May 30, 2001

This evening we offer Hún Qiáo: A Concert of Remembrance and Reconciliation. Hún Qiáo, Chinese for "Bridge of Souls," expresses our wish to recall and heal the World War II-era wounds in Asia and beyond. Throughout the East, the word "Hún" refers to souls who are summoned, during mourning, to return rightfully home. This musical bridge–this Qiáo–speaks to the heartbreak, to the wandering souls, of World War II. It offers the dead a chance to come home, and grants the living a chance for acknowledgment, acceptance, and reconciliation.

Hún Qiáo brings together, for the first time, distinguished composers from all sides of the war in Asia–Michio Mamiya from Japan, Chen Yi from China, Hi-Kyung Kim from Korea, and Andrew Imbrie from the United States–with renowned musicians Yo-Yo Ma, Wu Man, Mutsumi Hatano, and Mark Russell Smith. Their appearance with our Society’s artists reflects our common trust in music’s transcendent power, its promise of peace and healing among all peoples.

Nearly a lifetime ago, the Imperialist Japanese Army marched through occupied Korea and into China. In the winter of 1937—1938, the army raped and murdered its way through the Chinese capital city of Nanjing, killing 300,000 people in six weeks. Anguish seized a city, and then claimed much of a continent. By war’s end, tens of millions were dead; millions more hearts were broken. Wounds were borne, then bound, in silence.

Tyranny has worn many faces before and since World War II. Asia’s heartbreak has been replicated in every corner of the Earth. Barbarism has had its day in Auschwitz and Armenia, in Cambodia and the Congo, in Selma and Soweto. Its victims have been Ukrainian and Kosovar, Gypsy and Slav, Bengali and Rwandan, Cherokee and Lakota. Yet the survivors of World War II in Asia certainly rank among the most silent of the world’s sufferers, and have remained silent too long. Silence has a way of sustaining sorrow not yet put to rest. When hurt is hidden, heartbreak endures and haunts.

This truth became clear to Minnesota’s Asian Americans–many war refugees and survivors among them–during the 50th anniversary of World War II’s end in 1995. Many war wounds were healed by that commemoration–but few of the wounds inflicted by the Yangtze and Han Rivers.

It is time to heal them. The balm for such wounds, we have learned, is expression. The answer lies in speech, and remembrance and ritual. But what is the way to heal a grief beyond words?

We imagine the way is found in music–the one language the whole world speaks. Music, after all, can perform miracles. It can utter the unutterable, call Heaven down to Earth, awaken the dead, unite the estranged. Music builds bridges from heartbreak to healing. It calls wounded and wandering souls back home.

Tonight’s musical gathering speaks not just about a single tragedy in a single time. It grieves not just for one catastrophe or one perpetrator. It seeks instead to speak of the ubiquity of human suffering, to loosen cruelty’s fierce and foolish grip on the human heart. It seeks to replace heartbreak with harmony. It builds a bridge to the land of the living, to a world at peace.

Throughout Asia, the lotus flower, with its transcendent beauty that rises unsullied from the dark depths of a murky pond, is revered as a symbol of rebirth and peace. Its bud, flower, and seedpod, which are often present on a single plant at the same time, simultaneously represent the past, the present, and the future. During the war, many lotus ponds in China became dumping grounds for dead bodies. They dried up, yielding few blooms the following spring.