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the granddaughter of a prominent gentry family. h e eldest to be raped, and
who then committed suicide by drowning, was a grandmother on Jiangyuan
Lane in Chongming city.
15
Chongming Island had three comfort stations, and in 2000 a Chongming
comfort woman fi led a high-profi le lawsuit against the Japanese govern-
ment demanding compensation.
16
h e brutality and sexual violence of occu-
pation was not unique to Chongming, but the island was where Japanese
soldiers were quarantined if they were found to have venereal and other sex-
ual diseases. h us, the Chongming comfort women were particularly vul-
nerable to sexual diseases in addition to the traumas of wartime mass orga-
nized rapes.
My father was born in 1939 on Chongming Island in the midst of the Jap-
anese occupation, and my grandfather was head of a local businessman's
association, like the collaborators that Brook writes about during this vio-
lent period of Ch i nese h istor y. Unti l I went back i n 2009 to meet my extended
family, most of what I knew about Chongming and my family could only be
gleaned from two faded pictures. h e fi rst is of my father as a wide-eyed tod-
dler, being held by his father, next to his pregnant mother (two months
before her death in childbirth) and her parents—the prosperous merchant
and his wife sitting next to him, both with arms crossed. I can't make out my
great grandmother's bound feet from under her clothes. h e other picture
apparently was taken at the same time—full of other aunts and cousins,
whose names, histories, personalities, and identities are largely lost to me.
My great-grandfather was landed gentry, a well-off merchant who owned a
large grocery store in Chongming's main town. His wealth is evident in the
photo itself (having a photograph taken was still relatively expensive) and in
the fact that he had another name reserved for rich elders. h e joy in the
photographs (taken on December 8, during the Laba Rice Porridge Festival)
belied the brutal reality that the Japanese were in control of the island while
resistance fi ghters were burning telegraph poles and destroying bridges.
