Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (9 page)

At school my mother was taught that her country was Manchukuo, and that among its neighboring countries there were two republics of China one hostile, led by Chiang Kai-shek; the other friendly, headed by Wang Jingwei (Japan's puppet ruler of part of China).  She was taught no concept of a "China' of which Manchuria was part.

The pupils were educated to be obedient subjects of Manchukuo.  One of the first songs my mother learned was' Red boys and green gifts walk on the streets, They all say what a happy place Manchukuo is. Live under the Japanese You are happy and I am happy, Everyone lives peacefully and works joyfully free of any worries.

The teachers said that Manchukuo was a paradise on earth.

But even at her age my mother could see that if the place could be called a paradise it was only for the Japanese.

Japanese children attended separate schools, which were well equipped and well heated, with shining floors and clean windows.  The schools for the local children were in dilapidated temples and crumbling houses donated by private patrons.  There was no heating.  In winter the whole class often had to run around the block in the middle of a lesson or engage in collective foot stamping to ward off the cold.

Not only were the teachers mainly Japanese, they also used Japanese methods, hitting the children as a matter of course.  The slightest mistake or failure to observe the prescribed rules and etiquette, such as a girl having her hair half an inch below her earlobes, was punished with blows.  Both gifts and boys were slapped on the face, hard, and boys were frequently struck on the head with a wooden club.  Another punishment was to be made to kneel for hours in the snow.

When local children passed a Japanese in the street, they had to bow and make way, even if the Japanese was younger than themselves. Japanese children would often stop local children and slap them for no reason at all.  The pupils had to bow elaborately to their teachers every time they met them.  My mother joked to her friends that a Japanese teacher passing by was like a whirlwind sweeping through a field of grass you just saw the grass bending as the wind blew by.

Many adults bowed to the Japanese, too, for fear of offending them, but the Japanese presence did not impinge greatly on the Xias at first. Middle- and lower-echelon positions were held by locals, both Manchus and Han

Chinese, like my great-grandfather, who kept his job as deputy police chief of Yixian.  By 1940, there were about 15,000 Japanese in Jinzhou. The people living in the next house to the Xias were Japanese, and my grandmother was friendly with them.  The husband was a government official.  Every morning his wife would stand outside the gate with their three children and bow deeply to him as he got into a rickshaw to go to work.  After that she would start her own work, kneading coal dust into balls for fuel.

For reasons my grandmother and my mother never understood, she always wore white gloves, which became filthy in no time.

The Japanese woman often visited my grandmother.  She was lonely, with her husband hardly ever at home.  She would bring a little sake, and my grandmother would prepare some snacks, like soy-pickled vegetables.  My grandmother spoke a little Japanese and the Japanese woman a little Chinese.  They hummed songs to each other and shed tears together when they became emotional.  They often helped in each other's gardens, too. The Japanese neighbor had very smart gardening tools, which my grandmother admired greatly, and my mother was often invited over to play in her garden.

But the Xias could not avoid hearing what the Japanese were doing.  In the vast expanses of northern Manchuria villages were being burned and the surviving population herded into 'strategic hamlets."  Over five million people, about a sixth of the population, lost their homes, and tens of thousands died.  Laborers were worked to death in mines under Japanese guards to produce exports to Japan for Manchuria was particularly rich in natural resources.  Many were deprived of salt and did not have the energy to run away.

Dr.  Xia had argued for a long time that the emperor did not know about the evil things being done because he was a virtual prisoner of the Japanese.  But when Pu Yi changed the way he referred to Japan from 'our friendly neighbor to 'the elder brother country' and finally to 'parent country," Dr.  Xia banged his fist on the table and called him 'that famous coward."  Even then, he said he was not sure how much responsibility the emperor should bear for the atrocities, until two traumatic events changed the Xias' world.

One day in late 194x Dr.  Xia was in his surgery when a man he had never seen came into the room.  He was dressed in rags, and his emaciated body was bent almost double.  The man explained that he was a railway coolie, and that he had been having agonizing stomach pains. His work involved carrying heavy loads from dawn to dusk, 365 days a year.  He did not know how he could go on, but if he lost his job he would not be able to support his wife and newborn baby.

