P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hans Ingvar Roth
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bomb it easily as they had the city of Chungking; even so, Kunming suffered many bombings. After we arrived in Kunming, my sister Ruth travelled on to Uncle Poling’s school in Chungking. My mother was far too proud to go with her and live on the Nankai campus in Chungking.
Instead, my mother rented three rooms in Kunming, cooking food on a tiny charcoal stove on the ground. I shared a room with her, and my brother and Ming-Ming slept in the room opposite. We slept on thin mattresses laid on wooden boards. Flies and lice were our constant companions. The toilet was a deep hole in a room to the side of the house. It was emptied once a week. When the man came to collect the latrine bucket, the smell was appalling.
One night my mother did not come home. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I went to my brother and told him that our mother had not come home. He said that I should go back to bed. In the morning, to my enormous relief my mother came back. She never said what had happened and I never asked. (A similar incident occurred many years later. One day, in the summer of 1948, my mother disappeared. At that time we were living in Peter Cooper Village in New York—my father, me, my brother, and Ming-Ming. Ruth had gone to graduate school in Wisconsin. I had taken over the kitchen duties. After several weeks, Ruth wrote to us to say that our mother was in New York City, to judge from the stamp on the letter which she had sent to Ruth. After a few more weeks, my mother came back, to my father’s great joy. On that occasion, too, I did not ask where she had been or why she had disappeared.)
When words reached us that my father would be coming to Chungking in April 1940, we travelled by car from Kunming to Chungking. It was a new car that needed to be driven to Chungking from Vietnam and so the driver was earning a little extra cash by taking some passengers from Kunming. I sat in the front passenger seat, while my mother, brother and sister sat in the back. How my mother survived those three years without my father continues to amaze me.
In this moving account, Stanley relates the hardships that the family had to endure in the 1930s. His mother revealed her tremendous strength of personality in bringing the family safely from Tientsin to Kunming and Chungking. The sacrifices that she had to make for the family can only be glimpsed between the lines. The entire story would serve as the basis for a dramatic film. Stanley’s brother Chen Chung also developed asthma in the damp tunnel shelters that were used when the Japanese attacked Chungking; he would be afflicted by this asthma for the rest of his life. Stanley’s account of his mother’s escape with her children also highlights how distant Peng Chun Chang was from his family for several years. In many respects, they lived parallel lives. While Chang moved in the world of high politics, his wife was fighting to keep their family together and to enable them to survive in wartorn China.
After attacking Tientsin, the Japanese turned their attention to Nanking, which was devastated with great brutality between December 1937 and January 1938. According to Chinese sources, more than three hundred thousand Chinese died during the Japanese attacks. In addition, more than twenty thousand Chinese women were raped by Japanese soldiers while parts of the city were being destroyed. The Nanking (Nani-jing) Massacre is one of the most fraught events in modern Chinese history and continues to be a major obstacle to Japanese-Chinese relations.56 Chiang Kai-shek’s army was cut in half by the Japanese attacks, thereby becoming discredited in the popular view. Wuhan, the new capital, was also attacked in autumn 1938, and a new capital accordingly established in western China: Chungking.
Chang’s “Propaganda Trips”
P. C. Chang was thus traveling as an official representative of China’s Department of Foreign Affairs in the wake of the Japanese attacks in 1937. The purpose of his trips was to inform the world about Japan’s brutal military assault on China and to secure aid and sanctions against Japan. P. C. Chang remembers his journey in the following way:
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