Wild Swans. Jung Chang

Jinzhou. Even the appearance of a second flight of American B-29s in the clear, cold December sky failed to lift her spirits.

      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 neighbourhood 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 Miss 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-29s 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 neighbour 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 afterwards 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 neighbours were found dead. Some said they had poisoned themselves. All over Jinzhou Japanese were committing suicide or being lynched. Japanese houses were looted and my mother noticed that one of her poor neighbours 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 school friend 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 apartment. The clothes fitted 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 neighbourhood 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 colourful 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 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 knick-knacks. 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