"Everything that passes will leave a trace", whether you want to admit it or not, it will leave the imprint of history when it happens. Just as the Nanjing Massacre really happened, some people can cover up this history with a single sentence of "bloody and cruel". Patriotic education should start with dolls.
Countries that have done this do not feel that they cannot look at it directly, and those of us who have experienced suffering, why should we hide and avoid?
Since some people are afraid to show their children the real history, look at "May and August" written and filmed by Hong Kong director Du Guowei in 2002. This is a war based on the vision of the surviving children of the Nanjing Massacre.
This film looks at Nanjing from the end of 1937 to the beginning of 1938 through the perspective of several children, which makes people feel torn hearts and lungs and painful. It's an ordinary person's experience, May and August are a pair of sisters, May is the sister is ten years old, and August is the sister is three years old. They originally had a happy family, their father was a learned secondary school teacher, their mother was a gentle and kind housewife, and there was an amiable grandmother in the family. The little sisters originally had a carefree childhood.
Before the war, Nanjing's forests were lush and green tiles. Not only is the May family quiet and comfortable, but every family there lives in a simple and peaceful life. There are monkeys acting in the streets, beautiful goldfish in the yard and puppies running around happily with their tongues out.
The Japanese invasion shattered all the calm, and the neighbors who had been getting along very well had to go out for refuge. The mother played by Ye Tong is also worried, and begins to make various preparations, and begins to teach the children to practice running, in case he can use it every day. The children thought that their mothers were playing games with them, and their faces were full of innocent happiness.
Soon something to worry about happened, and the Japanese army closed the whole city and began to burn and loot with impunity, even killing people for fun. And the neighbors who wanted to flee were not spared, dead and wounded. The family cut off food, so that the father could only risk going out to exchange some food for his wife and daughter. As a result, the father did not return, and after waiting for a long time, the father did not appear, but the puppy Ah Bao took one of his father's arms back.
For May, her father's death was just the beginning of their family's misery. How could the Japanese soldiers have so easily spared the unarmed people, both to carry out their "three-light policy" and to destroy all the evidence of the crime, so they had to go door to door and kill them. Many neighbors and their grandmothers were killed during the killing, and the young and beautiful mother was devastated.
Hiding in the attics, May and August escaped. However, the weak August fell ill in fear and lack of food and clothing, and developed a high fever. Mothers had to risk going out to find food and medicine for them. But every time my mother had to come back for a long time, she came back with a tired face and messy clothes.
Children don't know what happened to their mothers, and it's easy to guess what such a woman would go through in a war to get food. The children who had lost their grandmother and father were very dependent on their mothers, and did not hide in the attic according to their mother's words when they went out to find medicine. May quietly followed her mother outside, and was soon spotted by the patrolling Japanese troops.
The mother is horrified when she sees her children and takes the initiative to make a noise to attract them to flee in the other direction. Soon the mother was captured by the Japanese and dragged into the tent. May saw that her mother was in danger and instinctively wanted to follow.
May looked at the figures in the tent and the excited cheers and laughter, and her mother cried out in despair, how did she feel?
The mother desperately broke free once or twice and stretched her head out of the tent, just to tell May to "run, run", "run, run, don't look back", using the escape method taught to them at that time, let the child leave this "hell on earth" quickly.
In the movie, the mother played by Ye Tong struggled and cried with all her might, and the sisters escaped smoothly, and the mother could never come back. Like many women in Nanjing at that time, she died in humiliation, shame and severe pain.
May shoulders the responsibility of caring for her sister. The children were lucky enough to meet kind nuns who gave them food and medicine to remove lice.
August asked her sister "When will Mom come back?" May said, "You obey, and Mom will come back." ”
May bathed August with river water when suddenly a male corpse floated in from a distance. May was stunned, and she stared at the corpse wrapped in water and grass for a long time. August was curious about her sister's actions, when May suddenly picked up the water, slapped it on August's face so that she could not open her eyes, and shielded her sister with a small arm, pushing the body away when she was not paying attention.
