Wei Shaolan (middle), her son Luo Shanxue and the crew of documentary Thirty Two, which tells their story. (Photo: Courtesy of Guo Ke)
71 years ago, Wei Shaolan, who was captured and forced into sex slavery by the Japanese soldiers that invaded China, found herself pregnant with a Japanese troop's child after fleeing imprisonment in a "comfort station." Luo Shanxue, the half-Japanese boy she gave birth to a year later, has struggled for a lifetime with the stigma and shame given to him by his family and other villagers, and yet neither he or his mother has ever received an apology from the Japanese government.
Despite his age, Luo Shanxue, 70, has not given up hope that he will one day meet his biological father. "I will find him," he murmured. Suddenly, he raised his voice and gestured frantically, saying "He should be killed! He is not a human, but an animal!"
He is the son of Wei Shaolan, now 90, one of the 20-odd women who were the sex slaves of Japanese soldiers during World War II that are still alive in China.
Wei, from a village in Lipu county in Guilin, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, was 20 years old when she and her 1-year-old daughter were captured by Japanese soldiers in 1944.
After spending three months confined in a local "comfort station," she managed to escape and ran back home. Shortly afterwards, diarrhea killed her daughter. Several months later in 1945, Luo was born, and Wei and her husband were certain that his father must have been a Japanese soldier.
And that label, being a descendant of a "Japanese devil," has been a stigma Luo has carried with him for his whole life. He has been the target of hatred and scorn from his neighbors - and his family - since childhood.
Painful memories
Decades after the end of the war, Wei, now bent double and wrinkled, still remembers events vividly. In 1944, Japan launched a massive offensive, attempting to carve out a north-south inland supply route in China. With 400,000 soldiers, nearly half of their military manpower, they invaded Guangxi and in November, they occupied Lipu, according to Vista, a Chinese news magazine.
Along with the rest of their village, Wei's family hid in mountain caves to escape Japanese patrols. When there were no soldiers around, they would return to their homes.
One day when they were hiding, her mother-in-law, thinking it was safe, asked her to go home and feed their pigs. Before she reached the village, she was stopped by a Japanese soldier.
She was loaded onto a truck, along with five or six other women. They were taken to another side of the mountain and on the way, Wei saw another two women loaded onto the truck.
They were sent to the Maling "comfort station," about 20 kilometers away from her village. The ruins of the station are still standing today.
"We were locked in a room, and the devils would come in and rape us," Wei recalled in the 2012 documentary Thirty Two, a film about the lives of Wei and Luo. "Five or six devils each time, taking turns on two or three girls."
During their imprisonment the girls were given pills, Wei said. But she didn't know they were contraceptives. She thought the pills were toxic so she secretly stuffed them into cracks in her cell's walls.
One night, when the guards had become inattentive, Wei fled. As she wasn't sure which direction to take, it took her two days to make it home.
The reunion with her husband was unhappy after he learned of her suffering and that she was bearing a baby that was not his. Gossip and rumors about the pregnancy spread throughout their small community.
Her husband demanded she have an abortion. He relented after his mother, a herbalist, insisted that Wei would likely become infertile if she had an abortion.
Ten years later after Luo Shanxue was born, Wei gave birth to a daughter and in 1957 she gave birth to a son.
A lasting stigma
Growing up, Luo knew he was treated differently from others. When his younger brother and sister enjoyed rice, he ate coarse cereals. Other children, and even his siblings, would call him "Japanese offspring." His father always gave him a cold shoulder.
But he dared not ask why, until he had a conversation with his uncle when he was 12. His uncle told him what Japanese soldiers had done to his mother. Luo finally understood when he saw a film about the Japanese invasion at school.
He understood why his father was reluctant to take him to see a doctor when one of his eyes had a problem, and why he was only sent to school for three years, while his siblings attended school for a much longer time. "It's because I'm not his child," Luo said.
The stigma of his parentage, in addition to his poverty and impaired sight, have led him being a life-long bachelor. Luo said he courted six girls but none decided to marry him.
"I wanted to get married, but there was no way," he said in the documentary. "When a girl agreed, her mother didn't agree." They believed having a half Japanese son-in-law would damage their reputation. "I have carried this stigma for a lifetime. It ruined my whole life," Luo said.
Luo's father died in 1986. Despite his father preferring his own biological children over him, Luo said he feels gratitude to the man that raised him.
"I'm very grateful for him. He only let me go to school for three years and made me eat coarse cereals, but they had no other choice, it was a bitter and poor time," he was quoted as saying by a recent report by the Legal Mirror.
Although he forgave his father, the barrier between him and his mother remains. Even though they live together under the same roof in a run-down house that's decades old, the two seldom talk with each other.
