Wild Swans

The Japanese had occupied it in early January 1932, after heavy fighting. Jinzhou was in a highly strategic location, and had played a central role in the takeover of Manchuria, its seizure becoming the focus of a major diplomatic dispute between the United States and Japan and a key episode in the long chain of events which ultimately led to Pearl Harbor ten years later.

When the Japanese began their attack on Manchuria in September 1931, the Young Marshal, Chang Hsueh-liang, was forced to abandon his capital, Mukden, to the Japanese. He decamped to Jinzhou with some 200,000 troops and set up his headquarters there. In one of the first such attacks in history, the Japanese bombed the city from the air. When the Japanese troops entered Jinzhou they went on a rampage.

This was the town where Dr Xia, now age sixty-six, had to start again from the bottom. He could only afford to rent a mud hut about ten by eight feet in size in a very poor part of town, a low-lying area by a river, under a levee. Most of the local shack owners were too poor to afford a proper roof: they laid pieces of corrugated iron over their four walls and put heavy stones on top to try to stop them from being blown away in the frequent high winds. The area was right on the edge of the town—on the other side of the river were sorghum fields. When they first arrived in December, the brown earth was frozen solid—and so was the river, which was about thirty yards wide at this point. In the spring, as the ice thawed, the ground around the hut turned to a quagmire, and the stench of sewage, kept down in winter because it immediately froze, permanently lodged in their nostrils. In the summer the area was infested with mosquitoes, and floods were a constant worry because the river rose well above the level of the houses and the embankments were poorly maintained.

My mother’s overwhelming impression was of almost unbearable cold. Every activity, not just sleeping, had to take place on the kang, which took up most of the space in the hut, apart from a small stove in one corner. All three of them had to sleep together on the kang. There was no electricity or running water. The toilet was a mud shack with a communal pit.

Right opposite the house was a brightly painted temple dedicated to the God of Fire. People coming to pray in it would tie their horses up in front of the Xias’ shack. When it got warmer, Dr Xia would take my mother for walks along the riverbank in the evenings and recite classical poetry to her, against the background of the magnificent sunsets. My grandmother would not accompany them: there was no custom of husbands and wives taking walks together, and in any case, her bound feet meant that walking could never be a pleasure for her.

They were on the edge of starvation. In Yixian the family had had a supply of food from Dr Xia’s own land, which meant they always had some rice even after the Japanese had taken their cut. Now their income was sharply down—and the Japanese were appropriating a far greater proportion of the available food. Much of what was produced locally was forcibly exported to Japan, and the large Japanese army in Manchuria took most of the remaining rice and wheat for itself. The local population could occasionally get hold of some maize or sorghum, but even these were scarce. The main food was acorn meal, which tasted and smelled revolting.

My grandmother had never experienced such poverty, but this was the happiest time of her life. Dr Xia loved her, and she had her daughter with her all the time. She was no longer forced to go through any of the tedious Manchu rituals, and the tiny mud hut was filled with laughter. She and Dr Xia sometimes passed the long evenings playing cards. The rules were that if Dr Xia lost, my grandmother would smack him three times, and if she lost, Dr Xia would kiss her three times.

My grandmother had many women friends in the neighbourhood, which was something new for her. As the wife of a doctor she was respected, even though he was not well off. After years of being humiliated and treated as chattel, she was now truly surrounded by freedom.

Every now and then she and her friends would put on an old Manchu performance for themselves, playing hand drums while they sang and danced. The tunes they played consisted of very simple, repetitive notes and rhythms, and the women made up the lyrics as they went along. The married women sang about their sex lives, and the virgins asked questions about sex. Being mostly illiterate, the women used this as a way to learn about the facts of life. Through their singing, they also talked to each other about their lives and their husbands, and passed on their gossip.

My grandmother loved these gatherings, and would often practise for them at home. She would sit on the kang, shaking the hand drum with her left hand and singing to the beat, composing the lyrics as she went along. Often Dr Xia would suggest words. My mother was too young to be taken along to the gatherings, but she could watch my grandmother rehearsing. She was fascinated and particularly wanted to know what words Dr Xia had suggested. She knew they must be great fun, because he and her mother laughed so much. But when her mother repeated them for her, she ‘fell into clouds and fog’. She had no idea what they meant.

But life was tough. Every day was a battle just to survive. Rice and wheat were only available on the black market, so my grandmother began selling off some of the jewellery General Xue had given her. She ate almost nothing herself, saying she had already eaten, or that she was not hungry and would eat later. When Dr Xia found out she was selling her jewellery, he insisted she stop: ‘I am an old man,’ he said. ‘Some day I will die, and you will have to rely on those jewels to survive.’

