On December 13, 1937, Japanese troops captured the Chinese city of Nanjing and subsequently took 300,000 lives over a six-week period. Not only were soldiers executed on mass, but large scores of the city’s most vulnerable civilians — women, children, the elderly — were raped and mutilated to death in the most unspeakable terms. Many people may know about the Rape of Nanking (also known as the Nanjing Massacre) through Iris Chang’s 1997 New York Times bestseller by the same name. But when I recently asked my artist-activist colleagues and high school aged Chinese dance students about it, I discovered that this horrific massacre is still largely unknown in mainstream American culture.
300,000 mass murdered and tortured in a six week period. History. FORGOTTEN.
Whenever I tell people I’m working on a piece about the Nanjing Massacre for the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company, their eyes widen. “Ugh! That’s so awful!” one exclaimed. “Everyone loves the dances with the pretty costumes. The dark ones though… Some people don’t get them,” another added. I’m sure many are thinking, “Of all things you could make a piece about, why choose something so disturbing?”
I have to admit… After doing some research on the Nanjing Massacre, I started asking myself the same question. Who wants to dwell on how young girls and great grandmothers were gang-raped to death in broad daylight? Or how Japanese soldiers repeatedly thrust their bayonets into mass graves to ensure there were no survivors? Or that so many corpses were thrown into the Qinhuai River that it turned red with blood? I found myself procrastinating on starting this project, because I was reflexively steeling myself from being hit in the gut. At first I could barely shed tears — the massacre was so unbelievably abominable, so surreal that I didn’t even know how to begin processing it.
But through my research, I keep coming back to one thing — if we forget history, we are doomed to repeat it.
Eighty years have passed since the Nanjing Massacre in 1937. Halfway across the world in America, we wake up every morning to news of mass shootings, acts of terror, nuclear threats, sexual assault scandals. I remember watching nonstop TV coverage of the Halloween 2017 truck ramming attack that killed eight and injured eleven in lower Manhattan — where I lived for three years — and reading Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking on my phone later that night before bed. An overwhelming sadness washed over me as I lay awake in the dark, overcome by the reality that there is still so much hate in the world — that the terror described in the book in 1937 is still alive and thriving today, just in another form by another enemy.
My main goal of commemorating the Nanjing Massacre is not to antagonize the Japanese — though I am, of course, appalled by the downplaying and even outright denial of the massacre in some circles of Japan, despite widespread evidence painstakingly detailed in Chang’s The Rape of Nanking. Rather, it is to raise awareness about a forgotten holocaust and to celebrate the heroes who responded to such hate with love. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
One such example are the rural Chinese families who took in Japanese orphans in the aftermath of World War II, despite their deep-seated hatred of the Japanese due to atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre throughout the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937-1945. I have heard about widespread anti-Japanese sentiment in China from a young age — it was what my grandparents’ generation lived through, and what they passed down to my parents growing up. But for these rural women in northeast China, their maternal instincts triumphed over their initial desire to beat up the Japanese orphans they encountered in the streets. From the depths of their hate, they chose love — sharing what precious little they had to raise children of the enemy as their own.
Last year my mother and fellow Atlanta Chinese Dance Company Co-Artistic Director Hwee-Eng Y. Lee and I learned about these forgotten heroes through an award-winning dance piece “Chinese Mother” by China’s Northeast Normal University. As I took it all in, I couldn’t help but think back to what was going on in my own country in 1945. More than 110,000 Japanese Americans — 62% of them American citizens like me — were being released from internment camps that uprooted them from being productive members of American communities into mass incarceration. Unlike the Chinese mothers who chose to love the enemy, the architects of Executive Order 9066 chose to hate their fellow countrymen. I see myself in the Japanese American internees — law-abiding Americans of Asian ancestry who knew no other country as home. If my friends and neighbors forget history, my family might be the next victim — and if I choose hate, my friends and neighbors may suffer the same fate.
In honor of the Chinese mothers who chose love, the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company will perform “Chinese Mother” as the finale of an original production Travels Around China: Circles of Love and Departure on March 31, 2018 at the Infinite Energy Theater. As a prequel, the company will premiere an original work commemorating the Nanjing Massacre to provide historical context for the piece. To truly appreciate the magnitude of one’s love, we must first journey into the depths of their hate. In today’s challenging times, when we hug our families a little tighter each night, let us always remember to choose love — even in the face of hate.
Photo of the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company performing “Chinese Mother” by Shelavon Vanzant.