英语泛读教程

In America many people are ignorant of the horrible crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during their invasion of China. In Japan, many even try to deny the Great Nanjing Massacre. Iris Chang wrote The Rape of Nanking to remind people of the evil done 60 years ago and the following is a comment on her book.

The Japanese Imperial Army made a prominent spot in the annals of collective evil 60 years ago when it launched the Great Nanjing Massacre. In less than two months, Japanese troops killed from 150 000 to 300 000 unarmed Chinese civilians and raped and tortured more than 100 000 women. It was an act of mass barbarism that much of Japan to this day either can't explain or simply won't admit could have happened.

In the United States, a series of conferences timed to the anniversary of the massacre － which began on December 13 and lasted for about six weeks － is attempting to revive long-dormant interest in this horrific event. Most Americans have absolutely no idea about either the December 1937 － January 1938 massacre or its relationship to World War II. Central to this attempted revival is a new book by Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking.

Chang, 29, lives in the California Silicon Valley city of Sunnyvale, 100 kilometers south of San Francisco. It's no coincidence that a Chinese-American writer in America's technology heartland is leading the charge that demands both Japanese acknowledgment of responsibility and mainstream American recognition. Chang and her book are indications of an important movement within America. It is a demand for shared history. As ethnic groups gain economic, social and political confidence, they prod and push for their historic tales to be heard.

"This is an invitation to Americans as a whole to become larger by incorporating the history of others," says Vera Schwarcz, a professor of Chinese history at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Nowhere is this movement more visible than among some of the more affluent Asian-American communities in California. "I go into school libraries and I'm shocked at how little there is," says Los Angeles-based Korean-American writer Helie Lee. Her critically-acclaimed memoir, Still Life With Rice, is a fascinating tale of her grandmother, who overcame extraordinary adversity at the hands of Japanese. "It is up to us as Asian-Americans to supply the resources, it is up to us to speak."

The Nanjing massacre provides a compelling focus for Chinese-Americans, who pressured the San Francisco Unified School District into including the massacre in high-school history courses. Similar demands are being made in Southern California's Orange County. Now, Chang is offering this history for mainstream consumption.

For Chang, the Nanjing massacre began with self-discovery. The daughter of Taiwan scientists who came to America in the 1960s, Chang heard stories about the massacre － how the Yangtze River ran red with blood－and how her grandparents had miraculously escaped the carnage.

Her grandfather － a journalist stationed in the then Nationalist capital of Nanjing － was being evacuated by boat from Wuhu. Her grandmother and infant aunt were making their way from their ancestral village by sampan. Her grandfather waited on the docks for four days. Time was running out. "In despair, he screamed his beloved's name － Yi-Pei － to the heavens," Chang writes. "Then, like an echo from far away, he heard a reply. It came from one last sampan approaching the docks."

But as a child, Chang could find nothing that tied those personal accounts to history as Americans understand it. "While still in grade school I searched the local public libraries to see what I could learn about the massacre, but nothing turned up," she says. "It made me wonder. If it was really as bad as my parents said it was, then why couldn't I find it in the library?"

Three years ago, Chang had just finished Thread of the Silkworm, a book on Chinese-American scientist Tsien Hsue-shen (Qian Xueshen), a victim of the McCarthy era in the 1950s who then helped China develop its missile program. She attended a conference on the Nanjing Massacre in the Silicon Valley community of Cupertina, organized by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, an umbrella group of 30 organizations.

"We feel that if we don't hold these people, this government, responsible, future generations will say, ‘Well, these people got away with it, so can we,'" explains Ignatius Ding, an engineer and an alliance founder. Ding adds, "The continued denial is an insult to our heritage."

The 1994 conference showcased dramatic and gruesome photographs of the massacre. "Nothing prepared me for these pictures," Chang writes in her book, "stark black-and-white images of decapitated heads, bellies ripped open, and nude women forced by their rapists into various pornographic poses, their faces twisted into unforgettable expressions of agony and shame."

Chang was appalled. "It was worse than I could ever have imagined," she says. "I felt sick to my stomach. I remember walking around in a state of shock." But the photos also hooked her on the need to relate this horror to other Americans. "I remember being very angry, especially at the intensity of the massacre, that more than 300 000 people may have died in the slaughter and that this could so easily be ignored. I felt I had almost a moral obligation as a Chinese-American writer to let the rest of the world know what happened. And I felt a kind of urgency."

She spent the next two years researching the massacre. Her conclusion: "This went beyond just a mere slaughter. This is one of the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen."

The young author describes her emotional and historical quest over lunch in a seafood restaurant near the apartment complex where she and her engineer husband, Bretton Lee Douglas, live. Chang talks in often-indignant tones, only occasionally picking at the fried squid in front of her. Her stories are laced with outrage, most often directed at Japan's dogged refusal to come to terms with its past.

"It's appalling that the Japanese continue to deny that it happened, that they really have escaped moral and financial responsibility," she says. Japan is "sending out the message to countries in the future that if you're rich and powerful enough, you can go ahead and kill and rape or torture hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and get away with it 60 years later."

Chang's research uncovered a 2 000-page diary of John Rabe, a German businessman who spearheaded expatriate efforts in Nanjing to counter the Japanese army's insanity. His account adds to the growing body of non-Chinese accounts that support the case of a systematic carnage by Japanese troops. Rabe's witnessing is all the more credible as he both headed the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone and the local Nazi Party.

Palace politics also plays a role. The late Emperor Hiroh-ito's uncle, Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, commanded the army around Nanjing. Orders, stamped with his seal, told officers to kill all captured Chinese soldiers. Even if one assumes that Japanese authorities lost control and their troops went crazy, why was the carnage allowed to continue for so long? Who or what finally stopped it?

All these issues are of little interest to most Americans, who suffer from what Schwarcz terms an "allergy to history." The Rape of Nanking stands as one of the only nonfiction accounts of the massacre in the English language. Yet it is barely 200 pages long, and appears to be aimed at an audience with little historical perspective. Chang and other Chinese-Americans ask that fellow citizens understand this horror in the most fundamental terms. The first task, they are saying, is basic education.