“Oh, what should I do?”
“It’s not your fault. Come on, Minnie, you mustn’t talk like this now. We must find out what happened to the camp.” Without waiting for her response, I rushed out to check with our staffers in various buildings.
This time we’d lost twenty-one young women.
ALTHOUGH MINNIE JOINED Lewis, Searle, and Plumer for the Christmas dinner, she was in no mood for the holiday. Old Liao had brought over a miniature fir and set it up in her room. Minnie liked the sight of the tree, the lit candles under it, and the Nativity scene arranged by the gardener, yet it didn’t cheer her up. She said she felt drained and powerless in her limbs. At the sight of her, a group of girls asked if the Japanese would come for the other seventy-nine “prostitutes” to make up the number, one hundred, as they had mentioned. She cried out, “Over my dead body they will!” Still, the girls looked unconvinced and frightened, and people wouldn’t stop talking about the women just abducted by the Japanese.
After the holiday Minnie took to her bed for three days, suffering from a sore throat and inflamed eyes. A bone-deep fatigue had sunk into her. She was so weak that she couldn’t even hold a pen. Yet she wanted to write a letter to the Japanese embassy on behalf of several women whose family members had been seized by the soldiers. She had promised to intercede for them, though she told me that she wouldn’t be much help.
13
FIVE DAYS after Christmas, Minnie went to the Japanese embassy and delivered the letter. As soon as she came back, Cola, the Russian man, arrived with two blind girls, one eight and the other ten, both wearing tattered robes and boots too large for them. The younger one held a bamboo flute while the older one carried an erhu, a two-stringed violin. They had performed with a small band at teahouses and open-air theaters to eke out a living since coming to the city the previous summer, but the other musicians in the band had fled and left them behind. Cola chanced on them outside Zhong Hua Girls’ School, took them in for a few days, and found boots and woolen socks for their bare feet. He thought that our camp might be more suitable for them, so he brought them to Minnie, who had no choice but to accept them.
Cola often said he didn’t like the Chinese because some businessmen had cheated him, but he’d told the other foreigners that he might be more helpful here once the city fell. On top of that, he owned an auto-repair business, which was booming even now. He used to believe that the Japanese, or the Greeks of Asia, as they called themselves, should rule China because he thought they could make this country a better place for business. Yet he was horrified by the soldiers’ brutalities and joined the Safety Zone Committee to help the refugees. He could serve as an interpreter since he knew some Japanese.
“Thank you, Miss Vautrin. There’s no way I can keep them,” he said in Mandarin, and pushed the two bony girls toward Minnie’s desk a little. “Only you can give them a home.”
“Jinling has been ruined by the Japanese too.” Minnie turned to the girls and held their small chapped hands, saying, “You’re safe here. Don’t be afraid.”
She then told me to give them the special room in the main dormitory, but I had to attend to a young mother in labor, so Holly led them out of the office, holding their hands as the three of them walked away.
AT LAST Ban began to talk. In the evening about twenty people gathered in the dining room to listen to him. He ate normally now, but he still wouldn’t move around campus and slept a lot during the day.
He said, “That afternoon when Principal Vautrin told me to go tell Mr. Rabe about the random arrest in our camp, I ran to the Safety Zone Committee’s headquarters. As I was reaching that house, two Japanese soldiers stopped me, one pointing his bayonet at my tummy and the other sticking his gun against my back. They ripped off my Red Cross armband and hit me in the face with their fists. Then they took me away to White Cloud Shrine.…”
Three evenings in a row he told his story to different groups of people. Sometimes, while speaking, Ban would break down, weeping wretchedly and flailing his thin arms. He would also tremble from time to time as though someone were about to strike him. We decocted some medicinal soup for him every day, made of dried tuckahoe, wolfberries, mums, and other herbs, to help him sleep well and to restore his wits.
He got better a few weeks later but still dared not step out of the compound of our college. Minnie told Luhai to assign him only domestic chores.
TWO. The Goddess of Mercy
14
NUMEROUS REFUGEE WOMEN had come and implored us to intervene on their behalf to get their menfolk back from the Japanese military, assuming they were still alive. A few even blamed Jinling for shutting out their husbands and sons — as a result, the Japanese had seized them. One woman condemned us for barring her fifteen-year-old son from the camp and told others, “See, he was made to fall into the Japs’ hands.” Words like those unsettled Minnie, who confessed to me that we shouldn’t have set the age limit at thirteen. If we’d known that the Japanese would arrest all the young males, of course we’d have raised the entry age to fifteen for boys.
I told Minnie not to be troubled by the women’s grumbles. Whenever I heard them complain, I’d say to their faces, “Look, I’m sorry about your loss, but we let in ten thousand of you, five times more than we planned originally. What else do you expect us to do? If we’d taken in more boys, some girls and women would have been kept out.” That shut them up.
I advised Minnie never to show her regret in front of the complainers or they would persist with unreasonable demands. Still, some of the refugee women were so wretched and piteous, unable to survive without their menfolk, that Minnie started preparing a petition. She assigned Big Liu to interview them to gather the needed information. Whenever she had a free moment, she’d drop by his office, which was one of the two inner rooms in the president’ office, and listen to the petitioners’ stories. Their voices, once you’d heard them, would go on ringing in your ears for a long time: “They took my three sons and my husband, and I was too frightened to beg them.” “He was my only son, and I hope he’s still alive and knows how to get back.” “My two grandsons were taken, the only farmhands in our family.” “I have four small children left and also my mother-in-law. I can only beg on the streets.” “My two sons never came back from their business trip, and one of their wives was killed by the soldiers. If they don’t come back, I won’t live anymore.”
I was not in favor of a petition. I said, “Minnie, the Japanese always finish off the men they seize. We know that’s a fact. What’s the sense of begging for mercy from those beasts? It’s like asking a tiger for its skin. We’d better concentrate on the matters at hand.”
In spite of my reservations, I told some women to register their losses with Big Liu as a record. I knew Minnie’s heart was in the right place. Within a week, by mid-January, Big Liu had documented more than 400 cases, with 723 men and boys taken by the Japanese, mostly around mid-December. Among them 390 were businessmen; 123 were farmers, coolies, and gardeners; 193 were artisans, tailors, carpenters, masons, weavers, and cooks; 7 were policemen; and 1 was a fireman. There were also 9 boys, thirteen to sixteen years old. Day after day more women came to Big Liu to have their cases filed.
Big Liu’s hair had grayed considerably, and even his thick shoulders looked hunched when he sat at his desk. He was cheerful and gregarious by nature, but lately he was aloof and taciturn and often lost his temper. He said he had a toothache. When he wasn’t busy, he would absently gaze up at the ceiling and let out deep sighs. I pretended to know nothing about his trouble and didn’t explain to Minnie when she wondered aloud about what was bothering him. I didn’t tell her that his daughter Meiyan was on his mind.