Nanjing Requiem

46




ON SUNDAY, the day before Christmas, Big Liu came to the president’s office and flopped into a chair. “Meiyan and Luhai ran away,” he croaked. “I didn’t mean to spoil your holiday mood, Minnie, but I thought you should know so you could find someone for the job left by Luhai.”

“Heavens, you mean they just eloped?” Minnie asked.

“I don’t know if they’re close like a couple. Apparently Luhai has been a bad influence and misled her. The girl has been in terrible shape ever since she was taken by the Japanese.”

“She must’ve been traumatized.”

“She’s hatred itself and kept saying China needed a revolution if we wanted to defeat Japan.” Big Liu’s face contorted as if he were suppressing a hiccup caused by heartburn.

“Do you think she’s really fond of Luhai?” I asked.

“I can’t tell, but she said they were just friends. Luhai must have connections with some resistance force. Who could’ve imagined he would abandon his family? I just hope he’ll treat Meiyan well, but that man has shifty eyes—he’s not reliable.”

“Are you going to hunt them down?” Minnie said.

“Where would I look? She’s grown enough to choose her own way of living.”

“Luhai’s family must be in a muddle.” Minnie turned to me. “Should we do something for his wife and kids?”

“Maybe we should,” I said.

The door opened and Donna stepped in, holding a letter. “Minnie,” she panted, “this is for you.”

“From whom?” Minnie took it.

“A young boy handed it to me and said it was from Ban, who left with Luhai. I was told to give it to you immediately.”

“You mean Ban also ran away?” I asked Donna, whose face was flushed.

“Apparently so.”

Minnie unfolded the sheet of yellow paper and found that Luhai had written the letter in English. I knew he had often perused the North China Daily News and other English papers, but I’d never heard him speak the language, which I’d been unsure he could read. Probably he had composed the letter in English to keep other Chinese from learning its contents. Nonetheless, Minnie read it out loud to us:

Dear Dean Vautrin:



Meiyan, Ban, and I decide to escape Nanjing. We want to be in the force fighting for our motherland, so we prepare to sacrifice everything, including family. If the country is lost, our home can not be same any more and our individual success mean nothing. Please do not trouble yourself and find us, because we are going very, very far away, under different name. But I have favors a favor to beg you—please give some helps to my wife and children, because I can do nothing for them from today on. One day I shall return like a fighter and a hero. Thank you from bottom of my heart. I shall remember your kindness forever.



Donna burst into laughter. “What kind of nonsense is that?” she snorted. “A man dumped his wife and kids on the pretext of sacrificing for his country.”

“The rascal is shameless,” Big Liu grunted.

“This is a bizarre letter,” Minnie admitted. “But why would Ban flee with them as well?”

“That boy hates the Japanese,” I said.

“Where do you think they might go?” Minnie asked.

“I’ve no idea,” Big Liu answered. “I hope they won’t head for the Communists’ base in Yan’an. Meiyan said she’d join any kind of resistance force as long as she could get out of Nanjing.”

“By why did the three of them flee together?” I said.

“Luhai was unhappy about his marriage, because his parents had picked his wife for him,” replied Big Liu.

Donna tittered, her face shiny and slightly fleshy. “So to fight an invader is a fine solution to marital trouble.”

“Stop it, Donna,” Minnie said. “Don’t be so sarcastic. I don’t think Luhai ran away because he wanted to dump his family. He’s not that kind of man.”

“That’s true,” I chimed in. “He wants to fight the Japanese, and so must Meiyan and Ban.”

We all agreed that no matter what, we ought to do something for Luhai’s wife. So Minnie and I went to see Mrs. Dennison to brief her about the runaways. To our relief, the old woman suggested that Jinling offer Fuwan, Luhai’s wife, a hundred yuan and persuade her to return to her folks in the countryside. We both felt this would be a reasonable solution.

“Son of a gun!” Mrs. Dennison said about Ban. “He took off without leaving me a word.”

With little difficulty, I convinced Fuwan to leave for her parents’ home. The poor woman, her eyes puffy, said that she was tired of city life anyway—if she stayed here, her two small sons might grow up to be bad like their father. In addition, Nanjing was such a horrible place that she was often depressed, so she wouldn’t mind returning to the countryside.

But a week later Luhai’s father, a trim man with beetle eyebrows, came from Shenyang to fetch his grandsons. He claimed that nobody could separate his grandkids from him and his wife. Fuwan and the boys left with him on the sly. This baffled us, and Mrs. Dennison regretted having given away a hundred yuan too easily.

With the old woman’s approval, Minnie offered Big Liu the business manager’s job left open by Luhai’s departure, but Big Liu wouldn’t take it, saying he preferred to teach. He had a good reputation as a teacher and used to be on the faculty of the language school, which had shut down long ago. Since there were more foreign academics and diplomats in town now, he could have earned more than his current salary—fifty yuan a month—by offering Chinese lessons (we all drew eighty percent of our normal pay now). To our relief, he told Minnie a few days later that he would continue working as Jinling’s Chinese secretary, because he felt this was more meaningful and also it was safer for his family to stay on campus. Mr. Rong, the assistant manager, was promoted to the position abandoned by Luhai.

AFTER THE NEW YEAR a bullnecked man named Boren, a friend of Luhai’s, came to see Mrs. Dennison and Minnie. He lived in the neighborhood and had always been hostile to Jinling and the local missionary groups. He had come to visit Luhai every once in a while. Boren was respected by the locals as a community leader of sorts and had been quite vocal about the missionary work, which he believed had brought about chaos in China. He had disliked Miss Lou and accused her of always toadying to the foreigners. He and I had never been on good terms either. But the moment he sat down in the president’s office, he was all smiles and even thanked me as I poured tea for him from a red clay teapot. He told us that the fall of our city had changed him, because Jinling had sheltered his family of seven for four months while he was away in Hunan Province taking care of his bedridden mother. His home, which was three hundred years old, had been burned down by the Japanese, and most of his antique furniture had been fed to the bonfire in the center of his courtyard.

He wanted to sell us a piece of land because he needed cash. His dog had snapped at a Japanese soldier’s heel and gotten its master into trouble. The bite was nothing serious, just two tiny punctures on the foot, but the Japanese police had hauled Boren in and beaten him up, despite his promise to kill the dog and let them have its meat.

“I sent everything, including its skin, to those bastards,” Boren said, “but they still won’t leave me alone. They said I had disabled a soldier and must accept the full consequences.”

“What does that mean?” Minnie said.

“I asked a friend of mine. He suggested I spend some money to appease the Japanese. But I don’t have any cash on hand. Everybody’s hard up for cash these days. My neighbor works in a factory and is paid in pots and ladles because they can’t ship their products out of Nanjing anymore. Every evening he has to peddle utensils downtown. If your school can buy a piece of land from me, you’ll save my life, and also my family.”

This came as a surprise. Both Mrs. Dennison and Minnie were intrigued. When the college was being founded, the old president had tried in vain to purchase land from Boren’s father; now this offer could be an opportunity, but Mrs. Dennison and Minnie wanted to look at the property again before deciding.