I MOVED BACK INTO THE LIVING QUARTERS AND BEGAN transcribing the recordings I had made of my grandmother, cringing at how much my poor Chinese had limited our conversations on the early tapes. I often caught myself pausing to write down follow-up questions and lamented my fluency having come too late. To replenish my coffers, I found a job teaching academic English in a college-prep program for wealthy Chinese students.

UNABLE TO TRAVEL FAR, I decided to pay a visit to Ginling College in Nanjing, a short train ride from Shanghai. I’d heard that alumnae in their seventies and eighties held monthly meetings and thought I might find some of my grandmother’s classmates. Hemmed in by mountains and by the Yangtze, topography limiting its sprawl, Nanjing was known until the Ming dynasty as Jinling, or “Gold Hill,” referring to the mountain guarding its backside, though the “hill” can also mean “mound,” “tomb,” or “mausoleum,” as the Chinese preferred to bury their dead on elevated locations and above ground. The classical name Jinling is still very much in use by literati and advertisers alike, adorning the signs of businesses seeking to exploit nostalgia or invoke the triumphs of imperial China. There are few Western equivalents to this interchangeability, though referring to the modern-day region of Laconia as “Sparta” might come close.

Nanjing is one of the oldest cities in China, having served as the capital of Chinese dynasties going back nearly two thousand years, including the Kuomintang during the Republican era, and with Hangzhou and Suzhou it formed the Jiangnan cluster of municipalities with a long history of industry, culture, and education. The founding emperor of the Ming dynasty had ordered the encirclement of the city with more than twenty miles of muscular ramparts, fifty feet high, forty feet wide at their base, and about half that width at their crenellated tops. The walls took twenty years to complete and required hundreds of millions of bricks that were produced in five provinces and inscribed with the names of the local quality-control officials. I had become so inured to the destruction of Chinese antiquity, and consequently sensitive to any vestiges of it, that I assumed the gray walls, collared with green trees and seeping vines, were too well-preserved to have been the originals, but they were.

From the train station, I took the subway into town, by coincidence emerging near John Rabe’s former home, a European-style villa with gray bricks and white windows. Rabe was a German businessman who worked for Siemens in China from 1910 to 1938. As the Japanese invasion of Nanjing became imminent in the winter of 1937, most Westerners fled the city. The two dozen or so who remained, including a Ginling College professor, organized the Nanjing Safety Zone, a trapezoidal area in the northwestern part of the city about the size of New York’s Central Park and encompassing foreign embassies, church organizations, and schools, where Chinese citizens who weren’t able to evacuate could seek refuge during the war. Rabe, a member of the Nazi Party, was elected the head of the Safety Zone committee, with the hope that his Nazi credentials would carry weight with the Japanese.

Chiang Kai-shek refused to surrender the capital but fled for Chongqing while tasking a rival general to defend Nanjing. This perceived abandonment of his countrymen earned Chiang the lasting enmity of mainland Chinese. For the overwhelmed defenders, military tactics quickly gave way to a frenzy of self-preservation. Fleeing Chinese soldiers stripped off their uniforms and left them in the street, along with weapons, backpacks, helmets, even shoes—anything that might identify them as noncivilians.

For six weeks following Nanjing’s capitulation, Japanese soldiers terrorized the city, burning, looting, and committing atrocities in what became known as the Rape of Nanking. Chinese prisoners of war and civilians alike—including women and children—were machine-gunned into mass graves, beheaded, bayoneted, or buried alive. Civilians were shot for the slightest indication of resistance or just because they, as Rabe wrote, “simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Japanese soldiers raped girls as young as eight years old and women as old as seventy, many of whom died after repeated assaults. Those who survived were often penetrated with bottles, sticks, and bayonets before being summarily executed. Even pregnant women were targeted and stabbed in their stomachs afterward. Japanese troops forced families to commit incest, sons raping mothers and fathers raping daughters, before killing them all. The total number of casualties remains heavily disputed, with estimates ranging from a few hundred (as some Japanese claim) to 300,000 (the figure most often cited by the Chinese).

