Nanjing Requiem (35 page)

“From whom?” Minnie took it.

“A young boy handed it to me and said it was from Ban, who left with Luhai. I was told to give it to you immediately.”

“You mean Ban also ran away?” I asked Donna, whose face was flushed.

“Apparently so.”

Minnie unfolded the sheet of yellow paper and found that Luhai had written the letter in English. I knew he had often perused the
North China Daily News
and other English papers, but I’d never heard him speak the language, which I’d been unsure he could read. Probably he had composed the letter in English to keep other Chinese from learning its contents. Nonetheless, Minnie read it out loud to us:

Dear Dean Vautrin:

Meiyan, Ban, and I decide to escape Nanjing. We want to be in the force fighting for our motherland, so we prepare to sacrifice everything, including family. If the country is lost, our home can not be same any more and our individual success mean nothing. Please do not trouble yourself and find us, because we are going very, very far away, under different name. But I have
favors
a favor to beg you—please give some helps to my wife and children, because I can do nothing for them from today on. One day I shall return like a fighter and a hero. Thank you from bottom of my heart. I shall remember your kindness
forever
.

Donna burst into laughter. “What kind of nonsense is that?” she snorted. “A man dumped his wife and kids on the pretext of sacrificing for his country.”

“The rascal is shameless,” Big Liu grunted.

“This is a bizarre letter,” Minnie admitted. “But why would Ban flee with them as well?”

“That boy hates the Japanese,” I said.

“Where do you think they might go?” Minnie asked.

“I’ve no idea,” Big Liu answered. “I hope they won’t head for the Communists’ base in Yan’an. Meiyan said she’d join any kind of resistance force as long as she could get out of Nanjing.”

“By why did the three of them flee together?” I said.

“Luhai was unhappy about his marriage, because his parents had picked his wife for him,” replied Big Liu.

Donna tittered, her face shiny and slightly fleshy. “So to fight an invader is a fine solution to marital trouble.”

“Stop it, Donna,” Minnie said. “Don’t be so sarcastic. I don’t think Luhai ran away because he wanted to dump his family. He’s not that kind of man.”

“That’s true,” I chimed in. “He wants to fight the Japanese, and so must Meiyan and Ban.”

We all agreed that no matter what, we ought to do something for Luhai’s wife. So Minnie and I went to see Mrs. Dennison to brief her about the runaways. To our relief, the old woman suggested that Jinling offer Fuwan, Luhai’s wife, a hundred yuan and persuade her to return to her folks in the countryside. We both felt this would be a reasonable solution.

“Son of a gun!” Mrs. Dennison said about Ban. “He took off without leaving me a word.”

With little difficulty, I convinced Fuwan to leave for her parents’ home. The poor woman, her eyes puffy, said that she was tired of city life anyway—if she stayed here, her two small sons might grow up to be bad like their father. In addition, Nanjing was such a horrible place that she was often depressed, so she wouldn’t mind returning to the countryside.

But a week later Luhai’s father, a trim man with beetle eyebrows, came from Shenyang to fetch his grandsons. He claimed that nobody could separate his grandkids from him and his wife. Fuwan and the boys left with him on the sly. This baffled us, and Mrs. Dennison regretted having given away a hundred yuan too easily.

With the old woman’s approval, Minnie offered Big Liu the business manager’s job left open by Luhai’s departure, but Big Liu wouldn’t take it, saying he preferred to teach. He had a good reputation as a teacher and used to be on the faculty of the language school, which had shut down long ago. Since there were more foreign academics and diplomats in town now, he could have earned more than his current salary—fifty yuan a month—by offering Chinese lessons (we all drew eighty percent of our normal pay now). To our relief, he told Minnie a few days later that he would continue working as Jinling’s Chinese secretary, because he felt this was more meaningful and also it was safer for his family to stay on campus. Mr. Rong, the assistant manager, was promoted to the position abandoned by Luhai.

