Adeline Oka

 

        I first became acquainted with the atrocities of Nanking ten years ago in Chinese school.  Having been inspired by my great-aunt, the prolific linguist who in her seventies decided to take up Mandarin, I chose to enroll in Chinese school.  Up to that point in my life, my only understanding of my Chinese background was the knowledge that my family was Chinese.  What that meant exactly, I did not know.  Neither my parents nor grandparents spoke, wrote, or read a single character of Mandarin.  We had no relatives who were born in China.  We were neither Buddhists nor members of any prominent Chinese religion, nor did we celebrate any Chinese holidays.  

When I learned about the Nanking massacre, I was moved to act.  I forgot about my feelings of awkwardness amid the Chinese community and became active in promoting awareness of the Rape.  I no longer cared about being an outsider, but saw myself as part of a larger movement for justice.  I spoke out in my middle school, urging my American classmates and teachers to sign petitions that called for reparations to be paid to Nanking victims.  In a strange way, the culture of oppression unites people.  Iris Chang writes, “There are several important lessons to be learned from Nanking, and one is that civilization itself is tissue-thin” (220).  In learning about the exploitation of others, we are reminded of our own vulnerability—and ultimately, our humanity 

Three years ago my interest in Nanking resurfaced when I took a college class on Asian Civilization.  I decided to read Chang’s book, but was skeptical about it.  I felt that the more atrocities I was exposed to, the more desensitized I would become and this would only result in my becoming apathetic to injustice.  But what I expected to be a sensationalized account of a regional war turned out to be one of the most important texts I would read in my college years.  I read the book to satisfy an academic curiosity, but the experience became for me, as it was for Ms. Chang, “a personal exploration into the shadow side of human nature” (220).  Instead of becoming apathetic, I became pro-active.  

I personally investigated, starting with questioning my grandmother.  A retired instructor of the German language, my grandmother is an accomplished, educated, woman of the world.   Yet whenever I ask her about our family history, she derides my efforts, dismisses my queries as pointless digs at the past, and rhetorically asks me why I was so weird.  Wondering if the horrors of Nanking were duplicated in Indonesia, I asked her about the era of Japanese occupation.  She recalled that those were hard times.

“We had no lights,” she began.  “We could only use oil or gas lamps.  If any household used electric lights, the soldiers would pound loudly on the doors and shout ‘Lights! Lights!’  We also did not have shoes in that era.  Many people went around covered only in [I imagine burlap] rice sacks.  We were forbidden to eat white rice; all white rice was reserved for the military.  We could only eat an inferior type of reddish-brown rice or a concoction of the cheap rice with cornmeal.  If we had any white rice we had to sneak around to eat it because we never knew what the Japanese would do to us if we were caught.  There were reports of men being captured by the Japanese, stores looted, and women being raped.  The Japanese often snatched single women and took them as their wives.”  I asked her if she witnessed any violence first-hand.  “No,” she said.  “My sisters and I stayed indoors all the time [during those years].  We were too afraid to come outside.”

I asked her if there was much discussion about the Nanking horrors when she was growing up.  At first she did not know what I was talking about.  When I explained, she remembered a time, long before the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, when there were newspaper reports of the war between Japan and China.  “My mother was very interested in the war.  She followed the newspaper stories diligently.  She kept a tally of the war casualties in the Bible.” I asked my grandmother if she still had those records.  She told me she did not. “But what did it matter, it was only numbers.” I imagine that it was not from insensitivity to the Nanking massacre that my grandmother uttered that remark; rather, it was reflective of an attitude that my grandmother, and many others have about the value of history.  For many people, especially those who are fortunate to have escaped horrific pasts, history is only a series of numbers, of names and dates.  We can turn to religion or philosophy, perhaps even economics, for the solutions to our existential plights.  Not history.

I asked my grandmother about the post-war years.  I had one sole motive for asking this question: to understand my family background and the persecution from which they escaped.  Growing up, my parents constantly reminded me of my place in society.  “You are a minority,” they would say.  Yet growing up in Los Angeles, I sensed a disequilibrium between what I was taught in my home and what I experienced outside of it, namely, that there were no minorities in this pluralistic community.   For years I just assumed that my parents were paranoid, but as I grew up and learned about the second-class status of the Chinese in Indonesia, I began to understand my parents’, sometimes defensive, attitudes.  I had felt, for years, that my family was petty and even a bit racist, when they made distinctions between the native Indonesians and the Chinese, emphasizing that we belonged strictly in the category of the latter.  I, for one, could not even distinguish between a native Indonesian and a Chinese-Indonesian.  My worldview was lacking a historical understanding, and consequently I felt disconnected from the world of my relatives.  

When I learned about Nanking, I wondered if Indonesian persecution against the Chinese was in any way linked to resentment towards Japan for wartime atrocities.  I had come to understand somewhat why there were tensions between the Chinese and Japanese and hoped that I would be able to extrapolate on these tensions and apply them to my own cultural history.  All my grandmother would say was that after the war, everyone did their best to get back on their feet.  “We were grateful when we could feed our families,” she said.  “There was no more talk of Japan.”  But how could all those people so easily dismiss what happened in Nanking and in Indonesia? I asked her.  Was there no more fear? Or hate?  My grandmother told me that hate would always be there.  “We cannot see what lays buried deep inside people’s hearts,” she said.  Yet she made it clear that there were no discussions about the war, in Nanking or in Indonesia, and that the focus for the Chinese-Indonesian families was to make progress in their situations and plan for the future.  The past was to be left in the bookshelves, in notes left in Bibles like that belonging to great-grandmother. 

Even after the actual “Rape” of Nanking ceased, the Japanese continued to subjugate the Chinese through promoting opium use, which was intended to “encourage addiction and further enslave the people…Many of the downtrodden citizens of Nanking fell prey to drugs because it gave them the means to escape, if only temporarily, from the misery of their lives” (163).  Opium was used to both pacify the people as well as to oppress them.  In a similar manner, forgetting about one’s past is a form of narcotic, a means of coping and escaping.  Unfortunately, we cannot escape history.  It remains with us in the present and follows us into the future.