smoke and clouds are a hundred years old. In 1997, a book called "Nanjing Massacre: The Forgotten "World War II" catastrophe" shocked China and the world, like a beacon lit in the dark, exposing the inhumane massacre in " World War II " to the eyes of Westerners. This book that is unwilling to open by both Chinese and Japanese. Its author, Zhang Chunru , spent his whole life to correct the name of history and ask for justice.
Zhang Chunru deeply engraved the ironclad evidence of the Nanjing Massacre into the memory of human beings all over the world. Due to constant revenge and harassment from Japanese right-wing forces, in 2004, Zhang Chunru, who was only 36 years old, ended his life with a pistol.
This is a good soul, a fearless Long March tear open the layers of ugly steel warriors of the invaders. Her life is as short and gorgeous as a rainbow. The three words "Zhang Chunru" have been forever embedded in the historical sky of the Chinese nation.
If this young life has not withered, today Zhang Chunru is only 54 years old.
Pure, as the name
In the afternoon of winter, cargo ships on the Huaihe come and go. On the bank of the river, the dry reed flowers sway in the wind, and there is a sense of tenacity and tranquility in the bleakness...
Xindu Township, Huaiyin District, Huai'an City (now Xindukou Street ) Xindu Village is on the west bank of the Huai River, which is Zhang Chunru's ancestral home.
One day in 1937, less than a month after the outbreak of the Nanjing Massacre, Nanjing City had already "hit storms are coming and winds are filling the building ". Zhang Chunru's grandfather Zhang Tiejun fled Nanjing with his family. Before 1949, he went to Taiwan again and served as the chief editor of the China Daily. Zhang Chunru's parents also went from mainland China to Taiwan and then immigrated to the United States.
On March 28, 1968, Zhang Chunru was born on the beautiful campus of Princeton University in the United States. Her father Zhang Shaojin is a doctoral student at Harvard University. Her monograph "Quantum Field Theory" has a great influence in the academic circle of theoretical physics in the United States. Her mother Zhang Yingying is also a doctoral student at Harvard University and is engaged in biological sciences research. Being born into such an extraordinary intellectual family, Zhang Chunru is destined to have a life different from that of ordinary people.
Her name is "Churu", taken from "The Analects of Confucius" "Follow it, it is Pure". It means "purity and harmony", not only the name, but also her heart. Of course, the name also contains the family’s hope for her, and also contains the family’s love for the motherland.
Zhang Chunru's initial understanding of the motherland comes from the family. When she was very young, she heard her family say that China had suffered too much suffering in the past and the people were displaced.
"1937", "Japanese Army", "Nanjing", "City Massacre" and other fragments were spelled into Zhang Chunru's mind in childhood: At that time, the Yangtze River surrounding Nanjing was almost blocked by the corpse, and the river water was stained with blood... She imagined what a cruel era it was. For some time, she didn't even want to mention the Nanjing Massacre, thinking that it was synonymous with "evil".
In addition to curiosity and sympathy for the motherland across the ocean, Zhang Chunru secretly decided in her heart: one day she would set foot on that homeland and see the place where her ancestors lived with her own eyes.
Although Zhang Chunru was born in the United States, her parents pay great attention to Chinese cultural education. My mother taught her Chinese, while my father told her the historical stories of China. The most common saying they said to Zhang Chunru is: Being a Chinese is very proud.
Although you see foreigners every day and eat hamburgers, Zhang Chunru insists on writing diaries in Chinese characters every day, with neat and elegant handwriting. In order to make the children proficient in Chinese and never forget their mother tongue, her mother not only made an appointment with her husband to speak Chinese at home, but also set up a Chinese reading and writing class near her home, innovatively teaching the children to recognize the traditional Chinese characters and teach the group of children who grew up in the United States to Chinese pinyin, so that these children born in the United States can remember their way of coming.
In 1985, the talented Zhang Chunru was admitted to the University of Illinois. Seeing that the graduation certificate of science and engineering was about to be obtained, she made an unexpected decision - to transfer to the journalism department.
In just one and a half years, Zhang Chunru won the bachelor's degree in the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois, and then won the master's degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University. After graduation, she worked for Associated Press and Chicago Tribune , and then became a freelance writer.
Zhang Chunru has loved writing since she was a child. Perhaps in the process of learning from childhood, her heart is becoming more and more urgent to use words to influence the world. Like Mr. Lu Xun, Zhang Chunru also picked up his pen and started creating.
At the graduation ceremony, as an outstanding student representative, Zhang Chunru delivered an exciting speech: "My greatest hope is that among you today, there are several people who can become fighters who fight for truth, goodness and beauty! We need such people to create a better world for the next generation of mankind and ensure the continuation of human civilization. Please believe in the power of the individual. One person can also make the world change greatly. A person, even a concept, can trigger or end a war. You, as an independent individual, can change the fate of millions of people!"