AFTER THE NEW YEAR
a bullnecked man named Boren, a friend of Luhai’s, came to see Mrs. Dennison and Minnie. He lived in the neighborhood and had always been hostile to Jinling and the local missionary groups. He had come to visit Luhai every once in a while. Boren was respected by the locals as a community leader of sorts and had been quite vocal about the missionary work, which he believed had brought about chaos in China. He had disliked Miss Lou and accused her of always toadying to the foreigners. He and I had never been on good terms either. But the moment he sat down in the president’s office, he was all smiles and even thanked me as I poured tea for him from a red clay teapot. He told us that the fall of our city had changed him, because Jinling had sheltered his family of seven for four months while he was away in Hunan Province taking care of his bedridden mother. His home, which was three hundred years old, had been burned down by the Japanese, and most of his antique furniture had been fed to the bonfire in the center of his courtyard.

He wanted to sell us a piece of land because he needed cash. His dog had snapped at a Japanese soldier’s heel and gotten its master into trouble. The bite was nothing serious, just two tiny punctures on the foot, but the Japanese police had hauled Boren in and beaten him up, despite his promise to kill the dog and let them have its meat.

“I sent everything, including its skin, to those bastards,” Boren said, “but they still won’t leave me alone. They said I had disabled a soldier and must accept the full consequences.”

“What does that mean?” Minnie said.

“I asked a friend of mine. He suggested I spend some money to appease the Japanese. But I don’t have any cash on hand. Everybody’s hard up for cash these days. My neighbor works in a factory and is paid in pots and ladles because they can’t ship their products out of Nanjing anymore. Every evening he has to peddle utensils downtown. If your school can buy a piece of land from me, you’ll save my life, and also my family.”

This came as a surprise. Both Mrs. Dennison and Minnie were intrigued. When the college was being founded, the old president had tried in vain to purchase land from Boren’s father; now this offer could be an opportunity, but Mrs. Dennison and Minnie wanted to look at the property again before deciding.

47

A
FEW DAYS LATER
we set out for the southwestern end of Jinling’s property to see the land Boren was offering. Apple and pear trees were bulky despite their leafless branches, and in the depths of the orchard some rooks were cawing like crazy. Old Liao appeared, trundling a load of bricks in a wheelbarrow. Even on such a wintry day the gardener wouldn’t stop working. He seemed ignorant of idleness, a typical peasant. Pointing at a path he’d newly paved with bricks, Mrs. Dennison said, “Nice job.” The man smiled without a word, then nodded at Minnie.

The land Boren offered was bumpy and overgrown with brambles, different from what we had expected. It would have to be leveled before it could be used. Also, because it was separated from Jinling’s property by a brook, it wouldn’t be easy to incorporate the land into the campus unless our college owned a length of the stream as well. Mrs. Dennison puckered her brow while the outer corners of her eyes drooped. I could tell she had misgivings.

“We will discuss this with the trustees and will let you know our answer soon,” Mrs. Dennison told Boren.

“Sure, no need to rush,” he said.

When the two women talked about the offer again, Mrs. Dennison was against buying it, saying it was just an acre of wasteland. Actually, it was 1.3 acres, at half price—four hundred yuan. Despite its bumpiness and its separation from our campus, Minnie believed we should jump at this opportunity. She said to Mrs. Dennison, “We’ll figure out how to use the land eventually. Let’s grab it.”

“No. At this time we mustn’t acquire anything we don’t need.”

“We have the money.”

“We must be frugal. The renovation will cost a fortune. You never know where an extra amount will have to be put up.”

“Please, it’s just four hundred yuan, a bargain.”

“No, I don’t want it.”

“I’m the dean of this college—my opinion doesn’t count at all?”

“Well, I don’t have to listen to you.”

“Don’t you remember how hard you used to haggle with those landowners over tiny parcels of land?”

“That was then. Things have changed and we have to concentrate on the task at hand.”

“Since when have you become so shortsighted?”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Can’t you see this is a windfall? We’ll need a lot of land for future development.”

“I don’t want to spend the money now.”

“It’s not your money.”

“Neither is it yours. If you love that piece of dirt so much, why not buy it for yourself?”