Dr.  Xia told him his stomach could not digest the coarse food he had to eat.  On 1 June 1939, the government had announced that henceforth rice was reserved for the Japanese and a small number of collaborators. Most of the local population had to subsist on a diet of acorn meal and sorghum, which were difficult to digest.  Dr.  Xia gave the man some medicine free of charge, and asked my grandmother to give him a small bag of rice which she had bought illegally on the black market.

Not long afterward, Dr.  Xia heard that the man had died in a forced labor camp.  After leaving the surgery he had eaten the rice, gone back to work, and then vomited at the railway yard.  A Japanese guard had spotted rice in his vomit and he had been arrested as an 'economic criminal' and hauled off to a camp.  In his weakened state, he survived only a few days.  When his wife heard what had happened to him, she drowned herself with their baby.

The incident plunged Dr.  Xia and my grandmother into deep grief.  They felt responsible for the man's death.  Many times Dr.  Xia would say: "Rice can murder as well as save!

A small bagful, three lives!"  He started to call Pu Yi 'that tyrant."

Shortly after this, tragedy struck closer to home.  Dr.  Xia's youngest son was working as a schoolteacher in Yixian.  As in every school in Manchukuo, there was a big portrait of Pu Yi in the office of the Japanese headmaster, which everyone had to salute when they entered the room.

One day Dr.  Xia's son forgot to bow to Pu Yi.  The headmaster shouted at him to bow at once and slapped him so hard across the face he knocked him off balance.  Dr.  Xia's son was enraged: "Do I have to bend double every day?

Can I not stand up straight even for a momenff I have just done my obeisance in morning assembly .... The headmaster slapped him again and barked: "This is your emperor!  You Manchurians need to be taught elementary propriety!"  Dr.  Xia's son shouted back: "Big deal!  It's only a piece of paper?  At that moment two other teachers, both locals, came by and managed to stop him from saying anything more incriminating.  He recovered his self-control and eventually forced himself to perform a bow of sorts to the portrait.

That evening a friend came to his house and told him that word was out that he had been branded a 'thought criminal' an offense which was punishable by imprisonment, and possibly death.  He ran away, and his family never heard of him again.  Probably he was caught and died in prison, or else in a labor camp.  Dr.  Xia never recovered from the blow, which turned him into a determined foe of Manchukuo and of Pu Yi.

This was not the end of the story.  Because of his brother's 'crime," local thugs began to harass De-gui, Dr.  Xia's only surviving son, demanding protection money and claiming he had failed in his duty as the elder brother.  He paid up, but the gangsters only demanded more. In the end, he had to sell the medicine shop and leave Yixian for Mukden, where he opened a new shop.

By now, Dr.  Xia was becoming more and more successful.

He treated Japanese as well as locals.  Sometimes after treating a senior Japanese officer or a collaborator he would say, "I wish he were dead," but his personal views never affected his professional attitude.

"A patient is a human being," he used to say.

"That is all a doctor should think about.  He should not mind what kind of a human being he is."

My grandmother had meanwhile brought her mother to Jinzhou.  When she left home to marry Dr.  Xia, her mother had been left alone in the house with her husband, who despised her, and the two Mongolian concubines, who hated her.  She began to suspect that the concubines wanted to poison her and her small son, Yu-lin.  She always used silver chopsticks, as the Chinese believe that silver will turn black if it comes into contact with poison, and she never touched her food or let Yu-lin touch it until she had tested it out on her dog.  One day, a few months after my grandmother had left the house, the dog dropped dead.

For the first time in her life, she had a big row with her husband; and with the support of her mother-in-law, old Mrs.  Yang, she moved out with Yu-lin into rented accommodation.  Old Mrs.  Yang was so disgusted with her son that she left home with them, and never saw her son again except at her deathbed.

