But it was no good. Zhao Yumo kept denying she knew her. Yet she gave Shujuan a sidelong glance just as Zhao Yumo used to, elegantly lifting the chin which had survived the ravages done to the rest of her face, and spoke in Zhao Yumo’s Suzhou-accented Nanking dialect. ‘Who is Zhao Yumo?’ she asked.
Then she stood up, edged along the rows of seats past people’s knees, and left. No one grumbled. How could they when that beautiful chin expressed such exquisite regret at the inconvenience she was causing?
It was, of course, impossible for Shujuan to follow her. No one was going to make way for her. She had no option but to go back the way she had come in. By the time she got outside, there was no sign of Zhao Yumo.
She wrote to Fabio Adornato, who was then in America, and told him that Zhao Yumo was still alive. Fabio’s grandmother had died in October 1945, leaving her house to him, and Fabio had gone back to sell it. Shujuan told him in her letter how the woman had denied that she was Zhao Yumo. In his reply, which arrived a month later, he said that perhaps it was only by changing her identity that she could go on living. He urged Shujuan to try to put the past behind her now and get on with her life.
Ever headstrong, Shujuan resolved never to give up her search for the stories of the Qin Huai women. If she didn’t remember them, who would? Some information came to her from Japanese journalists’ notes and some she got by chatting to Japanese veteran soldiers. But most was elicited from the Chinese she met as she travelled through the provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui and Zhejiang, which surround Nanking.
When Zhao Yumo had given her testimony to the War Crimes Tribunal, she had talked about how, when they were first taken, two of the women had tried to resist with knives taken from the St Mary Magdalene kitchen. They were killed on the spot. The other eleven, when the officers had had enough of them, were deposited in a newly established comfort station. Over the next couple of years, they died one by one; some were executed for trying to escape, others died from disease, and a few even committed suicide. The fact that Zhao Yumo was fortunate enough to survive was probably down to her looks and her style, which meant that she was used by middle-ranking and junior officers. They gradually relaxed their vigilance and eventually she made her escape. That was after about four years of being a ‘comfort woman’.
It was only many years later that Shujuan found out what had happened to Cardamom. In an archive she came across a photograph that had been recovered after the war in the notebook of a Japanese POW. In it, a girl was bound to an old-fashioned wooden chair, her legs forced apart and her private parts exposed to the camera lens. The girl’s face was out of focus, probably because she was struggling so hard and would not keep still, but Shujuan was convinced it was Cardamom. The Japanese soldiers had not only violated her and condemned her to a lingering death, they had immortalised her humiliation in a picture. The notebook also contained a description of what had happened.
Shujuan closed her eyes and tried to imagine the last moments of the girl who had been barely older than she was. Out in the streets at dawn, alone and drunk, Cardamom would have had difficulty getting her bearings. She had been shut up in the brothel since early childhood, no better than a slave. It was even harder for her to find her way now that the invasion had ravaged Nanking, leaving its houses in ruins or burned out, its streets blocked with overturned carts and the shops emptied of people and goods. She must have wandered about, increasingly confused. Then the Japanese soldiers came.
Shujuan knew what happened next from the soldier’s account. They chased after her but Cardamom threw off her pursuers by slipping down a narrow alleyway. That was when she stumbled over a mound of something soft, the spilled entrails of a dead woman. With a shriek of horror, she stood frozen to the spot, trying to shake the ice- cold sticky mess from her hands. It was her undoing. The soldiers had given up the chase but now they were on her. They were joined by a platoon of cavalry camped nearby who had been alerted by the girl’s cries.
In a looted shop, a large crowd of Japanese soldiers formed an orderly queue in front of a heavy old wooden chair which they were using as an instrument of torture. Cardamom was tied to it and the soldiers, wearing only loincloths, waited their turn to enjoy her. Cardamom’s arms and legs were bound to the chair rests, her legs stretched wide. She swore and spat until the Japanese boxed her ears to shut her up. Then she quieted down, not because she was ready to capitulate but because she suddenly thought of Wang Pusheng. Only the night before she had promised to spend the rest of her life with him. As soon as she finally had four strings for her
Shujuan remembered listening to Cardamom playing ‘Picking Tea’ on her one-stringed
About the Author
Born in Shanghai in 1959, GELING YAN served with the People's Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution, starting aged 12 as a dancer in an entertainment troupe. She published her first novel in 1985 and has now written over 20 books and won 30 awards. Her works have been translated into twelve languages, several have been adapted for film, and she also writes film scripts (including that for Zhang Yimou's adaptation of
Also by Geling Yan in English Translation
Copyright
Other Press edition 2012
Copyright © 2006 by Geling Yan
First published with the title
English translation copyright © 2012 by Nicky Harman
English translation first published in Great Britain in 2012 by Harvill Secker
This publication was assisted by a grant from China Book International.
Special thanks from Other Press to Rebecca Carter of Harvill Secker for her dedication, promptness, and generosity.
Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cardenas
Design revisions for this edition by Cassandra J. Pappas
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Yan, Geling.
[Jin ling shi san chai. English]
The flowers of war / Geling Yan; translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman.
p. cm.
Summary: “December 1937. The Japanese have taken Nanking. A group of terrified schoolgirls hides in the
