those camps that also accept men?” another female voice asked.

Minnie replied, “Wutaishan Primary School, the old Communications Ministry, Nanjing University’s Library, the military chemical shops—practically all the other camps admit families except for the one at the university’s dorms.”

“They’re too far away,” an old woman cried.

My temper was simmering. As I was wondering whether to say something to those selfish people, Miss Lou stood up and turned around to face them, her deep-set eyes steady behind her thick glasses. “Let’s remember who we are,” she said. “Jinling College is under no obligation whatsoever to accommodate any of us, but it offers to shelter us from the Eastern devils. We ought to appreciate what Principal Vautrin and her colleagues have been doing for us.”

“Shut up, little toady!” a male voice shouted from the back.

I stood and began to speak. “This is a chapel, not a cheap tavern where you can swear at will. So stop name-calling or make an exit. As for the men here, don’t you feel ashamed to compete with women and kids for safety? If you cannot fight the enemy and protect your families with arms, at least you should have the decency to leave them in more capable hands, while you look for refuge for yourselves elsewhere.”

That silenced the crowd, and for a moment the hall was so quiet that the distant artillery fire suddenly seemed to rumble louder and closer. After Miss Lou and I had sat down, Minnie continued, “We welcome all women and children, but we will do our best to shelter young women and girls first. That’s to say we encourage older women to stay home if they already live within the Safety Zone.”

“How about boys?” a woman asked from the back.

“Good question,” Minnie said. “Boys under thirteen will be admitted.”

“My fourteen-year-old is still a little kid,” a mother cried.

“But there’re fourteen-year-olds who are almost grown. We have to save room for girls and young women. In your son’s case, you should say he’s thirteen.”

That brought out peals of laughter.

“When can we come?” the same woman asked.

“When it’s no longer safe to stay home. Bring only your bedding, a change of clothes, and some money. No chests or boxes, please.”

At the meeting’s end, Miss Lou, the zealous little woman, read Psalm 70 loudly. She cried out the refrain in a shrill voice: “Make haste to help me, O God.” Then we all stood up and sang the chorus from the hymn “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.” I’d bet that only a few of the attendees knew the words by heart; nevertheless, we all sang with abandon, some holding large hymnals with both hands, and our voices were earnest and strong.

THAT EVENING we received the first group of refugees. Most of them had come from the countryside, and some had trekked all the way from Wuxi, a city more than a hundred miles to the east. The Japanese had not only plundered their villages and towns but also seized young men and women, so people had abandoned their homes and fled to Nanjing, or had tried to cross the Yangtze to reach Pukou, unaware that the Japanese had just captured that area outside Nanjing to cut the retreat route of the Chinese army. The Japanese torched most houses along the way, destroyed whatever they couldn’t use, and had felled thickets and forests within a quarter mile of the railroads to prevent their supply trains from being ambushed. To defend the capital, the Chinese army was also razing civilian homes, especially in the Jurong area; it ordered people to leave their villages and then burned their houses to clear all possible obstructions to its cannons. This created more refugees, and now crowds of them swarmed at the city gates, waiting to be let in.

A woman with salt-and-pepper hair collapsed in front of us, sitting on a boulder and weeping while relating her story. “My daughter and I came to town to sell taros,” she sobbed, “but there was such a big crowd gathering outside Guanghua Gate that I lost her. I thought she’d get through the gate anyway and we could meet inside the city wall, but after I came in, the gate was suddenly closed ’cause the Japs began shelling that area. I waited inside the wall for the whole afternoon and couldn’t go out to look for her. Our home’s already gone, and she wouldn’t know where to go. Oh, my poor child, she’s just eleven.”

Some families came intact, but the men had to go elsewhere to find shelter for themselves. Most of them were willing to do so, grateful that their wives and children were in safe hands. A sleepy-eyed man went up to Minnie and implored her to give his family a little food because they had no money. She told him, “Don’t worry. We won’t let them starve.”

Word had it that the camps that accepted men as well were filling rapidly. We had not expected to receive refugees so soon, and now, on the evening of December 8, more than a hundred were already here. Minnie told ruddy-faced Luhai to set up a soup kitchen that would open the next morning.