Spying

02 The Victim

The 22-year-old girl had never imagined she would die like this—inside an air-raid shelter in Chongqing.

She had thought about death before, but in her youthful and passionate mind, her demise should have been heroic, meaningful, and valuable. Perhaps shot through the chest by police suppressing a protest, or arrested by government agents and dying under torture as a testament to her convictions. Or maybe even going to the front lines, her blood fortifying the wall against the invaders…

But certainly not like this—crammed into an air-raid tunnel with tens of thousands of others, from afternoon till night, the air growing thinner, struggling to breathe, desperate to escape but unable to open the locked gates. Crushed by the surging crowd, collapsing from suffocation, only to be trampled by those still pushing forward.

She regretted coming to Chongqing today. She should have been in class at Huaxi University in Chengdu. That morning, her British Literature professor had been discussing the Lake Poets—Coleridge, Wordsworth… She had never cared much for those outdated literary images, finding them useless and weakening in the face of the nation’s crisis.

As early as high school, she had realized that what she cared about was vastly different from her peers.

In 1936, when Generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng launched the Xi’an Incident to force Chiang Kai-shek to resist Japan, she saw it as a righteous act. The Japanese had already seized the Northeast, yet the central government kept conceding. The Executive Yuan had even proposed planting Japanese cherry blossoms in Nanjing, the capital, to appease Japan.

To support Xi’an, she joined her first anti-Japanese protest, sharing the same simple yet fervent goal as the other young demonstrators—demanding the Nationalist government cease civil war and fight the foreign enemy.

Her parents, worried about her growing involvement in progressive activities, voiced their concerns, only to be countered with a question: How did you feel when the Beiyang government accepted Japan’s Twenty-One Demands?

In such moments, parents always lost to their children.

But the following year, after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, when Chiang Kai-shek declared resistance in his Lushan speech, they finally relaxed—albeit in a different way. “See?” they told their daughter. “The government has united against the enemy. There’s no need for a girl like you to wave banners all day. You’ll soon be in university—studying is your priority. Fighting the Japanese is the military’s job.”

Yet enrolling in the Foreign Languages Department at Ginling College didn’t dampen her pursuit of progressive ideas. She had longed for the university’s liberal environment, certain she’d find like-minded friends. She invited classmates to join her reading group, but few responded, and even those who came at first soon made excuses to avoid it. Pressed for answers, one finally admitted: their parents had warned them to focus solely on studies and avoid politically charged activities.

At first, she was disheartened. Then, furious. Especially after the school relocated to Chengdu that winter, fleeing the war. Immersing herself in Keats and Shelley, she realized, wouldn’t save China from the flames of war. She had to step out—out of the dormitory, the classroom, the campus—and into the struggle that could change the nation’s fate.At that time, Chengdu’s Huaxiba district was home not only to Ginling Women’s College but also to the University of Nanking, West China Union University, and Cheeloo University. Progressive groups from these schools often crossed paths and eventually decided to unite in continuing their anti-Japanese propaganda activities.

Engaging in such activities naturally invited interference from military police or special agents, but she had her own ways of slipping under the radar.

Whenever she left campus to attend rallies or demonstrations, if she encountered sudden inspections and needed to escape, she would pull out the dress she wore underneath her outer garments and swap her shoes for a pair of heels from her bag. In an instant, she transformed from a fist-waving progressive student into a delicate young lady gliding gracefully along the street.

This method worked almost every time. She could walk right past the military police with confidence, and they would simply assume she was an innocent passerby. Moreover, her affluent appearance made them hesitant to stop and question her.

Only once did she find herself truly pressed for time.

Plainclothes agents seemed to appear out of nowhere, scattering the protest crowd. Someone shouted, “The police are arresting people!” and the street quickly descended into chaos.

She was knocked down from behind, the flyers bearing slogans scattering from her hands as she stumbled and fell near the entrance of a shop. Just as she tried to get up, someone grabbed her arm. Her heart sank, thinking she had been caught, but before she could wrench free, she heard a girl’s voice.

“Hide inside the shop.”

She looked up and saw a face about her own age—fair and delicate, though now with finely arched brows slightly furrowed in a serious expression.

“Hurry,” the girl urged, pulling her inside and even brushing off the last flyer still clutched in her hand.

It was a herbal medicine shop. The girl pushed her behind the counter, telling her to crouch down and stay hidden while she stood nearby. Amid the commotion outside, she could hear the sound of an abacus being used.

Heavy footsteps rushed in, seemed to scan the area, and, finding nothing suspicious, soon left.

Only after the protesters and the arresting officers had all dispersed did the girl wait a little longer before bending down to say, “It’s safe now. You can get up.”

Her legs had gone numb from crouching, and she wobbled as she stood, steadied by the girl. When their eyes met, she finally remembered to say, “Thank you.” Before the girl could respond, she glanced at the abacus and ledger on the counter and asked the question that had been on her mind: “You’re a girl, yet you work as an accountant?”

“You’re a university student, yet you still think girls can’t do accounting?”

She paused, not offended, but instead laughed. “You’re right—Miss Accountant.”

The university student had been born in Southeast Asia and returned to China as a child, barely understanding the Nanjing dialect. Yet her father was a “patriotic overseas Chinese merchant” who had made the newspapers. She was a product of missionary schools of that era—her parents, though absent, valued her education and even encouraged her to pursue graduate studies in America after graduation. Miss Accountant’s parents, on the other hand, came from the outskirts of Chongqing. Though they cherished their only daughter, they had no choice but to expect her to shoulder some family responsibilities after finishing high school, securing her a job with relatives in Chengdu.

