The literary giant who vanished without trace

Yu Limin, the eldest daughter of Yu Dafu, at her father's 110th birthday anniversary in 2006 in Fuyang. [Wu Huang / China Daily]

After the Japanese gendarmerie received a tip-off from a collaborator, it went to arrest Indonesian anti-Japanese activists in their office in the suburbs. When one man supplied a list of alleged subversives, Zhao looked at it and pointed at the man saying: "He's just a bloody loan shark who bullies people. This is a list of people he wants to get money out of." A Japanese gendarmerie officer then slapped the man and tore up the list.

Zhang also said that in Yu's three years in Indonesia under the pseudonym Zhao Lian he did many good things for overseas Chinese such as bailing them out of jail and getting back seized property, including cars and houses, and protecting and financing dozens of artists and writers seeking refuge.

In a People's Daily article 30 years ago, Xia Yan, a playwright, screenwriter and literary critic, said that when he met Chen Jiageng in Singapore in February 1947, Chen told him: "Yu protected not only me but also many overseas Chinese leaders who were arrested."

In May that year a person in charge of the Malaysian Communist Party talked with Xia and said: "Without (Zhao's) help our organization would have suffered irremediable losses."

About three decades ago, too, Wang Jinding, another Chinese writer who went into exile, said that in early 1944 a spy trained in Singapore, Hong Genpei, tipped off the Japanese army that Zhao was none other than Yu Dafu. Soon after, Japanese officers placed some of Yu's works before Zhao Lian and said: "Your name isn't Zhao, is it?"

Realizing they had been tipped off, he acknowledged the truth and nonchalantly added: "Why didn't you ask me earlier? Yu Dafu was my pen name in my earlier days."

The Japanese officers then said they wanted to send him to Shanghai or Tokyo for his own protection, an offer he flatly refused.

"I'm not going anywhere," he is said to have replied.

Rather than simply arresting him, he was then subjected to blackmail.