When Fanfan fell asleep and Liya carried him to the other room, Haowen took something wrapped in a piece of tissue paper out of his inner breast pocket. “Mom,” he said, “I had nothing to bring you. Here’s a little keepsake.”
I opened the paper and found a gold bangle, smooth and solid. “You don’t need to do this,” I told him.
“Dad,” he said, turning to Yaoping, “I’m sorry I don’t have anything for you.”
“Forget about that. I’m happy just to see you safe and well. Bring Mitsuko home next time.”
“I will.”
As I was observing the bangle, I saw a tiny character, Diao, engraved on the inner side of the bracelet. My heart sank. I dropped the thing on the table with a clunk and asked, “Haowen, did you steal this from someone?”
“No, how … how can you say that?”
“It must belong to a Chinese with the family name Diao. Did you also join the Japanese in looting?” I got angrier as I spoke.
“Mom, you misjudge me. I only treat patients. There’s no way I could loot homes and rob my own people.” His face went misshapen as if something were stinging him.
“Then how come this bangle has the word ‘Diao’ engraved on it?”
“Let me take a look.” He picked it up and observed it, amazed by the character that he obviously hadn’t noticed before. He put it down. “I don’t know where it was from originally. It was an interpreter who gave it to me.”
“Is he Chinese?” his father said.
“Yes, the fellow had malaria and I took good care of him. You know the Japanese — they’d get rid of him like trash if he couldn’t get up from the sickbed within a couple of days.”
“What’s his surname?” I asked.
“Meng.”
“See, this bangle must’ve belonged to someone else,” I said.
“Meng gave it to me as a token of gratitude because I saved his life. I have no idea where he got it.”
“This might be ill-gotten,” I continued.
He looked tearful, then closed his eyes. “I’m cursed, cursed,” he muttered, his upper lip curled a little. “Even my mother rejects my present.” He sighed, lowered his head, and covered his forehead with his palm.
Pity and love stirred in my chest. I said, “All right, Haowen, I’ll keep this. But you must promise me that you’ll never rob anyone or steal from the civilians.”
“Do you think I could act freely like the Japanese? Heavens, the Japs treat me as a Chink, they don’t trust me. I’m cursed, cursed! I’m a pariah no matter where I go.” He stood up and went into the kitchen to wash his face at the sink. He blew his nose loudly.
Yaoping pursed his lips, then said to me, “Let’s treat him as our child, our only son. Can’t you see he’s miserable?”
I remained speechless and put the gold bangle away. Beyond any question, Haowen was good-natured and ill-used by the Japanese, but I didn’t want him to take advantage of his own people. Before I turned in, I said to him, “Keep in mind you’re a Christian. God will make us answer for what we did in this life.”
“I’ll remember that, Mom.”
That night he and his dad stayed in the inner room while I joined Liya and Fanfan in the other room. Haowen left before daybreak to catch the train.
29
ALTHOUGH THE MAIL was slower nowadays — sometimes it took several weeks to receive a letter sent within China — still its delivery was reliable. The Japanese had left the postal system in the southern provinces in Chinese hands, because it operated at a huge deficit, 120,000 yuan a month according to Minnie. In her official report to our New York board, Minnie said she was full of respect for the Chinese postal workers because we still received domestic mail every day.
I’d been in touch with Holly. She always sounded cheerful and had moved around, doing relief work. At present she was in Henan Province, where millions of people had become homeless because a dike along the Yellow River had been breached by the Nationalist army as a means to deter the advance of the Japanese forces. I had also been in correspondence with Dr. Wu and briefed her once a month about what was going on here. She was in Chengdu now, leading a large group of Jinling’s staff, students, and faculty. Once in a while she wrote to Minnie, who would share the letters with me. In the most recent one President Wu expressed her gratitude to Minnie for keeping the two programs in operation, but she wondered about the possibility of reopening the college in the fall.
The president wrote about the homecraft program and the middle schooclass="underline"
I understand that under the circumstances these two programs are the only possible arrangements. In fact, I am pleased that at least the Homecraft School, a fraction of our college, is still in place. But the middle school you are running should be only a temporary operation, and eventually it will have to be replaced by something like our former college. Mrs. Dennison wrote the other day that she was painfully concerned about the disintegration of our college and hoped we would make every effort to bring it back. In principle, I agree with her that the restoration of the college must be our goal, on which we should concentrate our effort. At the same time, I am also aware that as long as the Japanese occupy Nanjing, it will be unlikely we can realize such a goal. Damn the Imperial Army, they have destroyed everything and thrown us back to square one. These days I have often dreamed of our campus and Nanjing. How I wish I were with you again.
Dr. Wu also wrote Minnie that Mrs. Dennison would return from her yearlong furlough in the States, so we were pretty certain that the old woman would come back to Jinling. Had she been here the winter before, she might have remained behind like Minnie and opposed setting up the two current programs on campus: she’d always maintained that Jinling must grow into a top women’s college, well known internationally, so as to attract more funding.
Minnie and I agreed with President Wu that the middle school should be closed in due course, but for the time being it met the locals’ needs and there was no reason to dissolve it. More than four hundred girls had sat for the entrance test the previous fall and only a third of them were admitted, placed in four grades. For that and for the quality courses we offered, Jinling still commanded a fine reputation in Nanjing.
In her reply to President Wu, Minnie gave two reasons why restarting the college in the near future would not be feasible. First, we wouldn’t have enough freshmen, because in times like these few families would send their girls to Nanjing for college. Second, we would need a stronger faculty with college teaching experience, which again was unavailable. Minnie even asked Dr. Wu to encourage some of Jinling’s faculty members to return to Nanjing. Recently some foreigners, mostly American academics and missionaries, had arrived, but after speaking with our students and looking around, none of them had any desire to stay. Minnie added in her letter: “It was so easy for them to talk without committing themselves, and I have no choice but to depend on the Chinese faculty I assembled from the highways and byways. They are good enough for our current programs but will be inadequate for college teaching.” I totally agreed with her.
The Homecraft School had Dr. Wu’s blessing, though we had started it not long ago, in 1934, as a two-year program. Mrs. Dennison must have groused to Dr. Wu about our two ongoing programs and insisted that Jinling must excel in higher education again. Before taking her furlough the previous year, the old woman had even talked about starting some master’s programs here. Minnie had been lukewarm about that, though she’d never objected to it.