The looting, raping, and killing continued until eight days after the Japanese surrender, when the population was informed that a new army would be arriving the Soviet Red Army. On 23 August the neighborhood chiefs told residents to go to the railway station the next day to welcome the Russians. Dr. Xia and my grandmother stayed at home, but my mother joined the large, high-spirited crowd of young people holding colorful triangle-shaped paper flags. As the train pulled in, the crowd started waving their flags and shouting' Wula' (the Chinese approximation of Ura, the Russian word for "Hurrah'). My mother had imagined the Soviet soldiers as victorious heroes with impressive beards, riding on large horses. What she saw was a group of shabbily dressed" pale-skinned youths.

Apart from the occasional fleeting glimpse of some mysterious figure in a passing car, these were the first white people my mother had ever seen.

About a thousand Soviet troops were stationed in Jinzhou, and when they first arrived people felt grateful to them for helping to get rid of the Japanese. But the Russians brought new problems. Schools had closed down when the Japanese surrendered, and my mother was getting private lessons. One day on her way home from the tutor's, she saw a truck parked by the side of the road: some Russian soldiers were standing beside it handing out bolts of textiles. Under the Japanese, cloth had been strictly rationed. She went over to have a look; it turned out the cloth was from the factory where she had worked when she was in primary school. The Russians were swapping it for watches, clocks, and knickknacks. My mother remembered that there was an old clock buried somewhere at the bottom of a chest at home. She rushed back and dug it out. She was a bit disappointed to find it was broken, but the Russian soldiers were overjoyed and gave her a bolt of beautiful white cloth with a delicate pink flower pattern on it. Over supper, the family sat shaking their heads in disbelief at these strange foreigners who were so keen on useless old broken clocks and baubles.

Not only were the Russians distributing goods from the factories, they were also dismantling entire factories, including Jinzhou's two oil refineries, and shipping the equipment back to the Soviet Union. They said these were 'reparations," but for the locals what this meant was that industry was crippled.

Russian soldiers would walk into people's homes and simply take anything they fancied watches and clothes in particular. Stories about Russians raping local women swept Jinzhou like wildfire. Many women went into hiding for fear of their 'liberators." Very soon the city was seething with anger and anxiety.

The Xias' house was outside the city walls, and was very poorly protected. A friend of my mother's offered to lend them a house inside the city gates, surrounded by high stone walls. The family decamped immediately, taking my mother's Japanese teacher with them. The move meant that my mother had to walk much farther about thirty minutes each way- to her tutor's. Dr. Xia insisted on taking her there and collecting her in the afternoon. My mother did not want him to walk so far, so she would walk part of the way back on her own and he would meet her. One day a jeep-load of laughing Russian soldiers skidded to a halt near her and the Russians jumped out and started running in her direction. She ran as fast as she could, with the Russians pounding after her. After a few hundred yards she caught sight of her stepfather in the distance, brandishing his walking stick. The Russians were close behind, and my mother turned into a deserted kindergarten she knew well, which was like a labyrinth. She hid there for over an hour and then sneaked out the back door and got home safely. Dr. Xia had seen the Russians chasing my mother into the building; to his immense relief they soon came out again, obviously baffled by the layout.

just over a week after the Russians arrived, my mother was told by the chief of her neighborhood committee to attend a meeting the following evening. When she got there she saw a number of shabby Chinese men and a few women making speeches about how they had fought eight years to defeat the Japanese so that ordinary people could be the masters of a new China. These were Communists Chinese Communists. They had entered the city the previous day, without fanfare or warning. The women Communists at the meeting wore shapeless clothes exactly like the men. My mother thought to herself: How could you claim to have defeated the Japanese? You haven't even got decent guns or clothes. To her, the Communists looked poorer and scruffier than beggars.

She was disappointed because she had imagined them as big and handsome, and superhuman. Her uncle Pei-o, the prison warder, and Dong, the executioner, had told her that the Communists were the bravest prisoners: "They have the strongest bones," her uncle often said.

"They sang and shouted slogans and cursed the Japanese until the very last minute before they were strangled," said Dong.

The Communists put up notices calling on the population to keep order, and started arresting collaborators and people who had worked for the Japanese security forces.

Among those arrested was Yang, my grandmother's father, still deputy police chief of Yixian. He was imprisoned in his own jail and his boss, the police chief, was executed.

The Communists soon restored order and got the economy going again. The food situation, which had been desperate, improved markedly. Dr. Xia was able to start seeing patients again, and my mother's school reopened.

The Communists were billeted in the houses of local people. They seemed honest and unpretentious, and would chat with the families: "We don't have enough educated people," they used to say to one friend of my mother's.

"Come and join us and you can become a county chief."

They needed recruits. At the time of the Japanese surrender, both Communists and Kuomintang had tried to occupy as much territory as they could, but the Kuomintang had a much larger and better-equipped army. Both were maneuvering for position in preparation for renewing the civil war which had been partly suspended for the previous eight years in order to fight the Japanese. In fact, fighting between Communists and Kuomintang had already broken out. Manchuria was the crucial battleground because of its economic assets. Because they were nearby, the Communists had got their forces into Manchuria first, with virtually no assistance from the Russians. But the Americans were helping Chiang Kai-shek establish himself in the area by ferrying tens of thousands of Kuomintang troops to North China. At one point the Americans tried to land some of them at Huludao, the port about thirty miles from Jinzhou, but had to withdraw under fire from Chinese Communists. The Kuomintang troops were forced to land south of the Great Wall and make their way north by train. The United States gave them air cover. Altogether, over 50,000 US Marines landed in North China, occupying Peking and Tianjin.

The Russians formally recognized Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang as the government of China. By 11 November, the Soviet Red Army had left the Jinzhou area and pulled back to northern Manchuria, as part of a commitment by Stalin to withdraw from the area within three months of victory. This left the Chinese Communists alone in control of the city. One evening in late November my mother was walking home from school when she saw large numbers of soldiers hurriedly gathering their weapons and equipment and moving in the direction of the south gate. She knew there had been heavy fighting in the surrounding countryside and guessed the Communists must be leaving.

This withdrawal was in line with the strategy of the Communist leader Mao Zedong not to try to hold cities, where the Kuomintang would have the military advantage, but to retreat to the rural areas. "To surround the cities with our countryside and eventually take the cities' was Mao's guideline for the new phase.