Representations of the Nanjing Massacre in Chinese American Literature
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ABSTRACT PERPETRATORS, RESCUERS, SCAPEGOATS, AND SECONDARY WITNESSES: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE NANJING MASSACRE IN CHINESE AMERICAN LITERATURE Xiaoling Zhang, Ph.D. Department of English Northern Illinois University, 2017 Ibis Gόmez-Vega, Director This research probes into the representations of the Nanjing Massacre in Chinese American literature, in particular Shouhua Qi’s When the Purple Mountain Burns, Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem, Geling Yan’s The Flowers of War, and Wing Tek Lum’s The Nanjing Massacre: Poems. In light of René Girard’s theories of violence, in particular his ideas of a circle of violence, mimetic desire, sacrificial substitution, and myth as connected with stereotypes of persecution, this research diagnoses the terrors and horrors depicted in the above-mentioned texts and argues that the Nanjing Massacre as represented in Chinese American literature is no ordinary act of war, but sheer violence—violence taking innocent civilians and surrendered soldiers as scapegoats. Focusing on how each text addresses violence through the lens of perpetrators, rescuers, scapegoats, and secondary witnesses, this research concludes that the surge of the Nanjing Massacre texts at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the collective efforts of Chinese American writers, who are concerned about the witnessing crisis of the Nanjing Massacre and wish to reconstruct the forgotten history by drawing a panoramic view of the intensity and scale of violence borne in this catastrophe. NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY DEKALB, ILLINOIS MAY 2017 PERPETRATORS, RESCUERS, SCAPEGOATS, AND SECONDARY WITNESSES: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE NANJING MASSACRE IN CHINESE AMERICAN LITERATURE BY XIAOLING ZHANG © 2017 Xiaoling Zhang A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Doctoral Director: Ibis Gόmez-Vega ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I feel deeply indebted to my professors, colleagues, friends, and families whose intelligence, encouragement, support, and sacrifice have nurtured my dissertation to date. I wish to thank Dr. Ibis Gόmez-Vega, who directed my dissertation with impressive dedication and understanding. Her conferences with me on Asian American literature and suggestions on my essays, term papers, and dissertation drafts expanded my research interests and sharpened my writing skills. I wish to thank Dr. James Giles and Dr. Mark Van Wienen, my committee professors, for their insightful, patient, and warm guidance. I wish to thank Wanda Giles, who helped me proofread my prospectus and provided me with constructive suggestions for further revisions. I wish to thank Jane Ensor and Robert Ensor for their gift of The Holy Bible, a most valuable reference for my dissertation. My special thanks go to Robert Self and Lois Self, whose loving care has instilled in me hope and strength in times of difficulties and hardships. I thank Michael Day, Doris MacDonald, Ellen Franklin, Eric Hoffman, Jan Vander Meer, Lori Lawson, Jan Knudsen, Beth Schewe, Suzanne Coffield, Jeanne Jakubowski, Fredrik Stark, Floyd Knight, Xiling Wang, Xiaodong Liu, Gaiyan Wang, and Xiaohe Rui for their constant support and encouragement. Last but not least, I wish to thank my beloved families for their unwavering faith in my completing a very challenging program. I treasure their unconditional support and sacrifice as the most precious gift I have received in life. DEDICATION To Xitian Liang, my mother and my inspiration TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page 1. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 1 2. PERPETRATORS, VIOLENCE, AND THE “MIMETIC DESIRE” IN SHOUHUA QI’S WHEN THE PURPLE MOUNTAIN BURNS ............................................................................................... 20 3. RESCUERS, HEROISM, AND THE “ORDINARINESS OF GOODNESS” IN HA JIN’S NANJING REQUIEM ......................................... 62 4. SCAPEGOATS, MYTH, AND THE “STEREOTYPES OF PERSECUTION” IN GELING YAN’S THE FLOWERS OF WAR……………… ................................................................ 103 5. SECONDARY WITNESSES, ACCUMULATIVE PRIMARY WITNESSING, AND THE “HARD TRUTH” IN WING TEK LUM’S THE NANJING MASSACRE: POEMS ................................................................. 139 6. CONCLUSION…...… .......................................................................................... 187 WORKS CITED……. .......................................................................................... 