In 1991, Zhang Chunru married Brit Douglas, a white boy he met in college. The exquisite wedding dress wraps Zhang Chunru's beautiful body. She is young, beautiful and talented, and has a happy and confident smile. She has a good family background, a proud education, a matching marriage, and a gorgeous dream burning on the tip of her pen.
This year should be Zhang Chunru's happiest year. She not only gained love, but also met Bole, who was in her writing career, publishing agent Susan Rabinel. Zhang Chunru's first work was " Silk·Qian Xuesen's Biography ". The book tells the story of how the first person in the design of missile , Qian Xuesen's , suffered persecution in the United States and finally returned to China's historical facts and historical background. The book won the "Peace and International Cooperation Program Award" of the MacArthur Foundation in the United States and soon became a bestseller.
"If it weren't for being touched by historical materials from the Nanjing Massacre, Zhang Chunru might have enjoyed life as usual and be an ordinary person." said a Chinese-American scholar engaged in history research.
In 1994, after accidentally hearing that a friend was going to film "In the Name of the Emperor", Zhang Chunru was very interested. Her friend suggested that she go to San Francisco to visit a picture exhibition about the Nanjing Massacre organized by Chinese. Soon, Zhang Chunru drove to visit.
bloody storm, tragic. The amazing black and white photos hit Zhang Chunru's heart fiercely. In the past, she had only heard from her family's words that in 1937, in a city called Nanjing, the Japanese invaders carried out a cruel massacre of unarmed civilians and prisoners of war. But that period of history is too far away for Zhang Chunru, who was born in the United States and grew up in the United States. And this was the first time she saw the scene at that time, and everything in front of her shocked her.
"I have to do something!" The flesh and blood of fellow countrymen who were brutally killed lingered in Zhang Chunru's heart. As a writer, Zhang Chunru wants to become a fighter who shouts for history.
At that moment, Zhang Chunru seemed to feel the beating pulse of the motherland. Although she had never met each other, she was no stranger to her.
is 300,000 unjust souls running around and calling
In 1995, Zhang Chunru took a plane through Hong Kong and then took a train to Nanjing.
When Zhang Chunru first set foot on Nanjing, the homeland soaked in the blood of 300,000 compatriots, and stepped onto this former slaughterhouse with 300,000 predecessors wandering, what he saw was no longer the embarrassing appearance after the war, but a prosperous scene.
However, Zhang Chunru understood that the blood under the blue bricks had not yet disappeared, and the dead soul was still crying in the dark night. In the old days, the people of Nanjing were the same. Their existence made Nanjing today inevitably add a hint of sadness and vicissitudes.
Nanjing is extremely hot in midsummer. Zhang Chunru walked into the weeds in the suburbs of Nanjing in the scorching heat, looking for those marked and unmarked slaughterhouses. Every time she goes to a place, she has to carefully take pictures of every massacre site and burial site. If she meets a local person speaking dialect, she will record it one by one and take it back to listen.
She walked into those Qushenli Lane to interview the survivors of the massacre. Every old man was emotional and talked endlessly. Their pain was too deep, as if he could not vomit it out before he died of old age.
"Sometimes I feel like I'm doing time and space travel. For example, a victim told me face to face that she had resisted the three soldiers who tried to rape her, and her photos were something I've seen. A girl who was only nineteen years old at the time, covered in wounds... Sixty years later, when I saw the old man in front of me telling me what she had happened to me back then. This touched me a lot. I personally feel that the Holocaust was not only sixty years ago, but also affecting people today."
Zhang Chunru looked at such pictures every day, listened to all kinds of tragic experiences, and tried to put herself in the environment that was like hell on earth. All the indisputable facts strengthened her determination to tell the truth of the world.
In April 1996, the book "Nanjing Massacre" entered the most difficult writing stage. Zhang Chunru, who was buried in the vast and dark historical materials, lost weight, often had nightmares, and her hair fell off in a bunch of clothes. She told her parents that sometimes she had to get up and stay away from the documents and take a deep breath, and she felt extremely painful and almost suffocated.
In a letter to my mother, Zhang Chunru wrote: "What I have suffered now is completely incomparable to the experiences of the victims in the Holocaust. As a writer, I want to save these victims from forgetting and call out for those mute and speechless people."
In addition, Zhang Chunru also managed to check the transcript of the trial of Tokyo war criminals, and even faced the perpetrators of the Nanjing Massacre directly. What surprised her was that these beasts of that time had committed such heinous crimes, but they could still stay away from justice and live a happy life.
The history of human compatriots killing each other is long and miserable, and no disaster can be compared with the Nanjing Massacre during World War II.
