The Devil of Nanking

  ‘England.’

  ‘England?’ She stood back and plugged a cigarette into the holder, narrowing her eyes. ‘Yes. You look like English girl. What you want to work here for? Eh?’

  ‘The same reason everyone wants to work here.’

  ‘What that, then, hmm? You like Japanese man?’

  ‘No. I need the money.’

  Her mouth curled then, as if she was amused. She lit the cigarette. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Peachy.’ She tilted her head and blew the smoke in a stream over her shoulder. ‘You try tonight. You nice to customer I give you three thousand yen an hour. Three thousand. Okay?’

  ‘Does that mean you want me to work?’

  ‘Why you surprised? You want something else? Three thousand. Take it or fly away, lady. I can’t give you no more.’

  ‘I just thought . . .’

  Mama Strawberry held up her hand to silence me. ‘And if it goes peachy tonight, then tomorrow you come back and you wear nice dress. Okay? You no wear nice dress and you pay ten thousand yen penalty. Penalty. You get it, lady? This very high class club.’

  *

  The club seemed to me the most magical place I’d ever seen – the floor like a starlit pool floating fifty storeys above the world, surrounded on all sides by panoramic views of the Tokyo skyline, the video screens on neighbouring buildings showing newsreels and music videos. I moved through it in a kind of nervous awe, looking at the ikebana flower arrangements, the muted down-lighting. One or two customers were already there, small men in business suits, at tables dotted around, some in banquettes, some in deep leather armchairs, pools of smoke hanging above the tables. On a raised platform a thin-faced piano-player in his bowtie warmed up with tinkling arpeggios. The only place the view of the city was interrupted was where Marilyn – the blank reverse of her, girdered, engineered and supported with metal struts – creaked and rattled back and forth through the night, blocking our view completely every ten seconds or so.

  Mama Strawberry was sitting at a reproduction Louis Quatorze gilded desk just in front of the Marilyn swing, smoking from her elaborate cigarette-holder and punching numbers into a calculator. Not far from her was a table where the hostesses sat, waiting to be assigned to a customer, smoking and chattering – twenty of us, all Japanese with the exception of me and the twins. Irina had given me a handful of Sobranie ‘Pinks’ cigarettes and I sat in silence, smoking intently, looking warily across the club at the aluminium doors where the customers would arrive.

  Eventually the lift bell pinged and a large party of suited men came through the aluminium doors. ‘She’s going to put you with them,’ Irina whispered, sliding up to me, her hand held to the side of her mouth. ‘These ones, they always leave the tip. For their favourite girls. Mama gonna watch and see if you get tip. This is your test, bay-beee!’

  I was summoned, discreetly, along with the Russians and three Japanese hostesses, and sent to a table next to the panoramic window, where we stood formally with our hands resting lightly on the chair backs waiting for the men to cross the polished parquet floor. I copied the others, stepping agitatedly from foot to foot, wishing I could tug my skirt down. A string of waiters appeared from nowhere, hurriedly setting the table with piles of snowy white linen, a silver candlestick, gleaming glasses, finishing just as the men arrived and seated themselves, pulling back chairs and unbuttoning jackets.

  ‘Irasshaimase,’ said the Japanese girls, bowing, and sliding into the chairs, taking hot towels from the bamboo dish that appeared on the table.

  ‘Welcome,’ I mumbled, taking my cue from the others.

  A bottle of champagne and some Scotch appeared. I shuffled my chair forward and sat, glancing at everyone, waiting to see what to do next. The girls were slitting the hot towels from their wrappers, unfolding them into the men’s waiting hands, so I quickly copied, dropping one into the hands of the man on my left. He didn’t acknowledge me. He took the towel, wiped his hands, dropped it carelessly on the table in front of me, and turned away to speak to the hostess on his other side. The rules were clear: my job was to light cigarettes, pour whisky, feed the men finger food and entertain them. No sex. Just conversation and flattery. It was all printed out for the new girls to read on a laminated card. ‘Better you say something funny,’ Mama Strawberry had whispered to me. ‘Strawberry’s customers want to relax.’

