On July 7th, 1937, The Second Sino-Japanese War began. The Imperial Japanese Army invaded China at the Marco Polo Bridge incident and easily captured Beiping, which is now Beijing, and Tianjin. Afterwards, the province my grandfather lived in, Shandong, was captured by the Japanese until 1945 when the Japanese surrendered. My grandfather was four years old when this began.
My grandfather doesn't talk about his earlier part of his life and I'm not sure he ever has revealed very much about his childhood to anyone. Once in awhile, he will mention something oddly cryptic and vague about his earlier life, like Balakian's grandmother with her stories and her dreams. There have been small incidents in my life, just like Balakian's, where my grandfather mentions something out of the blue.
I remember about three years back, I was watching a documentary on the History channel about Japan during World War II at home and my grandparents came over for dinner. When the film ended, my grandfather kept on muttering in Chinese, "inaccurate events" and "stupid historians". I must have looked at him oddly because he said to me, "The Japanese performed worse torture than what was said in the video." He then held up a bamboo chopstick and continued, "They used to hang our people by their hands and have bamboo shoots growing below. The shoots were sharp and pierced the bottom of the feet as the shoots grew. Our people bled to death." He emphasized the description by piercing the air with the chopstick. I still have goose bumps as I repeat this now in this blog. The form of torture my grandfather described reminds me of the Turkish torture, where they beat the soles of the feet until they bleed out. He also said our people to symbolize my family's ethnic connection to the people who were tortured.
Even to this day, my grandfather hates Japanese culture. It wasn't until recently he would step into a Japanese restaurant and even when he comes to dine with us, he doesn't order food. He looks at my pens that say "Made in Japan" and mutters, "China is more prosperous." Just like Balakian's grandmother, his silence speaks louder than words when it comes to the fear of the atrocities of their past because the terrors may be too devastating to say outloud.
