Diary+Entry+4+-+October+1,+1945

October 1, 1945

Finally, the war between Japan and the United States ended. According to what I heard from the high school students I met after the hard times, until the end, that selfish Japan was stubborn. It didn’t give up to the Americans despite the uncountable deaths of the patriotic Japanese soldiers by the soldiers of the United States who wanted to stop the World War to finally bring international peace to the world.

Immediately after we heard the news about the withdrawal of the Japanese, my father, Ma Wei Wei, and I climbed down the mountain we had been staying in for about three years. The first thing we did as we reached the town in Nanjing we had lived in when I was young was to go to the place where my mother, Yang Mei, and I were separated. However, I couldn’t find anyone looking like mother in the group of hundreds of women searching for their own families and relatives. When my father and I were about to leave the place, thinking that maybe my mother had been sent to another camp, a familiar voice desperately cried out,

//“Ma Li LI! Ma Li Li, my baby!”//

When I turned around, I saw my mother: thin, pale, smaller than the size of her when we were separated. The three of us, my mother, my father, and myself, tightly held each other in our arms without saying a single word, but just sobbing. Our family was finally together.

These days, my parents are excited at the thought of sending me to high school again, and I try to seem excited about the plan. However, to be honest, I don’t see the plan becoming a reality. This is because in fact, the war is not completely over yet. Another attack, now by the Soviet Union, had occurred in Nanjing on August 9, 1945. There are bodies of dead people lying on the street, the smell of corpses fill the air, and I only see the future of another group of soldiers coming to my friends and my family and finally myself to take us all to their camps for whatever their intentions are. I do not want to experience the humiliation I had felt during the time I had spent at the Japanese soldiers’ camps. Thus, although I feel terribly sorry for my parents, I am going to end my life myself after writing this very last diary entry of mine. I believe this is the best choice I can make in this time period of chaos, endless war, and hopelessness. Now, goodbye to the brutal wars, goodbye to my parents, goodbye to the world....