  ‘Hallo,’ Svetlana said boldly, settling her bottom into one of the seats, dwarfing the men, moving from side to side like a broody hen so that everyone had to make room. She picked up a glass from the centre of the table and chimed it against the bottle. ‘Shampansky, darlink. So nice!’ She unloaded the entire bottle into four glasses then waggled the empty bottle above her head to summon the waiter for more.

  The men seemed to like the twins, they kept singing tunes to them that must have been from TV or radio because I didn’t recognize them: ‘“Double the pleasure, double the fun . . . Give me that little LIFT. Come and get you SOME!”’ Everyone would laugh and applaud and the conversation, in a mixture of Japanese and broken English, would take off again. The twins got drunk very quickly. Svetlana’s eye makeup was smudged and Irina kept jumping up to light the men’s cigarettes with a disposable Thai Air lighter, leaning across the table, knocking over the little bowls of seaweed and dried cuttlefish. ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ she squealed, when someone told a joke. She was flushed and slurring. ‘Make me laugh some more and I explode!’

  I sat quietly, not drawing attention to myself, pretending that this was all normal, that I’d done this a thousand times and really didn’t care that nobody was talking to me, that I didn’t get the jokes, didn’t recognize the songs. At about nine o’clock, just when I thought I could keep quiet all night long, and maybe they’d forget I was there, someone suddenly said, ‘And what about you?’

  Silence fell at the table. I looked up and found everyone halted in mid-conversation, staring at me curiously. ‘What about you?’ someone repeated. ‘What do you think?’

  What did I think? I had no idea. I’d been drifting off somewhere, wondering if these men’s fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers had been in China. I wondered if they had any sense of what their lives were built on. I tried to picture their faces in the tall collars of the IJA uniform, in the snowy streets of Nanking, one of them raising a glinting katana sword . . .

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  They exchanged glances, unaccustomed to this rudeness. Someone kicked me under the table. I looked up and found Irina making a face at me, nodding at my chest, using both hands to push her breasts up, her shoulders pinned back. ‘Sit up,’ she mouthed. ‘Put your busts out.’

  I turned to the man sitting next to me, took a deep breath and said the first thing that came into my head: ‘Did your father fight in China?’

  His face changed. Someone sucked in a sharp breath. The hostesses frowned and Irina put down her drink with a shocked clink. The man next to me was thinking about what I’d said. At length he took a breath and said, ‘What an odd question. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because,’ I said, in a tiny voice, my heart sinking, ‘because it’s what I’ve been studying for nine years. Nine years and seven months and nineteen days.’

  He was silent for a moment, looking at my face, trying to read me. Nobody at the table seemed to breathe: they were all sitting forward, poised on their chair edges, waiting to hear what his response would be. After a long time he lit a cigarette, took a few puffs, and rested it carefully, deliberately, in the ashtray.

  ‘My father was in China,’ he said seriously, sitting back and folding his arms. ‘In Manchuria. And as long as he lived he wouldn’t talk about what happened.’ His cigarette smoke moved up to the ceiling in a long, unbroken stream, like a white finger. ‘My schoolbooks had all mention of it removed. I remember sitting in class, all of us holding the paper up to the light, making sure we couldn’t read what was written under the white-out. Maybe,’ he said, not looking at any
one, but directing the words into the air, ‘maybe you’ll tell me about it.’

  I’d been sitting with my mouth open stupidly, terrified of what he might say. Slowly it dawned on me that he wasn’t angry and the colour came back to my face. I sat forward, excited. ‘Yes,’ I said eagerly. ‘Of course. I can tell you anything you want to know. Anything—’ Suddenly the words were backing up in my throat, wanting to spill out. I pushed my hair behind my ears and put my hands on the table. ‘Now, I think that the most interesting part was what happened in Nanking. No. Actually, not what happened in Nanking itself, but – let me . . . let me put it a different way. The most interesting thing was what happened while the troops were marching from Shanghai to Nanking. No one ever has really understood what happened, you see, why they changed . . .’

