The most pressing problem, however, was not hunger but the cold. Even as they ate, elbow to elbow on the benches of the small dining room, it was as if they were outside in the weather. They were certainly dressed so, with overcoats and hats and even gloves. It had snowed furiously earlier in the month but since then the skies had been swept clear by a piercing arctic wind that left everything frozen and desiccated. Although it was just past noon now, and the sun was shining from its low perch in the sky, it was barely fifteen degrees Fahrenheit and perhaps just above freezing inside. There was a small coal stove in the room but Reverend Lum and Francis Binet decided not to light it, hoping all the bodies in the small room would produce enough comforting warmth. They had to conserve what little coal they had left, as both Chinese factions and the Japanese colonial forces were depleting most of the available supply; it was still the heart of the winter, nearly two whole months left of it at least, and no one had spoken a word about how they would make it through without some profound happening or change.
As the diners ate, puffs of steam rose up from their mouths. People weren’t talking very much as they sat hunched over their small plates, trying to keep warm. Everyone ate the ribs first, for they cooled almost instantly on the frigid plates, the drops of fat congealing into opaque disks that floated on the thin dark sauce. Not a drop of it went to waste. Sylvie didn’t favor pork, but the fatty, gristly meat made her mouth gush so much her tongue almost ached and she had to quell the urge to try to swallow a section of bone whole, for how delicious it was. Instead she chewed off any nubs of soft cartilage from the ends and when she was done placed the bones on a plate being passed back around to Mrs. Lum, who said she was going to make a soup out of them for the next day.
Sylvie’s father nodded to her from across the table when he saw her ribs were as scoured clean as the rest. She had worried her parents for as long as she could recall because she rarely ate very much, but lately she was feeling hungry, even famished, and not simply due to the diminishing rations. She was almost fourteen and her body was at last changing, even if she was still too slim. Her hips had widened and her chest was welling out and there was a rougher hand to the surface of her skin, Like chamois instead of silk, her mother pronounced, in her typically clear-eyed style. As she took after her mother, Sylvie wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed, not even by the less pleasing difference in her hair, especially the tufts others couldn’t see, the new coarseness and musk beneath her arms and elsewhere. Maybe she did not fully feel like a woman because she wasn’t yet sure what being one was, or meant, but she was certain that her girlhood had passed, or if it hadn’t passed, that it was something only barely remaining, like a baby’s blanket finally worn through to a web of threads.
Besides, Sylvie knew she could not afford to be a child anymore. With the fighting, their life was becoming too dangerous and real. Her parents had been talking about her leaving with the Harrises, who were departing in several days for Shanghai, and then going on to Hong Kong, from there embarking on the long sea journey to Honolulu and finally Seattle, where they and the Binets were from. Sylvie’s aunt lived there, too, and offered a place for her to stay until her parents returned in the spring. They had each tried to speak to her about it in an idle, casual way, bringing up the idea as if it were merely a choice between summer camps, but Sylvie was old enough to know that her parents were not in the least casual or idle about anything. They were people who took seriously every action and effort, brooking high risks if necessary, for it was all in the service of what they saw as the most urgent calling in this life: educating children, feeding the poor, ameliorating suffering. Throughout her childhood they traveled from destitute place to destitute place, from the Amazon to West Africa and now to Asia, and although she always felt their love for her, she could feel cast apart from them as well, set just outside the tight centripetal force of their labors, the impassioned orbit of their work. She was rarely if ever out of their sight but she often felt eclipsed by the boundless, grinding need of the foreground, and in certain moments she was sure that she was the loneliest child on earth.
And yet her admiration for them never waned. If anything, it had only deepened as she had grown older, as her shame at her own selfishness and self-pity seemed monstrously childish in the face of her parents’ unstinting efforts. They had come to this village twenty-five kilometers outside of Changchung to revitalize an old church school, which, like every other mission they had helped run, was also becoming a de facto health clinic and agricultural center and, of course, soup kitchen. In five months the enrollment had doubled, even some well-to-do merchant families from the city now sending their children daily for schooling. Yet as the fighting escalated, it was also becoming a sanctuary; just a few days earlier her father-against the protests of Reverend Lum-had taken in and treated a pair of haggard, lightly wounded Chinese soldiers who said they were being pursued by the Japanese but might well have been deserters. Either way, it could bring trouble to them, Lum argued, but her father was nothing if not calmly pragmatic in such moments. He saw everything in its most essential human terms. “They’re simply scared and hungry,” he said to Lum and the rest. “And ultimately, we know, through no cause of their own. So how can we turn them away?”
Nothing had happened, neither side coming to search for them, and the two soldiers had slipped away the next evening under cover of darkness, each given a two-day bundle of rations. But Reverend Lum and Tom Harris were still concerned that such occurrences would only become more frequent and more dangerous, aside from taxing their dwindling resources, and after the helpers and their children finished eating and were excused the discussion around the table was about how the school should continue if and when full-scale war broke out. Reverend Lum and Harris were in favor of closing the gates to any combatants. They wanted to negotiate with both Japanese and Chinese officials to get them to recognize the school as a neutral zone.
“It’ll be safer if you can stay out of this thing completely,” Tom Harris said, his large hands wrapped around a cup of hot tea. He was about the same age as Francis, in his early fifties, not a minister but a second-career aid worker who was an expert in agricultural practices and irrigation. His wife, Betty, was a nurse practitioner, and during the last few months they had traveled northern Asia, immunizing children in remote villages against smallpox. “Or else, if they won’t let you be, then just close the school and all get out now. Don’t you remember what happened to that Lutheran missionary school in the Congo in ’twenty-nine? It was right smack in the middle of a brutal tribal war, and ended up being used by both factions. The head of the mission wanted the place to be an open refuge but in the end he was distrusted by all and they tore everything to pieces.”
“What happened to the head of the mission?” Reverend Lum asked.
“Please, Tom,” his wife said to him. “Sylvie’s parents don’t want her to hear about such things.”
“That’s all right, Betty,” her father said. “We don’t try to shield her from what goes on. Anyway, she’s old enough now. Aren’t you, sweetie?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Nobody was spared,” Harris said, looking away from Sylvie. “And they don’t use guns in the Congo. They don’t just shoot people. I’ll leave it at that, for everyone’s sake.”
“This isn’t Africa,” Mrs. Lum said.
“Oh no? I keep hearing about certain things up north. How the Japanese wiped a few villages off the map. Eradicated every last soul.”
“That’s a rumor they themselves spread to scare us,” she answered. “I heard it was just one remote village the Japanese wanted for a base, and that all the people agreed to be relocated and work in a boot factory near Harbin. So what’s the truth? What should we believe?”