Shadows Beneath the Sun: Ethical Memory, Critical Humanism, and WWII Chongqing in Luo Weizhang’s Novel

Abstract

Luo Weizhang’s novel Under the Sun centers on a fictionalized writer who reconstructs the life of protagonist Huang Xiaoyang through encounters with his literary remains and the memories of those who knew him personally. Set against the backdrop of the WWII Japanese bombings of Chongqing, the novel challenges dominant historical narratives by using the genre of historiographic metafiction and employing narrative strategies of counter-memory and postmemory. This paper reads Under the Sun as a literary performance of ethical remembrance: one that interrogates conventional notions of subjectivity, the fragile responsibility of narrating trauma, and the psychological toll of bearing witness across generations. Drawing on the framework of critical humanism, with its emphasis on relationality and ethical openness to the other, I argue that Luo’s novel reveals both the moral necessity and the psychic cost of engaging with histories of violence. In reframing the Chongqing bombings—long marginalized in global WWII memory—Under the Sun demonstrates how Chinese literature can expand the geography of remembrance and contribute to transnational debates on trauma, justice, and historical responsibility.

1. Introduction

When recalling World War II, collective memory often gravitates toward familiar turning points such as the Evacuation at Dunkirk and the Normandy Landings or toward catastrophic events like the London Blitz, the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the atrocities of Nanjing. These sites have become emblematic touchstones of twentieth-century warfare—moments through which the global imagination rehearses narratives of endurance, devastation, and moral reckoning. Yet beyond this map of remembrance lies another site, almost invisible outside China: Chongqing, the wartime capital, which endured years of systematic bombing beginning in 1938, well before the London Blitz, and whose devastation anticipated the logic of strategic bombing later unleashed on Europe and Japan.

Despite its scale and significance, Chongqing has largely faded from global memory, overshadowed by the more familiar wartime capitals of Washington, London, Paris, and Moscow—cities that, unlike Chongqing, continue to occupy central places in narratives of the war. What, then, became of the city that endured more than five years of bombardment? What did its citizens suffer, and how did those experiences reverberate in the lives of survivors and even of aggressors long after the war’s end? In Tokyo, visitors encounter the Zero fighter proudly displayed at the Yūshūkan Museum, accompanied by captions celebrating its first victory over Chongqing in September 1940. In Hiroshima, survivors recount the atomic bombing with sorrow and tears at the Peace Memorial Museum. To confront these juxtapositions is to be pressed with an unavoidable question: what, after all, constitutes ethical history and memory?

It is precisely this question that Chinese author Luo Weizhang takes up in his novel Under the Sun (Luo 2012).1 Through a nuanced reimagining of Chongqing’s wartime experience, Luo probes what it means to write ethically about violence and memory. Anchored in meticulous historical research, his novel resists treating history as a fixed text. Instead, it blends historiographic metafiction with strategies of counter-memory and postmemory to reckon with the silences of official archives while grappling with the limits of individual and generational remembrance. Framed through the figure of a fictional writer piecing together the fragments of protagonist Huang Xiaoyang’s life, Luo dramatizes the precarious labor of narrating trauma: the struggle to honor the dead, the weight of memory on survivors, and the ethical demand to see even across enemy lines.

This article reads Under the Sun as a literary performance of ethical remembrance: one that unsettles conventional notions of subjectivity, foregrounds the fragile responsibility of narrating trauma, and exposes the psychological toll of bearing witness across generations. Drawing on the framework of critical humanism, with its emphasis on relationality and openness to the other, I argue that Luo’s novel confronts both the crushing burden and the moral necessity of remembering histories of violence. In reframing the overlooked Chongqing bombings as a crucial site of transnational memory, Under the Sun demonstrates how Chinese fiction can intervene in global debates on trauma, justice, and responsibility, expanding the geography of memory studies beyond its Euro-American and Japan-centered coordinates.

2. Remembering Chongqing: History, Obscurity, and Strategic Bombing

To understand Luo Weizhang’s intervention, we must first recall the history of the Chongqing bombings—an episode central to the genealogy of modern air warfare yet largely absent from global memory.

Only eleven years after the Wright brothers’ first powered flight in 1903, airplanes were already being used for bombing on European battlefields. By the Second World War, aerial warfare had escalated into what different nations termed “strategic bombing”, “area bombing”, or “terror bombing”.2 Whatever the terminology, the result was the same: cities transformed into targets, civilians slaughtered, and the line between combatant and noncombatant erased. The culmination of this logic was the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, creating images of mushroom clouds that still haunt the global imagination.