  And that was how I started talking. I talked and talked into the night. I talked about Manchuria and Shanghai and Unit 731. Most of all, of course, I talked about Nanking. The hostesses sat in boredom, inspecting their nails, or leaning together and whispering to each other, shooting me glances. But the men all sat forward in eerie silence, staring at me, their faces taut with concentration. They didn’t say much more that evening. They left in silence and, at the end of the night, when Mama Strawberry clipped over to us with the tips, a sour look on her face, it was me she singled out. The men had left me the biggest tip. More than three times what they’d left anyone else.

  8

  Nanking, 1 March 1937

  The time I spend fretting about my wife! Thinking about our differences! For many of my colleagues this quaint, arranged marriage is anathema to all their ideals and, indeed, I had always expected to make a sensible alliance, maybe with someone from the university, one of those forward thinkers who take time, like our president Chiang Kai-shek, to truly consider China and her future. But, then, I hadn’t bargained for my mother’s hand in the matter.

  How infuriating! To be thinking even today of my mother. I tremble with embarrassment when I consider her, when I consider all my superstitious and backward family. The family that enjoyed wealth, but was never inclined or able to escape the provincial village, to break free of the Poyang summer floods. Maybe I’ll never truly escape either, and maybe this is the worst of the enduring truths about me: the proud young linguist from Jinling University, who is underneath just a boy from a China that doesn’t look forward and doesn’t change – that only stands still and waits for death. I think about that green and yellow countryside, punctuated by white goats and juniper trees, the plains where a man grows only sufficient to feed his family, where the ducks wander wild and pigs snout through the bean groves, and I wonder, can I hope to escape my past?

  With the clear eyes of hindsight, I see that my mother always had plans for Shujin. They had been together to the village fortune-teller, an old man whom I recall with no fondness, a blind man with a long white beard, persistently led round the villages like a trained bear by a child in straw sandals. The fortune-teller carefully noted down Shujin’s date, time and place of birth, and with a few scribbled characters and a juggling of his mysterious ivory tablets, soon, to my mother’s delight, judged Shujin to have the perfect proportion of the five elements, the correct balance of metal, wood, water, fire and earth, to produce myriad sons for me.

  Naturally I resisted. And would have resisted to this day, had my mother not become ill. To my fury, my desperation, even as she drew close to death she refused to forsake her country beliefs, her distrust of new technology. Instead of travelling, at my fevered insistence, to the good modern hospitals in Nanking, she put her trust in the local quacks, who spent long hours examining her tongue, emerging from her sick room with declarations of ‘An impossible surfeit of yin. It is a mystery, a scandal, that Doctor Yuan did not comment on this earlier.’ In spite of their potions, their brews and prognostications, she grew sicker and sicker.

  ‘So much for your superstitions,’ I told her, as she lay in her sickbed. ‘You understand, do you, that you are destroying me by refusing to come to Nanking?’

  ‘Listen.’ She rested her hand on my arm. Her brown hand, weathered by years in the provinces, lying across the crisp sleeve of the western suit I wore. I remember looking at it and thinking, Is this really the flesh that gave me life? Is it really? ‘You can still make me happy.’

  ‘Happy?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her eyes were bright and feverish. ‘Make me happy. Marry the Wangs’ daughter.’

  And eventually, out of nothing more than weary guilt, I capitulated. Really, the outrageous power our mothers have! Even the great Chiang Kai-shek was similarly swayed by his mother, even he submitted to an arranged marriage to please her. My qualms were terrible – what a disastrous match: the village girl with her ri shu almanacs, her lunar calendars, and me, the clear-eyed calculator, rapt in his logic and his foreign dictionaries. I worried intensely about what my colleagues would think, for I am, like most of them, a devout Republican, an admirer of the clear, forward-looking ideology of the Kuomintang, a cheerful supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, deeply sceptical about superstition, and everything that has held back China for so long. When the marriage took place, in my home town, I told no one. There were no colleagues to witness the rambling ceremony, no one to see me undergo the humiliating rituals – the token argument with the bridesmaids on the doorstep, caps of cypress, the tortuous procession avoiding wells or the houses of widows – every moment firecrackers making the entire ensemble jump like startled rabbits.

