The Flowers of War Read online

  The Flowers of War

  Geling Yan

  It is December 1937 and the Japanese Imperial Army has just entered Nanking. Unable to reach the Safety Zone in Pokou, a group of schoolgirls are hiding out in the compound of the St. Mary Magdalene mission. They are looked after by Father Engelmann, an American priest who has made China his home for many years. The church is supposed to be neutral ground in the war between China and Japan, but eyewitness reports from the outside make it clear the Japanese are not obeying the international rules of engagement. As the soldiers pour through the streets of Nanking, committing unspeakable atrocities on civilians, thirteen Chinese courtesans from a nearby brothel climb over the church compound's walls seeking refuge. Their presence further jeopardizes the children's safety and what happens next will change all of their lives.

  A haunting, passionate story inspired by true life events during the Nanking Massacre, this novel shows how war challenges our prejudices and that love can flourish amidst death and destruction. The Flowers of War is an unforgettable journey through the depths of the human heart.

  Review

  “I have long been a fan of Geling Yan’s fiction for its power to disturb us out of our ordinary worlds… The Flowers of War is [a] riveting tale that touches us at the center of our being.”

  — Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club

  “I will never forget some of the characters in this short novel for their amazing acceptance of their destiny and their dignity throughout. That [Yan] was able to convey this with so much authority, yet so simply, is testament to [her] splendid talent.”

  — The Arts Fuse

  Geling Yan

  THE FLOWERS OF WAR

  Translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman

  To my father, Xiao Ma

  One

  Shujuan woke with a start. The next thing she knew, she was standing beside her bed. It was about five in the morning, a little earlier perhaps. At first she thought it was the absence of gunfire that had woken her. The artillery that had been thundering for days had suddenly fallen silent. Then she noticed a warm stain on her cotton nightgown. She stood barefoot and dazed. Blood. The wetness quickly turned icy cold. So, it had finally happened to her, as it does to every woman.

  Her makeshift bed was in a row of eight. There was a narrow gangway and then another eight beds. Buildings all over Nanking were burning and light from the flames filtered through the blackout curtains that covered the small oval attic windows. Orange patterns rippled across the room. Shujuan could make out the sleeping forms of the other girls and hear their deep breathing as they dreamed of more peaceful days.

  She pulled a jacket over her shoulders and climbed down through the trapdoor in the floor to the workshop below. The workshop was used for printing and binding the pamphlets and hymn sheets that the St Mary Magdalene mission needed for church services and its other religious work. Usually the attic above was unoccupied. The trapdoor was merely to allow access for electrical or roof repairs. It was connected to a ladder by an ingenious mechanism that extended the ladder downwards as soon as the cover was opened.

  When Shujuan and fifteen classmates had arrived at the mission compound the previous evening, Father Engelmann had told them to stay upstairs in the attic as much as possible. They had been given a tin bucket to urinate in. But the blood on her nightdress was an emergency. Shujuan needed to go to the washroom.

  Father Engelmann hadn’t expected that he would have to give the St Mary Magdalene schoolgirls shelter. Yesterday afternoon he, Deacon Adornato and their two servants, Ah Gu and George Chen, had taken those pupils who had been unable to leave school down to the river to get the ferry to Pukou. But they had been unable to board. When the steamer pulled into the dock, a group of badly wounded soldiers appeared and pushed the girls aside. One of the soldiers told Father Engelmann that their division had been shot at, not by the Japanese, but by their own side. They had received orders to make an emergency retreat but had clashed with Chinese soldiers who had not received the same order and so thought they were deserters. Having obeyed instructions to destroy their heavy weaponry on leaving the battlefield, they were a sitting target. They were machine-gunned and came under artillery fire, and some were then crushed by tanks. Losses and injuries on the retreating side ran into the hundreds before the misunderstanding was sorted out. No doubt out of a sense of guilt, the unit who had inflicted the injuries took over the boat at gunpoint, and put the wounded onboard. There was no room for the clergymen and the girls.