In the first three years, Mr.  Yang reluctantly sent them a monthly allowance, but at the beginning of 1939 this stopped, and Dr.  Xia and my grandmother had to support the three of them.  In those days there was no maintenance law, as there was no proper legal system, so a wife was entirely at the mercy of her husband.  When old Mrs.  Yang died in 1942 my great-grandmother and Yu-lin moved to Jinzhou, and went to live in Dr.  Xia's house.  She considered herself and her son to be second-class citizens, living on charity.  She spent her time washing the family's clothes and cleaning up obsessively, nervously obsequious toward her daughter and Dr.  Xia.  She was a pious Buddhist and every day in her prayers asked Buddha not to reincarnate her as a woman.

"Let me become a cat or a dog, but not a woman," was her constant murmur as she shuffled around the house, oozing apology with every step.

My grandmother had also brought her sister, Lan, whom she loved dearly, to Jinzhou.  Lan had married a man in Yixian who turned out to be a homosexual.  He had offered her to a rich uncle, for whom he worked and who owned a vegetable-oil factory.  The uncle had raped several female members of the household, including his young granddaughter.  Because he was the head of the family, wielding immense power over all its members, Lan did not dare resist him.  But when her husband offered her to his uncle's business parmer she refused.  My grandmother had to pay the husband to disown her (x/u), as a woman could not ask for a divorce.  My grandmother brought her to Jinzhou, where she was remarried, to a man called Pei-o.

Pei-o was a warder in the prison, and the couple often visited my grandmother.  Pei-o's stories made my mother's hair stand on end.  The prison was crammed with political prisoners.  Pei-o often said how brave they were, and how they would curse the Japanese even as they were being tortured.  Torture was standard practice, and the prisoners received no medical treaunent.  Their wounds were just left to rot.

Dr.  Xia offered to go and treat the prisoners.  On one of his first visits he was introduced by Pei-o to a friend of his called Dong, an executioner, who operated the garrote.

The prisoner was tied to a chair with a rope around his neck.  The rope was then slowly tightened.  Death was excruciatingly slow.

Dr.  Xia knew from his brother-in-law that Dong's conscience was troubled, and that whenever he was due to garrote someone, he had to get himself drunk beforehand.

Dr.  Xia invited Dong to his house.  He offered him gifts and suggested that perhaps he could avoid tightening the rope all the way.  Dong said he would see what he could do.  There was usually a Japanese guard or a trusted collaborator present, but sometimes, if the victim was not important enough, the Japanese did not bother to show up.

At other times, they left before the prisoner was actually dead.  On such occasions, Dong hinted, he could stop the garrote before the prisoner died.

After prisoners were garroted, their bodies were put into thin wooden boxes and taken on a cart to a stretch of barren land on the outskirts of town called South Hill, where they were tipped into a shallow pit. The place was infested with wild dogs, who lived on the corpses.  Baby gifts who had been killed by their families, which was common in those days, were also often dumped in the pit.

Dr.  Xia struck up a relationship with the old cart driver, and gave him money from time to time.  Occasionally the driver would come into the surgery and start rambling on about life, in an apparently incoherent way, but eventually he would begin talking about the graveyard: "I told the dead souls it was not my fault they had ended up there.  I told them that, for my part, I wished them well.

"Come back next year for your anniversary, dead souls.  But in the meantime, if you wish to fly away to look for better bodies to be reincarnated in, go in the direction your head is pointed.  That is a good path for you."  Dong and the cart driver never spoke to each other about what they were doing, and Dr.  Xia never knew how many people they had saved.  After the war the rescued 'corpses' chipped in and raised money for Dong to buy a house and some land.  The cart driver had died.

One man whose life they helped save was a distant cousin of my grandmother's called Han-chen, who had been an important figure in the resistance movement.

Because Jinzhou was the main raiiway junction north of the Great Wall, it became the assembly point for the Japanese in their assault on China proper, which started in July 1937.  Security was extremely tight, and Han-chen's organization was infiltrated by a spy, and the entire group was arrested.  They were all tortured.  First water with hot chiles was forced down their noses; then their faces were slapped with a shoe which had sharp nails sticking out of the sole.