Wild Swans. Jung Chang

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 partner she refused. My grandmother had to pay the husband to disown her (xiu), 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 treatment. 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 garrotte. 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 garrotte 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 garrotte before the prisoner died.

      After prisoners were garrotted, 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 girls 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 railway 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 chillies was forced down their noses; then their faces were slapped with a shoe which had sharp nails sticking out of the sole. 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 neighbourhood committees. Early on in the occupation the Japanese had set up a widespread system of neighbourhood control. They made the local big shots the heads of these units, and these neighbourhood 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 labour. 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 mouldy 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,