Free Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin

the closed American embassy, we saw two Japanese soldiers coming from the opposite direction and hee-hawing while prodding a reedy boy ahead of them with rifles. The teenager pushed a barrow that had a large wooden wheel ringed with steel. It was loaded with booty—a stack of dried salt fish, a bundle of potato noodles, a jar of duck eggs still in brine, a wall clock, and a trussed pregnant sheep, still bleating. The soldiers each had about a dozen silver bracelets, watches, and gold rings affixed to their belts. All the women in the procession lowered their heads until the soldiers passed.
    When we arrived at the university, we found George Fitch, who had been managing the large camp there with Searle, squatting under a bulky linden, his head in both hands. “Hey, George, what’s the matter?” Minnie asked.
    He raised his bony face, his eyes watery and somewhat bloodshot. “The Japanese took away two hundred men just now,” he told her.
    “Were they surrendered soldiers?”
    “No, many of them were civilians.”
    “They just took whoever they wanted?”
    “They ordered them to undress and checked their shoulders and hands. If there was a mark like something left by a knapsack or a rifle, they took the man. But most of the poor fellows were coolies who had to work with tools and carry stuff around, and of course they had marks on their shoulders and calluses on their hands. The Japanese arrested practically all the young men. There was no way to reason with them. Oh, Minnie, this is horrible, as if we still live in the Dark Ages.”
    “What are they going to do to them?”
    “Finish them off, I’m sure.”
    “I guess they just want to kill to terrify the Chinese.”
    “Also to wipe out all the able-bodied males.” He sniveled and blew his nose into a piece of straw paper.
    Minnie said, “Maybe we shouldn’t have offered protection to those Chinese soldiers in the first place. Some of them were reluctant to give us their weapons, but we were so foolish that we promised them more than we can deliver.”
    “I’ve thought about that too. With firearms they could at least have defended themselves.”
    As we were speaking, a group of Japanese soldiers emerged, two of them dragging a scrawny man onto the lawn. I recognized Chang, who used to be a librarian at the university and now worked in the refugee camp as a file clerk. They meant to take him away, but he refused to go with them.
    We all stood up to watch. The leader of this group, a lieutenant, ordered a new recruit to stab Chang. The young soldier hesitated, but the officer barked out orders again. The man charged at Chang, whose cotton-padded overcoat was so thick that the bayonet didn’t go through. Realizing they meant to kill him, Minnie and George hustled toward them to intervene. I followed, but the soldiers blocked us. Then, to our astonishment, Chang undid his buttons and dropped his coat on the ground, facing his attacker with just his thin jacket on, his sparse goatee wet with snot. The lieutenant again yelled at the young man, who rushed toward Chang with a wild shriek and stabbed him through. The clerk’s legs buckled, but his eyes were still fixed on his killer. Then he fell, blood pooling around him.
    We were so stunned that for a while nobody could move or say a word. Then the troops marched away, and people gathered around Chang, who was breathing his last. “Revenge, revenge,” he mouthed.
    He died within a few minutes. I had known this wispy moonfaced librarian by sight and heard he had a fiery temper, but I’d never thought much of him.
    Having left the four hundred refugees with George Fitch, Minnie and I headed back. She panted a little as she walked, her gait ponderous but steady.
    “I wonder why God let this happen to us Chinese,” I said. “What did we do to deserve this? Why doesn’t God punish those heartless men?” Just that morning I’d heard that a nephew of mine, my cousin’s seventeen-year-old son, had been seized