The twenty-two Westerners on the Safety Zone committee—missionaries, businessmen, or doctors armed with only their occidental features and a moral authority—worked around the clock to protect the refugees of Nanjing; sometimes they were literally the only thing between a civilian and certain rape or death. Despite their heroic efforts, they were too outnumbered to stop all the incursions by Japanese soldiers, who regularly flouted the rules and broke into the camps. Inside the Safety Zone they stole food and clothing, carried off civilians to execute, and “raped until they were satisfied,” as an American surgeon serving at a hospital in the Safety Zone wrote to his family. Often a frantic civilian would find Rabe to report a rape in progress, and the two of them would rush to the scene, where Rabe chased away the Japanese soldiers, sometimes physically lifting the rapist off his victim. The Safety Zone was credited with having saved more than 200,000 Chinese from slaughter. Ironically, the item that Rabe relied upon most to stop the genocide was his swastika armband.

I headed to the Nanjing Normal University campus, a large research institution that still went by its former moniker of a teachers’ college and that had subsumed Ginling College. I entered at the university’s main gate, a narrow, angular arch of blue tiles, behind which slivers of historic buildings—the corner of a curved tile roof here, a splash of red column there—peeked from behind stands of tall, old trees. Nanjing Normal University is a popular destination for studying Chinese, and groups of foreigners—Americans, Europeans, even Japanese—strolled the wooded campus. In my search for the alumnae building, I passed a memorial for Minnie Vautrin, the longtime Ginling professor who’d helped designate Ginling as part of the international safe zone and stayed in Nanjing while the rest of the school evacuated. In addition to feeding, clothing, and sheltering the refugees, Vautrin ran from one entrance to another, chasing off Japanese intruders.

At the three-story alumnae house, the front door was locked, so I entered through a side door and came upon thirty elderly women on plastic chairs in a conference room. A younger woman asked what I wanted. I explained that I was the grandson of an alumna and had heard about the monthly meetings and hoped to find some of my grandmother’s classmates. “Oh, well, let me introduce you to Wang Laoshi,” the woman said. “She organizes these meetings.”

Wang Laoshi was a small, energetic woman in her seventies dressed in a floral print tunic, gray pants, and white walking shoes. They had just wrapped up the morning meeting, she said, and were about to break for lunch. Wang Laoshi insisted that I join them, so I followed their slow migration up the hill to the campus hotel. Recent graduates of the reconstituted Ginling College, a constituent, and still female-only, school of Nanjing Normal University, had set up a few tables in the hotel’s dining room. “These meetings don’t happen elsewhere, and we don’t know how much longer we will have them,” Wang Laoshi said. “We’re all getting old.”

Lunch consisted of light fare such as tofu and wood ear mushrooms, steamed fish, and buns, and the alumnae spent most of the time imploring me to eat more, piling food and rice into my bowl. “Eat up!” Wang Laoshi said. “We’re all grannies here. We can’t finish all this food.”

Most of the women who showed up at the alumnae gatherings had graduated after the Communist takeover in 1949; in 1951 Ginling was merged with Nanjing University. Wang Laoshi recognized my grandmother’s name—she had contributed money toward the construction of a new building on campus—but had never met her. “We don’t have anyone her age here,” she said. “None of those classmates can come out anymore, those who are left. But I remember your uncle Richard. Your grandmother told him to come to Ginling to recruit graduates for his new company, and he came here one year and hired a bunch of them.”

After lunch most of the group made their way back to the alumnae house to “rest” before heading home. Wang explained that the second floor was given over to residences for visiting alumnae, and on the third were rooms for visiting students or alumnae of Wellesley College, with which the new Ginling had a relationship. Students of Ginling’s original sister school, Smith College, had rooms on campus elsewhere. Much of the first floor of the building displayed Ginling’s history, with a special focus on former college president Wu Yifang. Born into a family of declining scholar-officials in 1893 in Hubei, Wu was educated at mission schools in the Jiangnan region and was part of Ginling’s inaugural class of 1919. She went on to earn a doctorate in entomology at the University of Michigan and returned to China in 1928 to become Ginling’s first Chinese president and was a beloved figure to its alumnae. It was through the continued efforts of Wu, who never married and endured the Cultural Revolution (Wang would only say that she “suffered”), that Ginling College was reopened in 1987, two years after her death, as China’s only women’s college.

