I read about it in the newspapers. That Dr. Wei is not Chinese; he’s an American. The Chinese all know about Unit 731, so it’s not news to us.
I don’t want to think about it much. Some stupid young people shout about how we should boycott Japanese goods, but then they can’t wait to buy the next issue of manga. Why should I listen to them? This just upsets people without accomplishing anything.
Name withheld, executive:
Truth be told, the people who were killed there in Harbin were mostly peasants, and they died like weeds during that time all over China. Bad things happen in wars, that’s all.
What I’m going to say will make everyone hate me, but many people also died during the Three Years of Natural Disasters under the Chairman and then during the Cultural Revolution. The War is sad, but it is just one sadness among many for the Chinese. The bulk of China’s sorrow lies unmourned. That Dr. Wei is a stupid troublemaker. You can’t eat, drink, or wear memories.
Nie Liang and Fang Rui, college students:
Nie: I’m glad that Wei did his work. Japan has never faced up to its history. Every Chinese knows that these things happened, but Westerners don’t, and they don’t care. Maybe now that they know the truth they’ll put pressure on Japan to apologize.
Fang: Be careful, Nie. When Westerners see this, they are going to call you a fenqing and a brainwashed nationalist. They like Japan in the West. China, not so much. The Westerners don’t want to understand China. Maybe they just can’t. We have nothing to say to these journalists. They won’t believe us, anyway.
Sun Maying, office worker:
I don’t know who Wei is, and I don’t care.
Akemi Kirino:
Evan and I wanted to go see a movie that night. The romantic comedy we wanted was sold out, and so we chose the movie with the next earliest start time. It was called Philosophy of a Knife. Neither of us had heard of it. We just wanted to spend some time together.
Our lives are ruled by these small, seemingly ordinary moments that turn out to have improbably large effects. Such randomness is much more common in human affairs than in nature, and there was no way that I, as a physicist, could have foreseen what happened next.
Scenes from Andrey Iskanov’s Philosophy of a Knife are shown as Dr. Kirino speaks.
The movie was a graphical portrayal of the activities of Unit 731, with many of the experiments reenacted. “God created heaven, men created hell” was the tagline.
Neither of us could get up at the end of it. “I didn’t know,” Evan murmured to me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He was not apologizing for taking me to the movie. Instead, he was consumed by guilt because he had not known about the horrors committed by Unit 731. He had never encountered it in his classes or in his research. Because his grandparents had taken refuge in Shanghai during the War, no one in his family was directly affected.
But due to their employment with the puppet government in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, his grandparents were later labeled collaborationists after the War, and their harsh treatment at the hands of the government of the People’s Republic eventually caused his family to flee for the United States. And so the War shaped Evan’s life, as it has shaped the lives of all Chinese, even if he was not aware of all its ramifications.
For Evan, ignorance of history, a history that determined who he was in many ways, was a sin in itself.
“It’s just a film,” our friends told him. “Fiction.”
But in that moment, history as he understood it ended for Evan. The distance he had once maintained, the abstractions of history at a grand scale, which had so delighted him before, lost meaning to him in the bloody scenes on the screen.
He began to dig into the truth behind the film, and it soon consumed all his waking moments. He became obsessed with the activities of Unit 731. It became his waking life and his nightmare. For him, his ignorance of those horrors was simultaneously a rebuke and a call to arms. He could not let the victims’ suffering be forgotten. He would not allow their torturers to get away.
That was when I explained to him the possibilities presented by Bohm-Kirino particles.
Evan believed that time travel would make people care.
When Darfur was merely a name on a distant continent, it was possible to ignore the deaths and atrocities. But what if your neighbors came to you and told you of what they had seen in their travels to Darfur? What if the victims’ relatives showed up at the door to recount their memories in that land? Could you still ignore it?
Evan believed that something similar would happen with time travel. If people could see and hear the past, then it would no longer be possible to remain apathetic.
Excerpts from the televised hearing before the Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 11Xth Congress, courtesy of C-SPAN
Testimony of Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth, witness:
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify here today. I would also like to thank Dr. Wei and Dr. Kirino, whose work has made my presence here today possible.
I was born on January 5, 1962, in Hong Kong. My father, Jaiyi “Jimmy” Chang, had come to Hong Kong from mainland China after World War Two. There, he became a successful merchant of men’s shirts and married my mother. Each year we celebrated my birthday one day early. When I asked my mother why we did this, she said that it had something to do with the War.
As a little girl, I didn’t know much about my father’s life before I was born. I knew that he had grown up in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, that his whole family was killed by the Japanese, and that he was rescued by Communist guerrillas. But he did not tell me any details.
Only once did Father talk to me directly about his life during the War. It was the summer before I went to college, in 1980. A traditionalist, he held a jíjīl? ceremony for me where I would pick my bi?ozì, or courtesy name. That is the name young Chinese people traditionally chose for themselves when they came of age and by which they would be known by their peers. It wasn’t something that most Chinese, even the Hong Kong Chinese, did anymore.
We prayed together, bowing before the shrine to our ancestors, and I lit my joss sticks and placed them in the bronze incense brazier in the courtyard. For the first time in my life, instead of me pouring tea for him, my father poured tea for me. We lifted our cups and drank tea together, and my father told me how proud he was of me.
I put down the teacup and asked him which of my older female relatives he most admired so that I might choose a name that would honor her memory. That was when he showed me the only photograph he had of his family. I have brought it here today and would like to enter it into the record.
This picture was taken in 1940 on the occasion of my father’s tenth birthday. The family lived in Sanjiajiao, a village about twenty kilometers from Harbin, where they went to take this portrait in a studio. In this picture you can see my grandparents sitting together in the center. My father is standing next to my grandfather, and here, next to my grandmother, is my aunt, Changyi (暢怡). Her name means “smooth happiness.” Until my father showed me this picture, I did not know that I had an aunt.
My aunt was not a pretty girl. You can see that she was born with a large, dark birthmark shaped like a bat on her face that disfigured her. Like most girls in her village, she never went to school and was illiterate. But she was very gentle and kind and clever, and she did all of the cooking and cleaning in the house starting at the age of eight. My grandparents worked in the fields all day, and as the big sister, Changyi was like a mother to my father. She bathed him, fed him, changed his swaddling clothes, played with him, and protected him from the other kids in the village. At the time this picture was taken, she was sixteen.