The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

In the Introduction to her famed book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, United States-born journalist Iris Chang recalls how she came to know about the Rape of Nanking in 1937 as a historical event. Her parents, who had survived years of war and revolution before fleeing to Taiwan and then the United States, never wanted her to forget the horrors of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Having grown up in the midst of World War II, Chang's parents had heard numerous accounts of the atrocities caused by the Japanese soldiers all over the Chinese Mainland, particularly during their brutal invasion of Nanking. These stories were passed down to their daughter as a "metaphor of unspeakable evil".

In this sense, Chang's parents had established a strong cultural "bond" between her life in North America and the emotionally powerful narratives of life in the Chinese Mainland. Although Chang is an American citizen who was born and educated in the United States, she was constantly told not to forget the horrible actions taken by the Japanese against her "motherland" (i.e. the Chinese Mainland) and "fellow people" (i.e. the Chinese).

Almost two decades later, Chang was again reminded of the cultural and emotive "bonds" created between herself and the Nanking Massacre as a consequence of her parents' anecdotes. This time it was via two documentary filmmakers who were working on projects about the historical event. Chang became involved with a network of activists, many of them first-generation Chinese Americans and Chinese Canadians who felt the need to bear witness to the historical event, to document and publicize it, and to pass their wartime memories to the future generations. Particularly after the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, Chinese activists organized conferences and educational campaigns all over the world to disseminate information about Japanese crimes during World War II.

All in all, Chang's desire to explore her own relationship to Chinese culture as the culture of her parents and other Chinese individuals of the same generation is a strong motivation for the writing of The Rape of Nanking. On the other hand, with the success of the book, Chang, an individual of Chinese descent and an American citizen, has been identified by her family and members of other Chinese communities all over the world as belonging to their perceived "Chinese" world. She has been "taken in" as a "Chinese daughter", and she appears to have also come to acknowledge, accept and advance this "Chinese" identity as part of her own cultural heritage.

Nonetheless, as a professional journalist, Chang understands the vital importance of promoting The Rape of Nanking to an English-language readership. It is to this readership, of Chinese or non-Chinese ethnic background, that Chang seeks to convey what she perceives to be the important lessons that one should learn from the historical event. Both her use of the word "Holocaust" and her deliberate linking of Jewish persecution under the Nazis with Chinese suffering during the war years in her text have powerful emotive overtones for Europeans and Americans in general. It appears fair to suggest that Chang's life experience in the West as an American citizen and journalist has enabled her to "tap into" the emotional vulnerabilities of European and American collective memories, in order to gain a wider audience for her reconstruction of the Nanking Massacre as a historical event.

Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II was published by Penguin Books in 1997.

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Copyright: Christine Sun, Taiwan.com.au Portal, 2005. All rights are reserved.