Surviving against all odds

I don't usually do book reviews for this blog, but I've been lost for the past couple of days in the Japanese occupation of Malaysia and Java during World War II through two very absorbing books. I just finished the second one and am sitting here pondering the meaning of surviving through what, to me, seems to be unbearable circumstances. The first book is historical fiction: The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng, a Malaysian who wrote his first book in 2007 about this tumultuous time. An excerpt from a review by Su Lin Lewis of the Times Literary Supplement:

The Gift of Rain is a war novel with a personal odyssey at its heart, one that complicates the stark lines of right and wrong during wartime. Tan Twan Eng exposes the way in which the complexities of collaboration and resistance, and the duties to one's country, are made more difficult by a mixed-race heritage and the demands of friendship. 

I had a hard time getting starting with this book, as I would go to bed pretty tired every night and  put it aside as I began to fade. But Friday night I couldn't put it down and was up late reading it, finishing it yesterday morning. I cried for quite awhile after closing the cover, which I found to be very satisfying. A weighty book that absorbs me like that and gives my angst a focus doesn't come along that often. I finished it wanting to know more about the period.

I went to Village Books, my favorite local bookstore, to see if the author has written any other books, but he hasn't.  However, one of the bookstore owners, Chuck, and I had a conversation about another book he highly recommended covering the same time period. This one is a memoir, written by a woman a few years older than me who lives right here in Bellingham: The Flamboya Tree. To think that I've probably walked right by Clara Kelly, I was intrigued, so I bought a used copy of her book and brought it home. Within a few hours, I had finished her story.

Clark Olink Kelly has this picture of the flamboya hanging in her home here in Bellingham, the only tangible piece of memorabilia surviving from that time in her life. She lived for almost four years in a Japanese internment camp in Java. By the time she left that camp, she had spent half of her life there and wanted to write down the memories of that time, especially of her mother's incredible strength of will and love that gave them the ability to survive this almost unendurable situation. I am amazed that her mother, who had grown up as a privileged Dutch citizen until taken away with her three children, found a way to survive and to bring all of them through that terrible time.

It really makes me wonder about how we find the strength within us to go through periods when it doesn't seem possible to find the will to take one more breath, much less to keep struggling against all odds. That link above takes you to an interview with Clara, so you can get a glimpse of the wonderful mother and grandmother she is today.

It reminds me also of another book I read in my twenties that affected me profoundly, Man's Search for Meaning, written by Viktor Frankl in 1946 about his experience as a concentration camp inmate. It describes a psychotherapeutic method he developed during that time, and he found the will to live. It has always fascinated me as to what makes one person just lay down and die when confronted with adversity, and another rise above it, even to create something transcendent out of the experience.

The 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima was this week as well, and my country, which is the only one so far to use the atomic bomb on another population, sent representatives to Japan's annual memorial for the first time ever, acknowledging the horrific loss of life in an official capacity. That really stunned me, since I assumed that this had been done long ago. The Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima is well worth visiting. The inhumanity of war hasn't changed throughout history, but maybe, just maybe, something is coming to fruition that started seven decades ago. And maybe that something is positive. We won't know during my lifetime, most likely, but I like to think that humanity will choose to survive against all odds.