Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (11 page)

The Japanese were becoming more and more edgy.  One day one of my mother's school friends got hold of a book by a banned Chinese writer. Looking for somewhere quiet to read, she went off into the countryside, where she found a cavern which she thought was an empty air-raid shelter.

Groping around in the dark, her hand touched what felt like a light switch.  A piercing noise erupted.  What she had touched was an alarm. She had stumbled into an arms depot.  Her legs turned to jelly.  She tried to run, but got only a couple of hundred yards before some Japanese soldiers caught her and dragged her away.

Two days later the whole school was marched to a barren, snow-covered stretch of ground outside the west gate, in a bend of the Xiaoling River.  Local residents had also been summoned there by the neighborhood chiefs.

The children were told they were to witness 'the punishment of an evil person who disobeys Great Japan."  Suddenly my mother saw her friend being hauled by Japanese guards to a spot right in front of her.  The girl was in chains and could hardly walk.  She had been tortured, and her face was so swollen that my mother could barely recognize her. Then the Japanese soldiers lifted their rifles and pointed them at the girl, who seemed to be trying to say something, but no sound came out. There was a crack of bullets, and the girl's body slumped as her blood began to drip onto the snow.

"Donkey," the Japanese headmaster, was scanning the rows of his pupils. With a tremendous effort, my mother tried to hide her emotions.  She forced herself to look at the body of her friend, which by now was lying in a glistening red patch in the white snow.

She heard someone trying to suppress sobs.  It was Mi~s Tanaka, a young Japanese woman teacher whom she liked.

In an instant "Donkey' was on Miss Tanaka, slapping and kicking her.  She fell to the ground, and tried to roll out of the way of his boots, but he went on kicking her ferociously.

She had betrayed the Japanese race, he bawled.  Eventually "Donkey' stopped, looked up at the pupils, and barked the order to march off.

My mother took one last look at the crooked body of her teacher and the corpse of her friend and forced down her hate.

4. "Slaves Who Have No Country of Your Own' Ruled by Different Masters (1945-1947)

In May 1945 the news spread around Jinzhou that Germany had surrendered and that the war in Europe was over.  US planes were flying over the area much more often: B-19s were bombing other cities in Manchuria, though Jinzhou was not attacked.  The feeling that Japan would soon be defeated swept through the city.

On 8 August my mother's school was ordered to go to a shrine to pray for the victory of Japan.  The next day, Soviet and Mongolian troops entered Manchukuo.  News came through that the Americans had dropped two atom bombs on Japan: the locals cheered the news.  The following days were punctuated by air-raid scares, and school stopped.  My mother stayed at home helping to dig an air-raid shelter.

On 13 August the Xias heard that Japan was suing for peace.  Two days later a Chinese neighbor who worked in the government rushed into their house to tell them' there was going to be an important announcement on the radio.  Dr.  Xia stopped work and came and sat with my grandmother in the courtyard.  The announcer said that the Japanese emperor had surrendered.  Immediately afterward came the news that Pu Yi had abdicated as emperor of Manchukuo.  People crowded into the streets in a state of high excitement.  My mother went to her school to see what was happening there.  The place seemed dead, except for a faint noise coming from one of the offices.  She crept up to have a look: through the window she could see the Japanese teachers huddled together weeping.

She hardly slept a wink that night and was up at the crack of dawn. When she opened the front door in the morning she saw a small crowd in the street.  The bodies of a Japanese woman and two children were lying in the road.  A Japanese officer had committed hara-kiri; his family had been lynched.

One morning a few days after the surrender, the Xias' Japanese neighbors were found dead.  Some said they had poisoned themselves. All overJinzhou Japanese were committing suicide or being lynched. Japanese houses were looted and my mother noticed that one of her poor neighbors suddenly had quite a lot of valuable items for sale.