A historian once estimated that if the hands of the victims of Nanjing were connected, they could be pulled from Nanjing to Hangzhou, which was 200 miles long. Their total blood volume can reach 1,200 tons, and their bodies can fill 2,500 train cars. Even the Nazis in Nanjing were terrified, calling the massacre a work of a "beast machine".
In the process of unveiling that painful history, Zhang Chunru had to engrave these sins and darkness in her heart. She shouldered the heavy burden of alerting the world with her weak shoulders, and searched for and rescued the painful memories of the demise of the Chinese nation.
"Nanjing Massacre:
The Forgotten "World War II" Catastrophe" was released in shock in 1997, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, Zhang Chunru discovered the Nanjing Massacre that had been covered with 70 years first-hand information "Rabe Diary" Chinese version was published in Nanjing.
In this year, the book "Nanjing Massacre: The Forgotten "World War II" Catastrophe" formed by 29-year-old Zhang Chunru was also released. It is the first English book to comprehensively record the atrocities committed by the Japanese army against Nanjing. She not only details the details of the crazy atrocities of the Japanese army in the book, but also analyzes the indifference of the Japanese soldiers growing up to human life under the background of militarist culture.
This book shocked the whole world as soon as it was published! In just one month, the book was listed in the bestseller list of the United States " New York Times " and was also named the most popular book among readers of the year. In the following years, it was translated into 15 languages and reprinted more than 10 times, and so far it has been printed.
"This is the first time in 60 years that anyone has let Americans know about the existence of this crime of war. What she does is something that countless male writers and historians in the United States who write in English have not done." The New York Times said that Zhang Chunru, "For the first time in more than 60 years, breaks the silence of China, Japan and the United States, and exposes Japan's animal nature to the world in English in detail."
In May 2016, an article "Escape from Death" was selected into the middle school textbook of Chinese Publishing House . This article is excerpted from Zhang Chunru's "Nanjing Massacre: The Forgotten "World War II" Catastrophe". This may be the best memory of Nanjing's 300,000 unjust souls.
This bullet that "traveled through 67 years"
eventually killed Zhang Chunru, who was only 36 years old,
After the publication of "Nanjing Massacre: The Forgotten World War II Catastrophe", Zhang Chunru became the target of extreme right-wing groups in the world, especially the Japanese right-wing criticism. But Kurahiko Saito, who was then the Japanese ambassador to the United States, shamelessly publicly claimed that the description in Zhang Chunru's book "Nanjing Massacre" was "very wrong"; not long after, Kurahiko Saito and Zhang Chunru appeared together in an interview program called "Jim Liller News", which undoubtedly gave the latter a good opportunity to face the qualities.
Facing Saito Kurahiko, Zhang Chunru pointed out without mercy: The Japanese government has never expressed serious and formal apology for the atrocities committed in Nanjing that year, and in the decades after the war, Japanese textbooks have also tried their best to distort and cover up this history; under Zhang Chunru's aggressive questioning, Saito Kurahiko was left with only vague arguments...
"I feel very lucky that "Nanjing Massacre" has become a bestseller. I don't want this history to disappear from now on, and I don't want the lives of so many people to be wiped out from now on, so I wrote this book. What really bothers me is Japan. The tough forces, they want this history to disappear, I think it is an insult to the victims, and people should fight to stop the massacre. "
" You better remember the me who was once - the me who was at the peak of my life as a bestseller - rather than the me who became distraught after returning from Louisville City ... Every breath becomes difficult - this anxiety is comparable to drowning in an open ocean. I know my behavior will pass on some such pain to others, those who love me the most. Please forgive me." This is the last thing Zhang Chunru left to the world.
On November 9, 2004, Zhang Chunru, who was only 36 years old, committed suicide by drinking a car on the roadside of Gallos, California.
Leaving her beloved parents, husband and 2-year-old son, we don’t know what kind of struggle and pain Zhang Chunru has experienced in her heart, so she made such a choice. Her life was short and gorgeous, just as she said: "I lived seriously and dedicated my sincerely to my goals, writing and my family."
That day, when the coffin of Zhang Chunru's young body was slowly buried, tears were scattered beside her. There were only 3 books in front of her spirit, and three books during her lifetime - "Nanjing Massacre: The Forgotten "World War II" Catastrophe", "Silk·Biography of Qian Xuesen" and "Chinese Americans: Oral History".
In the Paradise Gate Cemetery in California, USA, Zhang Chunru's tombstone is quietly lying in one place. There is a passage on the monument: "My beloved wife and mother, writer, historian, and human rights fighter."
"Some people are dead, but she is still alive." "A conscience at the age of thirty-seven, 10,000 kilometers of courage: a tragic journey to the soul. Life and death are on the long tomb path, looking at each other, praying silently, and listening one by one." This poem written to Zhang Chunru is sad and brave.
This man has passed away, and he should cry for a long song. Zhang Chunru's life is short but full of power.
