I cannot forget the last twenty sixty minutes of this film. They are burned into the whites of my eyes, escaping the black hole of the iris. As if I was reading Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking for the first time, again I became a witness to the atrocities committed against the Chinese during the Sino-Japanese war; conventionally known in Amerikka as the Pacific Front of World War II. The scene, a wholesale and indiscriminate massacre of Chinese denizens in Rack-Armor Terrace by the occupying Japanese forces evoked a rage that shook me to the core. Still, I had to ask, was I even entitled to it? Entitled to a historical legacy that continues to this day, found in the continued denials by the Japanese government that anything happened? I cannot rightly say I am, yet I cannot explain the searing sensation on my flesh: was the memory forever etched onto my DNA, a pain transmitted temporally through genes and chromosomes?
That is not to say that the scene came as a shock, a sudden fibrillation of a dead valve cultural/social history. One could argue that Jiang Wen builds up to this scene by covering it up with the comedic trope of mis-translation between Chinese and Japanese (languages). The film opens with Da Masan (Jiang Wen) being charged by an unnamed figure, ostensibly a resistance fighter, to safeguard two captured Japanese soldiers until the New Year. It is a task that Da Masan does not undertake with a patriotic fervor, rather he is motivated by the fear of death by the underground resistance force. This undoubtedly places Da Masan and his fellow villagers in a tricky spot. Rack-Armor Terrace is occupied by the Japanese Army, who announced their presence everyday with a bugle call and a routine march through the village. The premise of the film could have lent itself easily to a dramatic mediation of the politics of resistance and collusion among the Chinese during the Japanese occupation, yet Jiang Wen introduces a comedic element through the mis-translations between the two prisoners and the villagers.