  Father Engelmann had felt that it was too dangerous to stay by the river. He and Deacon Adornato had led their little party back through the alleyways of Nanking to the church, with Ah Gu and George Chen bringing up the rear.

  Shujuan clambered down the wooden ladder that creaked at each step she made. On reaching the floor of the workshop, she felt the bone-chilling December damp seep through the soles of her slippers. Standing on one of the tables near the ladder was a thick candle melted into a shapeless mass of wax. Its quivering sprout of light gave Shujuan a little comfort as she felt her way across the workshop. Father Engelmann had promised the girls that, when daylight came, they would return to the dock and, if there was no ferry, they would make for the Safety Zone and take refuge there instead.

  As Shujuan groped her way down the corridor made by the work tables, the candle went out like a sigh. She stopped, disoriented. The silence frightened her. Over the past days, she and her schoolmates had become accustomed to the thunder of artillery and machine guns. The lack of gunfire was disquieting. Not peaceful but ominous, as if Nanking were surrendering. But how could that be? Only a day ago Father Engelmann had reassured them that the city was impregnable. The sturdy city walls and the Yangtze River meant that it would be extremely difficult for the Japanese to take the city.

  Almost all the pupils who had been left at the school were orphans. Only Shujuan and Xiaoyu had parents, but they were abroad and had waited until too late to come and fetch their daughters. Shujuan felt utterly betrayed. Clearly her cowardly parents had not wanted to come back to a capital city abandoned even by the Chinese government.

  In the washroom, she stood by the toilet and examined her nightdress. She was torn between curiosity and disgust at the dark liquid issuing from deep within her belly. She had the sense that this blood had turned her flesh into fertile soil, a place where any demon could implant a seed which would put forth shoots and bear fruit. Shuddering, she wedged a bulky cloth into her underwear and left the washroom, walking in an ungainly fashion. In the workshop she went to the window and pulled aside the blackout curtains. The bell tower of the Gothic church loomed in the night. It had been shelled a few days before and, along with the main entrance to the compound, had been reduced to rubble. The only way into the compound now was by a smaller side door. Behind the church she could just make out the lawn. Father Engelmann was passionate about this patch of grass. It was, he said proudly to his congregation, the last island of green left in Nanking. For decades it had served as a place for holding charity sales and celebrating weddings and funerals. Now it was dominated by the two flags—the Stars and Stripes and a Red Cross one—that lay on the grass as a signal to aircraft that it was neutral territory. In spring and summer, the lushness of the grass formed a fairy-tale setting for Father Engelmann’s red-brick rectory.

  Shujuan stared up at the ruined tower which, silhouetted against the fires that raged outside, still retained some of its grandeur. There was a glimmer of dawn in the east. It looked as if it would be a beautiful day. Climbing back up the ladder, she slipped quietly into bed and fell into a deep sleep.

  * * *

  Shujuan was
woken not long afterwards by shrieks and wails coming from downstairs. Together with the other girls she jumped out of bed and ran over to the windows. Pushing aside the blackout curtains and tearing away the rice paper from the window frames, they managed to get a view of the front courtyard.

  Shujuan pressed the side of her face up against the window frame. She saw Father Engelmann run out from behind the church, his ample cassock flapping like a sail. ‘You’re not allowed over the wall!’ he was shouting. ‘We’ve got no food!’

  Some of the bolder pupils opened a window. Now they could take it in turns to stick their heads out and see better. Sitting on top of the wall, above the side door, were two young women. One was wearing a bright pink satin dressing gown which made her look like a newly wedded wife who had just jumped out of bed. The other wore a fox-fur stole over a tight cheongsam.

  Fascinated by the drama, the girls climbed, one by one, down the ladder, walked through the workshop and went to huddle together in the doorway. By the time Shujuan arrived, there were another four women on top of the wall. Despite Father Engelmann’s attempts to keep them out, the first two had succeeded in jumping down. By this time Ah Gu and George Chen had joined the fray.

