City of Life and Death

City of Life and Death

Like individual suffering, collective memory is often problematic because of its very nature as memory. Memories are subjective because of the events and emotions surrounding them. This is perhaps even more true for wartime memories. The horror and suffering that occur during times of war often creates for its victims and perpetrators memories that pose as truth, but that are in fact various versions of the truth. Some of these versions are suppressed for a variety of reasons, as demonstrated by the film "City of Life and Death" directed by Lu Chuan. The film concerns the events surrounding the Japanese invasion of the city Nanjing in 1937. What is particularly interesting about its narrative is the fact that it is told not only from the perspective of the Chinese victims as well as heroes during this time, but also from the perspective of the Japanese perpetrators, who are also demonstrated as suffering. This adds two perspectives to a collective memory that is traditionally shaped around the Chinese as suffering heroes in a time of horror and war.

Coble (2010) notes that, both during the war and afterwards, the story of Chinese suffering during the War has often been publicized with more than remembrance or disclosure in mind. It was a political and national effort to create a version of the war that illustrates the Chinese as suffering heroes and of the Chinese people as survivors against very difficult odds. The film, in turn, attempts to add two new perspectives to this version of the collective memory: the general Chinese people as suffering and dying, and the Japanese not only as perpetrators, but as suffering victims of their circumstances as well.

In the film, the representative of Chinese heroism is Miss Jiang, while suffering is demonstrated through the eyes of German Nazi John Rabe, who saved thousands of Chinese from the war-time atrocities they suffered, while the Japanese perspective is provided in the character of the young shoulder Kadokawa, who is shocked and horrified about the events he witnesses, but is equally powerless to stop them. Indeed, most characters in the film are demonstrated as victims of their circumstances, who had little choice but to simply act as witnesses to the events surrounding them. Some, like Miss Jiang, do however emerge as heroes and heroines, whose refusal to let their obstacles overcome them create a platform of bravery that is remarkable. The film is clever because it does not refute the collective memory of the war, but simply adds dimension to it. It does not ask the Chinese people to discard their memory of the war as a time of suffering and heroism; it asks them simply to consider that there is more than one dimension and more than one collective that took part in creating the memory.

In his article, Coble (2010) considers the underlying reasons for the relative one-dimensionality of the Chinese collective memory about the war in general and the evens in Nanjing particularly. First, the film demonstrates the politics of silence that surrounded the subsequent remembrance of the events at Nanjing. The Japanese not only refused to acknowledge the events officially; the Chinese also experienced a sense of urgency in terms of their maintained relations with Japan, and therefore did not make any demands relating to the case. Hence the tragedy was experienced as doubly odious for those who suffered during the massacre. The tragedy has, however, not been forgotten by those who suffered as a result of it. Indeed, since the 1980s, there has been an increase of public outcry in China to protest the Japanese attitude towards the massacre and its victims that, even today, appears a little flippant in its refusal to do anything as concrete as providing a public apology.

Furthermore, the silence has been broken by authors that focus on the cruelties suffered by the Chinese people, including many rapes of the women in Nanjing, the chemical and biological experiments, and the use of poison gas. Furthermore, prior to the film and during the 1990s, writings that focus on the massacre have increasingly become focused upon the suffering of the Chinese to replace the traditionally heroic narratives of resistance. The heroic narrative of resistance, however, has very specific roots in the era of the war itself. According to Coble (2010), Chinese reporters found themselves unwilling to demonstrate their countrymen as helpless victims of the Japanese. Therefore, the narrative that pervaded the era in the form of "news" reports and statements of "fact" was often colored by a collective attempt to focus on the potential unity and strength of the Chinese as a nation. This is therefore a trend that persisted in the collective narrative of the massacre at Nanjing, and the national perception of those who suffered because of it. While suffering was part of this narrative, it served to demonstrate the reaction of the Chinese people as a collective as one of heroism and a spur to action rather than being the hapless victims that so many indeed were.

Also, as far as the Nanjing massacre specifically is concerned, the relative silence that surrounded it both during and after the war is also the result of a drive to motivate and unite the Chinese people. Indeed, it was considered to the detriment of this fragile morale to create too accurate a narrative around such a devastating event. This has contributed to the recent collective memory of this event in terms of the heroism it created among the Chinese, but more recently also to the collective memory of victimhood and unfair treatment. Throughout both these narratives, the Japanese as almost demonic perpetrators remain. It is only most recently, through films such as Lu's work, that the Japanese perspective as suffering themselves and paying a terrible price for their actions enjoyed any attention at all. The film therefore demonstrates that collective memory is more often than not skewed as a result of the emotion surrounding it.