Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (10 page)

Then most of them were executed.  For a long time the Xias thought Han-chen was dead, until one day Uncle Pei-o told them that he was still alive but about to be executed.  Dr.  Xia immediately contacted Dong.

On the night of the execution Dr.  Xia and my grandmother went to South Hill with a carriage.  They parked behind a clump of trees and waited. They could hear the wild dogs rummaging around by the pit, from which rose the sickly stench of decomposing flesh.  At last a cart appeared. Through the darkness they could dimly see the old driver climbing down and tipping some bodies out of wooden boxes.  They waited for him to drive off and then went over to the pit.  After groping among the corpses they found Han-chen, but could not tell if he was dead or alive.

Eventually they realized he was still breathing.  He had been so badly tortured he could not walk, so with great effort they lifted him into the carriage and drove him back to their house.

They hid him in a tiny room in the innermost corner of the house.  Its one door led into my mother's room, to which the only other access was from her parents' bedroom.  No one would ever go into the room by chance.  As the house was the only one which had direct access to the courtyard, Han-chen could exercise there in safety, as long as someone kept watch.

There was the danger of a raid by the police or the local neighborhood committees.  Early on in the occupation the Japanese had set up a widespread system of neighbor hood control.  They made the local big shots the heads of these units, and these neighborhood bosses helped collect taxes and kept a round-the-clock watch for 'lawless elements." It was a form of institutionalized gangsterism, in which 'protection' and informing were the keys to power.

The Japanese also offered large rewards for turning people in.  The Manchukuo police were less of a threat than ordinary civilians.  In fact, many of the police were quite anti Japanese.  One of their main jobs was to check people's registration, and they used to carry out frequent house-to house searches.  But they would announce their arrival by shouting out "Checking registrations!  Checking registrations!"  So that anyone who wanted to hide had plenty of time.  Whenever Han-chen or my grandmother heard this shout she would hide him in a pile of dried sorghum stacked in the end room for fuel.  The police would saunter into the house and sit down and have a cup of tea, telling my grandmother rather apologetically, "All this is just a formality, you know .... '

At the time my mother was eleven.  Even though her parents did not tell her what was going on, she knew she must not talk about Han-chen being in the house.  She learned discretion from childhood.

Slowly, my grandmother nursed Han-chen back to health, and after three months he was well enough to move on.  It was an emotional farewell.

"Elder sister and elder brother-in-law," he said, "I will never forget that I owe my life to you.  As soon as I have the chance, I will repay my great debt to you both."  Three years later he came back and was as good as his word.

As part of their education, my mother and her classmates had to watch newsreels of Japan's progress in the war.  Far from being ashamed of their brutality, the Japanese vaunted it as a way to inculcate fear. The films showed Japanese soldiers cutting people in half and prisoners tied to stakes being torn to pieces by dogs.  There were lingering close-ups of the victims' terror-stricken eyes as their attackers came at them.  The Japanese watched the eleven and twelve-year-old schoolgirls to make sure they did not shut their eyes or try to stick a handkerchief in their mouths to stifle their screams.  My mother had nightmares for years to come.

During 1942, with their army stretched out across China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Ocean, the Japanese found themselves running short of labor.  My mother's whole class was conscripted to work in a textile factory, as were the Japanese children.  The local girls had to walk about four miles each way; the Japanese children went by truck. The local girls got a thin gruel made from moldy maize with dead worms floating in it; the Japanese girls had packed lunches with meat, vegetables, and fruit.

The Japanese girls had easy jobs, like cleaning windows.

But the local girls had to operate complex spinning machines, which were highly demanding and dangerous even for adults.  Their main job was to reconnect broken threads while the machines were running at speed.  If they did not spot the broken thread, or reconnect it fast enough, they would be savagely beaten by the Japanese supervisor.

The girls were terrified.  The combination of nervousness, cold, hunger, and fatigue led to many accidents.  Over half of my mother's fellow pupils suffered injuries.  One day my mother saw a shuttle spin out of a machine and knock out the eye of the girl next to her.  All the way to the hospital the Japanese supervisor scolded the girl for not being careful enough.

After the stint in the factory, my mother moved up into junior high school.  Times had changed since my grandmother's youth, and young women were no longer confined to the four walls of their home.  It was socially acceptable for women to get a high school education.  However, boys and girls received different educations.  For girls the aim was to turn them into 'gracious wives and good mothers," as the school motto put it.  They learned what the Japanese called 'the way of a woman' looking after a household, cooking and sewing, the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, embroidery, drawing, and the appreciation of art.  The single most important thing imparted was how to please one's husband. This included how to dress, how to do one's hair, how to bow, and, above all, how to obey, without question.  As my grandmother put it, my mother seemed to have 'rebellious bones," and learned almost none of these skills, even cooking.

Some exams took the form of practical assignments.

such as preparing a particular dish or arranging flowers.

The examination board was made up of local officials, both Japanese and Chinese, and as well as assessing the exams, they also sized up the girls.  Photos of them wearing prett3' aprons they had designed themselves were put up on the notice board with their assignments. Japanese officials often picked fiances from among the girls, as intermarriage between Japanese men and local women was encouraged. Some girls were also selected to go to Japan to be married to men they had not met.  Quite often the girls or rather their families were willing. Toward the end of the occupation one of my mother's friends was chosen to go to Japan, but she missed the ship and was still in JMzhou when the Japanese surrendered.  My mother looked askance at her.

