Nanjing Requiem

52




HALF A YEAR after Minnie’s death, the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States went to war with Japan. The Japanese confiscated our college and deported Mrs. Dennison, Donna, and Alice. Our campus became a cavalry barracks for some years.

My family moved to a suburb, and Liya and I did odd jobs to get by. My husband, Yaoping, didn’t return until the Japanese were defeated. He’d lost half his teeth. In the meantime, my son-in-law came back once to see his wife and son, but he fled to Taiwan with the Nationalist army before the Communists seized power in 1949. Afterward he sent Liya a letter via Hong Kong and told her to remarry, for he couldn’t come back to the mainland anymore. He implied that he would form a new family in Kao-hsiung. “Life would be too short for such an indefinite wait,” he wrote. Liya took to her bed for weeks, though two years later she married a shop clerk and has lived an uneventful life since.

Owing to his past connections with the American professors, my husband was classified as an unreliable person by the Communists, but he remained at Nanjing University as a lecturer, unscathed by political shifts. Big Liu was not so lucky. When Searle Bates was leaving China in the spring of 1950, dozens of Chinese saw him off at the side entrance of the university, and Big Liu cried out in front of everyone, “Searle, come back someday. We will miss you!” Those words were reported as evidence of his reactionary outlook, and seven years later he was labeled a rightist who constantly dreamed of the day the American imperialists would take over China. For that he suffered bitterly for decades.

Ban also had rotten luck. He fled Jinling with Luhai and Meiyan and joined the Nationalist army in Hunan Province. He was captured by the Communists in the civil war and sent back to Nanjing, where he was made to labor at a brick kiln. I saw him once in the summer of 1951—he was tall but bent like an old man and had a gray widow’s peak, though he was not yet thirty. He called me Auntie and I only nodded, too sad to say a word. Probably luckier than him, both Luhai and Meiyan died in the war. He was killed by Japanese artillery, and she was shot dead by a sniper while she was rescuing a wounded soldier. Although she was named a martyr, her father still had to suffer by virtue of his closeness with the foreigners.

Times have not affected Miss Lou that much. She worked at the orphanage left by Monica for a few years and later, after the Communists took over the country, became a kindergarten teacher.

Dr. Wu didn’t leave with the Nationalists for Taiwan despite their repeated urging. For that, she was reinstated by the Communists as the head of our school, which later became part of Nanjing Normal College. She was respected as a dignitary, and I resumed working for her.

After the Japanese surrendered, a portion of my diary was serialized by Nanjing Daily as evidence of the Japanese war atrocities. For that I was known as the Chinese woman who helped Minnie Vautrin run the Jinling refugee camp. In the summer of 1947, the Nationalist government interviewed me and then sent me to Tokyo as an eyewitness at the war crimes trials. For the first time I set foot in Japan.

All the hearings were conducted in a large white building, and each session was attended by more than a thousand people. The Chinese side hadn’t made a lot of preparations for the trial, assuming that as victors we could punish those war criminals at will, whereas the Japanese side was well prepared. Each defendant had two lawyers assigned to him, one American and the other Japanese. Most Japanese lawyers didn’t raise a peep, but the American lawyers were loud and arrogant and would even ridicule the witnesses as if we were the ones on trial. As a result, the judges threw some of them out of court.

One day in mid-August, as I was approaching the courthouse with a group of Chinese eyewitnesses, a thirtyish woman in a white kimono appeared with a young boy and bowed to me. Instantly I recognized her, so I stepped away from my colleagues and took her aside. Mitsuko kept bowing while saying in accented Mandarin, “Mother, here’s your grandson.”

Tears gushed out of my eyes, but I dared not speak much. She pushed Shin forward and told him, “Say ‘Grandma.’ ”

“Grandma,” he mumbled, a little worm of wrinkles on his forehead.

I squatted down and hugged and kissed him. He even smelled like his father. “Do you go to school?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“In what grade?”

He didn’t get the question, but Mitsuko put in, “Second.”

“When’s your birthday?”

His mother answered, “December fourth.”

“I will remember that, Shin,” I said, and kissed him between the eyes.

The hearing was to resume at one thirty, just a few minutes away. A Chinese official came out of the foyer and beckoned me to enter the court. What should I do? By no means could I let others know I was meeting my family members here. I was representing all the Nanjing women brutalized by the Japanese army and couldn’t possibly acknowledge Mitsuko and Shin overtly now. That would have amounted to inviting disaster. On the spur of the moment, I took off the gold bangle from my wrist and handed it to Mitsuko. “Haowen wanted you to have this,” I said, clasping her hand with both of mine. “Please don’t come to this place again. It’s not safe.”

Without waiting for her response, I veered and headed for the courthouse, my legs shaking. I had no clue where exactly we were staying, because all the Chinese eyewitnesses were semiquarantined, traveling as a group between the courthouse and the hotel, a wooden villa on the Sumida River. Otherwise I would have let Mitsuko know where we might meet again.

Several American missionaries were in Tokyo for the war crimes trials as well: Searle, Reverend Magee, Dr. Wilson, and Holly Thornton. I was happy to see them, though I was gloomy after meeting Mitsuko and Shin.

“What’s wrong?” Holly asked me one evening. “You look so blue.”