Schoolchildren revenged themselves on their Japanese teachers and beat them up ferociously.  Some Japanese left their babies on the doorsteps of local families in the hope that they would be saved.  A number of Japanese women were raped; many shaved their heads to try to pass as men.

My mother was worried about Miss Tanaka, who was the only teacher at her school who never slapped the pupils and the only Japanese who had shown distress when my mother's schoolfriend had been executed.  She asked her parents if she could hide her in their house.  My grandmother looked anxious, but said nothing.  Dr.  Xia just nodded.

My mother borrowed a set of clothes from her aunt Lan, who was about the teacher's size, then went and found Miss Tanaka, who was barricaded in her aparunent.  The clothes fit her well.  She was taller than the average Japanese woman, and could easily pass for a Chinese. In case anybody asked, they would say she was my mother's cousin.

The Chinese have so many cousins no one can keep track of them.  She moved into the end room, which had once been Han-chen's refuge.

In the vacuum left by the Japanese surrender and the collapse of the Manchukuo regime the victims were not just Japanese.  The city was in chaos.  At night there were gunshots and frequent screams for help. The male members of the household, including my grandmother's fifteen-year-old brother Yu-lin and Dr.  Xia's apprentices, took turns keeping guard on the roof every night, armed with stones, axes, and cleavers.  Unlike my grandmother, my mother was not scared at all.  My grandmother was amazed: "You have your father's blood in your veins," she used to say to her.

The looting, raping, and killing continued until eight days after the Japanese surrender, when the population was informed that a new army would be arriving the Soviet Red Army.  On 23 August the neighborhood chiefs told residents to go to the railway station the next day to welcome the Russians.  Dr.  Xia and my grandmother stayed at home, but my mother joined the large, high-spirited crowd of young people holding colorful triangle-shaped paper flags.  As the train pulled in, the crowd started waving their flags and shouting' Wula' (the Chinese approximation of Ura, the Russian word for "Hurrah').  My mother had imagined the Soviet soldiers as victorious heroes with impressive beards, riding on large horses.  What she saw was a group of shabbily dressed" pale-skinned youths.

Apart from the occasional fleeting glimpse of some mysterious figure in a passing car, these were the first white people my mother had ever seen.

About a thousand Soviet troops were stationed in Jinzhou, and when they first arrived people felt grateful to them for helping to get rid of the Japanese.  But the

104 "Slaves Who Have No Country of Your Own' Russians brought new problems.  Schools had closed down when the Japanese surrendered, and my mother was getting private lessons.  One day on her way home from the tutor's, she saw a truck parked by the side of the road:

some Russian soldiers were standing beside it handing out bolts of textiles.  Under the Japanese, cloth had been strictly rationed.  She went over to have a look; it turned out the cloth was from the factory where she had worked when she was in primary school.  The Russians were swapping it for watches, clocks, and knickknacks.  My mother remembered that there was an old clock buried somewhere at the bottom of a chest at home.  She rushed back and dug it out.  She was a bit disappointed to find it was broken, but the Russian soldiers were overjoyed and gave her a bolt of beautiful white cloth with a delicate pink flower pattern on it.  Over supper, the family sat shaking their heads in disbelief at these strange foreigners who were so keen on useless old broken clocks and baubles.

Not only were the Russians distributing goods from the factories, they were also dismantling entire factories, including Jinzhou's two oil refineries, and shipping the equipment back to the Soviet Union.  They said these were 'reparations," but for the locals what this meant was that industry was crippled.

Russian soldiers would walk into people's homes and simply take anything they fancied watches and clothes in particular.  Stories about Russians raping local women swept Jinzhou like wildfire.  Many women went into hiding for fear of their 'liberators."  Very soon the city was seething with anger and anxiety.