  Father Engelmann noticed the chattering girls and yelled fiercely, ‘Ah Gu! Take those girls away. They mustn’t see these women!’

  He looked tired. He hadn’t been able to shave since the water had been cut off, and the growth of stubble on his face made him look older than his sixty years.

  ‘They’re from the brothels!’ exclaimed some of the more sophisticated girls.

  ‘What brothels?’

  ‘The Qin Huai River brothels!’

  Deacon Fabio Adornato came hurrying out of the church building, shouting at the women: ‘Get out! We’re not taking in refugees!’ There was a momentary lull in the weeping and wailing as the women stared in astonishment at the big-nosed foreigner who spoke in authentic, unadulterated Yangzhou dialect, the kind spoken by cooks and barbers. But it didn’t last for long.

  ‘We ran away from the river but our cart overturned and the horse bolted,’ cried one of the women. ‘The city’s full of Jap soldiers and we can’t get into the Safety Zone!’

  ‘There’s no room to swing a cat in the Safety Zone, it’s crammed!’ chimed in a younger girl.

  ‘I know someone in the US embassy,’ shouted another, her words tumbling over each other. ‘He offered to hide us there, but last night he went back on his word. He just turned us away! All that fun we gave him—all for nothing!’

  ‘Fucker!’ said someone else casually. ‘When they come looking for pleasure, it’s all “Sweetheart this” and “Sweetheart that”, but then…!’

  Shujuan was flabbergasted at their language. She had never heard anything like it. Ah Gu tried to pull her away but she resisted. George, the cook, under orders to use a stout stick on the women to keep them out, was flailing to left and right of him, begging them: ‘Please, girls, go! You’ll only die of hunger or thirst if you come in here! The students only get two bowls of gruel a day and there’s no running water. That’s enough now, off you go!’ Shujuan noticed that he was half-hearted in the way he brandished his stick. It hit the brick walls, the ground, but never the women. In fact, the only person who got hurt was himself as the blows jarred his fingers and wrists.

  Suddenly one of the women knelt down in front of Father Engelmann and bowed her head. All Shujuan could see was her back, but it was an unforgettable back, as lithe and expressive as a face might be. Father Engelmann was trying to argue with the woman in the Chinese that he had learned so painstakingly over the last thirty years. He was reiterating what George had said: there was no food, no water, and no room. Hiding more people endangered everyone. When it was clear he was not getting his message across, he said in frustration, ‘Fabio, translate for me!’

  Deacon Fabio Adornato was born to Italian-American parents but brought up in a village in Yangzhou. He spoke in such perfect Yangzhou dialect that people called him ‘Yangzhou Fabio’.

  The woman knelt as if she had taken root, but her shoulders and back were alive with meaning.

  ‘Our lives are worthless,’ she said, ‘not worth rescuing. All we’re asking for is a good death. Even the lowliest of beasts, pigs and dogs, deserve a clean, merciful death.’

  There was no denying her elegance and dignity. As she spoke, her chignon suddenly came undone and hair cascaded down over her shoulders. It was beautiful hair.

  Father Englemann explained in his broken Chinese that among the pupils in his care there were some from the highest echelons of society, whose parents were long-standing members of his congregation. In the last few days they had cabled asking him to keep their daughters from harm. He had answered each cable swearing that he would guard them with his life.

  Fabio lost patience. ‘You’re wasting your breath talking like this to them. There’s only one sort of language they understand: George, start being a proper Monkey King and give them a real beating!’

  Ah Gu had given up trying to take Shujuan indoors and now rushed out and made a grab for George’s stick. Then one of the women suddenly fainted. As she fell into Ah Gu’s arms, her mangy mink coat slid open to reveal a white, naked body. Ah Gu let out a cry. The women on the wall took advantage of the diversion to hop nimbly down into the courtyard. A stout, dark-skinned woman stayed on top of the wall to hoist up an assortment of others, all of whom were unmistakably prostitutes.

