William E. Macmillan, or Mai Weili, or Billy, or Whatever
I have many names. Almost every time I meet someone, I get a new one.
According to the birth certificate from the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, my name is William Edward Sebastian de Royer-Macmillan. As far as I recall, my full name was used only three times during my life. First, on my birth certificate, then on my application to the Boston University School of Medicine, and finally on my marriage certificate. No one ever actually called me by such an oversized, regal name. Even when I was eight and stole a box of candy canes from the convenience store and the shopkeeper informed my father, he summoned me to his desk by calling me just William de Royer-Macmillan. That was the ultimate expression of his anger. Sometimes I tried to say my full name when I was alone, and if I could even manage to get the whole thing out, it took at least two breaths. My family and American classmates called me Billy, except my mother, who just called me B. I often felt my mother—a housewife who cared for a sick husband and five children—possessed the skills of a great mathematician and was thus always able to reduce life’s complex details to their simplest, most uncomplicated form, getting to the root of things in just one shot.
When I was twenty-five and about to leave for China as a missionary, my parents gave me a Chinese name, Mai Weili, a transliteration of the first part of my surname and my given name. In my church, I was called Pastor Mai. The residents of nearby villages were much less respectful. The people who came every Wednesday for a free bowl of porridge called me Lao Zhou, a play on the Chinese word zhou, meaning “porridge,” and a common Chinese surname. It made me sound like an old man, even though I was only in my twenties. The people who came for medical care called me Mr. Mai to my face, but behind my back, they called me Doctor Foreigner. Those who came for porridge or medicine far outnumbered those who came for prayer, but I wasn’t discouraged. I believed that after they had partaken of the goodness of God, they would eventually consider the way of the Lord. I learned early on that spreading the Gospel in China would depend on a good pair of legs, not just words. The legs upon which the Gospel traveled were porridge and medicine. Of course, the school was important too, but compared to porridge and medicine, the school was at most a crutch. That’s why I needed six porters when I disembarked in Shanghai. Clothes and books only accounted for half of what was in my trunks. The rest was all medical equipment and medicine I had acquired with funds raised in America.
My parents were missionaries sent to China by the Methodist Church. Their tracks covered almost the whole of Zhejiang province from north to south and east to west. For them, living in one place for six months was an eternity. Because of their itinerant lifestyle, none of the four children born to my mother before me survived. Then, when she turned thirty, she was suddenly overcome with panic. My parents had endured beds infested with bedbugs, porridge crusted with insects, leaky roofs made of scraps of tarp nailed together, and outhouses consisting of only bamboo poles, but the fear of being childless forever was beyond bearing. That year, after struggling painfully with their consciences, they applied to the parent church for permission to return home.
The year after they returned to the US, they had me. Over the next seven years, my mother gave birth to two more boys and twin girls. Out of gratitude, or perhaps guilt, they dedicated me, their eldest son, to the church, just as Abraham had offered Isaac. My missionary destiny was fixed before I was born—I heard God’s call while still in the womb.
Even so, I did not act rashly. I waited until I graduated from medical school and finished my residency before I left for China. What followed proved the wisdom of this decision—and perhaps its cruelty.
My parents had lived in China for twelve years. After returning to America, they talked endlessly about their time there. My siblings and I listened over and over to stories about how farmers in the Jiangnan countryside grew tea with waterlogged compost from grass and wood ash, or how families on the water trained herons to catch fish, or what the women ate during their confinement period after giving birth, or how, when times were tough, the housewives would add wild herbs to their porridge to assuage hunger. And so, twenty-six years after they left China, following their path to Zhejiang, when I saw the stone steps in the water, sampans crossing the river, children riding buffaloes, and the white camellias in full bloom on the slopes and heard the angry-sounding Jiangnan dialect, I was not surprised. It seemed, rather, infinitely familiar, like a dream I’d had again and again for many years. It seemed not like my future life, but like my past life.
And now, looking at you, Gunner’s Mate Ian Ferguson, and you, Special Operations Soldier Liu Zhaohu, I am indeed face-to-face with my past life. Today is August 15, 2015. It’s been a full seventy years since we three made our agreement. What is seventy years? For a worker bee producing honey, it’s more than 560 lifetimes. For a buffalo plowing a field, it’s perhaps three—if it is not slaughtered prematurely. For a person, it’s almost an entire life. In a history book, it’s probably just a few paragraphs.
But in God’s plan, it’s an instant, the blink of an eye.
I still remember every detail from that day seventy years ago. The news was first transmitted at your camp. The operator who sent hydrology reports to Chongqing was the first to hear the Japanese emperor’s “Jewel Voice Broadcast” on the radio. The emperor’s voice was hoarse and choked, and his words as formal as his tone, his speech pedantic and meandering.
“After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining to our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure . . . However, it is according to the dictate of time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.”
At first, no one understood what was being said. After listening to the news commentary, you learned the speech was called the “Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the Greater East Asia War.” In fact, there’s a name for the event that is easy to understand. It’s called surrender, even though that word was not in the emperor’s speech.
The madness that began in your camp spread like the flu to every household in Yuehu, which translates to “Moon Lake” in English. You cut quilts and winter clothes into strips and wrapped them around sticks, dipped them in tung oil, and set them on fire. The torches burning across the hillside made it seem as if the forest slopes had caught fire. God had mercy on you, arranging this day of madness in midsummer so you didn’t have to worry about needing warm bedding on a cold autumn night. Then the villagers crowded into the clearing where your unit held the daily drills. Normally, it was heavily guarded and civilians were not allowed to enter, but the sentry didn’t stop anyone. Indeed, there were no civilians that day, since everyone was an interested party. You set off firecrackers, drank toasts, yelled and danced like crazy, carried children aloft on your shoulders, and handed each man an American-made cigarette. Even more, you were all eager to kiss a woman—it had probably been a long time since you’d smelled the hair or touched the skin of a woman—but the commander at headquarters in Chongqing, Miles, had given strict orders, and though you didn’t obey completely, you didn’t dare go too far either. The next day when the sun had risen, the people of Yuehu found that their dogs and chickens had failed to sound the usual wake-up call, having all sounded themselves hoarse the previous day.