Japanese journalist and scholar Maeda Tetsuo reminds us that this history cannot be understood without beginning in China. In Strategic Bombing: Tracing From Guernica and Chongqing to Hiroshima, Maeda (2006) argues that Japan was the first to explicitly define and systematize strategic bombing, implementing it during its prolonged campaign against Chongqing (1938–1943). More than 218 air raids devastated China’s wartime capital with fragmentation and incendiary bombs, killing 11,885 people—most of them civilians. For Maeda (2009, pp. 141–42), Chongqing was “Hiroshima before Hiroshima”: a crucial but forgotten node in the genealogy of twentieth-century air wars. Without coming to terms with what happened there, he warns, we cannot fully understand the later nuclear bombings, the global adoption of indiscriminate air campaigns, or the logic of terror and revenge that escalated into weapons of mass destruction (Maeda 2009).

Yet despite its centrality, Chongqing has largely faded from transnational memory. Scholarship on the raids remains limited. Historians such as Mitter (2013, Forgotten Ally) and Li (2010, Echoes of Chongqing) have reconstructed the bombings through archival sources and women’s oral histories, while Young and Tanaka’s (2009) Bombing Civilians situates Chongqing alongside other cases of indiscriminate aerial warfare. Literary criticism, however, has focused overwhelmingly on Europe and Japan—W. G. Sebald on the silence of German writers, or Kyoko and Mark Selden’s anthology of Japanese testimonies—leaving Chinese experiences largely absent (Sebald 2003; Selden and Selden 1990). Within China, scholars including Liu Maowei, Xie Ruolang, and Hong Fuzhong have examined the raids through domestic archives, diaries, and historiography, while Chen Yongwan has addressed their literary representations (Liu 2019; Xie 2019; Hong 2019; Chen 2012). Yet these works tend to remain confined within either Chinese or Western frameworks. In global memory studies, Chongqing continues to occupy a marginal place.

Its obscurity is not incidental but produced by layered histories: the incomplete decolonization and deimperialization of postwar Japan, which foreground narratives of domestic victimhood while only partially acknowledging continental aggression; China’s mid-century civil war, which redirected commemorative energies into nation-building; the Cold War order, which consolidated a U.S.-Japan alliance and an Anglophone historiography focused on the Pacific theater; and the later rise of China, where both nationalist frameworks and market logics have shaped the circulation of stories. Together, these forces have yielded an uneven memory landscape in which Chongqing—though a laboratory for modern strategic bombing—remains peripheral.

Faced with this archive of absences, literature can do what official histories often cannot, by not simply adding facts but staging acts of remembrance that re-humanize the record and test the ethics of how we remember. It is precisely this work that Luo Weizhang’s Under the Sun undertakes. Rather than reproducing the panoramic sweep of official history, Luo turns to the fragmentary, the personal, and the everyday. By eschewing the spectacle of metanarrative and foregrounding the ethics of individual stories, Under the Sun retrieves Chongqing from obscurity and repositions it within transnational WWII memory as a site where remembrance, justice, and responsibility can be rethought.

3. Historiographic Metafiction and Memory Reconstruction

Luo structures Under the Sun—first published in 2012 and set in a contemporary present—around a fictional writer-narrator who reconstructs the life of Huang Xiaoyang through his manuscripts and through conversations with Xiaoyang’s ex-wife and acquaintances. This figure is not simply a narrator: he mediates between sources, speculates on gaps, and reflects on his own act of writing. In this sense, he embodies author, reader, and historian simultaneously, making the novel not only about historical recovery but also about the epistemological limits of that recovery.

At the center of the story stands Huang Xiaoyang himself, a historian consumed by the murder of his great-grandmother during the Rape of Nanjing. Testimonies conflicted: some claimed that the Japanese soldier not only shot her but also stamped on her back, while others recalled that the soldier called her “grandma” before pulling the trigger. For most people—and for what Xiaoyang calls “conventional historians”—the essential fact was simply that she was killed by a Japanese soldier. But for Xiaoyang, the question of how she was killed became a lifelong ethical pursuit. His research eventually extended across three families over sixty years, linking Nanjing, Chongqing, and Hiroshima. Yet at the very moment he seemed near resolution, Xiaoyang committed suicide, crushed by the truths he had sought (Luo 2012).

