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Nanjing, Now and Then
My good friend in Nanjing, the “Southern Capital”, is an entrepreneurial news tycoon who has opened markets and built businesses for several large newspapers in the city. He is conscientious, considerate, diligent, and sensitive to political issues, a must in the finicky relationship the private media has with the government. Well connected in news circles all over the country and in Canada as well (we first met in Vancouver in 1999), he has created a wonderful life and career for himself, his wife and daughter, pursuing interests and a livelihood that would not have been imaginable as little as 15 years ago. He loves his hometown very much, and prefers it greatly to Shanghai, which for him is too big and too busy. It really is a lovely city, with plenty of trees, gardens, and even lawns (!) right in the downtown areas. It definitely does have a laid back feel to it compared to some of the larger urban centres, and I enjoy going there myself.
Befriending Mr. Yu and seeing modern Nanjing leads me to reflect on how different life must have been in the past. On my most recent visit to the city, I had an opportunity to visit the Memorial Exhibition Centre of the Nanjing Massacre which happened in late 1937. Over a six month period, over 300,000 innocent citizens were put to death by the invading Japanese army. Nanjing at that time was the capital of the Republic of China, and the imperialist forces thought they would “teach a lesson” to the rest that resistance was futile. Nowadays, for the most part, the Japanese are a very polite and unobtrusive people as I discovered during my days of teaching English there, so it is hard to comprehend how utterly brainwashed the soldiers were into believing that the Chinese were something less than human. The Exhibition Hall holds nothing back in its graphic and heartbreaking depiction of the atrocities that occurred. What was especially upsetting to me was to see the images of defenseless children suffering those unspeakable horrors.
A weird thing happened when I was there. A video was being played, recounting the six months of terror, and sitting in front of me in the first row were a group of six children, between 6 and 10 years old. They did not understand what was being presented on the screen, so were busying themselves by chatting a playing patty-cake with each other. Their parents told them repeatedly to be quiet so that others could hear the narration, and repeatedly they started acting up out of boredom. Finally, one of the adults yelled out, “If you don’t pipe down right now, I am going to beat you to death!” The other Chinese around me did not react, as it is a common expression that is used very lightly, but I was shocked and dismayed at how inappropriate it was to say something like that at that very moment.
Anyway, what a difference time makes. It is surely important to learn from history, to make sure those negative chapters never occur again, but also to build upon previous successes. In both counts, Nanjing seems to be getting it right.
last modified Aug 12, 2004 at 9:02
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