Dr Xia was working as a salaried doctor attached to another man’s medicine shop, which did not give him much chance to display his skill. But he worked hard, and gradually his reputation began to grow. Soon he was invited to go on his first visit to a patient’s home. When he came back that evening he was carrying a package wrapped in a cloth. He winked at my mother and his wife and asked them to guess what was inside the package. My mother’s eyes were glued to the steaming bundle, and even before she could shout out ‘Steamed rolls!’ she was already tearing the package open. As she was devouring the rolls, she looked up and met Dr Xia’s twinkling eyes. More than fifty years later she can still remember his look of happiness, and even today she says she cannot remember any food as delicious as those simple wheat rolls.

Home visits were important to doctors, because the families would pay the doctor who made the call rather than his employer. When the patients were happy, or rich, the doctors would often be given handsome rewards. Grateful patients would also give doctors valuable presents at New Year and on other special occasions. After a number of home visits, Dr Xia’s circumstances began to improve.

His reputation began to spread, too. One day the wife of the provincial governor fell into a coma, and he called in Dr Xia, who managed to restore her to consciousness. This was considered almost the equivalent of bringing a person back from the grave. The governor ordered a plaque to be made on which he wrote in his own hand: ‘Dr Xia, who gives life to people and society.’ He ordered the plaque to be carried through the town in procession.

Soon afterwards the governor came to Dr Xia for a different kind of help. He had one wife and twelve concubines, but not one of them had borne him a child. The governor had heard that Dr Xia was particularly skilled in questions of fertility. Dr Xia prescribed potions for the governor and his thirteen consorts, several of whom became pregnant. In fact, the problem had been the governor’s, but the diplomatic Dr Xia treated the wife and the concubines as well. The governor was overjoyed, and wrote an even larger plaque for Dr Xia inscribed: ‘The reincarnation of Kuanyin’ (the Buddhist goddess of fertility and kindness). The new plaque was carried to Dr Xia’s house with an even larger procession than the first one. After this, people came to see Dr Xia from as far away as Harbin, 400 miles to the north. He became known as one of the ‘four famous doctors’ of Manchukuo.

By the end of 1937, a year after they had arrived in Jinzhou, Dr Xia was able to move to a bigger house just outside the old north gate of the city. It was far superior to the shack by the river. Instead of mud, it was made of red brick. Instead of one room, it had no fewer than three bedrooms. Dr Xia was able to set up his own practice again, and used the sitting room as his surgery.

The house occupied the south side of a big courtyard which was shared with two other families, but only Dr Xia’s house had a door which opened directly into it. The other two houses faced out onto the street and had solid walls on the courtyard side, without even a window looking onto it. When they wanted to get into the courtyard they had to go around through a gate from the street. The north side of the courtyard was a solid wall. In the courtyard were cypresses and Chinese ilex trees on which the three families used to hang up clotheslines. There were also some roses of Sharon, which were tough enough to survive the harsh winters. During the summer my grandmother would put out her favourite annuals: white-edged morning glory, chrysanthemums, dahlias, and garden balsam.

My grandmother and Dr Xia never had any children together. He subscribed to a theory that a man over the age of sixty-five should not ejaculate, so as to conserve his sperm, which was considered the essence of a man. Years later my grandmother told my mother, somewhat mysteriously, that through qigong Dr Xia developed a technique which enabled him to have an orgasm without ejaculating. For a man of his age he enjoyed extraordinary health. He was never ill, and took a cold shower every day, even in temperatures of minus 10°F. He never touched alcohol or tobacco, in keeping with the injunctions of the quasi-religious sect to which he belonged, the Zai-li-hui (Society of Reason).

Although he was a doctor himself, Dr Xia was not keen on taking medicine, insisting that the way to good health was a sound body. He adamantly opposed any treatment which in his opinion cured one part of the body while doing damage to another, and would not use strong medicines because of the side effects they might have. My mother and grandmother often had to take medicines behind his back. When they did fall ill, he would always bring in another doctor, who was a traditional Chinese doctor but also a shaman and believed that some ailments were caused by evil spirits, which had to be placated or exorcized by special religious techniques.

My mother was happy. For the first time in her life she felt warmth all around her. No longer did she feel tension, as she had for the two years at her grandparents’, and there was none of the bullying she had undergone for a whole year from Dr Xia’s grandchildren.

She was particularly excited by the festivals which came around almost every month. There was no concept of the work week among ordinary Chinese. Only government offices, schools, and Japanese factories had a day off on Sunday. For other people only festivals provided a break from the daily routine.

