I am not sure what the term is if there is one but I first noticed it in the young Chinese man’s eyes when we he was filing my foot bath at the Traditional Chinese Medicine clinic in Beijing years earlier. Here was a person of obvious Asian decent but who in a darkened room might have been easily mistaken for a white person. My presence, my way of speaking, my mannerisms were thoroughly and undoubtedly American. His mixed look of wonderment and ambiguity as to whether I was of the East or of the West had left an indelible mark on my mind ever since.
I am strongly opposed to war as a way to move humankind forward. I would be the very definition of a conscientious objector if the time came. Thankfully that opportunity has long passed. There is one aspect of World War II that has truly fascinated me: the indiscriminate killings by the Nazis, particularly of the Jewish people. I am less moved by the D Day landings in Northwest France or the Siege of Leningrad or even the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
So it took great effort to stir up a sense of sadness or loss as we visited the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery and the notorious bridge over the Khwae Yai River (“River Kwai”). As the saying goes, history is written by the victor. This statement is unsettling for me especially when it relates this corner of the globe. It ignores the countless Thai and Burmese who cut a swathe through their own jungles to help build that bloody railway or my countrymen who were also forced to trudge through their homeland with the Americans during the atrocious Bataan Death March. Their stories like many others in Southeast Asia go mostly untold and unappreciated.
