by Ken Liu
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
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for
giving me the opportunity to testify here today . I would also like to
Testimony of Lillian C. Chang- Wyeth, witness:
thank Dr. Wei and Dr. Kirino, whose work has made m y 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 y ear, 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 jíj īl ǐ ceremony for me where I would pick my
bi ǎozì, or courtesy name . That is the name young Chinese people
traditionally chose for themselves when they came of age, and by
which name they would be known by their peers. It wasn't something
that most Chinese, even the Hong Kong Chinese, did any more.
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 h e 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
10th 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 othe r
kids in the village . At the time this picture was taken, she was sixteen.
What happened to her? I asked my father.
She was taken, he said . The Japanese came to our village on
January 5, 1941, because they wanted to make an example of it so that
other v illages would not dare to support the guerrillas. I was eleven at
the time and Changyi was seventeen . My parents told me to hide in the
hole under the granary . After the soldiers bayoneted our parents, I saw
them drag Changyi to a truck and drive her away.
Where was she taken?
They said they were taking her to a place called Pingfang, south of
Harbin.
What kind of place was it?
Nobody knew. At the time the Japanese said the place was a
lumber mill . But trains passing by there had to pull down their
curtains, and the Japanese evicted all the villages nearby and patrolled
the area heavily . The guerrillas who saved me thought it was probably
a weapons depot or a headquarters building for important Japanese
generals. I think maybe she was taken there to serve as a sex slave for
the Japanese soldiers . I do not know if she survived.
And so I picked my bi ǎozì to be Changyi ( 長憶) to honor my aunt,
who was like a mother to my father. My name sounds like hers but it is
written with different characters, and instead of “ smooth happiness,” it
means “ long remembrance. ” We prayed that she had survived the War
and was still alive in Manchuria.
The next year, in 1981, the Japanese author Morimura Seiichi
published The Devil's Gluttony, which was the first Japanese
publication ever to talk about the history of Unit 731 . I read the
Chinese translation of the book, and the name Pingfang suddenly took
on a different meaning . For years, I had nightmares about what
happened to my aunt.
My father died in 2002. Before his death, he as ked that if I ever
found out for sure what happened to my aunt, I should let him know
when I made my annual visit to his grave. I promised him that I would.
This is why, a decade later, I volunteered to undertake the journey
when Dr. Wei offered this opportunity. I wanted to know what
happened to my aunt. I hoped against hope that she had survived and
escaped, even though I knew there were no Unit 731 survivors.
I was one of the first to question Evan's decision to prioritize
sending volunteers who are relatives of the victims of Unit 731 rather
than professional historians or journalists. I understand that he
wanted to bring peace to the victims' families, but it also meant large
segments of history were consumed in private grief, and are now lost
forever to the world . His technique, as you know, is destructive. Once
he has sent an observer to a particular place at a particular time, the
Bohm- Kirino particles are gone, and no one can ever go back there
again.
Chung- Nian Shih, Director, Department of Archaeology, National
Independent University of Taiwan :
There are moral arguments for and against his choice: is the
suffering of the victims above all a private pain? Or should it primarily
be seen as a part of our sha
red history?
It's one of the central paradoxes of archaeology that in order to
excavate a site so as to study it, we must consume it and destroy it in
that process . Within the profession we are always debating over
whether it's better to excavate a site now or to preserve it in situ until
less destructive techniques could be developed . But without such
destructive excavations, how can new techniques be developed?
Perhaps Evan should also have waited until they developed a way
to record the past without erasing it in the process . But by then it may
have been too late for the families of the victims, who would benefit
from those memories the most. Evan was forever struggling with the
competing claims between the past and the present.
I took my first trip five years ago, just a s Dr. Wei first began to
send people back.
Lillian C. Chang- Wyeth:
I went to January 6, 1941, the day after my aunt was captured .
I arrived on a field surrounded by a complex of brick buildings. It
was very cold. I don't know exactly how cold, but Harbin in January
usually stayed far below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Dr. Wei had taught
me how to move with my mind only, but it was still shocking to
suddenly find yourself in a place with no physical presence while
feeling everything, a ghost. I was still getting used to moving around
when I heard a loud “ whack, whack” sound behind me.
I turned around and saw a line of Chinese prisoners standing in
the field. They were chained together by their legs and wore just a thin
layer of rags . But what struck me was that their arms were left bare,
and they held them out in the freezing wind .
A Japanese officer walked in front of them, striking their frozen
arms with a short stick . “Whack, whack.”
[Yamagata and his wife sit on chairs behind a long folding table . He is in
his nineties. His hands are folded in front of him on the table, as are his
wife's. He keeps his face placid and does not engage in any histrion ics . His
voice is frail but clear underneath that of the translator's.]
Interview with Shiro Yamagata, former member of Unit 731, courtesy of
Nippon Broadcasting Co.
We marched the prisoners outside with bare arms so that the arms
would freeze solid quicker in the Manchurian air . It was very cold, and
I did not like the times when it was my duty to march them out.
We sprayed the prisoners with water to create frostbite quicker.
To make sure that the arms have been frozen solid, we would hit them
with a short stick . If we heard a crisp whack, it meant that the arms
were frozen all the way through and ready for the experiments. It
sounded like whacking against a piece of wood .
