Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction Group 3 - 2017 | Page 446

Lin was the one who had planned the whole thing. He knew when the war would start. Therefore, he bought enough food for four months and hid inside an underground room with his family one day before the war began. The Japanese occupied Shanghai for just three months. Lin knew from the radio that the Japanese were in power, so he and his wife Yang, decided to go outside and take a look. But, what they didn’t know was that this was a fatal decision. Let me explain. At that time, the Japanese orders were to kill any Chinese person they saw on the streets. Lin looked at the bloodshed all round him. He looked at the collapsed buildings. He saw the mess that he had conspired to create and started to feel guilty when he saw the dead bodies on the street. If he could go back to the past, he began to feel that he should have chosen death for himself. He gave a deep bow to a dead Chinese body. “All of this was caused by me. I brought violence to this city.” Lin sighed. “Violence always begets penalty. I wonder how all of this will end.” The Japanese troops didn’t know that he was Japanese when they saw him. Lin tried to explain that he was Japanese, but before he could finish, his tongue was cut-off. They raped Yang in front of him and then killed them both. Only their son, who had been left sleeping in their room inside the underground, survived. Violence always begets violence. The bodies of Lin and Yang were thrown into the Dong Hang like all the other Chinese. The sky was covered with black clouds and The Dong Hai was reddened by the blood of millions of bodies covering the sea bed. The breezes blew onto the shore, bringing the smell of blood into the desolate city. The Japanese tried to conquer China. They killed many Chinese people. But in the end they also suffered enormously. The atomic bombs were eventually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the Japanese suffer from the condemnation of international society, we never try to talk back because it is a kind of penalty. Many people know about the Battle of Shanghai and the Oyama Incident, but no one, apart from my family members know that it was my great grandfather who was the one who planned the whole thing. Maybe, if I have a chance in the future, I will represent my great grandfather and apologize to the Chinese people and tell them the story……I would call it a new story……The new story of old Shanghai.