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"When the Purple Mountain Burns" is an intimate account of six days in December 1937. In that week, Japanese troops killed hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens and POWs in Nanking, Dr. Qi's hometown, the capital of China at the time. Sights, sounds, and smells of death, rape and slaughter leap off the pages relentlessly and cumulatively. They surround the reader's mind and senses. They close in on the reader like the inexorably approaching Japanese soldiers.
Above and beyond - and more important - than that, the book is a splendid portrayal of Chinese culture, tradition, history and humanity, and of love, which overruns and transcends the horror.
Grandpa, a character modeled on Dr. Qi's real grandfather, is an extraordinary exemplar of Buddhist loving kindness. Sick and more than ready for death himself, he endures extended suffering, staying alive solely so that his delightful, loving and innocent 12-year-old granddaughter, Ning-ning, will not have to face the nightmare alone.
The grandfather-granddaughter story - and its tragic fate - is played off against the constantly growing awareness and reality of the inevitability of doom. Grandpa tries to prepare Ning-ning for the inevitable, bit by bit, by telling her about the history of their ill-fated city and her beloved family. He tries to warn her. He hopes, somehow, to make things different, but he knows, at this time and in this place, he can not do so. But spiritually, perhaps he can.
Other lights of humanity against the unfolding nightmare are several foreign heroes (real historical figures), who risk their lives to create what they thought was a "safety zone." One of these was Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary and professor. After returning on a furlough to America in 1941, Vautrin ended her life by opening the gas jet of a kitchen stove. She blamed herself for not having saved enough lives.
Nor can the reader ever forget the hastily arranged funeral service conducted by Grandpa and Ning-ning, after Auntie Huang, their neighbor downstairs, was grotesquely slaughtered, along with her husband and two children.
"May there be no war, no violence, no hatred, no greed, no misery in the next world, in this world, and in all the worlds here and beyond," Grandpa chants over the blood-drenched corpses as Ning-ning looks on, her hands folded in prayer like a little Buddha.
"Those Japanese who killed Auntie Huang's family; can they find salvation?" Ning-ning asks.
"If they're truly repentant," Grandpa says, "there's still hope." Grandpa relates a Buddhist parable about how true awakening and repentance can redeem anyone, anywhere, for most anything.
Let me describe this on a personal level. I, for one, enjoyed a first-rate Fairfield County and Ivy League WASP education, one of the best that money could buy. Yes, I am one of the American White Collar elite. Yet I had never heard of the 1937 atrocities in Nanking. I had been taught Western history - not "world history" - in high school and college. I was convinced that the West was where it all happened.
Little if anything important could happen elsewhere, or so I believed. The image of China, for me, was that of a Great Wall ringing a backward population of people where nothing ever happened. I do not recall hearing about the Rape of Nan king. Perhaps it was mentioned in one of my courses, presented as something of a footnote, but certainly no more than that.
This new novel is beautiful, timely, and poignant. It speaks the American language gracefully and it speaks to Americans at a time when we are struggling to come to grips with the realities of war.
Qi came to America in 1989 to study for his doctoral degree in English. He now lives here in Connecticut and is associate professor of English at WCSU. He is author of "Bridging the Pacific: Searching for Cross-Cultural Understanding Between the United States and China" and more than ten other books.
Don Dallas is a freelance writer and Milford resident. This is the first official review of "When the Purple Mountain Burns" in America.