The Xias' house was outside the city walls, and was very poorly protected.  A friend of my mother's offered to lend them a house inside the city gates, surrounded by high stone walls.  The family decamped immediately, taking my mother's Japanese teacher with them.  The move meant that my mother had to walk much farther about thirty minutes each way- to her tutor's.  Dr.  Xia insisted on taking her there and collecting her in the afternoon.  My mother did not want him to walk so far, so she would walk part of the way back on her own and he would meet her.  One day a jeep-load of laughing Russian soldiers skidded to a halt near her and the Russians jumped out and started running in her direction.  She ran as fast as she could, with the Russians pounding after her.  After a few hundred yards she caught sight of her stepfather in the distance, brandishing his walking stick.  The Russians were close behind, and my mother turned into a deserted kindergarten she knew well, which was like a labyrinth.  She hid there for over an hour and then sneaked out the back door and got home safely.  Dr.  Xia had seen the Russians chasing my mother into the building; to his immense relief they soon came out again, obviously baffled by the layout.

just over a week after the Russians arrived, my mother was told by the chief of her neighborhood committee to attend a meeting the following evening.  When she got there she saw a number of shabby Chinese men and a few women making speeches about how they had fought eight years to defeat the Japanese so that ordinary people could be the masters of a new China.  These were Communists Chinese Communists.  They had entered the city the previous day, without fanfare or warning.  The women Communists at the meeting wore shapeless clothes exactly like the men. My mother thought to herself: How could you claim to have defeated the Japanese?  You haven't even got decent guns or clothes.  To her, the Communists looked poorer and scruffier than beggars.

She was disappointed because she had imagined them as big and handsome, and superhuman.  Her uncle Pei-o, the prison warder, and Dong, the executioner, had told her that the Communists were the bravest prisoners: "They have the strongest bones," her uncle often said.

"They sang and shouted slogans and cursed the Japanese until the very last minute before they were strangled," said Dong.

The Communists put up notices calling on the population to keep order, and started arresting collaborators and people who had worked for the Japanese security forces.

Among those arrested was Yang, my grandmother's father, still deputy police chief of Yixian.  He was imprisoned in his own jail and his boss, the police chief, was executed.

The Communists soon restored order and got the economy going again. The food situation, which had been desperate, improved markedly.  Dr. Xia was able to start seeing patients again, and my mother's school reopened.

The Communists were billeted in the houses of local people.  They seemed honest and unpretentious, and would chat with the families: "We don't have enough educated people," they used to say to one friend of my mother's.

"Come and join us and you can become a county chief."

They needed recruits.  At the time of the Japanese surrender, both Communists and Kuomintang had tried to occupy as much territory as they could, but the Kuomintang had a much larger and better-equipped army. Both were maneuvering for position in preparation for renewing the civil war which had been partly suspended for the previous eight years in order to fight the Japanese.  In fact, fighting between Communists and Kuomintang had already broken out.  Manchuria was the crucial battleground because of its economic assets.  Because they were nearby, the Communists had got their forces into Manchuria first, with virtually no assistance from the Russians.

But the Americans were helping Chiang Kai-shek establish himself in the area by ferrying tens of thousands of Kuomintang troops to North China. At one point the Americans tried to land some of them at Huludao, the port about thirty miles from Jinzhou, but had to withdraw under fire from Chinese Communists.  The Kuomintang troops were forced to land south of the Great Wall and make their way north by train.  The United States gave them air cover.

Altogether, over 50,000 US Marines landed in North China, occupying Peking and Tianjin.

The Russians formally recognized Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang as the government of China.  By 11 November, the Soviet Red Army had left the Jinzhou area and pulled back to northern Manchuria, as part of a commitment by Stalin to withdraw from the area within three months of victory.  This left the Chinese Communists alone in control of the city.  One evening in late November my mother was walking home from school when she saw large numbers of soldiers hurriedly gathering their weapons and equipment and moving in the direction of the south gate.

She knew there had been heavy fighting in the surrounding countryside and guessed the Communists must be leaving.

This withdrawal was in line with the strategy of the Communist leader Mao Zedong not to try to hold cities, where the Kuomintang would have the military advantage, but to retreat to the rural areas.