What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
The story of a deranged middle-aged woman chained to her cell, a victim of human
trafficking, and the mother of eight children from ongoing rapes in a XuZhou
village, exploded and kept unfolding, revealing the tip of an iceberg of
unspeakable evil. Suddenly, the military tension on the Ukrainian front, the US
societal divide, Covid, or even the Olympic games, lost gravity. The allure of
intersubjective stories existing only in the collective human mind faded when
silhouetted against such gory babarity.
My thoughts flashed back to The Lottery, a grueling tale by Shirley Jackson,
where a village carries out the annual tradition of stoning a member chosen by
a lottery, which I read 27 years ago. It was said that when the story was out,
excepting the critics, few liked it. "Why don't you write something to cheer people
up?" her mother demanded. The author touched something that few dared to face.
The woman and XuZhou are real, however, and that the atrocity is happening at a
peak, if not the peak, of that nation's prosperity in its long "civilization."
The story wiped out my smuggness in what I thought that I had achieved and the
fact that I had flown the coop. I felt implicated for non-doing. For the whole
week, I lived under the weight of her fate, manifesting a scariest darkness of
human nature. Iris Chang could have felt something similar when she uncovered
what happened in Nanjing during WWII.
