1937: When My Mother Was Fifteen

In 1937, Japan invaded China on a national scale and seized Beijing, Tianjin, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, in effected launching the Second World War on the Pacific front. The Battle of Shanghai, which subsequently inspired television dramas and films, is to this day still celebrated as one of the first and costliest battles of the war. Japanese forces soon captured the city of Nanjing, tortured, raped, and murdered an estimated 300,000 civilians, known in history as The Rape of Nanking, a notorious event publicized by Iris Chang’s 1997 best bookseller with the same title, which was inspired by her maternal grandparents’ narrow escape stories from the Nanking massacre. Monuments upon monuments have been built all over China to remember the atrocity of Japanese invasion and those who refused to forget.

In 1937, the life of my mother, Ji Shuping, changed forever, so did countless Chinese. She was fifteen years old, a student at Fulun Middle School in Zhengzhou, Henan province. In late September of that year after the war broke out, my mother attended a life-changing event: Hong Shen, a founder of modern Chinese drama, produced a show in the auditorium of my mother’s middle school, as part of artists’ participation in war mobilization to defend China against Japanese aggression.

“During the show, I was mesmerized by the brilliant and handsome actor Jin Shan,” she told me, and her eyes became brighter with the memory, when I interviewed her many decades later about war-time theater for my teaching and research at UC Davis. Jin Shan performed a pantomime, she recalled; he played the role of a Japanese rogue who bullied and dragged away four beautiful and innocent Chinese girls, each with a name tag on her body signifying one of the four provinces lost to Japanese occupation in the Northeast since 1931. “No wonder Jin Shan was called ‘the emperor of Chinese theater,’” my mother beamed with admiration; “his maddening laughter, terrifying facial expressions, and skillful body movement left an indelible impression on me for the rest of my life.”

In the second piece of this show, my mother said she was lucky to watch the heart-rending performance of Wang Ying, a shining star with three early silent films and brilliant theater roles that had already spread her fame. Wang played the role of a starving daughter who fainted in the middle of her singing and was therefore whipped by her angry father in a play titled Putting Down Your Whip. My mother remembered how, at this point, an angry young man from the audience leapt upon the stage to stop the old man’s “abuse” of his daughter, only to be told that they were poverty-stricken refugees fleeing to the interior China from Manchuria which Japan had occupied since 1931. Deeply touched, the audience shouted: “Recover our lost land in Manchuria!” “Drive Japanese aggressors out of China!” “Down with Japanese imperialists.” Theater became effective war mobilization and had remained so throughout the war period.

My mother learned later that the angry young man was indeed another actor, planted by the director to pretend as an audience. As an audience member, my mother didn’t know that she witnessed theater history in China: the blend of theater, audience, and everyday experience to produce play with undefined beginning and ending points. Sixty years later I always remember to tell my students in American classroom so that they could appreciate a remote piece of Chinese theater history as indeed part of a family story.

After the show, Hong Shen gave a lecture to the faculty and students at this middle school on the magic power of drama: not only was it an amazing form of art, but it could also play a significant role in national salvation at the time of crisis. My mother received her first acting lesson from a theater giant as Hong demonstrated how to use facial expressions to portray a character’s feelings and how to create make-up materials.

My mother was hooked. She joined her school’s performance troupe to tour villagers and towns and played the role of the starving girl in the same play, imitating Wang Ying’s model performance while making a difference on the larger arena of war-mobilization. Putting Down Your Whip became the most performed play during the eight-year protracted war, starring famous performers—while creating new stars—as participants of twelve “Resisting Enemy Propaganda Teams,” one of which was led by Hong Shen. In 1943, Wang Ying performed the play in the White House at the invitation of President Roosevelt, which was no less warmly received than President Obama’s welcoming the cast of Broadway musical Hamilton in 2016. “It is a story for all of us, about all of us.” What Obama said of Hamilton’s place in history applies well to Putting Down Your Whip. As American founding fathers battled with British rule in Hamilton, Chinese citizens resisted Japanese colonialists with equal determination.

In 1938, after a year of constant bombing, my mother left her home city Zhengzhou to become a refugee herself. She travelled with a schoolmate, a young gentleman who later became a famous comedian and confessed his crush on her many years later. For many months, they walked, begged for rides, and climbed on whatever train was moving to the South. They finally reached Chongqing to enroll as freshmen in the Chinese National Drama School. My mother had no regret the rest of her life. The war provided her a perfect stage for pursuing dramatic art she was passionate about, with a clear purpose in making a difference in political life. That was where and how she found her place in the world.

Her journey away from home did not come easy. Her father, a railway clerk, fervently rejected her decision to take the entrance examination for the drama school. “You should become a medical student and be useful to the society. Actors are good for nothing!” She cried, argued, protested, and refused to eat and sleep. As the first-born and her parents’ “apple of the eyes,” they finally relented. In her memoir written many decades later, she still wondered: was it the war, karma, or the love of art that motivated her to reach this life-changing decision at age fifteen, at the time when actress was deemed as low and inferior as prostitute in a traditional Chinese society?

(To be continued)