This tragic arc is refracted through the testimony of others. His ex-wife, Du Yunqiu, admits that his relentless engagement with the past destroyed their marriage. In her words, his obsession felt suffocating: “He dug a well with good intentions, but tried to pour into it every river and stream he encountered or imagined. He judged everything—history, politics, personal feelings, even daily behavior—through a moral lens. The result was disastrous” (ibid., p. 87). For Yunqiu, what Xiaoyang experienced as ethical responsibility appeared instead as an unbearable absolutism that drained their everyday life. Unable to comprehend his obsession with fragments and uncertainty, she implores the writer to “see through” Xiaoyang by interpreting his papers and writing about him (ibid., p. 4). The writer then reconstructs Xiaoyang’s story using his diaries and letters, along with oral accounts, interviews, and an unpublished magazine profile. These materials are not presented linearly but interwoven and alternated, which interrupt the history of major events with the fractured histories of individuals, destabilize chronology, and foreground multiplicity.

At this point the novel shifts from story to reflection: how should such fragmented, contradictory evidence be read? The narrator frequently interrupts the narrative to confess his struggle with Xiaoyang’s words—diaries marked only by days without months or years, fragments without context. He admits he repeatedly “falls and climbs out of the trap” of interpretation (ibid., p. 6). Such intrusions underscore the constructed nature of the record, reminding readers that the documents are never transparent but filtered through interpretation. Luo skillfully arranges multiple perspectives under the control of the narrator who is not omniscient as well, performing textually the double role of spectator and actor in the historical process. In doing so, the novel refuses being conclusive and teleological.

This narrative design exemplifies what Linda Hutcheon terms “historiographic metafiction”, which incorporates literature, history, and theory by “its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs” (Hutcheon 2004, p. 5). Historiographic metafiction, therefore, distinguishes between “events”, which exist in the past without intrinsic meaning, and “facts”, which acquire meaning only through interpretation (ibid., p. 122). Luo makes this distinction visible, privileging the emotions, choices, and vulnerabilities of individuals over the “cold statistics” of official historiography. In his hands, history becomes not the record of certainty but the drama of human fragility—the attempt to “make dead history alive under the sun” through imaginative reconstruction (Wei 2011).

Rather than simply disrupting subjectivity in the abstract, Luo dramatizes the costs of inhabiting fractured subjectivities: Xiaoyang is undone by his own obsessive quest, Yunqiu is estranged by his relentless moral scrutiny, and the narrator himself is caught between the duty to remember and the impossibility of full recovery. Likewise, rather than merely disrupting historical transcendence, Luo insists that history remains bound to partial voices and contested memories, never resolved into a single authoritative account. What matters is not transcendence but the ethical weight of incompletion.

Having revealed history as mediated and uncertain, Luo’s novel leads us further into the terrain of counter-memory and postmemory, where remembrance is stretched beyond the solitary witness and the national frame, opening onto a more entangled field of relations and responsibilities. Born in Sichuan in the late 1960s, Luo belongs to the generation after the war, yet his work constitutes a transgenerational return to the traumas endured by his grandparents’ generation.3 Here he exemplifies George Lipsitz’s notion of counter-memory, which revises dominant narratives by centering suppressed or silenced voices, and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, through which later generations imaginatively invest in the traumas of their predecessors (Lipsitz 1990, p. 213; Hirsch 2012, p. 5). Luo’s narrator does not simply recover forgotten archives; he performs the difficulty of recovery itself, dramatizing the uncertainty of representation and the psychic cost of remembrance.

Importantly, Luo avoids what Viet Thanh Nguyen warns against: the danger of memory-work invested only in “the suffering of one’s own” (Nguyen 2016, p. 268). In Under the Sun, spatial and temporal frames deliberately overlap. Events in Nanjing, Chongqing, and Hiroshima are narrated in ways that blur national boundaries. Hiroshima’s atomic destruction is described as “heavy bombing which sounds both like and not like Chongqing heavy bombing”, filtered through the traumatized memories of a Japanese woman who suffered both (Luo 2012, p. 245). By entwining memories across national lines, Luo resists nationalist closure and humanizes both Chinese and Japanese experiences.

Ultimately, the interplay of historiographic metafiction, counter-memory and postmemory enables Luo to stage history as what he calls a “labyrinth”. In an interview, he likens memory to “Rashomon”, observing that “even events that occurred yesterday become blurred and confusing once they transform into memories, not to mention those that transpired more than half a century ago. Distances from truth widen when memories are recounted. Thus, what defines truth? More often than not, representations shape our understanding of truth” (Zhou 2018, p. 199). Building on this recognition of representation as inescapable, Under the Sun does not memorialize the past by offering resolution, but by dramatizing the tension between memory and forgetting, representation and truth. Literature here becomes an ethical experiment: to reimagine suppressed histories, to bear witness across generations, and to remind us of the fragile responsibility of narrating trauma.

