The Great Flowing River Read online

  The air-raid sirens sometimes started in the morning and stopped only after the sun had set. The Japanese planes came in wave after wave to bomb mainly Pukou, important military targets along the railway, and government organizations. The government had already started to urgently transport personnel and documents to the southwest, with those who remained working in temporary air-raid shelters. Setting out each morning, no one was certain if they would be able to make it safely back home.

  In August, the Military Committee was renamed the Supreme Command Headquarters for the War of Resistance, to prepare for full-scale resistance. My father was remitted to serve as Secretary of the Sixth Bureau, headed by Chen Lifu.

  By September, Nanjing was half deserted and by October, we were the only ones left on Ninghai Road. The neighbors had left in such a hurry that they didn’t even properly close up their doors or windows, which banged in the autumn wind. Scraps of paper and clothing blew through the streets, and the air was filled with an empty menace.

  From our doorway, I’d watch my father set off for work in the morning. Then I would ride my bike for a while, but before I’d gone very far, the frightening silence would send me quickly home. The air-raid sirens would go off every day at daybreak. There were quite a few of us at home, but with no air-raid shelter, we boosted one another’s courage as we listened to the bombs falling, feeling lucky we didn’t live in the center of town.

  At night, I slept alone in the room next to my parents’. When the moonlight was bright, the enemy planes would come and the air-raid sirens wailed even more shrilly. After one long and two short bursts of the siren, the planes could be heard ponderously approaching, followed by exploding bombs and the light of fires on the horizon. Alone in bed, I listened to the latches of the window screens creaking in the autumn wind, and seemed to see white lime raining down out of the sky, falling over the interminable steps at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial on Zijin Mountain, between the waves in Xuanwu Lake, on Dongchang Street Park, on the locust tree flowers in front of our house on Fuhougang Street, and on the seesaws at Drum Tower Elementary School. Death had already found its way to my window and rained down on the starlike cypress vine flowers growing on the newly built bamboo shed.

  I’ll never forget how every day at dusk, my mother, distressed and weak from illness, would force herself to get out of bed to greet my worried-looking father, comforted then at having us all together again.

  My father was always positive and optimistic. But even so, he still had not only to face the national crisis but also to find, through his own efforts, a way to solve the difficult problem of getting the teachers and students of Sun Yat-sen Middle School from the outskirts of Nanjing to Hankou, and then farther to the southwest.

  FLEEING FROM NANJING TO HANKOU

  In the middle of October, my father arranged first to send the seven-hundred-plus girl students and junior high students via the Jiangnan Railroad to Anqing, where they would board a riverboat to Hankou. They were to be led by the teachers and members of the Northeast China Association who had family dependents. The second group, three hundred plus high school boys, would remain in Banqiao until the next train and ship arrangements could be made. Only Huang Henghao, who had come from Beiping to establish the school, and Wang Yuzhang, the new principal, remained in Nanjing. Principal Wang was the second of five Wang brothers who were working for the anti-Japanese underground in Heilongjiang and who taught at the Central Military Academy after entering Shanhaiguan. Facing the present crisis, he had been ordered to take the more than one thousand teachers and students to the unoccupied rear. Our family left Nanjing with the second group of teachers and students.

  A month before departing, my father was worried about safety in the remoter areas, so he requested one hundred rifles for the school from Wu Keren, Corps Commander of the Sixty-seventh Army. He also gave the students military training to ensure their safety and that of the teachers along the way.

  We saw scarcely a soul on the way from home to the train station, and only upon arrival did we realize everyone had flooded into it. Thousands of people in large, dark cotton-padded coats pressed toward the platform, supporting the aged while leading the young. Bedding and luggage were everywhere, the station becoming a boiling cauldron of cries and shouts.

