by Ken Liu
Year after year, history grew as a wall between the two peoples.
[The camera switches to a montage of pictures of Evan Wei and Akemi
Kirino throughout their lives. In the first pictures, they smile for the
camera . In later pictures, Kirino's face is tired, withdrawn, impassive .
Wei's face is defiant, angry, and then full of despair.]
Evan Wei, a young Chinese - American specialist on Heian Japan,
and Akemi Kirino, a Japanese - American experimental physicist, did
not seem like the kind of revolutionary figures who would bring the
world to the brink of war. But history has a way of mocking our
expectations .
If lack of evidence was the issue, they had a way to provide
irrefutable evidence: you could watch history as it occurred, like a play.
The governments of the world went into a frenzy . While Wei sent
relatives of the victims of Unit 731 into the past to bear witness to the
horrors committed in the operating rooms and prison cells of
Pingfang, China and Japan waged a bitter war in courts and in front of
c ameras, staking out their rival claims to the past . The United States
was reluctantly drawn into the fight, and, citing national security
reasons, finally shut down Wei's machine when he unveiled plans to
investigate the truth of America's alleged use of biological weapons
(possibly derived from Unit 731's research) during the Korean War.
Armenians, Jews, Tibetans, Native Americans, Indians, the
Kikuyu, the descendants of slaves in the New World —victim groups
around the world lined up and demanded use of th e machine, some
out of fear that their history might be erased by the groups in power,
others wishing to use their history for present political gain. As well,
the countries who initially advocated access to the machine hesitated
when the implications became clear: did the French wish to relive the
depravity of their own people under Vichy France? Did the Chinese
want to reëxperience the self - inflicted horrors of the Cultural
Revolution? Did the British want to see the genocides that lay behind
their Em pire?
With remarkable alacrity, democracies and dictatorships around
the world signed the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium while
they wrangled over the minutiae of the rules for how to divide up
jurisdiction of the past . Everyone, it seemed, preferred not to have to
deal with the past just yet.
Wei wrote, “ All written history shares one goal: to bring a
coherent narrative to a set of historical facts. For far too long we have
been mired in controversy over facts. Time travel will make truth as
accessible as looking outside the window.”
But Wei did not help his case by sending large numbers of Chinese
relatives of Unit 731 victims, rather than professional historians,
through his machine. (Though it is also fair to ask if things really
would have turned o ut differently had he sent more professional
historians . Perhaps accusations would still have been made that the
visions were mere fabrications of the machine or historians partisan to
his cause.) In any event, the relatives, being untrained observers, did
not make great witnesses. They failed to correctly answer
observational questions posed by skeptics ( “ Did the Japanese doctors
wear uniforms with breast pockets? ” “ How many prisoners in total
were in the compound at that time?”). They did not understand the
Japanese they heard on their trips. Their rhetoric had the unfortunate
habit of echoing that of their distrusted government . Their accounts
contained minor discrepancies between one retelling and the next .
Moreover, as they broke down on camera, their emotional testimonies
simply added to the skeptics' charge that Wei was more interested in
emotional catharsis rather than historical inquiry.
The criticisms outraged Wei. A great atrocity had occurred in
Pingfang, and it was being willfully forgotten by the world through a
cover- up . Because China's government was despised, the world was
countenancing Japan's denial . Debates over whether the doctors
vivisected all or only some of the victims without use of anesthesia,
whether most of the victims were political prisoners, innocent villagers
caught on raids, or common criminals, whether the use of babies and
infants in experiments was known to Ishii, and so forth, seemed to him
beside the point. That the questioners would focus on inconsequential
details of the uniform of the Japanese doctors as a way to discredit his
witnesses did not seem to him to deserve a response.
As he continued the trips to the past, other historians who saw the
promise of the technology objected . History, as it turned out, was a
limi ted resource, and each of Wei's trips took out a chunk of the past
that could never be replaced . He was riddling the past with holes like
Swiss cheese . Like early archaeologists who destroyed entire sites as
they sought a few precious artifacts, thereby consigning valuable
information about the past to oblivion, Wei was destroying the very
history that he was trying to save.
