A Boy in Nanjing

I’m going to tell you a story.

(It might be long and I hope you don’t find it boring.)

This is the tale of how I ended up here,

As a sort of “east meets west;”

A dragon, you could say, 

in American Dress.

It started thousands of miles away

Where my grandparents grew up —the place is transformed today

Into a glowing, progressive state-civilization

A nation that conceals its own people’s frustrations

With skyscrapers and luxury second to none.

Where success blurs origin.

And the red nouveau riche?

Begin to forget where they came from  

But back then, there was a different state of mind

Filled with small villages, and millions of people left behind

A bottleneck to success with no room to climb

First came British invasion,

A population subjugated

With colonization 

The dynasty, forced to grapple with a modern state of mind

Centuries crumbled in seconds, 

Isolation, too late of a realization 

The country had fallen behind.

My great-grandfather, he grew up in this mess,

Found his way up the ranks

Reached the top, drew a blank

Then forced to fight Japanese occupation,

A sweeping militarization against his new young nation

And a growing red impulse, towards collectivization

Two evils, he hoped, with no correlation

My grandfather was only a little boy

Watching his father from afar

Think of new strategic ploys

For they couldn’t stay in one place,

There was always a threat,

In a three-sided race

And so they arrived in Nanjing,

They watched from afar as their brethren

filled with a terror that never lessened 

As they were murdered, and raped

By a sick, twisted enemy

With their own definition of “great”

The legacy of Nanjing

Never ceases in my mind

It echoes in rings

It is spiraling and sickening.

My grandfather watched on through the violence and chaos

He couldn't keep track of the things that he lost

He watched his own father, bled out by the red 

He went home to find his sister, sitting quietly, dead

And this wasn’t unusual, it was all so surreal 

And while the war numbed him, some feelings he feigned

the violence never managed to dull his pain

Finally, when the war came to a close

The Japanese left, the communists took hold

He had lost, but the fight wasn’t done

They had to flee, out of the country an to run

And then there’s me

And now maybe you can see

Why I’m on the fence

And slightly defensive

Of a nation that

Violates human rights.

The middle kingdom, now, exposed in raw light

My family may have been on the opposite side

But the red nation that failed to fail is still an integral part of my life

It frustrates me when people don’t understand

How, I ask you, could I hate my homeland?

My family, they’ve let it go

A process I don’t think I ever will know

As I enter a world where I’m a now a model minority

But there is so much more of me

I stand in defiance of laid back compliance

I won’t forget where I came from

For what the future will bring

Or of the time when my grandfather was a little boy in Nanjing.