  The seniors from Sun Yat-sen Middle School, shouldering rifles and wearing leggings, did their best to protect and move the more than two hundred students and teachers onto the carriages reserved by the Ministry of Education. My older brother, my cousin Pei Lianju (my uncle’s son, who was also studying at Sun Yat-sen), and nineteen-year-old Zhang Dafei had wrapped my mother in a quilt and carried her aboard to a corner where she could half lie, half sit. After that they passed my three little sisters and me through the window into the carriage. A small cloth bag fastened at my waist contained two gold rings and some money, along with a contact address in Hankou.

  On the train, people were pressed together, some sitting and standing while others squatted, without an inch of free space. The top of the train was full of people clinging to it, and no one would come down regardless of how forcefully the stationmaster shouted. All anyone could think about was getting on the train and out of Nanjing.

  Around noon, my father stood in the cold autumn wind outside the station, his heart filled with worry as he watched the train filled to bursting, its roof covered with clinging refugees, ponderously pulling out. Twenty days later the city would be the ghastly scene of the Japanese massacre. Day and night the Japanese planes bombed along the Yangtze River. Would these people, who were constantly on his mind, come though the five-hundred-li journey unscathed?

  When the train passed through the first tunnel, crying and shouting were heard coming from the roof: “Someone got swept off! Someone fell!” But the people inside the carriage couldn’t extend a helping hand.

  The train seemed to crawl along, and when planes were heard, the train hid in the next tunnel. By the time we got to Wuhu, where we would change to a ship, it was already dark.

  In order to avoid being bombed in daylight, the ships sailed at night, but with no lights on the wharf and just a few small lamps on the gangplank to light the way. We finally made it onto the wharf and stumbled aboard ship. Too many people swarmed forward and some fell into the water, and even though the boat couldn’t carry any more passengers, people still pushed forward on the gangplank. There was a sudden cracking sound as the gangplank broke and even more people plunged into the water.

  On that perilous and dreadful night, the cries for help of the people who had fallen into the water and the sound of those who were drowning rose from the surface of the black river, along with the shouts of the people already on board calling out to their children. The sounds, mixed with the cries of the people who had been swept from the roof of the train during the day, often came back to me through the rest of my life. Those piercing screams reverberated through many a sleepless night and were the beginning of my compassion, which began from what I read in literature and gradually broadened to encompass all the people of my country and humanity.

  In those days, Yangtze troop ships were one of the lifelines in the defense of the capital, and from the upstream city of Hankou, the farthest they could go was to Wuhu. Shanghai had fallen ten days earlier, and after the last defending soldier had pulled out, the Japanese planes focused on bombing the Yangtze River shipping, so the shipping channel beyond the wharf at Xiaguan in Nanjing was full of sunken craft. After the reinforcing troops from upstream disembarked at Wuhu, the empty ships were soon filled with government officials and documents (including treasures from the Forbidden City) before sailing back to Hankou at night. If the skies were clear after daybreak, the ships would draw near to the riverbank where there were overhanging trees and proceed slowly under cover, the tops of the ships camouflaged with tree branches. We took what was probably the last group of troop ships. In order to impede the Japanese ground offensive, Chinese troops destroyed the steel bridge as well as the road bridge
s at Wuhu on December 1, which meant that the ships could only get as far as Anqing, farther upstream. Trains from Nanjing to Anqing could no longer operate, as they had nearly all become bombing targets, and whether a person lived or died was solely a matter of fate.

  The trip upstream to Hankou from Wuhu should have taken two days and a night. We hid on the banks of the Yangtze during daylight for two days. Fortunately it was the start of winter, so the days were short, and after three nights, the ship arrived at Hankou wharf in the first glimmer of dawn. The students sitting in the hold of the ship took another ship to a middle school in Wuchang and were temporarily housed in the auditorium, where they rejoined their classmates of the previous group. We stayed at a hotel that my father had entrusted a friend to book and where we were to wait for him, lest we lose contact.

  THE COUNTRY DESTROYED, THE FAMILY SHATTERED

  At that point, however, my family faced an even greater life-and-death challenge.

