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Asian Journal of Women's Studies
ISSN: 1225-9276 (Print) 2377-004X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rajw20
Geling Yan's The Flowers of War: Bitterness and
Sacrifice in Colonized China
Altaher Bassmah Bassam
To cite this article: Altaher Bassmah Bassam (2017) Geling Yan's The Flowers of War: Bitterness
and Sacrifice in Colonized China, Asian Journal of Women's Studies, 23:1, 132-137, DOI:
10.1080/12259276.2017.1281535
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/12259276.2017.1281535
Published online: 15 Mar 2017.
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BOOK REVIEW
Geling Yan’sThe Flowers of War: Bitterness and
Sacrifice in Colonized China
The flowers of war, by Yan Geling, London, Harvill Secker, 2012, 256 pp.,
US$44.56 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1846555893
Geling Yan is a Chinese-American novelist and journalist, famous for compelling her
readers with plots inspired by historical events and vivid portrayal of characters. She
illustrates political notions related to patriotism and colonization, clearly embedded
in her novels, using this technique to reflect on the past and comment on the
present. These notions come from her active involvement in political affairs;
during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
1
she served in the People’sLiber-
ation Army and supported Communism. She also became a journalist in Tibet
during the Sino-Vietnamese War
2
and this achievement gave her the rank of Lieu-
tenant Colonel (Yan, 2014).
Yan’sThe Flowers of War was first published in Chinese in 2006, originally entitled
Thirteen Flowers of Nanjing, and translated into English by Nicky Harman in 2012.
The book begins in December 1937, when the Japanese Imperial Army has just
entered the capital city of China, Nanking. A Safety Zone is set up in Pokou, and
many civilians escape the city; however, a group of 16 schoolgirls are not able to
reach this zone. These girls came from St. Mary Magdalene Mission School and
are driven to seek refuge in a Catholic Church. Father Engelmann, an American
priest who had made China his home for many years, takes the responsibility of pro-
tecting the girls. There are other people in the Church who vow to protect the girls,
like Father Engelmann’s protégé, Deacon Fabio Adornato, an Italian American, who
was brought up in China’sYangzhou’s village and a group of church staff who are
not strong enough to be soldiers. Most of the girls are orphans except for two,
whose parents were unable to rescue them after the city fell.
International rules of war are supposed to be followed, one of them being not to
harm or kill innocent civilians, and Father Engelmann’s church is supposed to be a
sanctuary and neutral territory. However, several eyewitness reports show that the
Japanese did not follow these rules. Japanese soldiers pour through the streets of
Nanking, committing all kinds of atrocities on civilians. Thus, 13 Chinese prostitutes
flee from the Qin Huai River brothel and climb over the church walls, seeking refuge.
The school girls are fascinated and disgusted by the prostitutes and so they keep
their distance. Suddenly, three wounded Chinese soldiers arrive at the church, mir-
aculously surviving mass execution by the Japanese. They report the brutality of the
Japanese soldiers and horrific incidents taking place.
Most of the scenes are usually described from the viewpoint of a thirteen year-
old girl, Shujuan, one of the two non-orphaned girls, who harbors great anger at
everyone and everything. She is angry at her “cowardly parents”(7) who failed to
ASIAN JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S STUDIES, 2017
VOL. 23, NO. 1, 132–137
rescue her; she blames the war most of the time; and condescendingly looks at the
prostitutes with bitter prejudice.
When the Japanese break into the Church, the prostitutes hide in the cellar, but
the school girls are too late. They are spotted by the Japanese soldiers, and
ordered to turn themselves in, obviously to be used by them as comfort
women. Father Engelmann faces a dilemma: the brothel leader, Zhao Yumo is
willing to replace Shujuan, and calls for the other women to sacrifice themselves.
The women agree to Yumo’s suggestion and cut their hair, disguising themselves
in the girls’uniforms. The story ends on a sad note from Shujuan who ends up
admiring Yumo and the prostitutes for their bravery and sacrifice.
The plot of the novel is based on true events of the Nanking Massacre in 1937,
known as the Nanjing Massacre. However, the incident is commonly referred to as
the Rape of Nanking due to the widespread incidents of rape that the Imperial
Japanese Army committed against Chinese women. For six weeks during the
Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945),
3
Japan in this lengthy conflict sought
to dominate China politically and militarily in order to secure its vast raw material
reserves and other economic resources. The Chinese officials estimated the deaths
of Chinese victims in the massacre were over 250,000. The Nanjing War Crimes Tri-
bunal of the Far East condemned Japan of war crimes, and the criminals were sen-
tenced to death (Li, Sabella, & Liu, 2002).
