I sat quietly, not drawing attention to myself, pretending that this was all normal, that I’d done this a thousand times and really didn’t care that nobody was talking to me, that I didn’t get the jokes, didn’t recognize the songs. At about nine o’clock, just when I thought I could keep quiet all night long, and maybe they’d forget I was there, someone suddenly said, ‘And what about you?’
Silence fell at the table. I looked up and found everyone halted in mid-conversation, staring at me curiously. ‘What about you?’ someone repeated. ‘What do you think?’
What did I think? I had no idea. I’d been drifting off somewhere, wondering if these men’s fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers had been in China. I wondered if they had any sense of what their lives were built on. I tried to picture their faces in the tall collars of the IJA uniform, in the snowy streets of Nanking, one of them raising a glinting katana sword…
‘What about you?’
‘What about me?’
They exchanged glances, unaccustomed to this rudeness. Someone kicked me under the table. I looked up and found Irina making a face at me, nodding at my chest, using both hands to push her breasts up, her shoulders pinned back. ‘Sit up,’ she mouthed. ‘Put your busts out.’
I turned to the man sitting next to me, took a deep breath and said the first thing that came into my head: ‘Did your father fight in China?’
His face changed. Someone sucked in a sharp breath. The hostesses frowned and Irina put down her drink with a shocked clink. The man next to me was thinking about what I’d said. At length he took a breath and said, ‘What an odd question. Why do you ask?’
‘Because,’ I said, in a tiny voice, my heart sinking, ‘because it’s what I’ve been studying for nine years. Nine years and seven months and nineteen days.’
He was silent for a moment, looking at my face, trying to read me. Nobody at the table seemed to breathe: they were all sitting forward, poised on their chair edges, waiting to hear what his response would be. After a long time he lit a cigarette, took a few puffs, and rested it carefully, deliberately, in the ashtray.
‘My father was in China,’ he said seriously, sitting back and folding his arms. ‘In Manchuria. And as long as he lived he wouldn’t talk about what happened.’ His cigarette smoke moved up to the ceiling in a long, unbroken stream, like a white finger. ‘My schoolbooks had all mention of it removed. I remember sitting in class, all of us holding the paper up to the light, making sure we couldn’t read what was written under the white-out. Maybe,’ he said, not looking at anyone, but directing the words into the air, ‘maybe you’ll tell me about it.’
I’d been sitting with my mouth open stupidly, terrified of what he might say. Slowly it dawned on me that he wasn’t angry and the colour came back to my face. I sat forward, excited. ‘Yes,’ I said eagerly. ‘Of course. I can tell you anything you want to know. Anything-’ Suddenly the words were backing up in my throat, wanting to spill out. I pushed my hair behind my ears and put my hands on the table. ‘Now, I think that the most interesting part was what happened in Nanking. No. Actually, not what happened in Nanking itself, but – let me… let me put it a different way. The most interesting thing was what happened while the troops were marching from Shanghai to Nanking. No one ever has really understood what happened, you see, why they changed…’
And that was how I started talking. I talked and talked into the night. I talked about Manchuria and Shanghai and Unit 731. Most of all, of course, I talked about Nanking. The hostesses sat in boredom, inspecting their nails, or leaning together and whispering to each other, shooting me glances. But the men all sat forward in eerie silence, staring at me, their faces taut with concentration. They didn’t say much more that evening. They left in silence and, at the end of the night, when Mama Strawberry clipped over to us with the tips, a sour look on her face, it was me she singled out. The men had left me the biggest tip. More than three times what they’d left anyone else.
8
Nanking, 1 March 1937
The time I spend fretting about my wife! Thinking about our differences! For many of my colleagues this quaint, arranged marriage is anathema to all their ideals and, indeed, I had always expected to make a sensible alliance, maybe with someone from the university, one of those forward thinkers who take time, like our president Chiang Kai-shek, to truly consider China and her future. But, then, I hadn’t bargained for my mother’s hand in the matter.
How infuriating! To be thinking even today of my mother. I tremble with embarrassment when I consider her, when I consider all my superstitious and backward family. The family that enjoyed wealth, but was never inclined or able to escape the provincial village, to break free of the Poyang summer floods. Maybe I’ll never truly escape either, and maybe this is the worst of the enduring truths about me: the proud young linguist from Jinling University, who is underneath just a boy from a China that doesn’t look forward and doesn’t change – that only stands still and waits for death. I think about that green and yellow countryside, punctuated by white goats and juniper trees, the plains where a man grows only sufficient to feed his family, where the ducks wander wild and pigs snout through the bean groves, and I wonder, can I hope to escape my past?
With the clear eyes of hindsight, I see that my mother always had plans for Shujin. They had been together to the village fortune-teller, an old man whom I recall with no fondness, a blind man with a long white beard, persistently led round the villages like a trained bear by a child in straw sandals. The fortune-teller carefully noted down Shujin’s date, time and place of birth, and with a few scribbled characters and a juggling of his mysterious ivory tablets, soon, to my mother’s delight, judged Shujin to have the perfect proportion of the five elements, the correct balance of metal, wood, water, fire and earth, to produce myriad sons for me.
Naturally I resisted. And would have resisted to this day, had my mother not become ill. To my fury, my desperation, even as she drew close to death she refused to forsake her country beliefs, her distrust of new technology. Instead of travelling, at my fevered insistence, to the good modern hospitals in Nanking, she put her trust in the local quacks, who spent long hours examining her tongue, emerging from her sick room with declarations of ‘An impossible surfeit of yin. It is a mystery, a scandal, that Doctor Yuan did not comment on this earlier.’ In spite of their potions, their brews and prognostications, she grew sicker and sicker.
‘So much for your superstitions,’ I told her, as she lay in her sickbed. ‘You understand, do you, that you are destroying me by refusing to come to Nanking?’
‘Listen.’ She rested her hand on my arm. Her brown hand, weathered by years in the provinces, lying across the crisp sleeve of the western suit I wore. I remember looking at it and thinking, Is this really the flesh that gave me life? Is it really? ‘You can still make me happy.’
‘Happy?’
‘Yes.’ Her eyes were bright and feverish. ‘Make me happy. Marry the Wangs’ daughter.’