Wang introduced me to the rest of the women in the alumnae house, sitting placidly with straight backs and hands in their laps. They nodded and murmured approval over my interest in Ginling. One of the women asked if I could fix the ringer on her mobile phone. Eager to help, I fiddled with the phone for a long while, despite not being able to read the Chinese on her screen. One by one the women got up to leave, offering a chorus of polite excuses: We can’t help, we’re too young, we don’t know anything, we’re no use, we have nothing to say, you don’t want to waste your time talking to us. Except for Wang Laoshi and me, only one woman remained, a shy woman named Chen Laoshi, who graduated the same year as Wang. They decided to take me for a walk around the old campus.

Although the historic campus appeared as if it had always been there, it wasn’t even a hundred years old. Ginling College was founded in 1913, and its original campus constructed in 1916, on twenty-seven acres of rice and wheat fields and hills dotted with graves that a conglomerate of mission boards purchased piecemeal from the various owners. For most of the period of Western activity in China, foreigners constructed buildings in their native styles, importing the necessary materials to create faithful reproductions of European structures. Chinese architecture was regarded as “rotten” and backward, concerns about feng shui were dismissed as superstition, and objections that the erection of Western-style buildings all over China insulted the Chinese fell on deaf ears. Those magnificent Gothic, neoclassical, and art deco structures that I loved in Shanghai were seen as monuments not of integrity, efficiency, and modernity, as I saw them, but of oppression.

Western missionaries, unlike their commerce-oriented brethren, weren’t only interested in extracting wealth from China and were thus primed to be more sensitive to these unequal exchanges. The first attempts by American architects at sinicizing missionary buildings focused on the roof and simply capped four otherwise Western walls with a sloping roof and overhanging eaves superficially modeled after the ones in Beijing’s Forbidden City but without their actual structural design. For the Ginling College campus and grounds, the school’s president commissioned a Yale-trained New York architect named Henry Murphy, who had gained renown by successfully melding Chinese aesthetics with Western techniques in the construction of a medical campus in Hunan province—the Xiangya Medical School that my grandmother had wanted to attend. Murphy understood that Chinese-ness extended below a building’s roof, too, and would go on to design buildings for Beijing University and the Nanjing government. For all the new ideas being introduced inside those buildings—sturdy, high quality, and reminiscent of Ming dynasty palaces—the buildings themselves were perhaps the most visible reminder of the possibilities in balancing Chinese history and tradition with Western progress.

Working with a shady local land buyer, Chinese architects, and Shanghai builders, Murphy oriented the campus on an east–west swale and placed the college buildings at the foot of the hills to shield them from cold breezes; since the college was closed during the hottest months, winter comfort was the priority. He secluded the dormitories at the west end, forming four corners of a quadrangle. To protect the students from rain and snow, he connected the dormitories and academic buildings with covered walkways. Other accents included ponds, artificial streams, arched bridges, and a traditional Chinese courtyard. As Murphy pushed for a local style throughout, the interiors had exposed ceiling beams and columns, ornamental lamps, and latticed screens.

The new Ginling College campus opened in 1923, ready to accommodate four hundred students. The reaction to the building was overwhelmingly positive, and the provincial commissioner of public works claimed that it was the first time foreigners had adapted Chinese architecture to modern practices. A Ginling sociology professor summed up the aesthetic as “Chinese temples adapted to the use of Western science.”

When my grandmother arrived on campus in 1933, the curriculum she studied was modeled after the elite women’s colleges in the United States, and all classes except for Chinese language and literature were taught in English. Smith College donated thousands of dollars each year (including the entire cost of the social and athletic building) to its “Chinese sister” and sent more than a dozen graduates to Ginling as teachers, who wrote glowingly of the neatness and intellectual curiosity of their students. While the rest of the country swung from one ideological pole to another, Ginling’s students were a robust hybrid of East and West, “having much more regard for family ideals, and more appreciation of the finer things in Chinese culture, while at the same time, they are not so narrowly nationalistic and also appreciate the best things in Western culture,” as Ginling founder Matilda Calder Thurston reported.

Wang Laoshi and Chen Laoshi walked me down the hill toward the old Ginling quadrangle, following the slope of a creek bed that had long since been paved over. Wang’s father was a real estate developer in Shanghai. Though a Buddhist himself, he sent his children to missionary schools, “because they were better in every way,” Wang said. She was sent to one of the best, the McTyeire School, an elite school for girls that the Soong sisters had also attended. Attending Ginling was a foregone conclusion for Wang.