"Life will eventually disappear, but books and words can be circulated. Some people's lives are spent specifically for others." Zhang Chunru's mother ended the whole book with such words at the end of her memoir.
Zhang Chunru left, with despair of human nature, but her influence has not ended until today. Because of her, Japan's crimes were exposed throughout the world, and Japan's pursuit of a political power was also interrupted. In 2007, Zhang Chunru's Japanese version of "Nanjing Massacre: The Forgotten "World War II" Catastrophe" was released, which also allowed more Japanese people to face this history again.
Just as killing all the chickens that report dawn cannot stop the dawn, the black and white words left by Zhang Chunru with her life are the proof that she once ran for the Nanjing Massacre, which brought Europeans and Americans back to that bloody era. They knew what the Chinese fought in blood had encountered, and they also saw clearly the right-wing elements who were secretly brewing their strength.
Remember history and don’t forget the national sorrow
Nanjing Massacre in Zhang Chunru is a connection of life.It is a connection to her own life, to those who died in the Nanjing Massacre, and to us who live in peacetime.
For us, the relationship is that a generation that has not experienced war has occurred on this land we are now standing on, and so far, only a short 80 years have passed.
Remember history and don’t forget the national sorrow! In 2005, Zhang Chunru's bronze statue stood quietly on the right side of the memorial square of the Nanjing Massacre Victims Memorial Hall. She was accompanied by her English manuscript of the book "Nanjing Massacre: The Forgotten "World War II" Catastrophe", silently telling this dark history.
bronze statue is surrounded by iris, which represents her English name Iris. "Iris" is the name of the rainbow goddess greek in the myth of greek , symbolizing light and freedom. In the bronze statue, Zhang Chunru holds a book in her left hand and points straight to the sky with her right hand. It is calling for justice and lets the warm light in people's hearts illuminate the darkness of the past.
The leaves of the ivy behind the bronze statue are green, red, and fallen, and the years are reincarnated.
"The state commemoration is held to worship our country's sorrow. The mountains and rivers are still there, and the country is prosperous and the people are safe." On February 27, 2014, China established December 13 as the victims of the Nanjing Massacre 1 National Memorial Day , indicating that future generations should not forget the national humiliation and cherish peace.
2017 Qingming Festival, on the banks of the ancient Huai River, the solemn and elegant Zhang Chunru Memorial Hall bathes in the morning sun and looks at the east.
From this day on, the hero's soul returned to his hometown and was no longer lonely. 5.6 million people from his hometown accompanied her, and her profound thoughts never stop. She watches thousands of miles Jianghuai , and loves the innocent people all over the world! More and more people know Zhang Chunru, and are moved by her spirit of seeking truth and defending justice, and gaining strength from it.
On the other side of the ocean, "Zhang Chunru Park" named after Zhang Chunru was unveiled in San Jose, USA. The design of
Park is profound. Looking down from a high place, it is like a stone thrown into a pond to form ripples. Isn’t the little stone the incarnation of Zhang Chunru? She used the belief that "one person's power can change the world" to break the lies, restore the truth, and uphold justice.
Many local Chinese people expressed their hearts: "Name this park after Zhang Chunru is a compliment and memory of this great woman's extraordinary courage, strong sense of justice and unremitting pursuit of the truth."
"I hope everyone will not only pay attention to why Zhang Chunru died, but why she lived." After Zhang Chunru's death, Zhang Chunru's parents moved from Illinois to San Francisco Bay Area to continue their unfinished career. In 2005, he joined the San Francisco War of Resistance against Japan and actively participated in various activities commemorating Anti-Japanese War for many years, promoting Western society to understand the truth about the Japanese invasion of China, safeguard the history of World War II, and urged the Japanese government to compensate and apologize, "This is also to achieve Chunru's goal and dream."
"The "Nanjing Catastrophe" written by Zhang Chunru tells the world about China's suffering history, and we want to tell the world her story." The person who said this was a student of Beijing Foreign Studies University , named Qin Jiachen.
This young man from Nanjing united three other like-minded classmates to jointly plan and produce a 13-minute full-English short film "Talking about China in Foreign Languages | From Searching for the Roots to Searching for the Truth: Zhang Chunru and the Nanjing Massacre". The short film shows a large amount of first-hand audio-visual and written materials they collected from multiple venues, and tells Zhang Chunru's life and her motivation, history and international influence in writing "Nanjing Catastrophe".
In Qin Jiachen's circle of friends, he wrote this passage: We firmly believe that glory and suffering are both part of the "truth" and are stories worth telling. Learning from Zhang Chunru's method to tell the world about her story with "Nanjing Catastrophe", perhaps the best tribute and commemoration to her.
"People who forget history will surely repeat the same mistakes." She speaks for history and runs for peace. She is worth remembering and inheriting for our whole life.
Source: Central Committee of the Communist Youth League
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