A Nanking Winter by Marjorie Chan

A Nanking Winter by Marjorie Chan is a play that grapples with the painful history of the Nanking Massacre, which occured in 1937. Although the play takes place in contemporary Toronto, it explores China’s traumatic past of the Nanking Massacre through the perspective of a Chinese-Canadian academic. 

The play centers around a Chinese-Canadian professor who travels to Nanking (南京) in order to investigate archive materials for her research upon war atrocities. Chan tells a story of transnational haunting and intergenerational estrangement through the Chinese-Canadian professor’s interactions with a young local assistant and the lingering spectre of her own family's silence. Chan uses familial fragmentation to reflect how cultural memory is fractured under colonial and migratory pressures. Ultimately, the play critiques the Western academic gaze and commodification of suffering, inviting readers to ask: who has the right to speak, and for whom?

The 1937 Nanking Massacre, which is the main event in A Nanking Winter, is still one of the most disputed and ignored crimes against humanity in the 20th century. The play brings attention to how this event has been hidden from history, both in China during certain political regimes and in the West, where stories about World War II have long focused on the suffering of Europeans. The main character's initial distance from the event—seeing it as material rather than memory—is a direct criticism of this erasure. The play breaks down the idea that history can be easily researched, sorted, and stored away by showing how her grip on time and identity becomes less clear.

Historical Repression

Janie comes to Nanjing thinking that she can keep horror within the limits of school. She says early in the play, "I am an academic." I don't care about politics. "Politics has nothing to do with my work" (Chan 23). But the people around her, like her assistant Lin, won't let her be so far away. Lin asked, "Do you think you can write this story without bleeding?" (32) sums up one of the main points of the play: that it is impossible to look at history, especially violent and hidden history, from a neutral point of view.

Janie's efforts to stay out of things are constantly thwarted by the holes she finds. She has come looking for papers, testimonies, and proof, but instead she finds silence, blacked-out records, and emotional absence. Janie yells, "I'm not looking for poetry," because she's tired of not getting clear answers. "I'm looking for the truth" (47). But Chan's play shows that these groups aren't really opposites. When facts don't work, emotion—trauma, memory, haunting—takes over. It suggests that the truth is not only in what is written down but also in what is kept secret.

Gendered Violence

Janie is looking for historical clarity, but in the end, she has to deal with the weight of women's suffering, especially the sexual violence that Japanese soldiers did during the Nanking Massacre. These terrible things, which aren't well documented in traditional archives, come to light through ghostly figures and emotional breakdowns. One of the scariest parts of the play is when Janie's memory turns into a reenactment. She talks as if she is a woman who was attacked during the massacre: "He held me down... I was only fifteen... My brother's face... watching from the floor..." (65). The breakdown of voice—scholar, witness, victim—makes it hard to tell the difference between the past and the present, the researcher and the subject.

Chan purposely makes this ethical discomfort happen. Lin says to Janie, "You want stories so you can sleep at night, say you've remembered for them..." You haven't remembered a thing. You have "rewritten" (68). The play deals with the difficult desire to "give voice" without really listening. Being a diasporic Chinese woman doesn't mean Janie doesn't have to deal with the responsibilities—and risks—of representing history.

Familial Silence & Intergenerational Absence

The quiet moments Janie finds in the archive are like the quiet moments in her own family. Her father, who has since passed away, never talked about China, and her mother is still emotionally unavailable. When Janie asked her mother about her father's past, all she said was, "He left." What else can I say? (29). This emotional economy—of not talking or remembering—is a way to stay alive, but it's also a way to forget.

Janie wants to get history back for both personal and professional reasons. But the more she finds out, the more she loses. Her hallucinations, panic attacks, and times when she felt like she was two people at once show that remembering is not only healing, but also harmful. Chan's play warns that dealing with trauma is not the same as getting over it; it is facing it. And it might not bring peace.

Haunting, Fragmentation, and Theatrical Memory

"There are a lot of ghosts here." This line, which is said several times in the play, gives A Nanking Winter its mood. The play doesn't have a clear structure; it jumps around in time, has hallucinations, and changes who is speaking. Sometimes, Janie says things that aren't hers. At other times, the characters mix together. The result is a theatrical version of trauma's nonlinear time. Chan doesn't use these theatrical devices as metaphors; he uses them as a way to write history. The past is not gone; it is still here. The line between memory and hallucination, research and reenactment, is very thin. This formal choice shows how inherited trauma really works: it's not written down, but it's in silence, repetition, and the body.

Ultimately, Marjorie Chan's A Nanking Winter is more than just a play about the Nanking Massacre; it's also a reflection on how we learn about history, pass it down, and are affected by it. Chan criticizes both the flaws of academia and the emotional toll of remembering through Janie's unravelling. Her characters don't give answers; they ask tough questions like, "What do we owe the past?" Are we able to talk for the dead? And what happens when remembering hurts?

In the end, Janie doesn't get closure; she gets a kind of shaking awareness. She might not ever finish her book. She might never get the story "right." But maybe the most moral thing to do is not to make a decision, but to listen, even if it hurts, humbly, and without any guarantees.