Chapter 19 Creation Talk: Tragic and Splendid Sacrifice - Yan Geling

I don't always think of it as one of my best novels, but it's one I've long thought I had to write.For some reason, when people are in a foreign country, they will have a kind of "self-awareness" of their own race. This "self-awareness" of ethnic groups makes me very sensitive to all the stories between Chinese and other ethnic groups.This is not just a phenomenon that happened to me. Many friends around me began to collect and exhibit materials on the "Nanjing Massacre" in the United States very early, and at the same time launched a boycott of Japanese goods. Even when the Diaoyu Island incident occurred, more than a dozen people They actually raised a large sum of money, bought a small plane, and prepared to recover the Diaoyu Islands on behalf of the Chinese people.So I often joke that if you send an unpatriotic person abroad, he may become a nationalist in a few years.

So I started participating in the commemorative activities of the "Nanjing Massacre" in 1993.In Chicago at that time, the Chinese community showed the first pictures of the massacre.Every year after that, I participated in the massacre commemoration activities, and later also participated in the "60th Anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre" commemorative conference held in Nanjing in 1997, which was held by China and Japan.Just when I was visiting the execution grounds of the Holocaust, I felt compelled to write a work for this great historical tragedy. Internationally, the "Nanjing Massacre" is called "The Rape Of Nanking", replacing the massacre with Rape (that is, rape).Regarding this tragic historical event, scholars from both the East and the West would rather call it the "Great Rape", but rape is only a branch of the crime of the massacre.But it seems that this seemingly one-sided title has aroused my comprehensive thinking.Rape, a part of the tragedy that has occurred for seventy-four years so far, is the one that pricks the social conscience of scholars all over the world the most, and is more worthy of their emphasis and entry into the eternal record.During the "Nanjing Massacre", about 80,000 Chinese women were raped, accounting for less than a quarter of the total number of 300,000 victims, but "Rape" contains deeper and broader meanings on the slaughter.If the massacre is just the destruction of the body and the conquest through massacre, then "Rape" is to trample on the national humiliation of a country, occupy and desecrate the most secret and fragile private parts of a country, and completely hurt the soul of a country to achieve the ultimate goal. To succeed and conquer, to carry out massacres.Moreover, more than 70 years after the great tragedy, the facts are still being denied and tampered with, so it is a history that continues to be humiliated and raped.The 80,000 "Rape" victims have never been able to get revenge.From this point of view, history is weak and deceitful, and it is still a prey that can be humiliated and raped at will. "Rape" here shows a more painful meaning than massacre.

The most tragic victims of war are always women.Women are the ultimate trophies of conquerors.Women always suffer twice as much.And no matter in any culture, a virgin symbolizes a certain degree of holiness, and the occupier cannot be considered a full-scale occupation if he does not trample on the sanctity.This is the man's game - the tragedy of war on women. This story is dedicated to the female victims of The Rape Of Nanking, and as the story unfolds, I hope readers find, as I do, that their sacrifices were not only tragic, but beautiful.