For Whom the Sirens Call: Life in a City Marked by Tragedy
- The Nanjing Massacre dominates discussions of the city's past; To what degree should it define the present?
Students attend a memorial ceremony for victims of the Nanjing Massacre in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, Dec. 13, 2018. Du Yang/CNS/VCG
Every year on the morning of Dec. 13, the shrill cry of air raid sirens pierces the cold winter air above the eastern city of Nanjing. Down below, the city’s residents stop whatever they’re doing to observe a moment of silence for those who died during the Nanjing Massacre, a roughly six-week slaughter carried out by Japanese soldiers after occupying the city this day in 1937.
The wailing sirens — traditionally a warning of imminent attack — are meant as a reminder of the suffering and bloodshed that took place all those years ago. Growing up in Nanjing, I remember my whole school abruptly falling silent once the sirens howled. Teachers stopped talking mid-lecture, and the whole class stood up and waited quietly for the haunting sounds to fade.
We were never overtly taught to hate the Japanese in school, but we were also never allowed to forget the magnitude of the atrocities they committed. Both my primary school graduation ceremony and the ceremony to mark my graduation from the Young Pioneers were held at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, which itself is built atop a mass grave. When well-known director Zhang Yimou began filming his Nanjing Massacre epic “The Flowers of War,” he held auditions for extras at my high school. And I still remember my math teacher remarking one year, as the sirens tapered, that she didn’t care for Japanese.
It was hardly a stunning admission. Anti-Japanese sentiment persists nationwide, but it can be particularly potent in Nanjing, where the massacre is such a fundamental part of the city’s — and its residents’ — identities. It’s only natural, then, that impressionable young students pick up on and seek to mimic these feelings.
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What we all shared was a belief that it was our duty as Nanjingers to tell our city’s story. Last year, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall published a speech given by a Nanjing high school student preparing to study abroad in the U.S. Speaking for his fellow Nanjingers, he says, “We have a responsibility to be ambassadors for peace and to share the collective memory of what happened here with our peers around the world.”
Sometimes, I wonder if we put too much emphasis on the second half of that sentence. Internationally, the massacre tends to be the one thing people know about my hometown. The events of 1937 continue to define the city — and, by extension, those of us who grew up there.