194 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The Nanjing Massacre, as it involved Japanese invaders killing “more than 260,000 [Chinese] noncombatants” 1 (Chang 4) and raping “20,000–80,000 Chinese women” (Chang 6) in 1937 and 1938 in Nanjing, is also known as the Rape of Nanjing, the Nanjing Slaughter, and the Nanjing Atrocity. A Chinese national trauma during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937- 1945), the Nanjing Massacre has nevertheless remained an unpopular topic in Chinese American literature until the beginning of the twenty-first century. Prior to then, writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Lisa See used Japan’s invasion of China as the backdrop for their works and alluded to the Japanese atrocities against Chinese civilians in their stories. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) is perhaps the earliest Chinese American novel to choose the Japanese invasion of China as its historical background. Kingston uses the Sino-Japanese conflict to address an ethnic problem concerned more with the Chinese than the Japanese. In “Shaman,” one of five memoirs in The Woman Warrior, Kingston attributes Brave Orchid’s final decision to leave China to her witnessing the communal stoning of a mentally deranged woman, whose mad dancing during Japan’s air raid of the village makes her a suspicious “spy for the Japanese” (111). Thus, Kingston’s focus in this anecdote is the unbearable cruelty committed by the villagers who used their compatriots as scapegoats and treated them with barbarism similar to 1 Chang’s number of 260,000 victims in the Nanjing Massacre is based on the estimation of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. Other studies suggest the number can be over 300,000. See Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books,1997), 99-104, and Mark Eykholt’s “Aggression, Victimization, and Chinese Historiography of the Massacre,” in Joshua A. Fogel’s The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 46-47. 2 that of the Japanese invaders. Following Kingston, Amy Tan and Lisa See also used Japan’s invasion of China as the backdrop of their novels. Tan in The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), and The Opposite of Fate (2003) and See in The Shanghai Girls (2009) write the lives of their characters partially or entirely into the dark period of Japan’s invasion of China and allude to Japanese atrocities, particularly those of indiscriminate killing and raping.2 It was not until the beginning of the twenty-first century that the Nanjing Massacre became a central topic in Chinese American literature, considering the fact that three novels and a collection of poems dealing entirely with the Massacre were published between 2005 and 2012. The interest of Chinese American writers in the Nanjing Massacre has much to do with Iris Chang, whose publication of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II3 (1997) spurred the Chinese diaspora writers to represent the Massacre through works of history and literature. At the age of 29, Chang became a legendary Chinese American writer, whose monograph was translated into 15 languages and stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 10 weeks. In her book, Chang expresses not only her fury toward Japanese revisionists’ denial of the Nanjing Massacre but also her deep regret that in the United States the Japanese atrocities committed in Nanjing have never raised adequate attention from the general public. Along with wide acclaim of Chang’s book, which drew an unprecedented world attention to the Nanjing Massacre, there are critical voices as well. In Joshua A. Fogel’s review, The Rape of Nanking is 2 See “The Sino-Japanese War and Chinese History in Amy Tan’s Novels and Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls” in Walter S. H. Lim’s Narratives of Diaspora: Representations of Asia in Chinese American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 13-35. 3 Abbreviated as The Rape of Nanking in the rest of the dissertation. Also, Chang uses the Wade-Giles system of Romanization for the pinyin spelling of Nanjing in her book. 3 criticized as “a very angry book” and Chang as one who was “enraged at the perpetrators of the ‘rape’ of the city and at what she perceives as Japan’s failure to face up to a crime she openly equates to the European Holocaust” (818). However, I believe it is the very anger and regret of Chang that moved the Chinese American writers who felt what Chang had felt and wished to turn their shared anger and regret into literary works addressing the Nanjing Massacre. Chang’s anger in The Rape of Nanking is not groundless. In her book, she contrasts how Japan dealt with its war crimes differently from Germany. Unlike the Germans who “have incorporated into their postwar political identity the concession that the wartime government itself, not just individual Nazis, was guilty of war crimes,” the Japanese, on levels of government