On the twenty-third day of the twelfth moon, seven days before the Chinese New Year, the Winter Festival began. According to legend, this was the day when the Kitchen God, who had been living above the stove with his wife, in the form of their portraits, went up to Heaven to report on the behaviour of the family to the Celestial Emperor. A good report would bring the family abundant food in the kitchen in the coming year. So on this day every household would busily kowtow to the portraits of Lord and Lady Kitchen God before they were set ablaze to signify their ascent to Heaven. Grandmother would always ask my mother to stick some honey on their lips. She would also burn lifelike miniature horses and figures of servants which she made out of sorghum plants so the royal couple would have extra-special service to make them happier and thus more inclined to say many nice things about the Xias to the Celestial Emperor.

The next few days were spent preparing all sorts of food. Meat was cut into special shapes, and rice and soybeans were ground into powder and made into buns, rolls, and dumplings. The food was put into the cellar to wait for the New Year. With the temperature as low as minus 20°F, the cellar was a natural refrigerator.

At midnight on Chinese New Year’s Eve, a huge burst of fireworks was let off, to my mother’s great excitement. She would follow her mother and Dr Xia outside and kowtow in the direction from which the God of Fortune was supposed to be coming. All along the street, people were doing the same. Then they would greet each other with the words ‘May you run into good fortune.’

At Chinese New Year people gave each other presents. When dawn lit up the white paper in the windows to the east, my mother would jump out of bed and hurry into her new finery: new jacket, new trousers, new socks, and new shoes. Then she and her mother called on neighbours and friends, kowtowing to all the adults. For every bang of her head on the floor, she got a ‘red wrapper’ with money inside. These packets were to last her the whole year as pocket money.

For the next fifteen days, the adults went round paying visits and wishing each other good fortune. Good fortune, namely money, was an obsession with most ordinary Chinese. People were poor, and in the Xia household, like many others, the only time meat was in reasonably abundant supply was at festival time.

The festivities would culminate on the fifteenth day with a carnival procession followed by a lantern show after dark. The procession centred on an inspection visit by the God of Fire. The god would be carried around the neighbourhood to warn people of the danger of fire; with most houses partly made of timber and the climate dry and windy, fire was a constant hazard and source of terror, and the statue of the god in the temple used to receive offerings all year round. The procession started at the temple of the God of Fire, in front of the mud hut where the Xias had lived when they first came to Jinzhou. A replica of the statue, a giant with red hair, beard, eyebrows, and cloak, was carried on an open sedan chair by eight young men. It was followed by writhing dragons and lions, each made up of several men, and by floats, stilts, and yangge dancers who waved the ends of a long piece of colourful silk tied around their waists. Fireworks, drums, and cymbals made a thundering noise. My mother skipped along behind the procession. Almost every household displayed tantalizing foods along the route as offerings to the deity, but she noticed that the deity jolted by rather quickly, not touching any of it. ‘Goodwill for the gods, offerings for the human stomachs!’ her mother told her. In those days of scarcity my mother looked forward keenly to the festivals, when she could satisfy her stomach. She was quite indifferent to those occasions which had poetic rather than gastronomic associations, and would wait impatiently for her mother to guess the riddles stuck on the splendid lanterns hung at people’s front doors during the Lantern Festival, or for her mother to tour the chrysanthemums in people’s gardens on the ninth day of the ninth moon.

During the Fair of the Town God’s Temple one year, my grandmother showed her a row of clay sculptures in the temple, all redecorated and painted for the occasion. They were scenes of Hell, showing people being punished for their sins. My grandmother pointed out a clay figure whose tongue was being pulled out at least a foot while simultaneously being cut up by two devils with spiky hair standing on end like hedgehogs and eyes bulging like frogs. The man being tortured had been a liar in his previous life, she said—and this was what would happen to my mother if she told lies.

There were about a dozen groups of statues, set amid the buzzing crowds and the mouth-watering food stalls, each one illustrating a moral lesson. My grandmother cheerfully showed my mother one horrible scene after another, but when they came to one group of figures she whisked her by without any explanation. Only some years later did my mother find out that it depicted a woman being sawed in half by two men. The woman was a widow who had remarried, and she was being sawed in half by her two husbands because she had been the property of both of them. In those days many widows were frightened by this prospect and remained loyal to their dead husbands, no matter how much misery that entailed. Some even killed themselves if they were forced by their families to remarry. My mother realized that her mother’s decision to marry Dr Xia had not been an easy one.

3

‘They All Say What a Happy Place Manchukuo Is’

Life under the Japanese

1938–1945

Early in 1938, my mother was nearly seven. She was very bright, and very keen to study. Her parents thought she should begin school as soon as the new school year started, immediately after Chinese New Year.

