As I have been writing about the Taiping, the taking of Nanjing, and the establishment of their Jerusalem on the Yangtze, I have thought of my mother.
It’s the mid-1930s, some seventy-plus years after the fall of the Taiping’s “Heavenly City.” (The span of my lifetime—so not so long!) She is thirteen years old, attending Nanking American School, also known as Hillcrest. It’s a Friends boarding school. I wonder if “Hillcrest” has something to do with Nanjing’s Purple Mountain.
She rides the Shanghai-Nanking Railway from her home in Zhenjiang to Nanjing. (Her scrapbook preserves a train ticket.) Does she get off at Taipingmen station? The massive walls of the city still stand. She has walked through the city gates many a time. She passes a frail, elderly woman tottering along, who still bears childhood memories of the Taiping.
But this mid-1930s Nanjing of my mother’s school days bustles with activity. It is the capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, the Guomintang. And (so I recently learned) the government occupies none other than the old Taiping palace of the Heavenly King, Hong Xiuquan. There, on occasion, my mother’s Presbyterian missionary father visits with Gen. Chiang Kai-shek. It is said that the Generalissimo is a Christian. And this adds a sheen of hope to a new era of openness in China.1
The students of Hillcrest seem to breathe that air as they sing their school song:
Oh dear is the vale where the Yangtze river glides
On its winding way to the sea;
And dearer than all storied hills on earth besides
Is our own purple mountain to me.
Oh dear is Nanking with its walls and ancient towers
That look back on glories of yore;
And dear are the scenes of my happy childhood hours
That bespangle this old city o’er.
Oh dear are the moments when wandering I roam,
By the lake, o’er the hills, through the fields,
And dear are the friends of my happy China home,
Oh dear! For dear Nanking is gradually approaching the edge of a precipice. In December 1937, a year and a half after my mother’s departure from China, Nanjing falls to the Japanese imperial army. And the ancient city descends into infamous horrors. The massacre and rape of Nanjing.
A scrap of paper she kept has written on it: “The ministry of foreign affairs. Mr. Tsungwoo Ding. 236 Hupeh Road, Nanking, China. Next to this, a photo of a Chinese girl, signed Mei Dien[sp?]. Perhaps she is a school friend who can be reached at that address? What became of her when the Japanese imperial troops arrived? Did the family flee west with the Nationalist government to Chongqing?
The scent of the past seeps through fissures in time.
Frank Dikotter, The Age of Openness: China Before Mao (University of California Press, 2012).
This song is preserved in my mother’s scrapbook.