I thought that was why we called the prisoners maruta, wood logs .
Hey, how many logs did you saw today? We'd joke with each other. Not
many, just three small logs.
We performed those experiments to study the effects of frostbite
and extreme temperatures on the human body . They were valuable.
We learned that the best way to treat frostbite is to immerse the limb
in warm water, not rubbing it . It probably saved many Japanese
soldiers' lives . We also observed the effects of gangrene and disease as
the frozen limbs died on the prisoners.
I heard that there were experiments where we increased the
pressure in an air -tight room until the person inside exploded, but I
did not person ally witness them .
I was one of a group of medical assistants who arrived in January
1941. In order to practice our surgery techniques, we performed
amputations and other surgery on the prisoners. We used both
healthy prisoners and prisoners from the frostbite experiments. When
all the limbs had been amputated, the survivors were used to test
biological weapons.
Once, two of my friends amputated a man's arms and reattached
them to opposite sides of his body. I watched but did not participate . I
did not th ink it was a useful experiment.
I followed the line of prisoners into the compound. I walked
around to see if I could find my aunt.
Lillian C. Chang- Wyeth:
I was very lucky, and after only about half an hour, I found where
the women prisoners were kept . But when I looked through all the
cells, I did not see a woman that looked like my aunt. I then continued
walking around aimlessly, looking into all the rooms. I saw many
specimen jars with preserved body parts. I remember that in one of the
rooms I saw a very tall jar in which one half of a person's body, cleaved
vertically in half, was floating.
Eventually I came to an operating room filled with young Japanese
doctors . I heard a woman scream, and I went in . One doctor was
raping a Chinese woman on the ope rating table . There were several
other Chinese women in the room, all of them naked and they were
holding the woman on the table down so that the Japanese doctor
could focus on the rape .
The other doctors looked on and spoke in a friendly manner with
each other. One of them said something, and everybody laughed,
including the doctor who was raping the woman on the table . I looked
at the women who were holding her down and saw that one of them
had a bat - shaped birthmark that covered half of her face . She wa s
talking to the woman on the table, trying to comfort her.
What truly shocked me wasn't the fact that she was naked, or what
was happening . It was the fact that she looked so young. Seventeen,
she was a year younger than I was when I left for college . Except for
the birthmark, she looked just like me from back then, and just like my
daughter.
[She stops]
Representative Kotler : Ms. Chang, would you like to take a break?
I'm sure the Subcommittee would understand —
Lillian C. Chang- Wyeth
After the first doctor was done, the woman on the table was
brought away. The group of doctors laughed and joked amongst
themselves. In a few minutes two soldiers returned with a naked
Chinese man walking between them. The first doctor pointed to my
aunt, and the other women pushed her onto the table without
speaking. She did not resist .
: No, thank you . I'm sorry . Please let me
continue.
The doctor then pointed to the Chinese man, and gestured
towards my aunt . The man did not at first understand what was
wanted of him. The doctor said something, and the two soldiers
prodded the man with their bayonets, making him jump . My aunt
looked up at him.
They want you to fuck me, she said.
Sometimes we took turns raping the women and girls . Many of us
had not ever been with a woman or seen a live woman's organs. It was a
kind of sex education.
Shiro Yamagata:
One of the problems the army faced was venereal disease. The
military doctors examined the comfort women weekly and gave them
shots, but the soldiers would rape the Russian and Chinese women
and got infected all the time . We needed to understand better the
dev
elopment of syphilis, in particular, and to devise treatments.
In order to do so, we would inject some prisoners with syphilis and
make the prisoners have sex with each other so that they could be
infected the regular way . Of course we would not then touch these
infected women. We could then study the effects of the disease on
body organs . It was all research that had not been done before.
The secon d time I went back was a year later, and this time I went
back to June 8, 1941, about five months after my aunt's capture. I
thought that if I picked a date much later my aunt might have already
been killed. Dr. Wei was facing a lot of opposition, and he was
concerned that taking too many trips to the era would destroy too
much of the evidence. He explained that it would have to be my last
trip.
Lillian C. Chang- Wyeth:
I found my aunt in a cell by herself . She was very thin, and I saw
that her palms were covered with a rash, and t here were bumps around
her neck from inflamed lymph nodes . I could also tell that she was
pregnant. She must have been very sick because she was lying on the
floor, her eyes open and making a light moan—”aiya, aiya ”—the whole
time I was with her.
I stayed with her all day, watching her. I kept on trying to comfort
her, but of course she couldn't hear me or feel my touch. The words
were for my benefit, not hers. I sang a song for her, a song that my
father used to sing to me when I was little:
萬里長城萬里長，長城外面是故鄉
高粱肥，大豆香，遍地黃金少災殃。
The Great Wall is ten thousand li long, on the
other side is my hometown
Rich sorghum, sweet soybeans, happiness spreads
like gold on the ground.
I was getting to know her and saying goodbye to her at the same
time.
To study the progress of syphilis and other venereal diseases, we
would vivisect the women at various intervals after they were infected .
It was important to understand the effects of the disease on living
organs, and vivisection also provided valuable surgical practice . The
vivisection was sometimes done with chloroform, sometimes not. We
usually vivisected the subjects for the anthrax and cholera experiments