Narrativizing trauma, activating awareness: Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking and its afterlives

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhen Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking in 1997, exactly sixty years after the Nanjing Massacre, the subtitle The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, called attention to one of the greatest human tragedies in the twentieth century. As a powerful historic reminder, The Rape of Nanking aims “to understand the event so that lessons can be learned and warnings sounded.” This paper focuses on Chang’s role as a writer/fighter who uses words to fight forgetfulness with a forceful narrative concerning one of the most dreadful traumas in the collective psyche of the Chinese people. It produces quite a number of “afterlives,” including different Chinese translations in Taiwan and mainland China, a nanking winter (2008), a play by the second-generation Chinese Canadian playwright Marjorie Chan, Nanjing Requiem (2011), a novel by the first-generation Chinese American novelist Ha Jin, and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems (2013), a collection of poems by the third-generation Chinese Hawaiian poet Wing Tek Lum. Furthermore, the docudrama Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking (2007), directed by Bill Spahic and Anne Pick, presents a filmic representation of the short fascinating life of this passionate writer. This paper discusses how Chang, role as a writer and activist, fights against amnesia with remembrance as well as her rich legacy to the world across linguistic, generic, and semiotic boundaries. Chang’s text and its afterlives strive to give voice to those nameless war victims as a step towards truth, justice, reconciliation, and peace.