Nanjing Requiem Read Free

rampage, plundering, burning, and destroying foreign schools and residences. It was believed that the Communists had instigated the violence to frame Chiang Kai-shek and damage his relations with the West. Some soldiers beat up foreigners and assaulted women. A platoon broke into Jinling and carried off several microscopes from a biology laboratory and some staffers’ personal belongings. At Nanjing University six foreign men were shot dead. I remembered how some missionaries had climbed down the city wall and scrambled onto American and British gunboats, which had been laying down a barrage inside the city to keep the Chinese troops from approaching a group of foreigners trapped on a hill. Eventually all the Westerners fled Nanjing, and Minnie and our other foreign faculty members went to Tsingtao and dared not come back to teach. It looked as if that was the end of their mission work here, but some of them returned six months later. Minnie was the very first to come back, eager to complete the construction of a dorm building and the rose garden.

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    M INNIE HAD GONE to the U.S. embassy to deliver the portmanteau when Searle Bates arrived on a bicycle to inspect our camp in preparation for relief work and to collect the Red Cross flags made by some women from the Jinling neighborhood. He was wearing a gabardine coat and work boots, which made him appear more imposing. He was somewhat slight in build, around five foot nine, and nearsighted. He told me that there were plans for nineteen other refugee camps in the Safety Zone, but there was only one other besides our college that would admit women and children exclusively, the one at Nanjing University’s dormitories. Searle also delivered some letters and a bundle of the North China Daily News , a British newspaper some of our faculty members had subscribed to. Since August, when the Japanese began attacking Shanghai, the paper had always arrived in batches, usually two weeks late.
    Searle was a history professor at Nanjing University, most of whose staff had just fled inland with the national government. He had a PhD in Chinese history from Yale and spoke Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. My husband had worked with him before the war, so I had known him for years and liked him. I walked with him through the halls, from which we had cleared all the furniture to make room for refugees. I told him that we expected to receive twenty-seven hundred people maximum, figured on the basis of sixteen square feet per person (each refugee would have a two-by-eight-foot space), but we’d feel more comfortable with two thousand. He nodded, smiling, while his craggy face wrinkled a little, a pair of delicate glasses on his bulky nose. He jotted down the numbers in a notebook, his Parker fountain pen shiny in his sinewy hand. As we were crossing the quadrangle, he tilted his head toward the thirty-foot U.S. flag we had spread in its center to indicate to Japanese bombers that this was American property.
    “That’s impressive,” he said.
    “Gosh, it took us more than a month to make it,” I told him. “It’s hard to find a capable tailor nowadays. At first the man mistakenly placed the stars in the upper right corner of the flag, and he had a lot of trouble getting them to the left.”
    Searle chuckled. “What a pretty haven you have here.” He clucked his tongue. Jinling College was known for its lovely campus, planted with many kinds of trees and flowers. Every fall there’d been a flower show here, but not this year.
    Suddenly the air-raid sirens went off, wailing like a mourning crowd. People began running for shelter. “We’d better go underground,” I said, and pointed at the chapel, which had a basement.
    Searle shook his head. “I won’t bother with it until I see bombs falling.”
    I tugged at his sleeve. “Come. Consider this part of your inspection. You should see our air-raid shelter, shouldn’t you?”
    “It’s a false alarm.”
    There had been so many wrong