Ha Jin - Nanjing Requiem

A barefoot boy said to her, “Show us how a rooster cries.”

The madwoman bunched her lips and stretched her thin neck. She let out, “Cock-a-doodle-do, cock-a-doodle-do!”

“That’s nice,” the same boy said.

Another one asked, “How about a duck?”

Yulan screwed up her mouth and shrieked, “Qua, qua, qua — ka ka ka ka!”

That cracked up all the boys. I noticed that one of Yulan’s teeth was missing. Despite that, she was still somewhat attractive, with a heart-shaped face, long hair, clear skin, and a small waist.

“That sounds more like a goose, too loud and too slow,” the tallest boy said. “Let’s see how a pig does it.”

The madwoman lifted her face to the sky and squealed, “Oink, oink, oink!”

“That’s not how a piggy cries,” said another boy.

Miss Lou shouted at them, “Stop it! Don’t tease her anymore!”

Yulan turned to the little woman, flapping her long eyelashes. “Nice to see you, Aunt Lou. How’re you doing?”

“Come with us, Yulan,” I begged.

“No, you have a big-nosed spy with you. I’m not going with you and her.” She pointed at Minnie.

“Yulan,” Minnie said, “you know I’d never hurt you.”

“Liar. All you foreign devils are liars.”

That made Minnie tongue-tied. She and I stood by as Miss Lou tried to persuade the deranged woman. By now most of the boys had left; only two were still around, one holding a soccer ball under his arm and the other wearing a bamboo whistle around his neck. As Miss Lou patted Yulan’s shoulder and murmured something to her, the madwoman burst into sobs, nodding continuously.

A few minutes later she left with us. She was quiet now, though her eyes still radiated a fierce light. Minnie told Monica that we were taking Yulan back to Jinling. The nun rubbed her hands together and said, “Oh, that’s good. Something ought to be done for her, poor thing.”

Minnie flagged down a two-seater rickshaw and let Miss Lou and Yulan take it, saying that we preferred to walk. She also told the little woman to leave Yulan with Shanna when they arrived at Jinling. The rickshaw rolled away and disappeared beyond a crossroads.

Minnie and I headed west. My left shoulder was sore again, and we both grew pensive. In my mind’s eye arose the scene of willowy Yanying embracing the foreleg of the stone lion while a Japanese soldier punched her in the gut and her little sister, Yanping, bawled.

“If only we had acted bravely,” Minnie said. “We might’ve saved some of the women.”

I knew she was thinking of the same event, but I kept silent.

We began talking about how to help Yulan. I asked, “What should we do about her?”

“Any suggestions?” Minnie said.

“We’d better find out whether she still has some relatives here.”

“She’s an orphan now, Miss Lou told me. Jinling should at least shelter her and take care of her needs.”

Minnie’s tone of voice allowed no argument, so I didn’t go further. For the time being this might be the only solution.

But I had my reservations because our hands were already full. The madwoman might stir up disturbances and frighten the students, so I kept wondering if there might be a better arrangement. Minnie seemed to have gone out of her way to accommodate Yulan, who was not our responsibility, strictly speaking. Everyone knew that the Japanese had deceived Minnie and would have seized those “prostitutes” one way or another. To care for the demented woman might be to ask for trouble.

Uneasy about those thoughts, I didn’t let them out. We went to see Shanna when we arrived back at the college. Minnie asked her to put Yulan in a homecraft class, stressing that the woman used to be a refugee at Jinling and ought to remain in our care. To our relief, Shanna gladly accepted Yulan as a student.

“You did me a huge favor,” Minnie told the young dean.

“No big deal. I hope she’s a quick learner.” Shanna twisted the end of her glossy braid, in which she seemed to take great pride. She was quite a beauty, with silken skin, a sunny face, and a dancer’s figure, though her eyes were spaced wide apart, which gave her a nonchalant look. Somehow I didn’t like her that much. She seemed vain and capricious, wearing powder all the time, and could be a bad model for some girls and young women.

Yulan turned out to be good at weaving. She was also literate, knowing enough characters to read newspapers. If she were not insane, Minnie might have let her teach a literacy class. Among the thirty-nine students in the weaving course, she soon excelled as one of the best. She was especially skilled at making stockings and scarves. Once in a while she’d still lose it, yelling at others or wailing without cause, but people thought she was innocuous as long as she wasn’t provoked. Some older women were even fond of her.

LOCAL AUTHORITIES, uprooted by the war, no longer existed in many areas. According to what refugees told us, guerrillas had caused a good deal of trouble in the country. Villagers were being ground on the millstone, pressed hard from the top and the bottom. If the guerrillas blew up a section of a road, the Japanese would come and order the villagers to repair it within a short period of time. Meanwhile, the guerrillas would warn them that if they did the work, some of them would be executed, so the only thing left for the villagers to do was to pull up stakes and leave, but many of them didn’t have the supplies or funds for travel.

Most of the guerrillas were backed by the Communists, but some were also remnants of the Nationalist army. They plagued the Japanese occupiers incessantly, doing things like attacking their sentry posts at night and cutting the transport lines to Nanjing. They would also punish farmers who sold rice and other grains to the enemy. The Japanese would occasionally bribe the guerrillas so foodstuffs could be shipped into our city. Every now and then the local newspapers announced that twenty-five thousand yuan had just been paid to the guerrillas, who had agreed to keep all the roads open, so the citizens shouldn’t worry about the supply of rice for months to come. Still, the price of rice kept rising, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether to buy more for the two schools now or to wait for the price to drop.

Fuel was another problem. We had difficulty getting coal for the winter because only one hundred tons were allowed each dealer. Worse yet, the price was doubled now — forty yuan a ton for the soft and fifty for the hard. We decided to try to get forty tons from a mine near Wuhan for twenty yuan per ton, though we were unsure if the Japanese would let it enter the city. The good news was that the U.S. embassy approved of our plan and agreed to help us bring the coal in.

Minnie had hired another nurse, so I didn’t have to do anything for the infirmary anymore. I was pleased, though I still had my hands full, supervising the servants and the cooks. Somehow I tended to be at odds with the younger women on the faculty. Many of them complained about my bossiness, and Shanna and Rulian even nicknamed me the Ancient One. Ban, the messenger boy, told me that.

I often complained to Minnie that the madwoman, in addition to the four blind girls, was too much of a burden to us. I suggested sending Yulan to the mental asylum funded by the puppet municipality. “The Japanese destroyed her mind,” I said, “so their lackeys should take care of her.” But Minnie wouldn’t listen.

One afternoon Ban complained to me about the madwoman, and I took him to the president’s office. I said to Minnie, “Yulan is making trouble again.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“Tell her,” I urged Ban.

The boy, two inches taller than he had been the previous winter but still slight like a rake, said in disgust, “That crazy bitch follows me wherever I go and calls me ‘Little Jap.’ ”