‘What are you thinking, Yuelin?’
Yuelin blinked twice, then glanced at Shuai Zhang, who was sitting in the Crown Vic’s passenger seat. She then glanced in the rear-mirror, and could see Jantzen Pang in the back, wide awake and listening. These were her two closest comrades. And though they’d been driving in silence for some hours – they needed to get to San Francisco by sunrise – and Yuelin had been wrapped in thought, she was more than happy to talk with her comrades.
She smiled at Shuai.
‘I was thinking wuwang guochi – never forget national humiliation. I was imagining those words carved into every cliff-face in America.’
Shuai nodded. Yuelin knew he’d be unsurprised by this answer – after all, it was a phrase that’d been fed to them from their youth; a phrase that defined them as Chinese, and bound them intimately together, and collectively to their motherland.
And yet, though it was such an important part of their identities, she suddenly realized that they’d never in fact discussed it.
She glanced again at Shuai:
‘I suspect you know exactly what that phrase means to me – exactly what humiliation comes to my mind. But what about you?’
Shuai nodded slowly and licked his lip.
‘When I was at school, it used to bring to mind the French and British guizi occupying Beijing and burning the Yuanming Yuan royal palace during the Second Opium War. I remember seeing images of The National Ruin in my textbook, and thinking:wuwang guochi. But as I got older, I came to understand the nuances of the phrase. It’s about foreign powers taking advantage of China’s weaknesses. They used to call us the Sick Man of East Asia – dongya bingfu – and they still treat us that way.’
Shuai paused. ‘When I was at university, I remember my father telling me about the Yinhe incident, and how, because it was such a humiliation, the government was forced to hide it from the people. I understood that China was still being exploited.’
Yuelin hummed her agreement. The Yinhe was a Chinese cargo ship that the Americans, in 1993, had erroneously accused of transporting chemical weapons to Iran, and then forcibly searched with its military ships.
And sure enough, because the Chinese government was weak, and couldn’t stop this humiliation from taking place, it’d hid the incident from the majority of the Chinese people, and downplayed it on the rare occasions it was mentioned.
Yuelin glanced in her mirror, and could see Jantzen listening intently.
‘What about you, Jan?’
Jantzen pressed his tongue against his cheek. ‘When I hear it, I think of the individuals who’ve been humiliated. In fact, one individual in particular.’
He paused. ‘When I was eighteen, I visited The Memory Hall of Huang Jiguang in Sichuan province – have you been?’
Both Yuelin and Shuai shook their heads. This was little surprise: China had well over ten thousand patriotic tourist locations, known as memory sites.
‘Well, he was a soldier who fought in Korea against the Americans at the Battle of Triangle Hill in October 1952 – the Memory Hall was erected at Jiguang’s birthplace. He and his comrades needed to take the higher ground, but the space they needed to traverse was in the sights of an American machine-gunner. So he threw himself at the machine gun, sacrificing his life so his comrades could take the ground.
‘This resonated with me. Because not only does Jiguang represent all those Chinese who’ve laid down their lives fending off foreign guizi, but he was also one of the first to die resisting America – the power that has most sought to humiliate us since 1945.’ He paused. ‘So when I remember national humiliation, I also remember Jiguang’s bravery, and the bravery of people like him.’
Jantzen let off, and a contemplative silence fell between them.
Yuelin felt her chest swell with pride, and a renewed confidence in both the righteousness of their cause and the people she had fighting by her side. She had to admit that a few hours ago – when she’d learned that some Good Samaritan had sucker-punched two of her brethren and an important target had slipped through her fingers – she’d had a small crisis of confidence; a profound feeling that her carefully laid plans were more vulnerable than she’d thought. But having heard these comments from her brothers, she was able to put that event in perspective: a minor hitch.
Suddenly Yuelin remembered something she hadn’t thought about in years: a speech she’d heard back in 1996 by the then head of the Chinese Communist Party, in which he’d said there were two types of Chinese people – ardent patriots and the scum of a nation.
She was sitting with two of the most ardent patriots.