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Volume 13, Issue #2. Published on December 8, 2004
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The Wake of Nanking
The requiem of Iris Chang
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Jodie Xiao
Asian Pacific Review
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RAPE-gigantic caps filling the whole spine.
A bit further down-NANKING-all printed upon a red background.
Nanking? Could it be “Nam Ging?” I pulled it from the shelf.
On the cover, the red of Japan’s flag situated upon a black and white photograph-the first words of the flyleaf, “In December 1937, in what was then the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army…” It must be Nam Ging! Nanking in Mandarin, a slight variance from the Nam Ging of Cantonese in this case.
But when was it published? Since childhood I have never been able to find anything in print. Was I looking in all the wrong places up until now?
From the back cover “copyright 1996”-I remember thinking, “Oh, barely two years ago.”
There in my hands laid something physical; at last some record that showed the events of my father’s stories had been real!
Imagine being the child of a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust during World War II picking up physical documentation of their parent’s experiences-events rendered a few tightlipped words every now and then only to necessitate the explanation of dead family members-for the first time; finding scraps of resolve not in a textbook, nor in a classroom where all other histories of the War had been hashed and rehashed, nor through the social acknowledgement of such recognizable names like Auschwitz and Dachau, not in middle school, nor even in college, but by accident on the shelf of a secondhand bookstore.
As a child, I heard stories from my aunt of how my father’s family was separated in the process of fleeing from the Japanese during the occupation of China.
Growing up, I could never fully believe in those tales. Their sheer gore and cruelty made them hard to grasp. They were filled with such extraordinary proportions I thought them as gold spun from straw. My disbelief also extended to the lack of documented proof-physical as the leaves in my textbook or three dimensional as in the images of the Jewish Holocaust survivors on film.
“It must not have been that massive, that serious,” I told myself, since my American schoolbooks didn’t mention it, “Why would anything about the Japanese atrocities in China be hidden since the U.S. and China were allies during WWII?”
Without Iris Chang and her dedication in seeking truth, the torment of more than 350,000-more casualties than the death toll of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined (210,000)-would have gone ignored.
In writing “The Rape of Nanking,” Chang had accrued international criticism for unveiling a code of silence forged by The People’s Republic of China, The Republic of China, the United States and Japan amid brewing Cold War politics.
About a year ago, I had the privilege and great pleasure of meeting with Chang and attending two lectures held for the release of “The Chinese in America.” Although the gathering was dedicated to her newest book, the overwhelming interest of the audience and topic of discussion was Nanking.
When asked by a member of the audience whether she defined her identity as Chinese, American, or Chinese American in relation to writing about Nanking, Chang replied, “Yes, I’m Chinese American, but I see myself more as a citizen of the world, rather than any nation-state, having a responsibility to all of humanity. And it is from that, which I aimed in writing about Nanking.”
From the introduction of “The Rape of Nanking,” Chang wrote, “This book is not intended as a commentary on the Japanese character or on the genetic makeup of a people who would commit such acts. It is about the power of cultural forces either to make devils of us all, to strip away that thin veneer of social restraint that makes humans humane, or to reinforce it.”
There is no doubt that the world suffers from the loss of Iris Chang, a great journalist and true guardian of our humanity. And so I leave with this quote, a dedication in the spirit of her work:
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“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,
nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the specters of books.
You shall not look through my eyes either, not take things from me,
you shall listen to all sides and filter them through yourself.”
-Walt Whitman
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