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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.

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 to show up. At other times, they left before the prisoner was actually dead. On such occasions, Dong hinted, he could stop the garrotte before the prisoner died.

After prisoners were garrotted, their bodies were put into thin wooden boxes and taken on a cart to a stretch of barren land on the outskirts of town called South Hill, where they were tipped into a shallow pit. The place was infested with wild dogs, who lived on the corpses. Baby girls who had been killed by their families, which was common in those days, were also often dumped in the pit.

Dr Xia struck up a relationship with the old cart driver, and gave him money from time to time. Occasionally the driver would come into the surgery and start rambling on about life, in an apparently incoherent way, but eventually he would begin talking about the graveyard: ‘I told the dead souls it was not my fault they had ended up there. I told them that, for my part, I wished them well. “Come back next year for your anniversary, dead souls. But in the meantime, if you wish to fly away to look for better bodies to be reincarnated in, go in the direction your head is pointed. That is a good path for you.”’ Dong and the cart driver never spoke to each other about what they were doing, and Dr Xia never knew how many people they had saved. After the war the rescued ‘corpses’ chipped in and raised money for Dong to buy a house and some land. The cart driver had died.

One man whose life they helped save was a distant cousin of my grandmother’s called Han-chen, who had been an important figure in the resistance movement. Because Jinzhou was the main railway junction north of the Great Wall, it became the assembly point for the Japanese in their assault on China proper, which started in July 1937. Security was extremely tight, and Han-chen’s organization was infiltrated by a spy, and the entire group was arrested. They were all tortured. First water with hot chillies was forced down their noses; then their faces were slapped with a shoe which had sharp nails sticking out of the sole. Then most of them were executed. For a long time the Xias thought Han-chen was dead, until one day Uncle Pei-o told them that he was still alive—but about to be executed. Dr Xia immediately contacted Dong.

On the night of the execution Dr Xia and my grandmother went to South Hill with a carriage. They parked behind a clump of trees and waited. They could hear the wild dogs rummaging around by the pit, from which rose the sickly stench of decomposing flesh. At last a cart appeared. Through the darkness they could dimly see the old driver climbing down and tipping some bodies out of wooden boxes. They waited for him to drive off and then went over to the pit. After groping among the corpses they found Han-chen, but could not tell if he was dead or alive. Eventually they realized he was still breathing. He had been so badly tortured he could not walk, so with great effort they lifted him into the carriage and drove him back to their house.

They hid him in a tiny room in the innermost corner of the house. Its one door led into my mother’s room, to which the only other access was from her parents’ bedroom. No one would ever go into the room by chance. As the house was the only one which had direct access to the courtyard, Han-chen could exercise there in safety, as long as someone kept watch.

There was the danger of a raid by the police or the local neighbourhood committees. Early on in the occupation the Japanese had set up a widespread system of neighbourhood control. They made the local big shots the heads of these units, and these neighbourhood bosses helped collect taxes and kept a round-the-clock watch for ‘lawless elements’. It was a form of institutionalized gangsterism, in which ‘protection’ and informing were the keys to power. The Japanese also offered large rewards for turning people in. The Manchukuo police were less of a threat than ordinary civilians. In fact, many of the police were quite anti-Japanese. One of their main jobs was to check people’s registration, and they used to carry out frequent house-to-house searches. But they would announce their arrival by shouting out ‘Checking registrations! Checking registrations!’ so that anyone who wanted to hide had plenty of time. Whenever Han-chen or my grandmother heard this shout she would hide him in a pile of dried sorghum stacked in the end room for fuel. The police would saunter into the house and sit down and have a cup of tea, telling my grandmother rather apologetically, ‘All this is just a formality, you know…’

At the time my mother was eleven. Even though her parents did not tell her what was going on, she knew she must not talk about Han-chen being in the house. She learned discretion from childhood.

Slowly, my grandmother nursed Han-chen back to health, and after three months he was well enough to move on. It was an emotional farewell. ‘Elder sister and elder brother-in-law,’ he said, ‘I will never forget that I owe my life to you. As soon as I have the chance, I will repay my great debt to you both.’ Three years later he came back and was as good as his word.

As part of their education, my mother and her classmates had to watch newsreels of Japan’s progress in the war. Far from being ashamed of their brutality, the Japanese vaunted it as a way to inculcate fear. The films showed Japanese soldiers cutting people in half and prisoners tied to stakes being torn to pieces by dogs. There were lingering close-ups of the victims’ terror-stricken eyes as their attackers came at them. The Japanese watched the eleven-and twelve-year-old schoolgirls to make sure they did not shut their eyes or try to stick a handkerchief in their mouths to stifle their screams. My mother had nightmares for years to come.

During 1942, with their army stretched out across China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Ocean, the Japanese found themselves running short of labour. My mother’s whole class was conscripted to work in a textile factory, as were the Japanese children. The local girls had to walk about four miles each way; the Japanese children went by truck. The local girls got a thin gruel made from mouldy maize with dead worms floating in it; the Japanese girls had packed lunches with meat, vegetables, and fruit.

The Japanese girls had easy jobs, like cleaning windows. But the local girls had to operate complex spinning machines, which were highly demanding and dangerous even for adults. Their main job was to reconnect broken threads while the machines were running at speed. If they did not spot the broken thread, or reconnect it fast enough, they would be savagely beaten by the Japanese supervisor.

The girls were terrified. The combination of nervousness, cold, hunger, and fatigue led to many accidents. Over half of my mother’s fellow pupils suffered injuries. One day my mother saw a shuttle spin out of a machine and knock out the eye of the girl next to her. All the way to the hospital the Japanese supervisor scolded the girl for not being careful enough.

After the stint in the factory, my mother moved up into junior high school. Times had changed since my grandmother’s youth, and young women were no longer confined to the four walls of their home. It was socially acceptable for women to get a high school education. However, boys and girls received different educations. For girls the aim was to turn them into ‘gracious wives and good mothers’, as the school motto put it. They learned what the Japanese called ‘the way of a woman’—looking after a household, cooking and sewing, the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, embroidery, drawing, and the appreciation of art. The single most important thing imparted was how to please one’s husband. This included how to dress, how to do one’s hair, how to bow, and, above all, how to obey, without question. As my grandmother put it, my mother seemed to have ‘rebellious bones’, and learned almost none of these skills, even cooking.

Some exams took the form of practical assignments, such as preparing a particular dish or arranging flowers. The examination board was made up of local officials, both Japanese and Chinese, and as well as assessing the exams, they also sized up the girls. Photos of them wearing pretty aprons they had designed themselves were put up on the notice board with their assignments. Japanese officials often picked fiancées from among the girls, as intermarriage between Japanese men and local women was encouraged. Some girls were also selected to go to Japan to be married to men they had not met. Quite often the girls—or rather their families—were willing. Towards the end of the occupation one of my mother’s friends was chosen to go to Japan, but she missed the ship and was still in Jinzhou when the Japanese surrendered. My mother looked askance at her.

In contrast with their Chinese Mandarin predecessors, who shunned physical activity, 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 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.