To Anglicize and Angelize the Rape of Nanking

Abstract

Chinese narratives of the Rape of Nanking gravitate to a secular, nationalist mode of martyrdom. With China's rise, fiction and films revisit the Japanese atrocity in a global context, which means fiction written in or translated into English, as well as films featuring Western missionaries and the English language. These narratives include Nanjing Requiem; The Flowers of War the novel and the film; and City of Life and Death. The English and Christian epistemology intertwines to bracket such representations. Both the tongue and the God of whites are ways of meaning-making to sublimate a historical trauma of unfathomable horror.