Ed Note: This is one of my favorite posts, in part because it was such a personal experience to write it. It was written on the third day of the New Year in 2007.
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This past week as we sat down to another of many dinners, I had the pleasure of talking with YJ’s grandmother. “Lao Lao” was born to a well-to-do family and had gone to missionary school in the 1930s and 1940s in Tianjin. (She scared the hell out of me when I first met her a few years ago by suddenly turning to me and requesting, in perfectly enunciated English, to “Please have a seat.”) She told us stories of when the Japanese invaded Tianjin and she and her classmates rushed to the roof of their school to see the troops coming down the road. She told of her mother who used to dress her daughters up in rags and blacken their faces. “Japanese are superstitious and wouldn’t interfere with us (a euphemism for “rape”) because they would be afraid we were ghosts or devils.” She talked of how the KMT soldiers, marching into Tianjin after the Japanese surrendered, were so addicted to opium