Chen’s background was more modest, growing up in Ningbo, a former treaty port south of Shanghai on which the Japanese dropped fleas contaminated with bubonic plague during the war. Her father was a Qing dynasty xiucai who converted to Christianity. He had met Chen’s mother at church. When Chen and Wang arrived at Ginling in 1948, there were approximately five hundred students. The next year, after the Communist takeover of the mainland, only about one hundred remained.

The foreign teachers stayed until 1950, and Wang and Chen still remembered them clearly. On weekends the girls would take them out to the markets and shops near campus, or celebrate a classmate’s birthday, or take in a movie. Wang received an allowance from her family, while Chen worked in the library for spending money. Wang became a sociology major; Chen, a biology major. “If not for Liberation, I could have graduated in three years,” Chen said. She didn’t say what she had hoped to do afterward.

Not that it mattered much. Wang and Chen graduated in 1952, the last class to graduate from Ginling, and by then the government was making their decisions for them. They were sent to Anhui province to assist the government with the confiscation of property from landowners like my great-great-grandfather. Back in Nanjing, they became kindergarten teachers. Then, by dint of being missionary school graduates, they were brought to the university to help with translating documents. “I learned to type really well in middle school,” Wang said. “I could do it without looking.” They retired in the 1980s, refusing offers to work in the foreign language materials department, and went to volunteer at the Ginling College Library. “Look at the two of us,” Wang said. “We graduated together, worked in Nanjing together, we’re closer than sisters!”

We stopped at a small bluff behind the former 200 Building, home to the science department where my grandmother would have taken her classes. To our left was the 400 Building, a dormitory. Farther up the rise was Wu Yifang’s old residence. “She took this small path down to her office every morning,” Wang said. “It all used to be just hills and trees, and paper lanterns lit the path. It was so pretty.”

Wu’s old path was blocked with construction debris, so we wound our way down to the former Chapel and Music Building. “During the Cultural Revolution, we didn’t go to church or worship,” Chen said. “We burned our Bibles when the Red Guards came around to search our houses and confiscate contraband.”

“Aiya, we burned so many things,” Wang said. “All our school photos. We were afraid they’d be used against us.” Wang had grown up in an elegant four-story house in a wealthy part of Shanghai, but during the Cultural Revolution the government took one floor after another until the family was left with only the fourth floor.

“I even burned my diploma and wedding photos,” Chen said.

“It’s such a shame,” Wang said. “Because those are the very things we want now. But they’re gone.”

We emerged at the old campus, a grassy quadrangle ringed with hedges and a small sign reading, in English, “Beauty needs care, please do not step on the grass yopian.” Surrounding the quad were the original Ginling College buildings, nestled among trees as old as they were, and we faced the 100 Building, the central reception hall and gymnasium that also housed a social room where the students were allowed to receive male visitors. All the red pillars, the curved, overhanging roofs, and the ornate eaves recalled a smaller-scale Forbidden City. The buildings were all university offices now. A few were sheathed in bamboo scaffolding, undergoing repairs.

Wang had an appointment, and Chen needed to pick up some medicine from the hospital, so we said our goodbyes. Chen apologized for not being able to tell me anything about my grandmother. But I had learned plenty. I had always envied people who could rattle off their family histories—perhaps a quirk of Utah, where the Mormon Church had built the largest genealogy library in the world. Now, standing on the campus where my grandmother had studied as a young woman even younger than I was, her future yet to become my history, I could see that my family was not confined to my parents and three spectral grandparents. (My paternal grandfather died before I was born.) For a long time the disparate things about China in my consciousness—Marco Polo, the Ming dynasty, the wars, Mao, Tiananmen Square—and the few physical pieces of China I grew up with at home, remained as unremarkable as the furniture and about as interesting. And even once I noticed them, the stories behind these things were just shapes in a dark room. But now their connections lit up like landing strips, showing me where I stood and pointing where I needed to go next.

I had not been a good grandson. My relationship with my grandmother fell far short of Confucian standards. But here at Ginling I felt the greatest attachment to her, as well as her absence. The decades-long trek that my family began in 1938 had splintered it, over thousands of miles and countless upheavals, and had so estranged some members that I had spent most of my life not even knowing of their existence. In a general way, I had been following my grandmother’s life in reverse—America, Taiwan, Shanghai, and now Nanjing. But she had never gone home, living most of her adult life in exile, without completing her long march. I hoped that once I reconnected with the living members of her generation, once I made my way back to Xingang, I could both piece the family back together and finish her journey.