the Japanese were keen on sports, which my mother loved. She had recovered from her hip injury, and was a good runner. Once she was selected to run in an important race. She trained for weeks, and was all keyed up for the big day, but a few days before the race the coach, who was Chinese, took her aside and asked her not to try to win. He said he could not explain why. My mother understood. She knew the Japanese did not like to be beaten by the Chinese at anything. There was one other local girl in the race, and the coach asked my mother to pass on the same advice to her, but not to tell her that it came from him. On the day of the race my mother did not even finish in the first six. Her friends could tell she was not trying. But the other local girl could not bear to hold back, and came in first.
The Japanese soon took their revenge. Every morning there was an assembly, presided over by the headmaster, who was nicknamed ‘Donkey’ because his name when read in the Chinese way (Mao-li) sounded like the word for donkey (mao-lü). He would bark out orders in harsh, guttural tones for the four low bows towards the four designated points. First, ‘Distant worship of the imperial capital!’ in the direction of Tokyo. Then, ‘Distant worship of the national capital!’ toward Hsinking, the capital of Manchukuo. Next, ‘Devoted worship of the Celestial Emperor!’—meaning the emperor of Japan. Finally, ‘Devoted worship of the imperial portrait!’—this time to the portrait of Pu Yi. After this came a shallower bow to the teachers.
On this particular morning, after the bowing was completed, the girl who had won the race the day before was suddenly dragged out of her row by ‘Donkey’, who claimed that her bow to Pu Yi had been less than ninety degrees. He slapped and kicked her and announced that she was being expelled. This was a catastrophe for her and her family.
Her parents hurriedly married her off to a petty government official. After Japan’s defeat her husband was branded as a collaborator, and as a result the only job his wife could get was in a chemical plant. There were no pollution controls, and when my mother went back to Jinzhou in 1984 and tracked her down she had gone almost blind from the chemicals. She was wry about the ironies of her life: having beaten the Japanese in a race, she had ended up being treated as a kind of collaborator. Even so, she said she had no regrets about winning the race.
It was difficult for people in Manchukuo to get much idea of what was happening in the rest of the world, or of how Japan was faring in the war. The fighting was a long way away, news was strictly censored, and the radio churned out nothing but propaganda. But they got a sense that Japan was in trouble from a number of signs, especially the worsening food situation.
The first real news came in summer 1943, when the newspapers reported that one of Japan’s allies, Italy, had surrendered. By the middle of 1944 some Japanese civilians staffing government offices in Manchukuo were being conscripted. Then, on 29 July 1944, American B-29s appeared in the sky over Jinzhou for the first time, though they did not bomb the city. The Japanese ordered every household to dig air-raid shelters, and there was a compulsory air-raid drill every day at school. One day a girl in my mother’s class picked up a fire extinguisher and squirted it at a Japanese teacher whom she particularly loathed. Previously, this would have brought dire retribution, but now she was allowed to get away with it. The tide was turning.
There had been a long-standing campaign to catch flies and rats. The pupils had to chop off the rats’ tails, put them in envelopes, and hand them in to the police. The flies had to be put in glass bottles. The police counted every rat tail and every dead fly. One day in 1944 when my mother handed in a glass bottle full to the brim with flies, the Manchukuo policeman said to her: ‘Not enough for a meal.’ When he saw the surprised look on her face, he said: ‘Don’t you know? The Nips like dead flies. They fry them and eat them!’ My mother could see from the cynical gleam in his eye that he no longer regarded the Japanese as awesome.
My mother was excited and full of anticipation, but during the autumn of 1944 a dark cloud had appeared: her home did not seem to be as happy as before. She sensed there was discord between her parents.
The fifteenth night of the eighth moon of the Chinese year was the Mid-Autumn Festival, the festival of family union. On that night my grandmother would place a table with melons, round cakes, and buns outside in the moonlight, in accordance with the custom. The reason this date was the festival of family union is that the Chinese word for ‘union’ (yuan) is the same as that for ‘round’ or ‘unbroken’; the full autumn moon was supposed to look especially, splendidly, round at this time. All the items of food eaten on that day had to be round too.
In the silky moonlight, my grandmother would tell my mother stories about the moon: the largest shadow in it was a giant cassia tree which a certain lord, Wu Gang, was spending his entire life trying to cut down. But the tree was enchanted and he was doomed to repeated failure. My mother would stare up into the sky and listen, fascinated. The full moon was mesmerizingly beautiful to her, but on that night she was not allowed to describe it, because she was forbidden by her mother to utter the word ‘round’, as Dr Xia’s family had been broken up. Dr Xia would be downcast for the whole day, and for several days before and after the festival. My grandmother would even lose her usual flair for storytelling.
On the night of the festival in 1944, my mother and my grandmother were sitting under a trellis covered with winter melons and beans, gazing through the gaps in the shadowy leaves into the vast, cloudless sky. My mother started to say, ‘The moon is particularly round tonight’, but my grandmother interrupted her sharply, then suddenly burst into tears. She rushed into the house, and my mother heard her sobbing and shrieking: ‘Go back to your son and grandsons! Leave me and my daughter and go your own way!’ Then, in gasps between sobs, she said: ‘Was it my fault—or yours—that your son killed himself? Why should we have to bear the burden year after year? It isn’t me who is stopping you seeing your children. It is they who have refused to come and see you…’ Since they had left Yixian, only De-gui, Dr Xia’s second son, had visited them. My mother did not hear a sound from Dr Xia.
From then on my mother felt there was something wrong. Dr Xia became increasingly taciturn, and she instinctively avoided him. Every now and then my grandmother would become tearful, and murmur to herself that she and Dr Xia could never be completely happy with the heavy price they had paid for their love. She would hug my mother close and tell her that she was the only thing she had in her life.
My mother was in an uncharacteristically melancholy mood as winter descended on 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