In contrast with their Chinese Mandarin predecessors, who shunned physical activity, the Japanese were keen on sports, which my mother loved.  She had recovered from her hip injury, and was a good runner. Once she was selected to run in an important race.  She trained for weeks, and was all keyed up for the big day, but a few days before the race the coach, who was Chinese, took her aside and asked her not to try to win.  He said he could not explain why.  My mother understood. She knew the Japanese did not like to be beaten by the Chinese at anything.  There was one other local girl in the race, and the coach asked my mother to pass on the same advice to her, but not to tell her that it came from him.  On the day of the race my mother did not even finish in the first six.  Her friends could tell she was not trying. But the other local girl could not bear to hold back, and came in first.

The Japanese soon took their revenge.  Every morning there was an assembly, presided over by the headmaster, who was nicknamed "Donkey' because his name when read in the Chinese way (Mao-h) sounded like the word for donkey (mao-h).  He would bark out orders in harsh,

guttural tones for the four low bows toward the four designated points. First, "Distant worship of the imperial capital!"  in the direction of Tokyo.  Then, "Distant worship of the national capital!"  toward Hsinking, the capital of Manchukuo.  Next, "Devoted worship of the Celestial Emperor!"  meaning the emperor of Japan.  Finally, "Devoted worship of the imperial portrait!"  this time to the portrait of Pu Yi. After this came a shallower bow to the teachers.

On this particular morning, after the bowing was completed, the girl who had won the race the day before was suddenly dragged out of her row by "Donkey," who claimed that her bow to Pu Yi had been less than ninety degrees.  He slapped and kicked her and announced that she was being expelled.  This was a catastrophe for her and her family.

Her parents hurriedly married her off to a petty government official. After Japan's defeat her husband was branded as a collaborator, and as a result the only job his wife could get was in a chemical plant. There were no pollution controls, and when my mother went back to Jinzhou in 1984 and tracked her down she had gone almost blind from the chemicals. She was wry about the ironies of her life: having beaten the Japanese in a race, she had ended up being treated as a kind of collaborator. Even so, she said she had no regrets about winning the race.

It was difficult for people in Manchukuo to get much idea of what was happening in the rest of the world, or of how Japan was faring in the war.  The fighting was a long way away, news was strictly censored, and the radio churned out nothing but propaganda.  But they got a sense that Japan was in trouble from a number of signs, especially the worsening food situation.

The first real news came in summer 1943, when the newspapers reported that one of Japan's allies, Italy, had surrendered.  By the middle of 1944 some Japanese civilians staffing government offices in Manchukuo were being conscripted.  Then, on 19July 1944, American B-29s appeared in the sky over Jinzhou for the first time, though they did not bomb the city.  The Japanese ordered even household to dig air-raid shelters, and there was a compulsory air-raid drill every day at school.  One day a girl in my mother's class picked up a fire extinguisher and squirted it at a Japanese teacher whom she particularly loathed.

Previously, this would have brought dire retribution,-but now she was allowed to get away with it.  The fide was turning.

There had been a long-standing campaign to catch flies and rats.  The pupils had to chop off the rats' tails, put them in envelopes, and hand them in to the police.  The flies had to be put in glass bottles.  The police counted every rat tail and every dead fly.  One day in 1944 when my mother handed in a glass bottle full to the brim with flies, the Manchukuo policeman said to her: "Not enough for a meal."  When he saw the surprised look on her face, he said: "Don't you know?  The Nips like dead flies.  They fry them and eat them!"  My mother could see from the cynical gleam in his eye that he no longer regarded the Japanese as awesome.

My mother was excited and full of anticipation, but during the autumn of 1944 a dark cloud had appeared: her home did not seem to be as happy as before.  She sensed there was discord between her parents.

The fifteenth night of the eighth moon of the Chinese year was the Mid-Autumn Festival, the festival of family union.  On that night my grandmother would place a table with melons, round cakes, and buns outside in the moonlight, in accordance with the custom.  The reason this date was the festival of family union is that the Chinese word for 'union' (yuan) is the same as that for 'round' or 'unbroken'; the full autumn moon was supposed to look especially, splendidly, round at this time.  All the items of food eaten on that day had to be round too.

In the silky moonlight, my grandmother would tell my mother stories about the moon: the largest shadow in it was a giant cassia tree which a certain lord, Wu Gang, was spending his entire life trying to cut down.  But the tree was enchanted and he was doomed to repeated failu/e.  My mother would stare up into the sky and listen, fascinated.

The full moon was mesmerizingly beautiful to her, but on that night she was not allowed to describe it, because she was forbidden by her mother to utter the word 'round," as Dr.  Xia's family had been broken up. Dr. Xia would be downcast for the whole day, and for several days before and after the festival.  My grandmother would even lose her usual flair for storytelling.

On the night of the festival in 1944, my mother and my grandmother were sitting under a trellis covered with winter melons and beans, gazing through the gaps in the shadowy leaves into the vast, cloudless sky. My mother started to say, "The moon is particularly round tonight," but my grandmother interrupted her sharply, then suddenly burst into tears. She rushed into the house, and my mother heard her sobbing and shrieking: "Go back to your son and grandsons!  Leave me and my daughter and go your own way!"  Then, in gasps between sobs, she said:

"Was it my fault or yours that your son killed himself?

Why should we have to bear the burden year after year?  It isn't me who is stopping you seeing your children.  It is they who have refused to come and see you .... Since they had left Yixian, only De-gui, Dr. Xia's second son, had visited them.  My mother did not hear a sound from

Dr.  Xia.

From then on my mother felt there was something wrong.  Dr.  Xia became increasingly taciturn, and she instinctively avoided him.  Every now and then my grandmother would become tearful, and murmur to herself that she and Dr.  Xia could never be completely happy with the heavy price they had paid for their love.  She would hug my mother close and tell her that she was the only thing she had in her life.

My mother was in an uncharacterisfically melancholy mood as winter descended on Jinzhou.  Even the appearance of a second flight of American B-29s in the clear, cold December sky failed to lift her spirits.