When Wei jumped onto the tracks in front of a Boston subway
train last Friday, he was undoubtedly haunted by the past. Perhaps he
was also despondent over the unintended boost his work had given to
the forces of denial . Seeking to end controversy in history, he
succeeded only in causing more of it . Seeking to give voice to the
victims of a great injustice, he succeeded only in silencing some of them
forever.
[Dr. Kirino speaks to us from in front of Evan Wei's grave . In the bright
May sunlight of New England, the dark shadows beneath her eyes make
her seem older, more frail.]
Akemi Kirino:
I've kept only one secret from Evan. Well, actually two.
The first is my grandfather. He died before Evan and I met . I
never took Evan to visit his grave, which is in California. I just told him
that it wasn't something I wanted to share with him, and I never told
Evan his name.
The second is a trip I took to the past, the only one I've ever taken
personally . We were in Pingfang at the time, and I went to July 9,
1941. I knew the layout of the place pretty well from the descriptions
and the maps, and I avoided the prison cells and the laboratories. I
went to the building that housed the command center.
I looked around until I found the office for the Director of
Pathology Studies. The Director was inside. He was a very handsome
man: tall, slim, and he held his back very straight. He was writing a
letter. I knew he was 32, which was the same age as mine at that time.
I looked over his shoulder at the letter he was writing . He had
beautiful calligraphy.
I have now finally settled into my work
routine, and things are going well . Manchukuo
is a very beautiful place . The sorghum fields
spread out as far as the eye can see, like an
ocean. The street vendors here make
wonderful tofu from fresh soybeans, which
smells delicious. Not quite as good as the
Japanese tofu, but very good nonetheless.
You will like Harbin. Now that the
Russians are gone, the streets of Harbin are a
harmonious patchwork of the five races: the
Chinese, Manchus, Mongolians, and Koreans
bow as our beloved Japanese soldiers and
colonists pass by, grateful for the liberation
and wealth we have b rought to this beautiful
land . It has taken a decade to pacify this place
and eliminate the Communist bandits, who are
but an occasional and minor nuisance now .
Most of the Chinese are very docile and safe.
But all that I really can think about these
days when I am not working are you and
Naoko. It is for her sake that you and I are
apart. It is for her sake and the sake of her
generation that we make our sacrifices. I am
sad that I will miss her first birthday, but it
gladdens my heart to see the Greater East Asia
Co- Prosperity Sphere blossom in this remote
but rich hinterland . Here, you truly feel that
our Japan is the light of Asia, her salvation.
Take heart, my dear, and smile . All our
sacrifices today will mean that one day, Naoko
and her children wil l see Asia take its rightful
place in the world, freed from the yoke of the
European killers and robbers who now
trample over her and desecrate her beauty. We
will celebrate together when we finally chase
the British out of Hong Kong and Singapore.
Red sea of sorghum
Fragrant bowls of crushed soybeans
I see only you
And her, our treasure
Now, if only you were here.
This was not the first time I had read this letter. I had seen it once
before, as a little girl . It was one of my mother's treasured possessions,
and I remember asking her to explain all the faded characters to me.
“ He was very proud of his literary learning,” my mother had said .
“ He always closed his letters with a tanka.”
By then Grandfather was well into his long slide into dementia.
Often he would confuse me with my mother and call me by her name.
He would also teach me how to make origami animals. His fingers
were very dextrous—the legacy of being a good surgeon.
I watched my grandfather finish his letter and fold it . I followed
him out of the office to his lab . He was getting ready for an
experiment, his notebook and instruments laid out neatly along the
workbench.
He called to one of the medical assistants. He asked the assistant
to bring him something for the experiment. The assistants returned
about ten minutes later, holding a bloody mess on a tray, like a dish of
steaming tofu. It was a human brain, still warm from the body from
which it was taken that I could see the heat rising from it.
“ Very good,” my grandfather nodded . “Ver y fresh . This will do. ”
There have been times when I wished Evan weren't Chinese, just
as there have been times when I wished I weren't Japanese . But these
are moments of passing weakness. I don't mean them . We are born
into strong currents of history, and it is our lot to swim or sink, not to
complain about our luck.
Akemi Kirino:
Ever since I became an American, people have told me that
America is about leaving your past behind. I've never understood that.
You can no more leave behind your past than you can leave behind
your skin.
The compulsion to delve into the past, to speak for the dead, to
recover their stories: that's part of who Evan was, and why I loved him .