The novel also highlights an important historical fact that happened in Nanking,
which was the manipulation of women into becoming comfort women for the Japa-
nese Army. The atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers were massive, as they
performed acts of looting, murder, and rape in various places in China, especially
“along the Yantzi River while proceeding towards Nanjing, as well as after entering
the city”(Tanaka, 2002, p. 13). However, very few prostitutes volunteered to become
comfort women and many women were manipulated, for example, they were
tricked into working as nurses and were shocked to find themselves placed in
comfort stations instead of hospitals. Others were kidnapped and forced to
become sex slaves (Tanaka, 2002, p. 13). This was evident in Minni Vautrin’s
diaries,
4
an American Missionary, the source of Yan’s inspiration for writing The
Flowers of War. Vautrin was a real historical figure, who saved thousands of lives
by offering them shelter in her Ginling College.
The survivors were mostly women and children and included almost 10,000
people. Vautrin kept a diary, and wrote about an incident that haunted her con-
science bitterly. It was about the time when the Japanese arrived at her door,
demanding that she turn in a hundred girls who had sought refuge at her
campus. She faced a difficult dilemma: whether to allow the Japanese to take a
hundred civilians when there were a hundred prostitutes who could take their
place. Regardless of the profession of the prostitutes, the women were still
human. However, the prostitutes stepped forward and agreed to go instead,
thus sacrificing their bodies and lives to save the civilian girls (Pollard, 2012).
Critics did not deal with the novel as a postcolonial text per se; they actually
dealt with it as a historical novel that reflected the trauma of the Nanjing Massacre
and was usually compared to another novel. Guo Quanzhao and Bu Lili, a couple
of critics who have stated clearly in their article, that Yan’s novel was able to
BOOK REVIEW 133
capture a significant historical event and was able to embed it in fictional and non-
fictional characters to highlight one of Asia’s largest massacres of all time:
The Nanjing Massacre, which …committed brutality and atrocity beyond
human imagination, has been unprecedented national wound and unbearable
heaviness for the Chinese people …Two Chinese American authors, Yan Geling
and Ha Jing, bravely took on the challenge and turned out their novels The
Flowers of War and Nanjing Requiem respectively. Both are worthy of remarking
and praising in art and thought [sic] (Guo & Bu, 2012, p. 3).
The novel at some point is seen from a colonial and postcolonial perspective. Accord-
ing to Elleke Boehmer (1995), colonial literature reflects the spirit of colonial expan-
sion and its literature was mostly written by Europeans about non-European lands
dominated by them. As for postcolonial literature, it relates to work from colonized
countries that attempts to subvert colonial literary discourse and the factors
shaped by it. It is more likely for literature to write back to the empire. The idea of
decolonization is vivid and the remainder of colonialism is prevalent in domestic
affairs, as well as for anti-conquest narratives, a critique of racism, the colonial exhaus-
tion of natural resources, and the attempts to reconnect with cultural heritage.
By closely looking at the characters, the first thing that strikes one as odd is the
presence of a white man in the midst of Asia during WWII. Father Engelmann was
not the ordinary devoted priest of the Catholic Church; he was a residue of colo-
nialism in China. Also, he was a devoted missionary who came to Asia with a
purpose in mind, which was to enact the Civilizing Mission. What Father Engel-
mann is trying to do in Nanking is actually fulfilling colonization in the name of
the mission and salvation. These notions are also seen in the school the girls
attend, St. Mary Magdalene Mission School. The word “mission”emerges once
again as a colonial icon that sets out to educate the Chinese girls and teach
them the English language to understand and obey the white man’s order. All
the girls speak and understand English. Also, they obey Father Engelmann’s
orders. Apparently, it was his mere presence that invoked authority, especially
when the Japanese invaded the church, where he claimed his power to protect
the refugees:
This is the House of the Lord …You are breaking the laws of man and of God …
you have no business being here. I am the priest! And I command you, in the
name of the Father to leave now (112)!
Moreover, the colonial gaze or gaze of appropriation is relevant in the novel. Mary
Louise Pratt introduces this gaze in which the colonizer admires the exoticness of
the other, and wishes to conquer it. This greed is what Pratt calls the “anti-con-
quest”; she defines it as “the strategies of representation whereby European bour-
geois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert
European hegemony”(Pratt, 1992, p. 7). She sees the hero of the anti-conquest as
a“seeing-man”who hungers to possess everything in sight. This comes across
most clearly in the ways that natural history formed a particular style of travel
writing that aimed at territorial surveillance, appropriation of resources, and
134 BOOK REVIEW
administrative control (Pratt, 1992). The Japanese invasion of China began with
this hungry colonial gaze.
As a result, a clear hierarchy can be seen at the very heart of the novel. Father
Engelmann is at the highest level, because he is white, European, and a man of
God. Then come the Japanese, the colonizers, they have the proper militia to
achieve colonization. The Chinese are now the colonized in their own land and
are losing their position in Nanking, while the Japanese are expanding further.
After that comes the lowest level that includes the Chinese school girls and,
even further down, the Chinese prostitutes. Such a hierarchy refers to the subal-
tern theory that refers to the act of grouping society. This society is “subject to the
hegemony of the ruling classes”(Pratt, 1992, p. 7).