May was calm, because in the past her mother always covered the eyes of the sisters at such times, and now it was her turn to cover her sisters' eyes. May's childhood ended quickly, and she needed to become unusually resilient.
Thanks to the help of the Red Cross, they survived in the camp. The uncle worked hard to find them, and the uncle became their only relative, taking them to the home in Zhenjiang. He asked May to go to school with his son, while his uncle went out to busy with business while continuing to search for May's mother.
My uncle's mother-in-law, although she didn't like May and August, was well-off and adopted two girls. May went to school with her cousin Tianbao, and her aunt took great care of the two girls, and her cousin was also very friendly to them.
August receives a lot of snacks from May's classmates because they ask where August came from, and August says that her parents and grandmother are dead, and she doesn't even have a puppy. The students understood and knew that she was a survivor who had escaped from Nanjing City. And May knows that August said these words to others, and for the first time she lost her temper with her sister, she was very angry and told her sister, don't go to win the sympathy and pity of others, mother knows that she will beat you.
May meets Fang Yi, a boy who can draw, who lives in a broken hut
Fang Yi said to May, You don't understand me.
And the stubborn May said, no, I understand, I am also from Nanjing, and my parents are also dead.
In fact, in May, he met Fang Yi, who fled at the beginning of the war in Nanjing, and picked up a paintbrush for him. May learns that Fang Yi's parents were also killed by Japanese soldiers, and she wants to be friends with Fang Yi, who is also sick.
Fang Yi is very sensible and lives with his righteous father who saved him, and now that his righteous father is ill, he comes to take care of his righteous father.
May saw Fang Yi's paintings, all of which were cities under the flames of war, tired corpses, and empty and desperate eyes. Fang Yi pointed to the bodies of a couple on the canvas and told May that the only survivor was him, who had survived under his father's protection. In that era, most of the children who could learn to draw were from rich families, but they could not escape the destruction of their families. At such a youthful age, Fang Yi should face life with enthusiasm, but the war brought him only fragmentation and difficulty in living.
After a few days of stable life, the Japanese army began to bomb Zhenjiang, and my uncle was also shot and soon died. People here also began to run for their lives, and the aunt and cousin and her old mother also followed the fleeing team, but there was nothing they could do about the sisters. Before leaving, the aunt told May, don't hate the aunt, the soldiers are in chaos, the aunt is a woman with old and young, and she is also self-conscious.
Sitting on the threshold, May and August are like two homeless puppies floating alone in this chaotic world.
The righteous father who lived with Fang Yi also died of a serious illness, and May took August to find Fang Yi. Fang Yi told them not to be afraid, he would take care of them in the future, and Fang Yi became their brother from then on. On his way to flee with May and July, Fang Yi encountered nuns and a group of orphans who had escaped from the city of Nanjing.
The nun asked May, and Fang Yi fled with them, telling them that the Nanjing Massacre had begun and that the camp was no longer safe. May said that she was going to say goodbye to her parents on the Yangtze River, because Fang Yi told her that the Japanese army had massacred in Nanjing, and the corpses were everywhere. Those Japanese soldiers burned the bodies of Chinese with fire, so the ashes were blown up by the wind and turned into clouds, and the clouds became rain, falling into the Yangtze River, and seeing the water of the Yangtze River was like seeing their relatives, so they had to go to the Yangtze River to say goodbye to their relatives.
At the end, countless children walk to the Yangtze River because their parents were also killed by the Japanese army.
The war destroyed the originally quiet homeland, deprived countless Chinese of their lives, and stained the water of the Yangtze River red. Such a national vendetta really cannot be forgotten, "forgetting history is equivalent to betraying the past"!
Those who say that patriotic education films are terrible, who are afraid of frightening children, those who run to the Jingguoshen community to punch cards and don't care, if they see the evidence left in the Nanjing Massacre, will they still say these words and do those things?
Say what cruel and bloody, real war is far more brutal than the film!