Time Travel: Recent Trips

by Paula Guran

  Our doctrines concerning the succession of states, developed under the Westphalian framework, simply cannot deal with these questions raised by Dr. Wei's experiments.

  If these debates have a clinical and evasive air to them, that is intentional. "Sovereignty," "jurisdiction," and similar words have always been mere conveniences to allow people to evade responsibility or to sever inconvenient bonds. "Independence" is declared, and suddenly the past is forgotten; a "revolution" occurs, and suddenly memories and blood debts are wiped clean; a treaty is signed, and suddenly the past is buried and gone. Real life does not work like that.

  However you want to parse the robber's logic that we dignify under the name "international law," the fact remains that the people who call themselves Japanese today are connected to those who called themselves Japanese in Manchuria in 1937, and the people who call themselves Chinese today are connected to those who called themselves Chinese there and then. These are the messy realities, and we make do with what we are given.

  All along, we have made international law work only by assuming that the past would remain silent. But Dr. Wei has given the past a voice, and made dead memories come alive. What role, if any, we wish to give the voices of the past in the present is up to us.

  Akemi Kirino:

  Evan always called me Tóngyě Míngměi, or just Míngměi, which are the Mandarin readings for the kanji that are used to write my name (桐野明美). Although this is the customary way to pronounce Japanese names in Chinese, he's the only Chinese I've ever permitted that liberty to.

  Saying my name like that, he told me, allowed him to picture it in those old characters that are the common heritage of China and Japan, and thus keep in mind their meaning. The way he saw it, "the sound of a name doesn't tell you anything about the person, only the characters do."

  My name was the first thing he loved about me.

  "A paulownia tree alone in the field, bright and beautiful," he said to me, the first time we met at a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences mixer.

  That was also how my grandfather explained my name to me, years earlier, when he taught me how to write the characters in my name as a little girl. A paulownia is a pretty, deciduous tree, and in old Japan it was the custom to plant one when a baby girl was born and make a dresser out of the wood for her trousseau when she got married. I remember the first time my grandfather showed me the paulownia that he had planted for me the day I was born, and I told him that I didn't think it looked very special.

  "But a paulownia is the only tree on which a phoenix would land and rest," my grandfather then said, stroking my hair in that slow, gentle way that he had that I loved. I nodded, and I was glad that I had such a special tree for my name.

  Until Evan spoke to me, I hadn't thought about that day with my grandfather in years.

  "Have you found your phoenix yet?" Evan asked, and then he asked me out.

  Evan wasn't shy, not like most Chinese men I knew. I felt at ease listening to him. And he seemed genuinely happy about his life, which was rare among the grad students and made it fun to be around him.

  In a way it was natural that we would be drawn to each other. We had both come to America as young children, and knew something about the meaning of growing up as outsiders trying hard to become Americans. It made it easy for us to appreciate each other's foibles, the little corners of our personalities that remained defiantly fresh-off-the-boat.

  He wasn't intimidated by the fact that I had a much better sense about numbers, statistics, the "hard" qualities in life. Some of my old boyfriends used to tell me that my focus on the quantifiable and the logic of mathematics made me seem cold and unfeminine. It didn't help that I knew my way around power tools better than most of them—a necessary skill for a lab physicist. Evan was the only man I knew who was perfectly happy to defer to me when I told him that I could do something requiring mechanical skills better than he could.

  Memories of our courtship have grown hazy with time, and are now coated with the smooth, golden glow of sentiment—but they are all that I have left. If ever I am allowed to run my machine again, I would like to go back to those times.

  I liked driving with him to bed-and-breakfasts up in New Hampshire in the fall to pick apples. I liked making simple dishes from a book of recipes and seeing that silly grin on his face. I liked waking up next to him in the mornings and feeling happy that I was a woman. I liked that he could argue passionately with me and hold his ground when he was right and back down gracefully when he was wrong. I liked that he always took my side whenever I was in an argument with others, and backed me up to the hilt, even when he thought I was wrong.

  But the best part was when he talked to me about the history of Japan.

  Actually, he gave me an interest in Japan that I never had. Growing up, whenever people found out that I was Japanese they assumed that I would be interested in anime, love karaoke, and giggle into my cupped hands, and the boys, in particular, thought I would act out their Oriental sex fantasies. It was tiring. As a teenager, I rebelled by refusing to do anything that seemed "Japanese," including speaking Japanese at home. Just imagine how my poor parents felt.

  Evan told the history of Japan to me not as a recitation of dates or myths, but as an illustration of scientific principles embedded in humanity. He showed me that the history of Japan is not a story about emperors and generals, poets and monks. Rather, the history of Japan is a model demonstrating the way all human societies grow and adapt to the natural world as the environment, in turn, adapts to their presence.

  As hunter-gatherers, the ancient Jōmon Japanese were the top predators in their environment; as self-sufficient agriculturalists, the Japanese of the Nara and Heian periods began to shape and cultivate the ecology of Japan into a human-centric symbiotic biota, a process that wasn't completed until the intensive agriculture and population growth that came with feudal Japan; finally, as industrialists and entrepreneurs, the people of Imperial Japan began to exploit not merely the living biota, but also the dead biota of the past: the drive for reliable sources of fossil fuels would dominate the history of modern Japan, as it has the rest of the modern world. We are all now exploiters of the dead.

  Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history's ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance and scarcity of the raw material for life. It was the kind of history that a physicist could love.

  Japan was at once universal and unique. Evan made me aware of the connection between me and the people who have called themselves Japanese for millennia.

  Yet, history was not merely deep patterns and the long now. There was also a time and a place where individuals could leave an extraordinary impact. Evan's specialty was the Heian Period, he told me, because that was when Japan first became Japan. A courtly elite of at most a few thousand people transformed continental influences into a uniquely native, Japanese aesthetic ideal that would reverberate throughout the centuries and define what it meant to be Japanese until the present day. Unique among the world's ancient cultures, the high culture of Heian Japan was made as much by women as by men. It was a golden age as lovely as it was implausible, unrepeatable. That was the kind of surprise that made Evan love history.

  Inspired, I took a Japanese history class, and asked my father to teach me calligraphy. I took a new interest in advanced Japanese language classes, and I learned to write tanka, the clean, minimalist Japanese poems that follow strict, mathematical metrical requirements. When I was finally satisfied with my first attempt, I was so happy, and I'm certain that I did, for a moment, feel what Murasaki Shikibu felt when she completed her first tanka. More than a millennium in time and more than ten thousand miles in space separated us, but there, in that moment, we would surely have understood each other.

&nb
sp; Evan made me proud to be Japanese, and so he made me love myself. That was how I knew I was really in love with him.

  Li Jianjian, Manager, Tianjin Sony Store:

  The War has been over for a long time, and at some point you have to move on. What is the point of digging up memories like this now? Japanese investment in China has been very important for jobs, and all the young people in China like Japanese culture. I don't like it that Japan does not want to apologize, but what can we do? If we dwell on it, then only we will be angry and sad.

  Song Yuanwu, waitress:

  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 tag line.

  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 of 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 BohmKirino 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,

  11th 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 jíjīlĬ ceremony for me where I would pick my biăozì, 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 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.

  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 villages 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 biăozì 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.