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To get to the museum, we had to walk along a dusty road, site of construction, including dump trucks and other heavy machinery. Always just a little further, when we stopped to ask someone. The Memorial Museum for the Rape of Nanking was gruesome, including partly excavated, violated squeletons, as well as hundreds of photos and documents as enduring “evidence” of the massacre. And somehow, we do always need to see for ourselves, before we believe, numb as we are to words and photos coming at us at the speed of media.(family has been on the road, escaping from Nanking) We reached the village at the top, the one called Heaven’s Breath. There we all agreed to stop early and stay the night. Why not make the scenery last longer?
And then we saw the army truck that had driven up from the other side. It was still there, ready to go down the same road we had taken. Why not brag to them about the magical sights we had just seen? We could give them something to look forward to!
We found the soldiers sitting outside on the ground, quiet and still. And right away we saw by their faces: Those men had no ears for our happy talk. They told us they were on their way to Chung King—to help us set up a new capital city—because of what had happened to the old. And then we learned what we did not know in Kweiyang, the news about Nanking.
Who knows why the Japanese changed their minds about their paper promises? Maybe someone threw a rock, maybe someone refused to bow down. Maybe an old woman tried to stop her neighbor, scolding him, “Behave! You want to get us all in trouble?”
“They lied,” said one of the soldiers sitting on the ground. “Raped old women, married women, and little girls, taking turns with them, over and over again. Sliced them open with a sword when they were all used up. Cut off their fingers to take their rings. Shot all the little sons, no more generations. Raped ten thousand, chopped down twenty or thirty thousand, a number that is no longer a number, no longer people.”
I was seeing this in my mind. The old woman who was our cook, Wan Betty, the little boy throwing rocks in the lake. I was thinking, This happened when we were having good times and bad times, while I was complaining as we traveled from there to here. I was hearing this with no danger to myself, yet I had so much terror in my heart I did not want to believe it.
I told the soldier, “This cannot be true. Only rumor.”
“Believe what you want,” the soldier said, and then spit on the ground.
I found out later I was right. What the soldier had said—that was only rumor. Because the real number of people who died was much, much worse. An official later told me it was maybe one hundred thousand, although how did he know? Who could ever count so many people at once? Did they count the bodies they buried, each one they burned, those dumped into the river? What about all those poor people who never counted in anyone’s mind even when they were alive?
I tried to imagine it. And then I fought to push it out of my thoughts. What happened in Nanking, I couldn’t claim that as my tragedy. I was not affected. I was not killed.
And yet for many months afterward I had dreams, very bad dreams. I dreamt we returned to Nanking and we were telling the cook and Wan Betty about the beautiful scenery at Heaven’s Breath, bragging about the good dishes we ate in Kweiyang. And the cook said to me, “You didn’t have to leave Nanking to see such things, to taste such good food. We have the same, right here.”
In front of me, she set down a dish, piled with white eels, thick as fingers. And they were still alive, struggling to swim off my plate.
Helen told me there’s a restaurant (in California)—just opened—and they have this same kind of eels, cooked with chives in very hot oil. She wanted us to go try them, to see if that restaurant is any good. But I said no. I don’t have an appetite anymore for that kind of eels.
My tongue doesn’t taste things the same way anymore. Like celery, I can’t eat celery anymore. All my life I loved celery. Now, as soon as I smell it, I tell myself no. And I don’t even remember what made me not like it anymore. But with eels, I know.
Do you know why that is? Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?
My mind was swimming with words like:
“the Japanese Imperial army advanced and brutally….”
“the Japanese forces took the city…”
“they brutally decapitated…”
“they burned this man with kerosene…”
the violence an inescapable whirl (the room was circular) and I wanted only to flee. Say it ain’t so. We want always to believe the good, so desperate is that want. To feel that evil exists only as a temporary aberration in our human history. But when we are made to confront it, we cannot adequately explain what drives the violent tool. Metal against flesh. Twisting out life…