Just the same, my grandfather is part of who I am, and what he did, he
did in the name of my mother and me and my children. I am
responsible for his sins, in the same way that I take pride in inheriting
the tradition of a great people, a people who, in my grandfather's time,
committed great evil .
In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and
maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how
can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of
circumstances? It's easy to be civilized and display a patina of
orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in
darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of
the blackest coal?
Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of
ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to
his and my lasting shame . Labeling someone a monster implies that he
is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us . It cuts off
the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but
there's nothing learned, nothing gained. It's simple, but it's cowardly . I
know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather
can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused . There are no
monsters. The monster is us.
Why didn't I tell Evan about my grandfather? I don't know. I
suppose I w as a coward . I was afraid that he might feel that something
in me would be tainted, a corruption of blood . Because I could not
then find a way to empathize with my grandfather, I was afraid that
Evan could not empathize with me . I kept my grandfather's sto ry to
myself, and so I locked away a part of myself from my husband. There
were times when I thought I would go to the grave with my secret, and
so erase forever my grandfather's story.
I regret it, now that Evan is dead. He deserved to know his wife
whole, complete, and I should have trusted him rather than silenced
my grandfather's story, which is also my story. Evan died believing that
by unearthing more stories, he caused people to doubt their truth. But
he was wrong. The truth is not delicate and it do es not suffer from
denial—the truth only dies when true stories are untold.
This urge to speak, to tell the story, I share with the aging and
dying former members of Unit 731, with the descendants of the
victims, with all the untold horrors of history . The silence of the
victims of the past imposes a duty on the present to recover their
voices, and we are most free when we willingly take up that duty.
[Dr. Kirino's voice comes to us off - camera, as the camera pans to the star-studded sky.]
It has been a decade since Evan's death, and the Comprehensive
Time Travel Moratorium remains in place. We still do not know quite
what to do with a past that is transparently accessible, a past that will
not be silenced or forgotten. For now, we hesitate.
Evan died thinking that he had sacrificed the memory of the Unit
731 victims and permanently erased the traces that their truth left in
our world, all for nought, but he was wrong. He was forgetting that
even with the Bohm - Kirino particles gone, the actual photons forming
the images of those moments of unbearable suffering and quiet
heroism are still out there, traveling as a sphere of light into the void of
space.
Look up at the stars, and we are bombarded by light generated on
the day th
e last victim at Pingfang di ed, the day the last train arrived at
Auschwitz, the day the last Cherokee walked out of Georgia. And we
know that the inhabitants of those distant worlds, if they are watching,
will see those moments, in time, as they stream from here to there at
the speed of light . It is not possible to capture all of those photons, to
erase all of those images . They are our permanent record, the
testimony of our existence, the story that we tell the future. Every
moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the
eyes of the universe.
For far too long, historians, and all of us, have acted as exploiters of
the dead. But the past is not dead. It is with us . Everywhere we walk,
we are bombarded by fields of Bohm- Kirino particles that will let us
see the past like looking through a window . The agony of the dead is
with us, and we hear their screams and walk among their ghosts. We
cannot avert our eyes or plug up our ears. We must bear witness and
speak for those who cannot speak. We have only one chance to get it
right.
This story is dedicated to the memory of Iris Chang and all the victims of Unit 731.
Author's notes
I first got the idea for writing a story in the form of a documentary after reading Ted
Chiang's “ Liking What You See: a Documentary.”
The fol lowing sources were consulted during the research for this story . Their help
is hereby gratefully acknowledged, though any errors in relating their facts and
insights are entirely my own.
For the phrase “exploiters of the dead ” and the history of Heian and pre-modern
Japan:
Totman, Conrad. A History of Japan, Second Edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2005.
For the history of Unit 731 and the experiments performed by Unit 731 personnel:
Gold, Hal. Unit 731 Testimony, Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1996.
Harris, Sheldon H. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the
American Cover-Up, New York: Routledge, 1994.
(Numerous other newspaper and journal articles, interviews, and analyses were also
consulted . Their authors include, among others, Keiichi Tsuneishi, Doug Struck,
Christopher Reed, Richard Lloyd Parry, Christopher Hudson, Mark Simkin,
Frederick Dickinson, John Dower, Tawara Yoshifumi, Yuki Tanaka, Takashi