4. Critical Humanism and the Burden of Ethical Remembrance

In the preface to Orientalism, Edward Said emphasizes that humanism is the only and final resistance of human beings against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history (Said 2003, p. xxii). While acknowledging critiques of traditional humanism—especially its liberal aspect—as Eurocentric and universalizing by post-modern and poststructural critics, Said (ibid.) nevertheless insists on its value as a commitment to mutual learning among civilizations. Instead of succumbing to the “manufactured clash of civilizations”, he urges us “to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together”. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, I call the humanism that Said envisions “critical humanism”: a practice that rejects the myth of the universal man, embraces multiplicity, and insists on the dialectics of subjecthood and subjection. At its core lies the Levinasian face-to-face encounter with the other—an encounter that resists objectification, refuses totalization, and grounds justice in responsibility (Levinas 1969, p. 93). Critical humanism, therefore, is not a notoriously naïve universalism but an ethical orientation that affirms the irreducible singularity of others.

Yet as Nguyen reminds us, ethical remembrance demands more than acknowledging our own humanity; it requires recognizing “the stereoscopic simultaneity of human and inhuman” in both ourselves and others (Nguyen 2016, p. 100). To practice critical humanism is therefore to risk historical discomfort and to bear the psychic shadows that such recognition entails. The cost of ethical remembrance lies specifically here: confronting truths that destabilize the self, refusing consoling certainties, and carrying the emotional weight of recognizing both humanity and inhumanity in self and other.

It is precisely this burden that Luo Weizhang dramatizes in Under the Sun through the figure of Huang Xiaoyang, whose lifelong quest to reconstruct personal histories ultimately leads to his death. Unlike colleagues who treat history as data in service of national victory, Xiaoyang insists that memory must honor the irreducible individual. In a conference speech, he contrasts the “coldness” of statistics with the “warmth” of individual recollection, urging historians to write history that does not erase the human (Luo 2012, pp. 287–89). Yet this conviction isolates him: his peers mock him for being “too literary”, and even his wife Yunqiu grows estranged from what she sees as his enslavement to the past. His attempt to imagine the inner world of the Japanese soldier who killed his great-grandmother is dismissed as both futile and dangerous. His colleagues even insist with chilling candor: “If the battlefield were pushed into Tokyo and a frail old Japanese woman was struggling along the street, they—as soldiers of a warring nation—would shoot her without hesitation. And after firing, they would stamp on her back once, twice, three times, or countless times, for no other reason than that she was an enemy” (ibid., p. 289).

By shifting the imagined battlefield to Tokyo, Luo exposes the logic of this nationalist stance: it asserts one’s own humanity by denying the humanity of the enemy, while refusing to recognize the inhumanity within the self. Against this, Xiaoyang’s quest seeks not facts alone but an ethical orientation toward the other. He wants to understand the Japanese soldier not to excuse him or perpetuate hostility, but to recover the human heart that persists even within atrocity (ibid., p. 211). Here Luo stages a Levinasian gesture of refusing to demonize the enemy. Ethical remembrance, in this sense, requires us to see not only the humanity of victims but also the traces of humanity in perpetrators, as well as the inhuman impulses within ourselves.

Xiaoyang’s pursuit intersects most powerfully with the life of the character An Jing/An Zhiwei—born Inoue Yasuko in Hiroshima. Her trajectory dramatizes the very difficulty of sustaining critical humanism across national, cultural, and emotional divides. Yasuko first came to China with her family’s beer business, adopting the Chinese name An Jing. When her family returned to Hiroshima before the fall of Nanjing, she chose instead to remain in China, migrating with student refugees to Chongqing. During five and a half years of bombings, she joined the ambulance corps, saving victims and even once running toward a firebomb in defiance and atonement. Spiritually and morally, she became Chinese: a woman who risked her life against her country’s militarism and who loved Huang Bodao, Xiaoyang’s uncle.

