By mid-January, we still had seven thousand refugees. Many women believed that only through Minnie’s intervention could they get their menfolk back, so they stuck with us. In late January Minnie and Big Liu presented the petition to the Japanese embassy, where an attaché named Fukuda accepted it and said that some office would give it full consideration. At the same time the puppet municipality, the so-called Autonomous City Government, composed of some bureaucrats and local gentry who had Japanese connections, ordered that all the refugee camps close down by February 9, which in a way eased Minnie’s mind a little because she knew that Mrs. Dennison would hate to see the college remain a refugee camp.We began persuading the older women among the refugees to go home. Some left, but they came back within two or three days. Many of the refugees had no place to live anymore, for nothing was left of their homes. One woman in her early forties was dragged away by four soldiers; they molested her for a whole night and did not release her until the next afternoon.
