September 1, 1945 - Hong Kong

Keiji MAKIMURA, 29 August 1945

DELIVERANCE

South China Morning Post, September 1, 1945

Henry Ching, Post editor for 33 years until 1958, wrote this editorial on September 1, 1945, when the paper reappeared for the first time after the Japanese occupation.

How long dead? Three years, eight months and six days. Forty-four months lost from our lives - a thousand and more dreary days and nights of waiting and hoping, starving, praying and enduring. Not really dead, only buried alive, conscious of great tumult far off, wherein we could have been participating - wish-dreaming with all the phantasmagoria of delirium. Now for us, the forgotten folk, life begins again. We return to the world like Phra the Phoenician. Some are not with us, will not awaken again. Requiescat! And we who, by the grace of God, survive, emerge from entombment leaner, prematurely aged and spiritually very tired, to justify our existence anew, to try to overtake the march of time, to fill the great gap in our knowledge of our fellow men and of humanity's affairs. History has moved far on, left us stumbling an age behind.

How much elated? The bewilderment of that tragic Christmas Day when our world came to an end returns to us. Can this be it? Can this peace be deliverance? Aye, this is Peace - this is The Day, in faith whereto throughout those interminable months we refused to die. So mild a day, so tame an ending! In the comfortable countries they have already given their thanks and abandoned themselves in celebration. We too had thought to rejoice mightily, in overnight relief: thought also to be avenged for hardship and tyranny, for persecution and slappings - prepared to take again the risks of bombardment, of looting, of starvation, even of vindictive massacre, if only to prevent the vulture horde from escaping with their surfeit. Frustrated to the end; tantalized by uncertainties, rumours and delays, to us the truce brought little more than a fuller realization of our weariness.

How much chastened? The gaping ruins, the walking skeletons, the accumulation of filth, the degradation to be seen on all sides - these are the superficies of a devastation of pride. We have been guilty of failure; we have rediscovered poverty. We have sampled want. We know just how unfitted we are to wrest a livelihood from a primitive economy, without the aid of privilege; we know how it feels to be beggars and helpless. We comprehend how the submerged other half lived and what it is that makes criminals. We appreciate the value of friends, and we have learned why some of us had none. Few can now recall the old recriminations, and many would prefer that they would be forgotten. They are part, however, of the sins of the past and of the warnings for the future. Tolstoi in his 'Peace and War' says that wars are not brought about by politicians, nor even by policy. He agrees that war is the explosion of accumulated conditions, and that those conditions are created by selfishness, by wrong thinking. None of us must cry 'Peccavi.'

How much regenerated? With the end of a difficult war a more difficult task begins - to construct the new world order, to secure the general acceptance of the truth that war will only cease when the causes of war have been destroyed. Are we equal to it? Hong Kong the proud, the beautiful, out-raged, dragged in the mire, to be a foul trollop - Hong Kong is but one of many victims. Her rehabilitation is a task peculiarly ours. It will need much patient effort, for so many of our local institutions have been destroyed, and so many habits have been changed. Success will be great or small in proportion to the sanity that has been left to us, and in ratio to our consciousness of our obligations.

As we return to our own, our rugged familiar Catskills greet us wanly, yet encouragingly. They too have suffered; and because we have bled with them we should know at last what these green hills mean to us. We owe them more faithfully our love and our loyalty, so that this our Hong Kong may flourish again, more beautiful, more prosperous, more progressive - and purer of soul.