Mrs. Dennison’s last sentence put Minnie in mind of acquiring the land on her own. She talked with me about this. Since she wanted to spend the rest of her life here, she could build her home on that slope beside the babbling brook. From that spot you could see a good part of campus and enjoy peace and quiet. If the college provided her with a bungalow someday, the land still wouldn’t be wasted—she could donate it to Jinling or build a small folk school on it. She had been making one hundred yuan a month since the previous winter and had saved about eleven hundred yuan, too little to build her own house. But she would save more and buy the lot first.

Her reasoning made sense, so I encouraged her to buy the land. At such a low price she could sell it and make her money back whenever she wanted. We went to Boren’s three days later and wrapped up the purchase. The man was elated and even called Minnie “the goddess of generosity” when she told him she was acquiring the land for herself. This unnerved her. “Please don’t call me that,” she said, but he merely grinned, showing his square teeth.

48

M
ONICA BUCKLEY DIED
in early February, and the missionary community, regardless of denomination, assembled in the Shigu Road Cathedral for her funeral. The nave had a domed roof and stained-glass windows, which were high and narrow with arched tops, the panes iridescent like peacock feathers. More than two hundred Chinese also attended.

Reverend Wei presided over the ceremony. People stood up and sang the hymn “O Thou Whose Own Vast Temple Stands.” Next, Pastor Daniel Kirk read out Psalm 23. Minnie was moved by the solemn, serene poem, which she said she’d never before thought so sublime. Then a few friends of Monica’s went to the chancel lined with winter plum blossoms to deliver their eulogies and to reminisce about her. Among them was Alice, who had started her missionary career at the same time as the dead woman back in Anhui, though they belonged to different denominations. She told the audience that Monica had often missed her hometown in rural Pennsylvania but never lost sight of her real home in heaven, in God’s mansion, because she believed we were all virtually foreigners or guests on earth. After Alice, a tall American man with graying hair and sagging cheeks spoke. He declared that he’d known Monica for almost two decades, and in spite of her languid appearance, she had a good sense of humor and an extraordinary memory, and she enjoyed telling stories, especially to children. Once he’d told an anecdote from his childhood in which a man got drunk and exchanged his ulster for a puny catfish. A few weeks later he heard Monica telling the same story to a group of small girls but with a more dramatic ending: the man gave away his team of mules and wagon for a salmon, so now he couldn’t go home anymore and had to sleep in the open air with snow falling—he almost froze to death and lost two fingers. What had happened was that Monica had overheard him in the adjacent room when he was telling the anecdote. “Now,” the man concluded, “I hope she will entertain angels up there with all the jokes and stories she can make up with such grace and ease.”

That brought out laughter among the foreigners, while most Chinese remained quiet, bewildered. Indeed, a funeral was a sorrowful, solemn occasion. How come these foreigners wisecracked and gave belly laughs?

After the reminiscences, Searle, his face freshly shaved and his hair combed back, went to the pulpit and delivered a sermon in honor of Monica titled “The Christian Duties in the Time of War.” He spoke in Mandarin about the Japanese annexation of some Asian countries and about their brutalities. I knew that the Japanese kept a watchful eye on him because of his writings about their exploiting the narcotics business, and that they had also demanded that he surrender all the paperwork of the International Relief Committee—including the records of nine hundred cases of murder, rape, and arson within the Safety Zone perpetrated by Japanese soldiers during the first weeks after the fall of Nanjing—but he had told them that Eduard Sperling had taken all the files back to Cologne. Searle talked about the situation in Europe. He said, “Under the threat of a world war, what should we Christians do? First, we must strive to make peace and oppose war. Some of you were here when Nanjing fell two years ago and saw with your own eyes what it was like. Men can be more vicious than beasts of prey if they’re put in the extreme situation of war. No rules will be followed, and all kinds of evil will be unleashed. War is simply the most destructive force we human beings can produce, so we must make every effort to prevent it.

“However, if we survey human history, we can see that there were times when war was unavoidable, even necessary. There have been some wars that can be called just wars. For example, if people take up arms against foreign invaders, can we blame them? Should we attempt to dissuade them from fighting their national enemy? Of course not. Therefore, the Christians in those countries should fight like common citizens and should combine their fulfillment of Christian duties with the survival of their nations. As for those Christians whose countries are aggressors, they should do the opposite—work against war and do their utmost to make peace.”