My Love Letter to Hiroshima

Trigger warning: contains representations of sexual and physical violence 

Time seems to stand still at Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome. Every morning at 8:17, I pass it for just one second on the train, but it feels like a lifetime. The structure is eerily beautiful and tourists flock around it all year, but all I can imagine are the rotting flesh on living people and the gaping mouths of dying children — humanity at its lowest. 

There are times I feel guilty for caring so much about the people of Hiroshima. “They deserved it” is what my grandfather would say in his thick Beijing accent. “That entire country should have been annihilated.” It’s hard to openly disagree with a man who once watched a group of gloating Japanese soldiers rape his mother when he was a child. His father was killed by Japanese bombs. Almost everyone from Grandpa’s hometown in Shandong was either massacred or starved to death. Even as his memory began to wane in the last years of his life, he could recite the names of everyone in his old home and how they were killed. 

My cousins and I grew up with stories — complete with black-and-white photos — detailing Japanese war crimes. Gory accounts of beheadings, live burials, and torture became my bedtime stories when Grandpa came to babysit. They were the only kind of stories he knew how to tell. When I was seven years old, I told a concerned teacher that my worst nightmare was being cut up for a human experiment in Unit 731. 

Grandpa’s favorite story to tell was his least gory one. On the first day the Japanese soldiers occupied his home, they stuffed human feces in every crevice of the town’s only rice mill. The old stone mill had taken decades to carve and without it, everyone starved. Hunger killed one-third of the town’s population. 

 My parents didn’t mind that Grandpa’s stories kept me up at night. My entire family knew them by heart. They traded stories over Lunar New Year feasts. Though my father couldn’t stand his brothers, they shared an undying anger towards anything Japanese. It was the glue that kept our family together. 

When I first learned about the atomic bombs in fifth grade, I was intrigued. A colorless picture of a scarred twelve-year-old Japanese girl in a dress accompanied the lesson in my history book. She looked just like me. What war crimes could she have committed?

I made the mistake of bringing up what I learned at a family dinner. My parents rolled their eyes, sparing no sympathy, when I mentioned Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

“What they did to us was one hundred times worse,” said my mother. 

“And they still haven’t apologized,” my father added. The conversation ended but I didn’t stop thinking about the girl in the dress. 

My cousins and I were not allowed near anime, Pokemon cards, or Studio Ghibli movies. Apparently, hating the Japanese is part of the Chinese identity. 

But identities can change, especially for an immigrant girl growing up in California. Grandpa’s babysitting became less frequent after I started middle school. Eventually, his horror stories no longer haunted my mind as much as they used to, though they still lingered at times. Much to my family’s dismay, I secretly loved Nintendo games, my first car was a Toyota, and my best friend of twelve years is Japanese-American. There was nothing my parents could do. The cherry on top of it all was when I got my first full-time job in one of the most infamous cities in Japan.

It was my first night in Hiroshima when an old taxi driver with broken English asked me where I was from. 

“I’m American,” I answered from the backseat.

The man took a moment to think. Then, he looked at me through the rearview mirror with great intensity and said:

“America,” gesturing towards me. 

“Hiroshima” pointing at himself. 

“BAM!” His hands mimicked an explosion. 

I sat there for a good five seconds, too baffled to speak. 

“Yeah…Sorry about that,” was all I could think to say. If Grandpa taught me anything, it’s that seventy-eight years is not enough time to separate tragedy from identity. If I’m being honest, I still cling to so much of my own pain. 

The rest of the car ride was silent. 

I should have said I was Chinese.

Today at 8:17 AM, the Dome stood surrounded by leafless trees. A group of protesters circled the park with their homemade posters and signs, calling for a ceasefire in Palestine. I watched them as my train sped past. In one second, an eternity flashed before my eyes. All it takes is just one second for a bomb to drop, turning a thriving city into a massive graveyard. It won’t take long to clear the corpses and debris but the hate will last much longer. And though it’s difficult to admit, the hate is justified. 

I have no right to judge my grandfather for his lifelong anger. He endured so much pain and lost everything in his lifetime. He survived a genocide and spent the rest of his existence reliving it so he wouldn’t forget. It was because of his resilience that I’m even here, privileged enough to say that my worst fears have never become my reality.

It’s a tit-for-tat world. An eye for an eye. A bomb for a massacre. Vengeance for vengeance for vengeance. It’s a world with powerful countries and angry people desperately blowing up the planet for a taste of justice.

Each day at 8:17, I see the Dome and wonder: How much time do we have left to suffer in this murderous cycle? 

Maybe all we have is one more second before we are all annihilated from existence by our own creations. And honestly, that would be the better option.

But we’re human beings. We drag things out whether we intend to or not. 

So, how much time do we have left to suffer?

I think we have all the time in the world.