Education was tightly controlled by the Japanese, especially the history and ethics courses. Japanese, not Chinese, was the official language in the schools. Above the fourth form in elementary school teaching was entirely in Japanese, and most of the teachers were Japanese.

On 11 September 1939, when my mother was in her second year in elementary school, the emperor of Manchukuo, Pu Yi, and his wife came to Jinzhou on an official visit. My mother was chosen to present flowers to the empress on her arrival. A large crowd stood on a gaily decorated dais, all holding yellow paper flags in the colours of Manchukuo. My mother was given a huge bouquet of flowers, and she was full of self-confidence as she stood next to the brass band and a group of VIPs in morning coats. A boy about the same age as my mother was standing stiffly near her with a bouquet of flowers to present to Pu Yi. As the royal couple appeared the band struck up the Manchukuo national anthem. Everyone sprang to attention. My mother stepped forward and curtsied, expertly balancing her bouquet. The empress was wearing a white dress and very fine long white gloves up to her elbows. My mother thought she looked extremely beautiful. She managed to snatch a glance at Pu Yi, who was in military uniform. Behind his thick spectacles she thought he had ‘piggy eyes’.

Apart from the fact that she was a star pupil, one reason my mother was chosen to present flowers to the empress was that she always filled in her nationality on registration forms as ‘Manchu’, like Dr Xia, and Manchukuo was supposed to be the Manchus’ own independent state. Pu Yi was particularly useful to the Japanese because, as far as most people were concerned, if they thought about it at all, they were still under the Manchu emperor. Dr Xia considered himself a loyal subject, and my grandmother took the same view. Traditionally, an important way in which a woman expressed her love for her man was by agreeing with him in everything, and this came naturally to my grandmother. She was so contented with Dr Xia that she did not want to turn her mind even slightly in the direction of disagreement.

At school my mother was taught that her country was Manchukuo, and that among its neighbouring countries there were two republics of China—one hostile, led by Chiang Kai-shek; the other friendly, headed by Wang Jingwei (Japan’s puppet ruler of part of China). She was taught no concept of a ‘China’ of which Manchuria was part.

The pupils were educated to be obedient subjects of Manchukuo. One of the first songs my mother learned was:

Red boys and green girls walk on the streets,

They all say what a happy place Manchukuo is.

You are happy and I am happy,

Everyone lives peacefully and works joyfully free of any worries.

The teachers said that Manchukuo was a paradise on earth. But even at her age my mother could see that if the place could be called a paradise it was only for the Japanese. Japanese children attended separate schools, which were well equipped and well heated, with shining floors and clean windows. The schools for the local children were in dilapidated temples and crumbling houses donated by private patrons. There was no heating. In winter the whole class often had to run around the block in the middle of a lesson or engage in collective footstamping to ward off the cold.

Not only were the teachers mainly Japanese, they also used Japanese methods, hitting the children as a matter of course. The slightest mistake or failure to observe the prescribed rules and etiquette, such as a girl having her hair half an inch below her earlobes, was punished with blows. Both girls and boys were slapped on the face, hard, and boys were frequently struck on the head with a wooden club. Another punishment was to be made to kneel for hours in the snow.

When local children passed a Japanese in the street, they had to bow and make way, even if the Japanese was younger than themselves. Japanese children would often stop local children and slap them for no reason at all. The pupils had to bow elaborately to their teachers every time they met them. My mother joked to her friends that a Japanese teacher passing by was like a whirlwind sweeping through a field of grass—you just saw the grass bending as the wind blew by.

Many adults bowed to the Japanese, too, for fear of offending them, but the Japanese presence did not impinge greatly on the Xias at first. Middle- and lower-echelon positions were held by locals, both Manchus and Han Chinese, like my great-grandfather, who kept his job as deputy police chief of Yixian. By 1940, there were about 15,000 Japanese in Jinzhou. The people living in the next house to the Xias were Japanese, and my grandmother was friendly with them. The husband was a government official. Every morning his wife would stand outside the gate with their three children and bow deeply to him as he got into a rickshaw to go to work. After that she would start her own work, kneading coal dust into balls for fuel. For reasons my grandmother and my mother never understood, she always wore white gloves, which became filthy in no time.

The Japanese woman often visited my grandmother. She was lonely, with her husband hardly ever at home. She would bring a little sake, and my grandmother would prepare some snacks, like soy-pickled vegetables. My grandmother spoke a little Japanese and the Japanese woman a little Chinese. They hummed songs to each other and shed tears together when they became emotional. They often helped in each other’s gardens, too. The Japanese neighbour had very smart gardening tools, which my grandmother admired greatly, and my mother was often invited over to play in her garden.

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.