Voices From Chongqing: Life In and Out of Shelters
Chongqing:
Wreckage and Revival
WWII in Asia, and Its Aftermath
A Story to Tell
How humans came to settle disputes through war is bizarre enough. At some point during the negotiation we decide that we should stop negotiating and start annihilating each other instead.
But a lot that happened during WWII are bizarre even in the context of war, and air raids — particularly the Japanese air raids over the city of Chongqing — are certainly one of those bizarreries. Not only were the Japanese Air Force trying to use violence — a decidedly cost-ineffective method — to achieve their political goals, they were aiming that violence specifically at civilians — schools, hospitals, residential areas. This in hopes that, at some point during the city's course of gradually being eradicated, their political demands will seem acceptable.
For five years, people of Chongqing — along with those who fled from other parts of China to Chongqing — lived with the reality that any time a batch of bombs may come and burn everything they knew or loved, if not themselves as well. They had to lead a life of navigating in and out of air raid shelters, which was a life of the most devastating or captivating stories occurring almost daily.
“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?”
– Blaise Pascal (Physicist, philosopher, writer, 1623 – 1662, France)
“You can no more win a war than win an earthquake.”
– Jeanette Rankin (Politician, activist, 1880 – 1973, USA)
Voices amid Firebombs
What do you feel living day after day in a world that is being deliberately destroyed, not knowing if you will spend the next day in your own home or a dark, crowded shelter? What do you feel when your home is destroyed? What do you feel if your family doesn't make it out? What do you feel when your neighbour, whose home is also in ruins, hands you a piece of their food?
In Chongqing, amid firebombs, voices came out. They utter softly the most extraordinary stories, and paint most vividly a city that yearned for peace.