  Although there was someone to carry my mother from the Nanjing train station to the military wharf at Wuhu, she had still suffered greatly, and once on board ship she began to bleed heavily. By the third day of the trip, the styptics could no longer stem the metrorrhagia, and all our underclothes were placed under her lower body after the bedding was used up.

  By the time the boat reached Hankou, my mother was in a coma. She seemed to be breathing her last when she was carried from the wharf to a Catholic hospital that morning. My eighteen-month-old sister Jingyuan was carried to the hospital at the same time. She hadn’t been fully weaned and, having just learned to walk, was very cute. On board ship, when the adults were doing everything in their power to attend to my mother, she would walk around alone and people would sometimes feed her things. On the third day of the voyage, she began vomiting constantly and when we sent her to the hospital, she was placed in the pediatric ward. The doctor diagnosed her as having acute enteritis. She was in the far right end of the hospital and an aunt took me along to to see her; my mother was in the intensive care ward at the far left end of the hospital, where my uncle looked on as the doctors did everything to stabilize her in her severely weakened condition. My uncle Pei Shuqing had been an elementary school principal who had fled northeast China after Beiping and Tianjin fell and managed to get to Nanjing to join us in our flight to the rear.

  On the fifth morning, as I slept leaning against my sister’s bed, I was suddenly awakened by the sound of my aunt crying. My sister had become nothing more than a bag of bones, and her small sweet face had turned snow white. She had died. Just before I had drifted off to sleep out of weariness, she had opened her eyes and said, “Sister, hold me.” But now she was already cold.

  A Catholic nun who served as nurse came and closed her eyelids and said, “With your tears falling on her face, she won’t be able to go to heaven.” My aunt told me to go out and wait in the hall for a while before coming back in. When I came back, they had already wrapped her tiny form in a white blanket and carried her out.

  It was already daylight but still raining. It was a unfamiliar steel-gray winter sky over an unfamiliar city. Thirteen years old and filled with trepidation and grief, I seemed to crawl to the doorway of my mother’s room at the left end of the hospital.

  She no longer recognized me. Several doctors and nurses stood around her bed, and although they had just given her a transfusion, she had not yet revived. The oldest doctor motioned my uncle to the doorway and said, “You should prepare yourselves. We’ll continue doing everything we can, but there’s not much hope.”

  My uncle, accompanied by his students, found a coffin maker in that unfamiliar city and ordered a coffin for an adult, along with buying a small one. He also had to order mourning clothes for me and my sixteen-year-old brother. When he returned to the hospital, my mother’s heartbeat was very weak.

  Rushing to my mother’s bedside, my uncle shouted to my barely breathing mother, “Yuzhen, wake up! You can’t die. Your children are so young, you can’t die!”

  Many years later, my mother still remembered that morning, when wrapped in a shroud of gray clouds and fog, she heard my uncle shout her name. She seemed to see my older brother and me carrying or holding three little ones by the hand, standing in the snow. She struggled to grab hold of us, stumbling forward.…

  I stood alone in the doorway of my mother’s room, listening to my uncle shout her name, feeling cold, alone, and frightened. At that moment, I saw Zhang Dafei enter through the main door and run over to us. My tears began to pour down once again as I said to him, “My sister died, and now Mom is dying!”

  He entered her room, knelt before her bed, bowed his head, and prayed.

  When he came out of the room, he said, “I’ve already enrolled in the military academy. I changed my name to Dafei. I have to assemble at the wharf at eleven o’clock, but I had to come and see Mom before I left. Tell your brother that I’ll write as soon as I can.”

  He then took out a small package and placed in my hands, saying, “Take good care of this. It is what I want to say to you.” Then he strode quickly out the door of the hospital.

  Later, he told me in a letter that he had run almost all the way to the wharf and reported on time. He wept all the way because for over a year he had received motherly love and warmth from my mother, and he didn’t know if he would ever see her again.

