Frog

Soldiers from the eastern Shandong military district of the Eighth Route Army showed up at Great-Uncle’s house to recruit him, as a follower of Norman Bethune, reminding him of his fine reputation. I already belong to the Shanxi-Chaha’er-Hebei arm, he said. But we’re Communists, just like they are, the Shandong representative said. It doesn’t matter where you work. We really need someone like you, Old Wan, and we’ll do whatever is necessary to keep you here. Commander Xu said if an eight-man sedan chair won’t do the trick, he’d hogtie him and take him under escort to a banquet in his honour. That is how Great-Uncle wound up staying home in Shandong, where he founded the Xihai Underground Hospital.

The hospital had underground passages that linked the wards and other rooms, including a sterilisation room, a treatment room, an operating theatre, and a recovery room, all of which remain in Zhu Family Village, which is part of Yutong Township in the Laizhou Municipal area, and are still well maintained. An old woman of eighty-eight, Wang Xiulan by name, who was Great-Uncle’s nurse back then, is still alive and well. Several of the recovery rooms lead directly to a well. One day back then, a young woman went to the well for water, and was surprised when her bucket stopped before reaching the bottom. She looked down, and there in a hollow in a wall, a young, wounded Eighth Route soldier looked up and made a face at her.

Talk of Great-Uncle’s superb medical skills quickly made the rounds. It was he who removed the shrapnel lodged near Commander Xu’s scapula. He also managed to save both Political Commissar Li’s wife and her child during a difficult birth. Word had even spread to Pingdu city, which was under the command of an officer named Sugitani, whose warhorse had stepped on a land mine during a mop-up operation. He had taken off on foot, leaving the horse behind. Great-Uncle performed surgery on the horse, and after it recovered it became the mount for Regimental Commander Xia. But before long, the horse was so homesick it bit through its tether and ran back to Pingdu. Sugitani was so happy to see his horse again, with its wounds healed, he told his Chinese collaborators to find out what had happened. He learned that the Eighth Route Army had established a hospital right under his nose, and that the medical skills of its director, Wan Liufu, were responsible for saving the life of his horse. Commander Sugitani, who himself had received medical training, was impressed by Great-Uncle’s skills and summoned him to surrender. To do so, Sugitani adopted a scheme from the classical novel Three Kingdoms, which was to secretly infiltrate our hometown to kidnap my great-grandmother, my great-aunt, and my aunt, and take them back to Pingdu, where he sent a letter to Great-Uncle, telling him they were being held hostage.

After reading Sugitani’s letter, my great-uncle, a dedicated Communist, wadded it up and threw it away. The hospital commissar retrieved the letter and delivered it to district headquarters. Commander Xu and Commissar Li wrote a joint letter to Sugitani, denouncing him as a petty man and threatening to throw the entire weight of the Shandong Eighth Route Army against him if he harmed a hair of any of the three members of Wan Liufu’s family.

Gugu said that she and her mother and grandmother were well treated during the three months they spent in Pingdu. According to her, Sugitani was a fair-skinned young man who wore white-framed glasses and had a moustache. Quiet and bookish, he spoke fluent Chinese. He called my great-grandmother Aunt, called my grandmother Sister-in-law, and called Gugu Niece. She did not have a bad opinion of him. Of course, she only said that privately to members of the family. To others she said that all three were victims of Japanese brutality, subjected to coercion and bribery, though they remained steadfast.