Chapter 10: The Nanjing Safety Zone: The Dilemma of Creating a Protective Wall

Robert Frost used the concept of a wall in his blank verse poem Mending Walls to represent the divider that separates his neighbor’s property from his own. Metaphorically, Frost’s wall could be any kind of a barrier, physically or mentally, that isolates one group of people from another. Mending Walls poses multilayers of dilemma: Do we need a wall to ensure a good relationship with our neighbors? If good fences make good neighbors, what should we wall in and what should we wall out?

The implications of Frost’s Mending Walls echo the dilemma that two-dozen¹ westerners faced when they created a walled area inside Nanjing, the old capital city of China, in order to protect Chinese noncombatants when the Japanese Imperial Army relentlessly murdered more than 300,000 noncombatants within a six-week period in Nanjing that was known as the Nanjing Atrocities (December 1937 to February 1938).