By Hann-Shuin Yew
Published in the Library of Congress
Dear Ms. Chang,
This is a late letter. It should have arrived in your hands two or three weeks ago, while you were still here to read it — so that you might have heard me say how much your work has meant to Chinese people all over the world, and so that I might have told you, in my own voice, how much I owe you. Now Nanjing has one more death to its account, and this is something I cannot stop grieving.
Like you, Nanjing was always there, beneath the surface of my growing up. My parents would mention the words Nanjing Massacre in passing, but they would not tell me how my own great-grandparents and great-uncle had died at the hands of the Japanese soldiers. Even so, I came to know — mostly through the controversies that erupted after your Rape of Nanking was published — that something beyond all reason had happened in that city during the Second World War.
To my regret, that knowledge did not really touch me when I was a child. The Nanjing Massacre was a subject buried in the older generation, a thing too terrible to be reached for. The older generation, for me, meant my maternal grandmother, who hated the Japanese, who spoke a dialect I could not follow, and who did things I could not understand — refusing to step inside a Japanese restaurant, weeping when I played a Japanese pop song on my CD player. Yes: Nanjing belonged to a generation I could not reach.
I learned why my grandmother hated the Japanese only after she had died. At her funeral, an uncle told me that she had watched her own parents being tied to a tree and beaten to death by Japanese soldiers. That had not happened in Nanjing — it had happened in a small, nameless village in the middle of China. The killing the Japanese carried out was not confined to Nanjing. In hundreds of forgotten villages across China, men and women had been murdered and tormented in the same way. The wound of Nanjing runs through China; the smaller, forgotten massacres were repeated, in different forms, almost everywhere.
Why must we wait for death before we can learn so much?
To be honest with you, Ms. Chang — until you were gone, I had not been able to finish reading The Rape of Nanking. I could not. When I read the cruelties you had set down, when I saw those scenes in my mind, the horror and the nausea forced me to put the book away. I, too, lost relatives in this “forgotten holocaust”; every sentence in your book, every photograph, struck a place in me that already knew the answer. It took me four years to read the first four chapters. Each time I picked the book up again, I went cold all over at the banality of evil you had laid bare.
But what you must have felt was incomparably worse. You looked at the rawest evidence — at the films, at the testimonies, at the photographs of suffering. For years, day after day, you lived inside the fear and pain that the victims had lived through. How did you do it? Where did your fearlessness come from?
When I read in the newspaper that you had taken your own life, I knew I must read your book. If you had had the courage to write it, I owed you, at the very least, the courage to read it through. So I sat on a bench, in the wind, with your now-worn book in my hands, and I thought of you.
This time, somehow, I could read it all the way through. I no longer tried to hold the horror at a distance. I no longer tried to protect myself from the smell of the suffering and the sound of the cries. Instead, when I let myself sink into Nanjing, I saw John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin and Dr. Robert Wilson — and you — standing before me. I saw the living Bodhisattvas of Nanjing rescuing the thousands of victims. And I saw you drawing aside the bamboo curtain that had stood for so long between the world and Nanjing.
Thank you, Ms. Chang, for the courage that allowed you to bring out the truth. Even though you can no longer read this letter, I hope, before you went, you understood the great change you had wrought in the world. So I thank you.
Yours sincerely,
Hann-Shuin Yew
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Hann-Shuin Yew, 16, a high school junior
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I was born in Singapore, and as I was growing up my family moved to several different cities — Shanghai, Vancouver, and now San José, in California. I have had the chance to live among different cultures and to see how Chinese communities live in different parts of the world. This has given me a great love for history and literature, especially the works that have helped me understand my own cultural inheritance. My other interests include word puzzles, brain teasers, origami, and, now and then, writing poetry.
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(Translated by Yang Hui, reviewed by Jian Shuhui, August 6, 2018.)
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This letter won first place in the California high-school category of the 2005 Library of Congress essay contest, “Letters About Literature: A Letter to an Author Whose Book Has Changed Your Life.”