  The little package he placed in my hand contained a small Bible, identical to his own, brand new, bound in leather with gilt pages. From that day on, I carried it with me on every rough journey in all sorts of vehicles and boats. Today, more than sixty years later, it is still clear and legible.

  On the flyleaf, he wrote:

  To little sister Pang-yuan:

  This is the life of mankind, the soul of the universe, as well as the spiritual granary for all Christians. May eternal God always love you and always be with you, and see that your sweet future is always bright, that you might always reside in the garden of happiness. Amen!

  Zhang Dafei, your fourth brother in God

  November 18, 1937

  Before that day, no one had ever blessed my weak and troubled life with words like “sweet future.”

  THE NANJING MASSACRE

  On December 7, my father arrived in Hankou. He and several dozen members of the Supreme Command Headquarters for the War of Resistance, who were the last to leave Nanjing, went first with Chairman Chiang Kai-shek to Yichang, where they boarded a military ship for Hankou.

  Our father had finally returned to us, dark and thin, for it had been difficult to procure food and drink in the last few days in Nanjing. It was the first time in my life that I had seen a grown man cry—tears streamed down his face as he looked around at his frightened children. His white handkerchief, which was gray with dust, was soaked through with tears. He said, “Our country is lost and our family shattered!”

  Mother, who hovered between life and death, was relieved at seeing her husband rejoin the family. Her worried heart now settled, she went on to live.

  Every morning, my father would cross the river from Hankou to the garrison Supreme Command Headquarters for the War of Resistance, which had been moved to Wuchang Garrison Headquarters, where he would review battlefield reports and manage the overall strategy. The war had already lasted five months, and the Japanese army that once boasted it would occupy all of China within three months now found itself confronting an awakened country.

  Japanese firepower, which had been aimed at Nanjing, Shanghai, Wuhu, and Nanchang, was now redeployed to bomb Wuhan day and night. All that remained of the once densely populated city center were the broken walls of tall buildings. All night long, firelight burned without ceasing along the river. The number of enemy planes increased, and our air force met them head on, shooting many down. The people, though living under the threat of death, still stood amid the rubble, cheering the air force that had become the biggest hero of New China.

  On the afternoon of December 13, the newsboys on the street shouted “Extra!
” My uncle ran downstairs to buy a paper, which said: “Nanjing falls. Japanese troops drive through the Zhonghua Gate into our capital, burning and pillaging, and massacring.”

  On the front page of the paper the following day was: “Nanjing falls. In the first two days, fifty thousand defenders are killed and wounded; more than one hundred thousand women, children, old, and weak are brutally massacred. Japanese abominations include even a killing contest.”

  On the same page was printed a foreign dispatch reporting that Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Romain Rolland, and John Dewey had issued a joint declaration calling for the people of the world to band together and boycott Japanese goods, and not cooperate with Japan, so as not to give strength to the Japanese invasion. At the same time it called for lending full support to China until Japanese troops were completely withdrawn and had put an end to all savage acts. The declaration was supported by nongovernmental groups and unions from all nations. But in any age, the voice of international justice is often drowned out by the gunfire of the mighty. Three months later, Hitler’s troops marched in and swallowed up Austria. Thinkers and scholars watched as their European homelands fell under the frightful control of totalitarianism. How could their sympathy for China have any practical effect?

  After Wuhu fell, in order to delay the Japanese advance upstream, the Chinese army scuttled eighteen ships and a large number of sailing vessels, blocking the river at Madang, forming a second blockade line so that our full force could be brought to bear at Jiujiang City and protect Wuhan. The evil and savage acts of the Japanese in Nanjing made the entire country determined to fight a protracted war of resistance. The southwestern provinces all cabled to say that they were joining the front line in the war and on December 26, the Chinese Communists announced their support for Chiang Kai-shek to fight a war of resistance to the end.