Yet on 6 August 1945, Hiroshima’s destruction returned her to an impossible position. Bodao rejoiced, but for her, his joy mirrored the annihilation of her hometown. In her posthumous papers, she confessed that her love vanished, just as Hiroshima and all people she knew vanished in the nuclear blast (ibid., p. 297). She recalls that “her heart was consumed by grief and fury. The atomic bomb had been dropped by the United States, a power half a world away. But Huang Bodao was right before her. And so she poured all her anguish onto him, crying out that she was Japanese, and that Hiroshima was her home” (ibid., p. 297).4 In this moment, the devastation of her city and the loss of her love became inseparable. Torn between the two worlds she inhabited, she reclaimed her Japanese identity and returned to Hiroshima, mourning both her family and the impossibility of belonging wholly to either nation. Ten years later, she returned to Chongqing as An Zhiwei, beginning yet another life. Her three names—Yasuko, An Jing, An Zhiwei—mark phases of rebirth, trauma, and reinvention. Through her, Luo dramatizes the porousness of national boundaries, the possibility of ethical transformation, and the double bind of remembering both one’s own suffering and the suffering of others.

Xiaoyang’s confrontation with An Jing’s identity precipitates the collapse of his search. For years he resisted verification, circling around hints that she was Japanese, as if ambiguity itself could preserve the openness he sought. But when the truth became undeniable, it shattered the fragile space he had built. His despair reflected, on one hand, the derision of his peers, who dismissed his emphasis on warmth and humanity as sentimental, signaling his isolation within the very discipline to which he had devoted his life. On the other hand, it stemmed from the devastating recognition that An Jing/An Zhiwei embodied the paradox of critical humanism: both victim and enemy, rescuer and aggressor, self and other. In her, the simultaneity of human and inhuman was no longer abstract but inscribed in the body of someone intimately tied to his own family’s trauma.

As his friend Yang Shengquan observes: “Human beings are unable to bear too many truths. The mission of historians is not to show us all the truths but, instead, to point out the truth that we, as human beings, can endure” (ibid., p. 269). Xiaoyang’s suicide, then, was not triggered by a single revelation but by a collision with truths he could not integrate—truths about history, about others, and about himself. To recognize Anjing/An Zhiwei as both the Japanese other and a woman who had loved, suffered, and atoned in China was to confront the contradiction at the heart of his project. Her life demonstrates the possibility of crossing boundaries, but his inability to bear this truth reveals the psychic limit of ethical remembrance.

Luo thereby dramatizes the paradox of ethical remembrance: to remember ethically is to resist erasure and to recognize both humanity and inhumanity in self and other, but this responsibility can overwhelm the very subject who embraces it. If official historiography seeks closure, certainty, and victory, Under the Sun insists on the irresolvable trauma and the fragility of the human subject who bears witness. Literature takes on the burden that history cannot: it creates a space for contradiction, stages the collapse of certainty, and insists on relationality rather than resolution. Where history risks becoming either cold data or nationalistic triumph, fiction keeps memory ethical precisely because it remains unfinished. In this sense, Luo’s novel performs what Said calls humanism’s final resistance—not through universal claims, but through the fragile, difficult, and often unbearable work of facing the other.

5. Reframing Global Memory: From Chongqing to Transnational Debates

Having traced the psychological cost of ethical remembrance in Luo Weizhang’s Under the Sun, we can now situate the novel within the broader landscape of global WWII memory. As I noted in the outset, this landscape has been overwhelmingly structured around the European battlefields and the twin traumas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Aerial bombings in Germany and England and, especially, the nuclear bombings have become metonyms for ethical debates about modern warfare: technological violence, civilian vulnerability, the politics of testimony, and the dialectics of memory.

By contrast, the air raids on Chongqing—lasting for five and a half years and killing tens of thousands—have all but disappeared from global consciousness. This erasure is not accidental, as I mentioned earlier. It reflects the unfinished projects of deimperialization and decolonization in East Asia, the silences of the Cold War, and the geopolitical structures that privilege certain sites of trauma over others. The fading of Chongqing, in other words, is a political forgetting rather than a sign of historical insignificance.

It is precisely here that Luo’s novel makes a crucial intervention. By weaving individual testimonies into the form of historiographic metafiction, Under the Sun insists that Chongqing belongs within the global archive of WWII trauma. The raids it depicts parallel Hiroshima and Nagasaki in their deliberate targeting of civilians with bombs now classified as weapons of mass destruction (Maeda 2009, p. 142). At the same time, they complicate the moral economy that casts Japan solely as victim. Through the figure of An Jing/An Zhiwei/Yasuko—a Japanese woman who suffers both in Chongqing and in Hiroshima—Luo highlights how trauma crosses national boundaries, binding Chinese and Japanese together in overlapping experiences of violence, guilt, and mourning.

