Let’s Cherish the Peace We Are Having Now
2016-01-22
I haven’t watched domestic TV series for a long time, given that all the family disputes between mothers and wives and the pretentious struggling of the young in wealthy families made your working days even more tiresome. But on my last trip home, I chanced upon Yanko, a TV drama about the anti-Japanese war in Yantai, Shandong province back in the 1930s to 1940s and shed tears at certain scenarios despite myself. So when I came back, I began to watch it every day and have just finished this 79-episode the day before yesterday.
It is not an excellent TV drama artistically: the lines and scenes were repetitious and clunky (that’s why it couldn't be finished within 30 episodes), climaxes appeared almost in every episode, and the heroes and heroines were too flat to be true, etc. But in spite of all these flaws, it has captured the spirit of our predecessors fighting dauntlessly for such a great course and finally winning the peace we are having now.
Here are some of the scenes that moved me into tears:
“The platoon leader of the Red Amy was severely hurt in one fighting and had to stay in a stretcher when the whole team was forced to move to another battlefield. Knowing he would be a burden, he deliberately commanded the team to somewhere near a ravine, where, he forced the rest of the soldiers to jump between the two rocks over the ravine, while he himself, too feeble to move any more, stayed where he was, used up all his bullets and enticed the enemies to approach. When they did arrive and were about to catch him alive, he, holding the grenade in his hand, died with all the enemies.”
“In order to wipe out the investigation team of Kuomintang who stood side by side with the Japanese invaders, the Red Army sent one soldier to be undercover in the investigation team. He had successfully won their trust and guided them to an island where an ambush was made ready. However, a traitor in the Army began to fire all of a sudden, which made the investigation team realize that their guide was a Communist member. Before he could jump into the sea for escape, the investigation team shot him simultaneously on the spot. He died, with dozens of bullets in his body.”
“The enemy troops invaded the village while two medics were concentrating on the operation of one of their comrades. The operation went quite well and the soldier was saved and shifted quickly to another place. The medics, instead of moving with the militia, chose to stay in the battlefield to fight against the enemies. They had known each other for over three years and had strong feelings for each other. Now they finally got the chance to express their love, and it was one of the most exciting and touching things to have your love returned. With the bullets run out, they died, hand in hand in the heavy gunfire, with smile on their faces.”
I knew some of the scenes in this TV drama were exaggerated and fabricated, but I’m even sure what they actually experienced was a much more dangerous and harsh situation beyond imagination. While watching them, I can not help asking myself: if I were in that position, what would I do? Could I be that bold and determined to fight against the enemies for our motherland and our people without hesitation? I knew the answer may not be a definite yes, indeed I don’t think any of us could earnestly pledge we’d do the same if it were to happen again, and that’s the very reason why we should cherish the hard-won peace we are having now.
Peace is a supreme word, without which, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are mere talk without significance. Although the vast majority of Chinese people are enjoying peace, we should not ignore the fact that the gaining of it is never easy and that a large number of people throughout the world are still suffering from all kinds of human wars and conflicts. From the two World Wars to the Korean War, Vietnam War and Gulf War, from 911 Terrorist Attack to the atrocities of the Islamic State recently, the wars and conflicts between nations and regions, races, and religions have never really departed us and be it a just cause or not, it is millions of ordinary people of both sides that become the victims, either dying in the battlefields, or becoming homeless and suffering agonizingly afterwards. I remember reading an article involving an interview with a man survived from the atomic bombardment in Hiroshima during the Second World War. Every day he was suffering from severe wounds outside and inside. While the physical scar could be healed some day, the terror, guilt and loneliness may never be cured. So in human wars there’s no winning at all. It is failing of the mankind.
History is a mirror for reflection. In A Global History, the author Leften Stavros Stavrianos, apart from telling us the history of the human beings from prehistoric time until the contemporary period in his lucid and logic way, kept reminding us: what can we learn from the history to avoid the recurrences of human tragedies? It is true that compared with our ancestors living in the caves and hunting for food each day, nowadays we deem ourselves especially developed in science and technology, in the scope of knowledge and indeed in everything else, but isn’t it true that when the Europeans started to conquer and oppress other people in America, Asia and Africa in the 16th century and continued to do so till the outbreak of the First World War, they also counted themselves superior and were thus endowed with the privilege and responsibility to “cultivate the lower races” in every conceivable way? So what we truly need is not to carry out any “justice course” in the name of gaining peace for any specific group of people, region or country; what we need is to discard any sense of superiority and any form of prejudice and discrimination upon any race, gender, religion, nation and so forth, accept who they are, and treat them as members of our family, the big family of the human beings. We’re all brothers and sisters living on this planet and everyone should and must have the same right for life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and on top of that, peace.
Together let’s cherish the peace we are having now. It is hard to win, but easy to lose.
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