Learning about how the world was from the people there, then
What started as a phone call to my grandfather for his 95th birthday turned into a lesson for my 9-year-old about the value of learning about history from those who lived it.
Lily didn’t know much about World War II until she learned on the phone that her great-grandfathers had both fought in it.
She was amazed. She didn’t know anyone in our family had ever joined the military, let alone volunteered to fight in faraway lands as the world seethed with combat.
Both my grandfathers, who lived just three miles apart in rural northern Michigan but didn’t meet until my parents met decades later, signed up during the war to become fighter pilots — an extremely dangerous job then.
But they were too tall for the cockpits and — in what Lily calls “the coincidence of all coincidences” — both instead became airplane mechanics.
She’d always liked her greatgrandpa Nilsson. (My mother’s father died before she was born.)
But after the call, she had a newfound respect for what he’d lived through and what he’d done during such extreme times.
“I’m glad I live in China, today,” she said, as I explained the war after we hung up.
She has recently become obsessed with history. And her unique upbringing means she pores over books about both Western and Eastern, and especially Chinese, history.
As such, she’s learning about WWII differently than I did.
I don’t remember learning about
Japan’s invasion of China in school and only encountered it as a brief aside during university.
Although the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, US society has since focused mostly on the European Theater and especially the Nazis.
I myself only learned about the Japanese invasion of China after moving to Beijing.
That’s especially in 2007, when I interviewed the parents of Iris Chang, the author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII, who later committed suicide after spending so much time researching the horrors of what happened in Nanjing. And in 2005, I interviewed the surviving relatives of Minnie Vautrin, who saved thousands of Chinese women in Nanjing.
By an incredible coincidence, two of Vautrin’s surviving relatives lived just a few houses from my home in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. And Vautrin is also buried nearby.
How precious an opportunity it is for my daughter to be able to learn about the war from a family member who fought in it, since there will be no veterans left in just a few years.
How I wish I’d asked my other grandfather, who went to the Philippines to fight Japan (Grandpa Nilsson was mostly stationed in Italy), more questions while I still could.
I remember he told me he couldn’t eat rice afterward because it reminded him of corpses.
“We have to remember the past to understand the future,” Lily said as we talked that night. “Where’d you hear that?” I asked. “I just thought of it now,” she responded.
“And we should respect older people. What Great-Grandpa did then made our family what it is today. And other people in his time made the world the way it is today.”
Respect for elders is a Chinese virtue I admire.
This is shamefully absent in much of the West and especially the United States, where younger people often regard the elderly with derision for being “out of touch” — eg, “OK, boomer” vs the Chinese tendency to address seniors as “teacher”.
Age brings experience, and experience brings wisdom. That doesn’t mean we must agree with elders’ viewpoints.
But we should respect that they have lived through much we haven’t in the past, built the world we live in today and have insights about the future we don’t.