Positioning Chongqing within transnational debates unsettles the binary of victim and perpetrator and pushes memory studies toward what Michael Rothberg calls “multidirectional memory”. In Rothberg’s formulation, memory is not a zero-sum competition in which the remembrance of one trauma displaces another, but a field of “ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” (Rothberg 2009, p. 3). Remembering Chongqing does not diminish Hiroshima; rather, it enables a fuller reckoning with both. In this sense, Luo’s novel extends the critical humanist emphasis on relationality and openness to the other. It urges comparative trauma studies to incorporate Chinese experiences of bombing alongside European and Japanese cases, complicating our frameworks of trauma, testimony, and justice.

What is at stake, then, is more than the recovery of a forgotten episode. Under the Sun demonstrates how Chinese literature can expand and reframe the field of memory studies, offering a counterpoint to Euro-American and Japan-centered narratives. By foregrounding the ethics of remembrance, Luo makes visible the shadows of Chongqing and insists that they, too, belong to the world’s memory of war. In so doing, the novel not only amplifies an overlooked history but also gestures toward a more genuinely global memory studies—one that emerges from the dialogic interplay of multiple, entangled pasts.

6. Conclusions

Under the Sun closes with a paradox suggested by its title: wherever there is light, there are also shadows. This image captures not only the novel’s aesthetic but also the ethical burden of remembrance. To recall histories of violence is to invite illumination—an act of justice, care, and openness to the other. But it also means confronting shadows: the psychic cost of memory, the impossibility of full knowledge, and the temptation to forget—not only of the humanity of others but also the inhumanity that may reside within ourselves.

In the novel’s postscript, the narrator records the completion of his work on Xiaoyang, coinciding with Yunqiu’s exhibition of paintings on the Chongqing bombings. Refusing to display them in a museum, she insists they be shown in a public square so that ordinary people might remember the past. Each canvas depicts a broken face—some with one eye, others with three, five, or even eight eyes. However fragmented, each face still sees (Luo 2012, p. 310). These multiplied eyes allow Yunqiu to finally “see through” her ex-husband and herself, and they invite both viewers and, I would add, readers of the novel to look differently: to see with and for the other, whether Chinese or Japanese, who endured the devastation of war. As Levinas (1969, p. 23) reminds us, “Ethics is an optics”: to imagine ethically is to reorient our vision toward the face of the other and welcome the other.

Huang Xiaoyang’s suicide dramatizes the limits of human endurance in bearing witness, while Yunqiu’s paintings gesture toward the possibility of seeing otherwise—of multiplying perspectives so that memory might remain a shared, unfinished task. Despite its psychic cost, critical humanism offers a framework for resisting closure: it deconstructs official history, unsettles nationalist certainties, and embodies a fragile but necessary care that crosses boundaries.

Read through this lens, Under the Sun is more than a counternarrative to official history. It performs a literary practice of ethical remembrance that foregrounds relationality and responsibility even across enemy lines. By humanizing both self and other, it unsettles the nationalist logics that too often govern war memory. At the same time, situating Under the Sun within global debates on WWII memory demonstrates how Chinese literature can reshape the geography of remembrance. The bombings of Chongqing, long marginalized in global consciousness, deserve recognition alongside Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and European battlefields—not as a rival claim, but as part of “multidirectional memory”, where remembering one history enables remembrance of others (Rothberg 2009).

Luo’s novel is not entirely without company. Other contemporary Chinese writers have also sought to reconstruct the memory of Chongqing’s devastation. Xiong Mingguo’s Chongqing! Chongqing! dramatizes the collective endurance of the city under siege, while Fan Wen’s The Eyes of Chongqing explores the bombings through a blend of documentary detail and fictional testimony (Xiong 2015; Fan 2017). Each of these texts retrieves suppressed histories and probes the ethics of remembering violence. What distinguishes Under the Sun, however, is its sustained focus on the intimate, psychological toll of remembrance and its insistence on confronting both self and other across enemy lines.

Ultimately, Luo’s novel compels us to reckon with both the necessity and the impossibility of memory. Its vision of critical humanism insists that remembrance must remain ethically open—attentive to one’s own suffering and that of others. If sunshine brings illumination, its shadows remind us of the fragility and cost of such work. To face these shadows is not to despair but to recognize, as Luo suggests, that in searching for the stories of our ancestors we may also catch sight of ourselves—and, just as importantly, the lives of others (Wei 2011).