In Nanjing, June 4, 2008

We are walking outside in the morning sunshine.The heavy midnight rain has miraculously cleared.But Nanjing always smells like death.Once, when walking after an early spring rain,we stirred up a foul odor in the thick, fallen leaves.Hu Xian and I simultaneously uttered the same word: rot.

Nanjing has many memorials to the dead:Zhongshan Mausoleum, Meiling Palace,Flower Terrace Martyr Cemetery,Memorial Hall of Crossing the River,the Holocaust Memorial Museum.Last night, between spring and summer, the rainrevived the bloody smell from nineteen years ago,spreading it north to south, south to north, for thousands of miles.

It’s been nineteen years, and if Hu Xian were still alive,he would be middle-aged, his youthful aspirations fulfilled.He would see the survivors living a happy life,their records purged. What would he be doing, if he had lived?How would he have spent his young life?

If there had been a new beginning instead of death,many other nineteen-year-olds would be grownups.Their thoughts would awaken every day full of life,full of innocence.

Look at me now. I’m no differentfrom every other person, living a materialistic life.I appear much the same as I did then.I get up at 10 a.m. each morning,eat three meals a day, like any of the peopleyou see in the streets, in offices, or classrooms.

But inside me there’s a bloody bowland a small, lit candle.I walk through a city square inside me...At noon, suddenly it’s dark... I am wasted, empty. . .I try to keep from spilling the bowl of blood in my hands.I try to pretend that I’m no different from everyone elseyou see in the streets, in offices, or classrooms.

Nanjing2008.6.4