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. Labourers 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 neighbour country’ to ‘the elder brother country’ and finally to ‘parent country’, Dr Xia banged his fist on the table and called him ‘that fatuous 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 1941 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 labour 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 moment? 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 offence 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 labour 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 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
