Diary+Entry+1+(CY)

Nanjing is “like a coiling dragon and a crouching tiger” (Chang) that has protected us and provided home to our ancestors. But now to see this great city fall under the cold-blooded hands of the Japanese fills me with hatred, disgust, and ever deep despair. What could have happened to my mother and sister? I heard people talk. Talk of crimson nightmares. They say that the Japanese have killing contests where they line up the men and shoot them with genuine smiles of joy emanating from their faces. They even tally up the number of decapitated heads to see which group of Japanese soldiers killed the most. I heard that they half-bury our men and run them over with mowers. They say that the Japanese search every home and ask for //hua gu niang// or young girls. I heard that they rape women, rape them to death day and night. And to think one of these people could have been my mother, my sister! To imagine them in these situations, what horror! They say the chances of surviving the war are slight, and if...if my mother and sister had met such a terrible fate were there fellow Chinese men who at the very least tried to protect them, how futile the attempt was? I know they must have been defenseless themselves with nothing on them to attack the Japanese, but if death was inevitable wouldn’t there have been honor in dying while protecting your own fellow countrymen? Or was it not even that? Was death so excruciatingly painful and brutal that it was not even a matter of death, but a matter of how they died that stopped them from helping their own countrymen? And how were the Japanese as the tale goes able to smile so genuinely in the midst of this inhumane cruelty, destruction, and chaos? Murder was just a sports to them: there was no target, they killed any Chinese men in sight. They killed even the most helpless people - children and elders - who couldn’t have possibly been in the Chinese army. It would not be an overstatement to say that they are the sons of the devil. Even though they were trained under severe discipline as people say they were if there was anything human left in them they would have heard the cries of the helpless men. They would have really seen the horrific deaths of the innocents. But they didn’t, and that was why millions of innocent men had to suffer for their ignorance, their indifference.
 * July 1937**