Catching Up

It’s Monday in Nanjing, and I need to catch up with what I’ve been doing these past couple of days. One of the highlights of the past week was going to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial — it was very moving, and made the history and accounts I’ve read about the Nanjing Massacre very real. It felt very similar to my visit to the Hiroshima Memorial last summer — a number of school groups, including Japanese student groups, hung paper cranes at the Nanjing Memorial site, in similar fashion to the Hiroshima girl who died from radiation poisoning from the atom bomb.

Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
圣母无原罪主教座堂
For Father’s Day, I went to Mass at the Cathedral in Nanjing. While the Catholic Church in Nanjing has a history of over three hundred years, the Cathedral was built in the 1870s – but like the rest of Nanjing, there is a lot of construction even at the church; they are building a number of annexes to house the various activities that they have organized. The mass was conducted in Mandarin, following the typical Vatican II liturgy, and almost every seat in the church was taken (probably a hundred and fifty people); there were sprinklings of foreigners at the Mass as well. It was nice to be at Mass for Father’s Day, but it reminded me that I was in church without my own sons for this Father’s Day!

I also had a chance last Saturday night to attend a Kun Opera — I was told by Don Snow and Wei Hong, some friends we met who live here and regularly attend shows, that Kun Opera was just designated a World Heritage Tradition. It was a wonderful performance in a beautiful setting. But Patricia got to go to Hong Kong Cantopop star Zhang Xueyou’s (Jacky Cheung) concert here in Nanjing — the big event, held in a stadium.