Behind the Book: The Years of War

Readers always ask which incidents in the novel are based on true events. There is so much in this book drawn from my own family history and family connections.

My father was only fourteen when he left home for boarding school. After high school, he went on to Nanking University. When war broke out, students who were able to return home did so, but by then many could not even contact their families. Father felt he had to stay with his professors and school no matter what. A university education was his sworn duty to his family. And so when Nanking University evacuated, he left with them.

He traveled with classmates, professors, school administrators, and servants. They walked beside donkey carts piled high with luggage, lab equipment, library books, and kitchenware. They traveled in a less-than-organized manner, often breaking off into smaller groups depending on what transportation they could find. Sometimes they split up with plans no more definite than to meet at a certain town in a few days’ time. Some students hitched rides, others climbed on trains, but most walked. They stopped wherever it seemed they might be safe for a few days and always tried to carry on with classes.

Buddhist and Daoist temples could be found in every village and throughout the countryside. They were the most suitable accommodations since temple halls could be used as both classrooms and sleeping quarters. After long hours of walking, the students would sling off their heavy canvas backpacks, unroll straw mats and blankets onto cold stone floors, and settle down to sleep. My father dreaded the Daoist temples because of their giant demon statues, deities with protruding eyes and enormous fangs, painted in bright colors. Sometimes when he woke in the early hours of the morning, my father would open his eyes to a red-painted guardian from the gates of hell glaring down at him. Decades later, he still suffered nightmares of demons trying to drag him into the underworld.

When he thought back to those days on the road, my father said that to describe what they did as “fleeing” was ridiculous. He estimated they probably covered no more than eight or ten miles a day, a small distance to put between them and an invading army. But somehow through all this, my father never felt as though he was truly in danger. Since he and his classmates all suffered the same hardships, he simply accepted the constant hunger and fatigue. With the self-centered optimism of youth, he believed he and his classmates were safe as long as they obeyed their teachers.

But from time to time, a student would disappear and there would be rumors that they had slipped away to enlist or had been murdered by the opposing side. The character of the bold and beautiful Wang Jenmei is based on one of my father’s classmates, a young man who was murdered during the journey, drowned in a lake. Decades later, my father still suffered nightmares in which he had been captured by Communist spies (in his dreams it was always the Communists) who were going to murder him.

The young field medic Daming is based on the wartime experiences of a dear friend of the family, Chi-Han Chou, our uncle Chou. Like Daming, Uncle Chou was not a very good student and thought that going to war would be an adventure. So he and a classmate dropped out and made their way to the front lines to look for the classmate’s uncle, a general. The two young men were only about nineteen at the time, with no real skills, but they could read. So they were given medical manuals and pressed into service. Unlike Daming, Uncle Chou survived the war. He married my mother’s dearest friend, moved to Taiwan, then Seattle, and lived a long and blessed life.

The story of Duckling is heart-wrenching and sadly true. A friend of the family, James Oliver Bennington, served during World War II as a water tender second class in the US Navy. On one trip, they transported a troop of Chinese soldiers. One of the soldiers brought his daughter with him. She was “the most be-yoo-tiful little girl,” James recalled. The Americans spoiled the child terribly while she was on board, but in the end there was nothing they could do but watch the young soldier march off to war, his daughter riding on his shoulders. I wrote a better fate for Duckling.

For the chapters set in Shanghai, I drew upon my mother’s stories. She was fifteen and at boarding school in Nanking when war broke out. Her father (the real Dr. Mao) rushed there to bring her home. The family of nine (my grandparents, my grandfather’s concubine, four children, his intern, and a maidservant) traveled by riverboat from their hometown of Pinghu to Shanghai’s International Settlement. They were luckier than most because as a doctor, my grandfather could support them. For the next eight years they lived in a two-room flat. My grandfather used the front room as his clinic and at night the family spread out over the two rooms to sleep. My mother slept on the examining table.

My grandfather had developed a cure for opium addiction, and a bank manager in Shanghai heard about this and sought him out. After my grandfather cured him, the manager began referring all his wealthy friends to my grandfather, whose practice thrived until the war ended and the family could return to their hometown of Pinghu.

As for my father, he was twenty-eight years old before he saw his family and his hometown again.