Kao-Hwa Sung, who lives in San Jose, a living witness to the brutality of the Japanese military against Chinese civilians during World War II, is speaking out with other survivors. When she was a teenager, she watched her father repeatedly beaten by Japanese soldeiers with a metal rod for information to find students supporting the rebels in Shanghai.
"I was so angry," Sung, 74, said in Mandarin, tears welling and her face crumpling as she recounted the decades-old memory. "I wanted to hit them. But there was nothing I could do."
The 60-year-old wounds remain unhealed. This year, the Bay Area's Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition and the Global Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War want to prevent such a thing from happening again, and they're seeking redress from Japan. On Sunday, December 18, Sung and other survivors will speak at an event to memorialize wartime victims and to honor the late author Iris Chang, who wrote "The Rape of Nanking," an account of the eight-week massacre that came to symbolize Japanese atrocities in Asia. (Source: Vanessa Hua, San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 17, 2005).