My aunt Meng Shujuan has been looking for someone.To be precise, looking for a woman.After searching and searching, she gradually got old, and she forgot all the important matters of marriage.When I was old enough to be her talker, I found out that the woman my aunt had been looking for all her life was a whore.When she met my aunt, she was the head of the business.In the language of the new century, it is a wrist-level figure. In August 1946, at the trial meeting of Japanese war criminals held in Nanjing, my old aunt almost found her.She sat on the witness stand and identified a premeditated mass rape by a high-level Japanese military officer.

My aunt recognized her by her voice.The aunt, who was in the crowd outside the courtroom, heard her testimony, albeit under another name, from a tweeter hanging from a telephone pole. It took my aunt an hour to enter the courtroom from outside the courtroom.Fifty-six years ago, in August, Nanjing was empty of thousands of people. The citizens would rather suffer from heat stroke than come and witness the fate of the Japanese who had ruined them for eight years.The inside and outside of the Judgment Hall were packed so seamlessly that my young aunt felt the walls squeezed, changing shape with every jostling.After the Japanese massacred the city, the remaining population of Nanjing seemed to be gathering inside and outside the court at this moment, and listening to the speech delivered by the loudspeaker half a mile away also relieved their hatred.

My aunt Shujuan saw her back from a distance.Still a very good back view, not spoiled out of shape.Aunt Shujuan tore a gap from the surrounding crowd and came behind her, drenched in the sweat of tens of thousands of people.Aunt stretched out her hand and patted the famous flowing water shoulder in Nanjing in the 1930s.The turned face was not the one my aunt remembered.It was a plausible face; my aunt later speculated that the naturally beautiful face might have been disfigured and restored by a poorly skilled plastic surgeon. "Zhao Yumo!" Meng Shujuan, who was only twenty years old then, exclaimed softly.The woman named Zhao Yumo stared at her eyes pretending to be confused.

"I'm Meng Shujuan!" my aunt said. She shook her head and said in typical Zhao Yumo's voice, "You've got the wrong person." The prodigal sons in Nanjing in the 1930s all knew Zhao Yumo, and they all loved her slightly out-of-key singing. My aunt Shujuan was unyielding, squeezed to her side, and told her that Meng Shujuan was one of the female students rescued by Zhao Yumo and her sisters! No matter how much Meng Shujuan insisted, Zhao Yumo was determined not to know her.She also squinted at her with Zhao Yumo's eyes, picked up Zhao Yumo's cold jaw that had survived the disfigurement, and said in Zhao Yumo's Nanjing accent with a Suzhou accent: "Which one is Zhao Yumo?"

After saying this, she stood up from her seat and squeezed sideways between the backs of the people in the front row and the knees of the people in the back row.No one can complain about the inconvenience caused by the beautiful apology that the beautiful chin makes so frequently. Of course, Aunt Shujuan couldn't follow Zhao Yumo, and she also built a path between her back and her knees; no one would continue to make things easier for her.She can only get in and get out in the same way.By the time Aunt Shujuan retreated from the hearing inside and outside the court, Zhao Yumo was gone.

From that time on, my aunt Shujuan strengthened her belief that no matter how unlike Zhao Yumo Zhao Yumo became, she would definitely find out where she and her twelve sisters were.She found some of them from the records of Japanese reporters, some of them she chatted with Japanese veterans, and the biggest part was her decades of searching among the people of Jiangsu, Anhui, and Zhejiang. The data she collected was vast.On the vast territory displayed in this document, Meng Shujuan saw her own coordinates when Nanjing fell on December 13, 1937, and the location of the Wilson Gospel Church where she and her classmates hid.The data showed her the big picture before the fall of Nanjing, and the panicked, tiny insect-like life in the big picture——

This is my 13-year-old aunt, Meng Shujuan.