  But my family were satisfied and I was regarded as heroic. My mother, maybe feeling she had been released from her earthly obligation, died shortly afterwards. ‘With a smile on her face that was marvellous to see’, if my dear sisters are to be believed. Shujin became a proper mourner, getting down on her knees herself to dust the floor of my parents’ house with talcum powder: ‘We’ll marvel at her footprints when her spirit comes back to us.’

  ‘Please don’t talk like that,’ I said impatiently. ‘It was these very peasant beliefs that killed her. If she had listened to the teachings of our president—’

  ‘Hmmph,’ said Shujin, getting up and dusting off her hands. ‘I’ve heard enough about your precious president, thank you. All this rubbish about New Life. Tell me, what is this marvellous New Life he preaches, if not exactly this, our old life, re-created?’

  Now, still in mourning for my mother, with my business cards still printed on white paper, I find in her place, as if from the same bud, that a replacement has appeared, this troublesome, infinitely frustrating, fascinating wife. Fascinating, I say, because what is odd, what is wholly unexpected and improbable, is – and I quake to write this – that in spite of my impatience with Shujin, in spite of her backwardness, in spite of everything, she stirs something in me.

  This embarrasses me intensely. I would not admit it to a soul – certainly not to my colleagues, who would challenge her ridiculous beliefs on every intellectual level! She can’t even be called beautiful, at least not beautiful as is commonly regarded. But, from time to time I find myself lost, for several minutes, in the habit of watching her eyes. They are so much paler than other women’s, and I notice this particularly when she studies something, because then they seem to open abnormally wide and soak up the light, igniting tigerish stripes in them. Even an ugly toad dreams of eating a beautiful swan, they say, and this ugly toad, this skinny, truncated, pedantic toad, dreams daily of Shujin. She is my weakness.

  Nanking, 5 March 1937 (the twenty-third day of the first month by Shujin’s lunar calendar)

  Our house is small but it is modern. It is one of the two-storey lime-plaster whitewashed houses that have sprung up just north of the intersections of Zhongshan and Zhongyang Roads. The front door opens into a small, walled piece of land and from there into a tar-paved alley; at the back, past the kitchen, is a small plot of scrubland with pomegranate and teak trees and a disused well that becomes stagnant in the summer. We don’t need the well, we have running water: astonishing for this part of Nanking
where you can still see shanty-like shacks constructed from only tyres and wooden crates. And we have not only water but electricity, too, a lightbulb in each room, and imported flowered wallpaper in the bedroom! This house should make Shujin the envy of the neighbourhood, yet she prowls the place like a hunter, seeking out all the crevices and gaps that bad spirits could creep through. Now in every room there are altars to the household gods, separate cloths and brushes set aside to clean them; a spirit wall at the front door and blue ba-gua mirrors facing the interior doors. A carving of a qilin has appeared over our bed to help us conceive a son, and there are small yellow mantras tied to all the doors and windows, even to the trees outside.

  ‘Really,’ I say. ‘Can you not see how this sort of behaviour has held our nation back?’

  But she has no concept of nation-building, or moving forward. She is afraid of the new and the unfamiliar. She still wears trousers under her qipao and thinks the girls in Shanghai, with their silk stockings and short skirts, are scandalous. She worries that I won’t love her because her feet aren’t bound and has somehow contrived to be the owner of an old pair of clogs with embroidered tops that are rather Manchu in style and give her feet a pointed appearance as if they had been in bindings since she was a child. Sometimes she sits in bed looking at her feet, pressing them and wiggling the toes as if natural, unrestrained feet are something she feels a mild disgust for.

  ‘Are you sure, Chongming, that these feet are pretty?’

  ‘Don’t speak nonsense. Of course I’m sure.’

  Only last night when I was preparing for bed, oiling my hair and pulling on my pyjamas, she started again with her petitioning. ‘Are you? Quite sure?’

  I sighed and sat on the small stool, taking a pair of ivory-handled scissors from the chest. ‘There was nothing,’ I clipped my thumbnail, ‘absolutely nothing, lovely about tortured feet.’