Hsin-ching

Hsin-ching is the former Manchurian city where the veterinarian lived and worked at the zoo, and where Nutmeg spent the happiest period of her childhood. The city gathers two contrasting forms of memory: an earlier world of protection and wonder, and the upheaval of August 1945, when Soviet forces advanced and soldiers killed most of the zoo’s large animals. Those histories later become part of the chain connecting Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Lieutenant Mamiya, Mr. Honda, and Toru Okada.

Setting and Early Memory

For Nutmeg, Hsin-ching first survives as the scene of a private childhood refuge. As the veterinarian’s daughter, she was allowed into the zoo when it was closed and could walk alone from cage to cage. She remembered the clear autumn sky, the clouds, the birds moving among the trees, and the zoo’s smells and light. This solitary landscape was her earliest memory and the happiest time of her life, when she felt protected, loved, and reassured. It became an inner place she could later recall in moments of crisis.

That memory has a second life in Nutmeg’s work. When she instinctively touched the temple of a woman who had become disoriented, she focused on the childhood zoo, and the woman’s headache eased. Later, Nutmeg again summoned Hsin-ching while concentrating on the mysterious presence she sensed in the woman. The recollection was therefore not only a record of a lost childhood: it became a means by which Nutmeg engaged with her strange ability.

The Zoo in August 1945

In August 1945, Hsin-ching was under imminent threat as Soviet troops advanced across the border. At the zoo, soldiers had killed the tigers, leopards, wolves, and bears the previous afternoon. The veterinarian woke the next morning to a routine that could no longer be separated from that loss. He knew the killings had happened, though they seemed distant and unreal after the night’s sleep; the elephants’ calls reminded him that some animals had survived.

The veterinarian regarded the young lieutenant who had led the execution detail as more reasonable than the fanatical officers he had encountered in Manchuria. The lieutenant had spared the elephants, an act the veterinarian took as evidence of ordinary human sensitivity. The contrast did not undo the killing, but it made the distinction between military orders and individual judgment important to the scene.

The zoo’s predicament continued the following day. After the veterinarian and other workers had fed the animals, the lieutenant returned with the same eight armed soldiers and announced that the army would commandeer the zoo’s only mule and wagon. The director explained that the zoo had already given up its truck and two horses, while the veterinarian argued that the remaining animals needed the mule and wagon for their twice-daily feeding. The lieutenant answered that the city’s defense came first and that the animals could be released if necessary. The exchange leaves the zoo caught between the practical demands of keeping its remaining animals alive and the military’s preparations for a threatened city.

Historical Connections

Hsin-ching connects the veterinarian’s family history to the military past recalled by Lieutenant Mamiya. In Toru Okada’s account, the veterinarian, Lieutenant Mamiya, and Mr. Honda are linked through the city and through their respective histories in Manchuria. Mr. Honda and Lieutenant Mamiya had served on the Manchurian-Mongolian border; Mamiya and Okada, in turn, are connected by their experiences in wells. The associations form a chain reaching back to the 1939 fighting at Nomonhan and to prewar Manchuria.

The city consequently operates as more than a geographical point in the novel’s history. It is at once Nutmeg’s remembered refuge, the setting of the zoo’s wartime destruction, and a hinge in the network of encounters and memories that joins characters from different generations. The remembered animals and landscape endure alongside the military history, making Hsin-ching a place where personal recollection and historical violence remain inseparable.