Two girls from entirely different backgrounds became friends by chance. The university student half-jokingly called the other her “savior,” while Miss Accountant scolded her with a parental tone: “You’re a proper student—why skip classes to stir up movements and revolutions?”If anyone else had said that, the university student would have long since lost her temper. But facing this accounting clerk, her eyes sparkled with mischief, and a sly smile crept onto her lips. "If you're so eager to attend university, why don’t you go to class for me?"

The student often had progressive activities to organize, which sometimes clashed with her university schedule. When faced with professors who took attendance seriously, she couldn’t always rely on classmates to cover for her. The girl before her was the same age, with a similar height and build. If she tied her hair the usual way and changed clothes, she could easily pass for the student from a distance.

At first, the accounting clerk found the idea absurd, but she couldn’t suppress her curiosity. The herbal medicine shop wasn’t particularly busy, and since she wasn’t responsible for dispensing prescriptions, she could always catch up on bookkeeping at home in the evening. So, the two girls put their heads together, and the next day, they went to the university to familiarize themselves with the classrooms.

The student’s classmates, used to her antics, merely teased her when they saw she had found a "stand-in," promising to cover for her when she skipped class. Over time, they even started calling the accounting clerk by the student’s name, jokingly asking the real student, "And who might you be?"

Of course, it was all in good fun.

By the final year of university, only the real student faced the question of what to do after graduation. Many of her classmates chose to apply to research institutions abroad, but the student secretly confided in the accounting clerk that she wanted to go to Yan’an.

At that time, Yan’an was the holy land in the hearts of all progressive youth.

But the student still had reservations. Her father’s investments in the country often involved government participation. Although the Nationalists and Communists were currently cooperating, if she were to fully embrace the leftist path, it might affect her family. Just as she was hesitating, an event in early 1941 pushed her decisively into opposition against the authorities.

On January 18, the student woke up early to study for her final exams at the library. But she had barely sat down when a fellow reading group member from Qilu University slapped that day’s Xinhua Daily in front of her. On the second page, in the middle, was a sixteen-character inscription signed by Zhou Enlai: A historic injustice, a leaf in the south; brothers at war, why such haste?

The Wannan Incident in Anhui had finally been exposed—half a month after it occurred—by the only Communist newspaper in Nationalist-controlled territory.

The student hesitated no longer.

Her latest reckless plan was to tell her parents she had been accepted by a university in America and would board an ocean liner at Hankou Pier. In reality, she would jump off the deck before the ship set sail. Once she reached Yan’an, like many others she knew, she would change her name and become a new person.

But before that, she would continue her activism, leveraging her influence to expose the Nationalists’ "false resistance and true Communist suppression."

That was why she arrived in Chongqing on June 5, 1941. According to plan, the next day she would join a protest led by Central University and meet with the Communist Party’s organization and leaders in Chongqing to finalize arrangements for her journey to Yan’an the following month.

Yet none of this would come to pass.During the air raid alert, the university student, along with the surrounding residents, rushed into the public air-raid shelter located at Shibati. Outside the shelter, over twenty Japanese warplanes tore through the sky, subjecting the city to yet another relentless bombing from day to night.

No one could claim that the citizens of Chongqing had grown accustomed to the air raids over the years, for no one can ever grow accustomed to disaster. But that day in the tunnel, a different kind of hell unfolded.

The gates were locked from the outside, guarded by soldiers who refused to open them until the all-clear signal was given. This inflexible, fear-driven rule, enforced by those unwilling to take responsibility, trapped the refugees inside the suffocating space even as oxygen grew scarce. It wasn’t until eleven at night, when the Japanese bombing ceased, that the tunnel doors were finally opened—but by then, the stampede had already happened.

China’s household registration system at the time was woefully inadequate, leading to later debates and disputes over the true number of victims in several massacres on this land. In the case of the tunnel tragedy, the official death toll initially reported as 461 was later revised to 992.

But for those eager to close the matter swiftly, the exact numbers were merely tools to hasten a final verdict. The lives behind those figures held no weight in their considerations. Naturally, they paid no mind to the countless unregistered souls lost in the chaos.

The only person in the world who might have suspected the university student’s fate was the accountant’s daughter. But she arrived in Chongqing days after the incident, seeking out the Central University reading group that had originally planned a protest the following day. There, she learned that the student and his classmates from Chengdu had been staying at a hotel west of the city center. When she went to the hotel, she found it destroyed in the bombing. The noodle shop owner across the street, a survivor, told her that everyone in the area had taken shelter in the Shibati tunnel that afternoon.

The noodle shop owner handed her a local newspaper, which devoted two full pages to listing the names of the tunnel victims—but the university student’s name was not among them.

The daughter of the wealthy entrepreneur, who had traveled to another city for secret activities, would never carry identification that could reveal her true identity. So when the Chongqing government tallied the victims of the tunnel disaster, her trampled body could only be labeled as an unidentified casualty, buried in an unmarked grave outside the city.

The noodle shop owner, seeing the pale-faced young woman before him—who spoke with the same local accent—understood.

“It’s all because of those damned Japs,” he said.

Of course, the blame fell on the Japanese. But why had the shelter been so overcrowded that day? Why had the guards refused to open the doors even when they knew people inside were suffocating? Though the accountant’s daughter had no choice but to accept her friend’s death, these questions lingered in her mind. Yet she also knew there would be no answers.

Meanwhile, in Chengdu, a man in a German-style military uniform, a blue-sky-and-white-sun emblem on his cap, walked into the herbal medicine shop where the accountant’s daughter worked.