“I’m kind of under the weather,” I said. “This humidity really gets to me.”

“The hearings must’ve gotten to you a lot too.”

“I can’t sleep well these days.”

I dared not confide in Holly, whose eyes crinkled up at the corners as she observed me. Unlike Minnie, she might not be that discreet in spite of her good nature.

The Chinese side had little material evidence to support our charges because during the war nobody had expected to face these criminals at such a trial. But thanks to the conscientiousness of the Americans—particularly the Safety Zone Committee’s paperwork kept by Searle, the photographs shot by Magee, and the medical records filed by Wilson—and also thanks to some secret reports about the Nanjing atrocities that the German embassy had dispatched to the Nazi government, the court could make a fair assessment of the crimes perpetrated by the Imperial Army. Magee disclosed to me that he’d brought along the footage he’d shot, but the court wouldn’t accept the films as evidence. In truth, the U.S. government meant to downplay the trial and avoid antagonizing the Japanese populace so that Japan would become a staunch anticommunist country. Among the twenty-five major war criminals on trial, only seven received the death penalty.

When the judge asked Iwane Matsui whether he was guilty, he muttered that he was not. Still, the moment the death sentence was announced, the top general, skeletal and bespectacled now, sobbed and collapsed in his seat, unable to stand up. His bald head was bobbing. Two tall guards wearing white helmets and “MP” armbands stepped forward, pulled him up, and hauled him out of the courtroom.

We left Tokyo on a balmy morning in late August. As we walked out of the hotel and headed for the sedans that were taking us to the airport, I caught sight of Mitsuko and Shin again. They stood at the side of the gate, she wearing an apple-green cheongsam that set off her curvaceous figure, while he had on a white shirt and navy blue shorts. Behind them was a large bonsai in a stone planter, and beyond them seagulls were sailing above the turquoise river, letting out cries. Mother and son waved at me almost timidly while my colleagues and the officials turned to watch. There was no way I could go up to Mitsuko and Shin, so I just nodded at them. Slowly I climbed into a car. As we pulled away, I covered my face with both hands.

That was the last time I saw them.



AUTHOR’S NOTE




This is a work of fiction. For the information, facts, and historical details, I relied on numerous publications and am indebted to their authors, editors, and translators.

In addition to the electronic version of Minnie Vautrin’s Diary (1937–1940) provided by Yale Divinity School Library, I found the following publications very useful in creating this novel: Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937–38 (University of Illinois Press, 2008), and They Were in Nanjing: The Nanjing Massacre Witnessed by American and British Nationals (Hong Kong University Press, 2004), both edited by Suping Lu; Hua-ling Hu’s American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, ed. Erwin Wickert (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); Eyewitnesses to Massacre: American Missionaries Bear Witness to Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing, ed. Zhang Kaiyuan (M. E. Sharpe, 2001); Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (Basic Books, 1997); Honda Katsuichi’s The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame, trans. Karen Sandness and ed. Frank Gibney (M. E. Sharpe, 1999); Documents on the Rape of Nanking, ed. Timothy Brook (University of Michigan Press, 1999); Mary Bosworth Treudley’s This Stinging Exultation (Taipei: The Orient Cultural Service, 1972); Ginling College, coauthored by Mrs. Lawrence Thurston and Miss Ruth M. Chester (New York: United Board for Christian Colleges in China, 1955); The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs, coauthored by Shi Young and James Yin (Chicago and San Francisco: Innovative Publishing Group, 1997); Qin hua rijun nanjing da tusha riji [Diaries by the Japanese Soldiers in the Nanjing Massacre], ed. Guangyi Wu (Beijing: Sociological Documents Press, 2005); Zhaiwei Sun’s Chengqing lishi [Clarifying History: Studies and Reflections on the Nanjing Massacre] (Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Press, 2005); Tamaki Matsuoka’s Nankin-sen tozasareta kioku o tazunete [Battle of Nanking: Searching for the Closed Memories—Witnesses of 102 Japanese Soldiers in China], translated into Chinese by Meiying Quan and Jianyun Li, and edited by Weifan Shen, Zhaoqi Cheng, and Chengsha Zhu (Shanghai Reference Books Press, 2002); Nanjing da tusha shiliao ji (7: Dongjing shenpan) [Historical Materials of Nanjing Massacre (vol. 7: The Tokyo Trials)], ed. Xiaming Yang (Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Press, 2005); Nanjing da tusha shiliao ji (28: lishi tuxiang) [Historical Materials of Nanjing Massacre (vol. 28: Historical Photographs and Graphics)], ed. Bihong Cao et al. (Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Press, 2006); and In the Name of the Emperor [documentary], directed by Nancy Tong and Christine Choy (Hong Kong, 1995).



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS




My heartfelt thanks to my editor, Dan Frank, for upholding a rigorous standard; to Deb Garrison for her invaluable comments; to my agent, Lane Zachary, for her patience and unflagging enthusiasm; to Suping Lu for allowing me to reprint the map of Jinling Women’s College; to Rong Cai and Changsheng Li for helping me get some details right; to Aimin Chen and Yuen Ying Chan for sending me needed materials; and to Lisha and Wen for their constant love and support.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HA JIN left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of five novels, four story collections, and three books of poetry. He has received the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Ha Jin lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.