The schoolgirls and prostitutes are subaltern,
5
for they are used as a commod-
ity in the eyes of Japanese colonizers. When the Japanese demand of Father
Engelmann to provide the army with comfort women, it reflects the idea of colo-
nial desire that was first introduced by Robert Young. The colonial desire “indi-
cates the extent to which colonialist discourse was pervaded by sexuality. The
idea of colonization itself is grounded in a sexualized discourse of rape, pen-
etration and impregnation, whilst the subsequent relationship of the colonizer
and colonized is often presented in a discourse that is redolent of a sexualized
exoticism”(Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1998, p. 40). Thus, the colonizer’s aggressive
need for more women, especially virgins, shows how colonization can come in the
form of raping women, because the latter represent land and honor. The Japanese
do not show any mercy when they corner Father Engelmann to surrender the
school girls, because they know how to exercise their prerogative to conquer.
He is seen as powerless when it comes to protecting the girls; however, he
remains unharmed throughout the war because he is the white man whose sanc-
tity should not be desecrated. As for the school girls, their welfare is merely play
dough in the hands of the Japanese colonizers.
Resistance is inevitable, and for the first time throughout the war, the subaltern
women are able to fight back and show resistance. It starts with Shujuan, the thir-
teen year-old. She resists by convincing the girls to commit mass suicide. She
organizes for them to do so by the bell tower and vows that no harm will come
to them, nor will the fear of losing their virginity haunt them anymore. Everyone
stops them from committing suicide, and Mo decides to sacrifice herself and the
other women to save the young girls, she says:
Unless the Japanese are insane, I don’t think they will kill us. They just want plea-
sure. That’s what we do. We have experienced all kinds of men. As long as we
can get out alive, we will find a way to survive …I think, we should do some-
thing heroic, and change the old way of thinking (223).
Yumo’schoiceofsacrifice is a form of resistance and her way of protecting the inno-
cent. Her sacrifice would not be useless, because in Shujuan’ssurvival,shewould
release the latter from captivity, and give her an opportunity to live a better life.
The unthinkable sacrifice by the prostitutes to save the schoolgirls is symbolic,
for the women represent the Chinese subaltern, contaminated by war and coloni-
zation. Resisting, in all of its forms, is a means of protecting the land of its virginity
BOOK REVIEW 135
and fertility. Yan’s purpose is to show that strength and resistance is to be found in
everyone. The retelling of the historical events of the Nanking massacre through
the eyes of Shujuan and Yumo is, therefore, a way of reconnecting with Chinese
culture and heritage, and how resistance can exist, no matter what form it takes.
The Flowers of War is truly an inspiring story filled with the rhythm of sorrow,
despair, and hope beating in its background. Yan is able to captivate the readers
with her rich characters, and allows them to see the consequences of war from a differ-
ent perspective. Her ability to give her less unfortunate characters a voice and code of
action to protect the schoolgirls and their country opens a gateway for many scholarly
works like post-colonialism and feminism to explore further upon Asian studies. Yan
offers readers some of the best scholarship on the history of China and her insights
into Chinese culture are a valuable contribution to a historical field.
Notes
1. Also known as Cultural Revolution, which was a social-political movement that
took place in the People’s Republic of China (1966–1976). The main aim of
this movement was to remove capitalism and enforce communism.
2. The Third Indo-China War in which China and Vietnam fought for a short period
of time in the early period of 1979 when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and China
responded.
3. The Second Sino Japanese War was the largest Asian war in the twentieth
century that merged into WWII as a major front, known as the Pacific War.
4. Wilhelmina “Minnie”Vautrin (1886–1941) had her diaries published years later
after her death in Hu, Hua-Ling’sAmerican Goddess at the Rape of Nanking (2000).
5. The word subaltern was first used by Antonio Gramsci; the subaltern categorizes
all kinds of human statuses into classes, and these groups cannot use the hege-
monic power to their advantage. Gayatri Spivak (1942–) criticizes the represen-
tation of subaltern subjects in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”(1998) and
shows that Foucault and Deleuze render the subaltern voiceless in the same
manner they are made voiceless by colonial discourse. She also tackles the
issues of race and power, and how it becomes more critical and complex
when race and power involves gender. Spivak traces women’s absence of self-
representation on both colonial and native (1998, p. 134).
Notes on contributor
Bassmah B. ALTAHER is an English Instructor at the German Jordanian University,
whose passion is teaching, researching, and reading. She has a PhD in English Litera-
ture from the University of Jordan and is specialized in American Modern Literature
and the Modern Novel. Her main research interests are Film and Literature, Post-colo-
nialism, and African-American Literature.
References
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University Press.
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Hu, H. L. (2000). American goddess at the rape of Nanking. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press.
Li, F. F., Sabella, R. & Liu, D. (Eds.). (2002). Nanking 1937: Memory and healing. New York: East Gate.
Pollard, L. (2012, January 24). The story behind Chinese war epic The Flowers of War.BBC. Retrieved
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Bassmah Bassam ALTAHER
bassmah.altaher@gju.edu.jo
© 2017 Bassmah Bassam ALTAHER
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/12259276.2017.1281535
BOOK REVIEW 137
