Eric Allen, an American blues singer active in China recently wrote a song about Fang Dazeng, a Chinese war photographer and correspondent who disappeared after documenting the Lugou Bridge Incident. This event is also known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, an armed encounter in a neighborhood of Beijing on July 7, 1937, during the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. 

A correspondent for Ta Kung Pao, the oldest Chinese-language newspaper in China that is still in circulation today, Fang was the first journalist to report on the incident on spot. He went missing at the age of 25. Some people believe he died during the war. 

On the night of July 7, 1937, Japanese troops stationed near the Lugou Bridge in the southwest of Beijing demanded entry into nearby Wanping County on the pretext of searching for a missing soldier. 

Fang Dazeng (COURTESY OF NEW WORLD PRESS)  

The Chinese military rejected the demand and in retaliation, the Japanese bombed the county seat and the bridge. Historians regard the attack as the beginning of Japan’s full-scale invasion of China, though Japan had invaded northeast China in September 1931. 

Hearing the news, Fang rushed to the bridge and began reporting the offensive. His last known report The Change of the Northern Section of Pinghan Line was from Lixian, a county in Hebei Province in north China, on September 18, 1937. It was also when he disappeared. 

Although his whereabouts have remained a mystery, Fang left behind more than 800 rolls of film, which are of immense value for war studies and for people to gain a deeper understanding of what really happened at that time. 

Photos of soldiers fighting the war, taken by Fang Dazeng (COURTESY OF NEW WORLD PRESS)  

Eric, also an English reviewer at New World Press, has participated in reviewing several books about Fang written by documentary director Feng Xuesong. Eric was impressed with Fang’s legendary life. “I found this young man’s compassion for his country and its people, as well as his ability to capture feeling in photographs, very moving,” Eric said. 

He added that, as powerful as the commitment and loyalty of Fang Dazeng was the persistence of the correspondent’s mother Fang Zhuli and younger sister Fang Chengmin, who both awaited his return, in vain, and safeguarded his photographs despite the risks involved, for the rest of their lives. After his disappearance, his mother had waited for him for 32 years until her death in 1969. 

Fang Dazeng, his mother (first right) and younger sister pose for a picture at their home in Beiping, now Beijing. This is the only existing photo of them together.(COURTESY OF NEW WORLD PRESS)  

Inspired by Fang and his family’s life stories, Eric wrote a song called She Waits, a song about the “incredible strength in loyalty, longing, and love,” according to Eric. The song was written from the perspective of the correspondent. The ‘she’ is primarily his mother and, to a lesser extent, his younger sister. “Both of them ‘waited’ for the return of Fang, but his mother hoped, against all hope, until her final day,” Eric said, “Her incredible commitment to him in always believing he would return really touched me. Out of a mother’s love, Fang Zhuli refused to give up, even after it was clear that Fang Dazeng would never return.” 

The song is also included on his eponymous album, Eric Allen, slated for release in January 2021. 

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon  

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