She used carbon paper to make an extra copy of the report for Dr. Wu, though without her address we didn’t know where to send it yet. Minnie reviewed the major happenings before and after the fall of the city, including our efforts to help the refugees, the measures we’d taken to protect the school’s properties, the conditions of the neighborhood, and the systematic destruction of lives and homes by the Japanese. She listed some arrests, rapes, robberies, and instances of arson — but they were too numerous to include all of them. Besides, she couldn’t mention too many atrocities in case the Japanese confiscated the letter. She included the abduction of the twelve girls on December 17, but emphasized that six of them had come back unharmed the next morning. She wrote: “We deem that this miracle was wrought by our prayers.”
I thought about telling her my doubts about the six girls’ claim that the Japanese had not molested them, but I had no evidence to back up my conjecture, so I refrained.
Minnie talked with me about the twenty-one “prostitutes.” Should we report that as well? If we did, what should we say? Would the board members in New York understand the situation? I could tell that Minnie was worried about Mrs. Dennison, because the old woman was in New York at the moment, fund-raising for our college, and she had always kept a close watch on Jinling. Mrs. Dennison might make a big fuss about this incident and even publicize it as a scandal, as we could not describe the circumstances in detail without putting ourselves at greater risk with the Japanese authorities.
After we had deliberated, Minnie said to me, “If it’s a mistake on my part, I’ll bear the guilt alone and do more good deeds to atone for it. God is greater than our hearts and knows everything.”
I didn’t fully understand her last sentence and asked, “You mean your conscience is clear?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that. But for now I prefer to keep this matter between God and me.”
“If you’re at fault, I’m part of it too. Don’t worry about it. Nobody will say you’re responsible for losing those women. We all know that the Japanese would have seized them one way or another that day.”
Somehow we both felt that some of the abducted women might come back, that it might be too early to fully gauge the weight of the incident. What’s more, we were certain that among the twenty-one women there’d been at least two or three former prostitutes. Deep down, though, we both knew that most of the women were unmarried and innocent. If only we had some information on them. If only we could find a way to bring some of them back. Those young lives had been ruined. No matter how we tried to reason away our responsibility, we were somewhat implicated, since by now everyone knew that Minnie had granted the Japanese permission. I made a mental note to write to Dr. Wu about this incident once I heard from her.
The more Minnie ruminated on this, the more remorseful and distressed she became. I urged her to stop thinking about it. There was so much to worry about at the moment that we mustn’t let our sense of guilt paralyze us.
We decided to focus on the first eleven days of the Japanese occupation, up to December 23, so that Minnie wouldn’t have to mention what had transpired on the twenty-fourth. When the next report was due, she could start from Christmas. Besides her inability to clearly explain her responsibility for the abduction, she was afraid of giving Mrs. Dennison a weapon to use against her. We knew that the only person who cared to scrutinize her report was the old woman, who seemed to hover over Minnie’s shoulder all the time. To appease Mrs. Dennison, Minnie stressed that the refugee camp here was only temporary, that we would try to reinstate the college as soon as possible after the refugees left.
Having written about a few more rape cases and several such attempts that had been stopped in time, Minnie concluded: “I wish we could have prevented all the tragedies, but compared to most of the other camps, our record is exceedingly good.” That was true, yet it didn’t ease her mind.
One of the accomplishments she wrote about was teaching the refugees to line up for food. For weeks the women and girls had crowded the porridge stands, jostling to reach the cauldrons. The lawn had been trampled into puddles of mud, and even the cypress hedges were crushed in places. How marvelous it was to see the women standing in orderly lines at mealtimes now. Minnie also reported that many refugees complained that the porridge was too watery. Obviously there was theft going on in the porridge plant, but as yet we hadn’t been able to find out where. The graft angered Minnie, and she assigned Luhai to keep a close watch on the cooks, but he couldn’t detect the cause. Minnie vowed to get to the bottom of it and questioned the headman of the kitchen personally. The pockmarked man named Boom Chen hemmed and hawed, saying he’d do everything in his power to thicken the porridge, but so far nothing had changed and the refugees kept griping.
Several times our college had offered to run the porridge plant ourselves, yet the local Red Cross people would not let us. Minnie couldn’t understand why they still had profit in mind under such circumstances. If only there was a way to nab the crooks.
The report was at last completed. How should she send it? Minnie said she would ask a fellow missionary going to Shanghai to mail it from there.
THE JAPANESE TROOPS grew less violent after the New Year, and some refugees felt things were stable enough that they no longer needed to stay in our camp. By mid-January, we still had seven thousand refugees. Many women believed that only through Minnie’s intervention could they get their menfolk back, so they stuck with us. In late January Minnie and Big Liu presented the petition to the Japanese embassy, where an attaché named Fukuda accepted it and said that some office would give it full consideration. At the same time the puppet municipality, the so-called Autonomous City Government, composed of some bureaucrats and local gentry who had Japanese connections, ordered that all the refugee camps close down by February 9, which in a way eased Minnie’s mind a little because she knew that Mrs. Dennison would hate to see the college remain a refugee camp.
We began persuading the older women among the refugees to go home. Some left, but they came back within two or three days. Many of the refugees had no place to live anymore, for nothing was left of their homes. One woman in her early forties was dragged away by four soldiers; they molested her for a whole night and did not release her until the next afternoon. She came back and begged Minnie never to make her go home again. A woman of sixty-three went back and was caught by two soldiers. She told them she must be as old as their grandmothers; all the same, they knocked her down, raped her, and stomped on her bound feet. She limped back to Jinling the next day, still shaken, and couldn’t stop her tears. Some of the women, shocked and humiliated, wouldn’t speak to anyone after they were back in our camp.
Their stories upset us, and we realized that we could not close the camp in a hurry. Even if we tried hard, there was no way to meet the deadline, which was just a week away. One thing we were clear about now — no matter what, we must never force any woman to leave. We ignored the deadline, giving the excuse that most of the refugees were homeless.
THE DEADLINE had passed, but not a single camp closed down. John Rabe insisted to the officials that there was no way to send the women home without exposing them to molestation by the soldiers, so the matter was dropped. Meanwhile, the Autonomous City Government had been registering all the citizens and refugees, and declared that anyone older than fifteen without an ID certificate would be arrested and jailed. Frightened, people lined up at various camps to go through the registration process. Some living outside the Safety Zone even came a day before and, bundled in overcoats or wrapped in blankets, waited a whole night to get registered. A lot of men feared that this might be another ruse to ensnare the so-called former soldiers and have more of them “mopped up.” Indeed, in the past three weeks the Japanese had seized more than twenty thousand men from various registration sites. Promised leniency and well-paid jobs, those men had stepped out, hoping to make some money for their families, but the Japanese apprehended them all. About three thousand of them were forced into convict labor while the rest were led to execution grounds.
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