  Fabio was in despair. ‘That’s enough!’ he shouted. ‘We’ve got every single whore from the Qin Huai brothels here!’ Meanwhile Ah Gu was trying to extricate himself from the embrace of the woman who had fainted but she hung on like a limpet, and the more he struggled, the more she tightened her hold.

  Father Engelmann, unable to stop this gaudy tidal wave of females, was looking crestfallen. ‘Open the door,’ he finally ordered Ah Gu.

  Shujuan watched in horror as a colourful assortment of women swept in, cluttering the neatly swept, stone-flagged courtyard with their belongings: baskets, bundles and satin bed quilts from which tumbled hair ribbons, silk stockings and other intimate articles. How could her parents have left her to witness such a vile scene? It could only be because they were selfish and loved her less than her sister. It had been a niggling doubt, but now she was sure of it. Her little sister was their favourite. Her father had been awarded a scholarship to pursue his studies in America, and immediately declared that only her sister would go since she had not yet started school. Shujuan could not have her schooling interrupted by a trip overseas. Her mother backed her father. A year would fly by, they comforted Shujuan, and the whole family would soon be together again. Shujuan seethed with resentment against her parents as she watched George struggling with the woman in his arms. By now the front of the mink coat was wide open revealing an expanse of flesh the colour of sour milk. Shujuan shrank back into the doorway, her face aflame. Then she turned and fled back up to the attic, to which the other girls had already retreated to watch events from the windows.

  There was pandemonium in the courtyard as the women ran around in search of food, water and a place to relieve themselves. One told another to hold up an expensive-looking bottle-green velvet cape in front of her, saying apologetically to the ‘foreign monks’ that they had been on the run all night. She could not wait any longer, she said, and disappeared behind the cape as if taking a curtain call.

  ‘Animals!’ yelled Fabio in English.

  ‘Please control yourself, Fabio,’ Father Engelmann said quietly. Then he turned to the prostitutes, including the one who had emerged cheerfully from behind the velvet cape and stood holding up her trousers by their cord. ‘Since you have come to stay here –’ he chose his words carefully—‘I beg you, as the priest of this church, to behave yourselves with decency.’

  ‘Father, listen…!’ expostulated Fabio.

  ‘You listen to me! Let them come in,’ said Father Engelmann. ‘At least for today. Once the Japanese have comple
ted their occupation, they’ll have responsibility for keeping the peace in the city. Then we can ask these women to leave. The Japanese people are well known to be law-abiding. I’m sure their troops will soon impose order on this chaos.’

  ‘They won’t be able to impose order in a day!’

  ‘Well then, two days. In the meantime, they can camp in the cellar.’

  Father Engelmann turned and walked back towards his house. He had announced his decision and there was no room for further discussion.

  ‘Father, I don’t agree!’ Fabio shouted after him.

  Father Engelmann stopped and turned round. As invincibly refined as ever, he said quietly: ‘I know you don’t agree, Fabio.’ Then he continued on his way. What he had not said was even clearer: Your disagreement is not of the slightest importance to me. His refinement conferred unchallengeable superiority. Although Fabio’s American parents had died when he was young and he had been cared for by a Chinese woman in the countryside of Yangzhou, he looked down on lower-class Chinese in the same way that the local dignitaries or militia did. But if they were several rungs below him in the social scale, then so was he to Father Engelmann who regarded him as inferior because of his rural upbringing.

  At that moment, a young prostitute made for the door of the building that housed the workshop. She had seen the girls’ heads at the attic windows and felt sure that it would be a good place to go. At least it would be warmer and more comfortable than outside. Fabio grabbed her from behind but she slipped out of his grasp like an eel. Fabio made another attempt, and this time got hold of the bundle she carried on her back. It was of coarse cloth, less slippery than her satin dressing gown, and he managed to get a purchase and pull her away from the doorway. But the bundle came undone and a sudden hailstorm of small bone mah-jong pieces rained down on the ground. They were fine-quality pieces—you could tell that from the clear, clinking noise they made as they fell.