As I sit writing at the window, the lattice shutters open, I am looking directly down into the street, and what can I see? A woman wheeling a handcart in the direction of the Shangyuan gate. It is piled with mattresses and furniture and soybean sacks. On top of the bundle is strapped a dead man, quite naked. Her husband maybe, or a relative who has been waiting for the money for a funeral. Look at that sight! Have we become insane? Are we so eager to abandon our city that we can’t even bury our dead here?
Nanking, 10 December 1937
At my elbow lie two small cards. Refugee certificates. One for Shujin, one for me. If the day comes when the Japanese arrive we will wear them pinned to our clothing. I collected them this morning at the Red Swastika Society. When the sun came out as I was walking home, I took off my cap. One of the lecturers had told me to do this. He has decided not to stay in Nanking: he’s going to head for the river, hoping to break through somewhere upstream of Xiaguan and make for Chongqing. As we said goodbye he looked at me carefully and said, ‘If you are outside in the sun today take off your cap. Get a tan on your forehead. I heard they’ll tear off a civilian’s cap and if he’s pale on the forehead they take him for military.’
‘But we’re civilians,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, looking at me with something like pity in his eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘We’re civilians,’ I repeated, as he walked away. I had to raise my voice. ‘And if it comes to it the Japanese will know us as such and leave us in peace.’
I stood for a while, my heart beating angrily as he disappeared down the corridor. It was a long time before I made my way out on to the street. I walked for a short way, then glanced over my shoulder. I was out of sight of the campus, so I snatched off the cap quickly, shovelled it into my pocket and walked the rest of the way home with my head back, my face turned up to the sun, the words my mother said on her deathbed running through my head: ‘Turn your face to the sun, my boy. Remember that life is short. Always turn your face to the sun when you have the chance.’
Snow came in the night. All night long I listened to the muffled silence, Shujin completely quiet next to me. She has to lie on her side now because she is getting big, and I can feel her feet, the tips of her fingers cold on the occasions they brush my skin. She is so quiet, these days, that she seems almost transparent, as if one day she might just dissolve away leaving a baby in her place. So contained. Maybe she thinks that these are the crucial days, when our baby is exposed to primal human forces – love, truth, compassion and justice – and maybe she needs to keep quiet and concentrate so that these elements will come in their purest form. She rarely mentions leaving any more. From time to time she asks me, ‘Chongming, what’s happening? What’s happening in the east?’ And each time I have no words for her, only lies: ‘Nothing. Nothing. All is as it should be. General Tang is in control.’
When we drew back the bed-curtains this morning condensation had gathered on the glass in the windows, and outside the snow was deep on the ground. Usually by midday it has been turned to slush by the carts, but today Nanking is eerily silent. Only the army vehicles move through the streets and when I went to a market near the Ming Palace ruins to buy locks for the doors, nails to barricade the house, I was surprised to see that only a handful of traders was setting up stall, the snowflakes hissing on their red charcoal-burners. I bought padlocks from a vendor who charged ten times the normal amount. They are almost certainly stolen, but he seemed to have no difficulty selling them.
‘Mr Shi!’
I turned from the stall and was surprised to see, of all people, a professor of literature from Shanghai University, Liu Runde. I have met him only once before and I couldn’t immediately fathom what he was doing in a Nanking market.
I cupped my gloved hands, lifted them above my face and bowed to him. ‘How odd to see you,’ I said, lowering my hands, ‘here in Nanking.’
‘How odd to see you, Mr Shi.’ He was wearing a traditional man’s gown, his hands folded around a hand brazier inside his copious sleeves, and, incongruously, a western hat with a wide grey band. He removed his brazier from inside the folds of his gown, stooping to place it on the ground, so he could return the bow. ‘How odd to see anyone. I imagined the entire staff of Jinling University had fled the city.’
‘Oh no. No, no. Not me.’ I tightened my jacket at the throat and tried to sound casual, just as if staying here had always been my intention. ‘My wife is expecting a baby, you know. She needs to be near the hospitals, the city health centre. A fine institute, some of the very latest technology.’ I stamped my feet a few times, as if I was not nervous but merely trying to keep out the cold. When he didn’t say anything else I looked around the deserted street then leaned nearer to him, saying in a low whisper, ‘Why? Do you think I’m unwise?’
‘Unwise?’ He looked ruminatively along the street, over my shoulder, out across the galvanized roofs, in the direction of the east, a thoughtful, pinched expression on his face. After a while his expression cleared, a little colour came to his cheeks, and he looked back down at me with a warm smile. ‘No. Not unwise at all. Quite the contrary.’
I blinked at him, my heart rising. ‘The contrary?’
‘Yes. Oh, let’s not doubt there are those who have no faith in our president – sometimes it seems as if the whole of China has lost trust in him and is fleeing to the interior. But as for me? I have made up my mind. I fled Shanghai, I admit that, but my days of flight are over.’
‘There are those who say Tang is weak, not committed. What do you think of those opinions? Some people say the Japanese will walk all over him. Some people say they’ll come into the city and kill us in our homes.’
‘Pah! Some people are too afraid of change, if you ask me. It takes men like us, like you and me, Master Shi, to stand firm. To forget the cowardly, backward nation we have left behind us – to show faith in our city, in our president’s choice of general. Otherwise what do we amount to? A gaggle of whey-faced cowards, that’s what. Besides, the Nationalist forces have every trick up their sleeves. Just look out there, beyond the eastern walls. Can you see the smoke?’
‘Yes.’
‘Buildings burning outside the eastern walls. Burned by our men. To those who say Chiang Kai-shek has no military policy, give them this: scorched earth. The policy of scorched earth. Let the Japanese find nothing, nothing to subsist on as they march. That’ll finish them in no time.’
The relief I felt was indescribable. Suddenly, after all this anxiety, I am vindicated, reassured that I am not alone. Standing there, all at once it seemed as if I was with a very dear old friend. We talked and talked, the snow falling on our shoulders, and when, in the course of our conversation, we discovered that he and his family are living, coincidentally, less than half a li away from Shujin and myself, we decided to continue the conversation at his house. We walked amicably, arm in arm, back to his house, a one-storey adobe shack with a kaoling thatch, no courtyard and no electricity, in which live old Liu, his wife and their teenage son, a dark little thing who appears to my eyes to have been rubbed in dirt.