History

I've recently been learning what it means to have witnesses to history. It started with something quite mundane.

My mother has a a plastic plate that I colored in preschool displayed alongside fancy plates and mementos. It's quite ugly. There are two stick figures, one green and one blue. Their faces are formed by an unconnected, squiggly line that attempts to form an oval. Their hair consists of five lines each, radiating from this lopsided oval, leaving their heads looking more like ameoba with long flagella. This plate is one of the only objects that shows I attended preschool in America.

But it reminded me that there were other witnesses. The courtyard outside the Nanking Massacre Victims' Memorial reminds me of a sci-fi temple. Rubble cracks beneath my sneakers as I accidentally slip off the stone walkway. The obnoxious sun and humid air are strangling. Bullet holes further disfigure the ragged concrete walls. Near the center of the courtyard is an enormous silver bell. It's called the bell of peace but seems more like one you hear tolling in a graveyard, as the whole place is seething with oppression.

A blast of air conditioning greets you as you enter the actual memorial , a relief from the furnace-like temperatures of Nanking (南京是中國四大火爐之一). But the whole exhibit is doused in a shroud of darkness, leaving your eyes struggling to see what's ahead of you.

The exhibits are a little distasteful and overtly political. One wonders why Japanese translations are written alongside the English and Chinese. Photographs are chosen to overwhelm you with emotional and gory images, with questionable captions that ring of "heartless Japanese" and "comrades." My friend called me over, and the nearby guard questioned me about whether "一场浩劫" could be a part of "文明史" (whether a massacre could be a part of civilized history). "Obviously not," he said, "because civilized history is good." Apparently one of the guests had informed the guard that their description was incorrect, and the museum curator decided to change the words the next day.

But soon, one begins to realize that there are few tasteful ways to talk about the massacre. When more credible first-hand accounts like journals, letters, orders, interviews with Japanese soldiers, and Japanese newspapers at the time begin to confirm the horrors, I begin to understand what Conrad and Golding meant. The atrocities testify to the darkness in human nature, a bestial survival instinct that weathers away--when given a chance--any socially-cultured 'civility.' Of course, I don't discount the heros like Magee and Rabe (ironically, the former an American pastor who collaborated with the latter, a German Nazi businessman) who certainly defied the times. And I'm not saying the "Japanese" deserve the title of bestial. Rather, when governments fail and humans are left on their own, we're all prone to wade deep into the murky river and discover our "heart of darkness."

But enough on this.

Before you loop out of the memorial, you walk through a half-excavated graveyard, the site of a mass execution. These countless, sun-bleached bones are now housed under a rectangular prism, an obsidian and austere structure. As I walk on the glass panes, just centimeters above a maddening crumple of countless femurs, skulls, and radii, a chill courses under my skin and I begin to understand... life is fragile and short. It's an experience that leaves you moody for days, When your blood and ancestry is the same as these people, either extinguished by a fortunate bullet or suffocating slowly in a watery mess, you can't help but feel an eerie connection.

It's doubly chilling to hear from a living witness what one gathers from a staid memorial. Recently, my grandfather has been telling my brother and me (obviously at different times) stories of his youth. When the Japanese attacked Shanghai, my grandfather was witness to some of those same atrocities. They burned down his home, for that matter. Lots more on this... but it's a story for another day.

They say history is boring. I must disagree.