American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin - Hardcover

Hu, Hua-ling

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809323036 ISBN 13: 9780809323036

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Synopsis

The Japanese army’s brutal four-month occupation of the city of Nanking during the 1937 Sino-Japanese War is known, for good reason, as “the rape of Nanking.” As they slaughtered an estimated three hundred thousand people, the invading soldiers raped more than twenty thousand women—some estimates run as high as eighty thousand. Hua-ling Hu presents here the amazing untold story of the American missionary Minnie Vautrin, whose unswerving defiance of the Japanese protected ten thousand Chinese women and children and made her a legend among the Chinese people she served.

Vautrin, who came to be known in China as the “Living Goddess” or the “Goddess of Mercy,” joined the Foreign Christian Missionary Society and went to China during the Chinese Nationalist Revolution in 1912. As dean of studies at Ginling College in Nanking, she devoted her life to promoting Chinese women’s education and to helping the poor.

At the outbreak of the war in July 1937, Vautrin defied the American embassy’s order to evacuate the city. After the fall of Nanking in December, Japanese soldiers went on a rampage of killing, burning, looting, rape, and torture, rapidly reducing the city to a hell on earth. On the fourth day of the occupation, Minnie Vautrin wrote in her diary: “There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. . . . Oh, God, control the cruel beastliness of the soldiers in Nanking.”

When the Japanese soldiers ordered Vautrin to leave the campus, she replied: “This is my home. I cannot leave.” Facing down the blood-stained bayonets constantly waved in her face, Vautrin shielded the desperate Chinese who sought asylum behind the gates of the college. Vautrin exhausted herself defying the Japanese army and caring for the refugees after the siege ended in March 1938. She even helped the women locate husbands and sons who had been taken away by the Japanese soldiers. She taught destitute widows the skills required to make a meager living and provided the best education her limited sources would allow to the children in desecrated Nanking.

Finally suffering a nervous breakdown in 1940, Vautrin returned to the United States for medical treatment. One year later, she ended her own life. She considered herself a failure.

Hu bases her biography on Vautrin’s correspondence between 1919 and 1941 and on her diary, maintained during the entire siege, as well as on Chinese, Japanese, and American eyewitness accounts, government documents, and interviews with Vautrin’s family.

About this title

About the Author

Hua-ling Hu has taught Chinese language and literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she received a doctorate in history, and modern Chinese history at the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. She served as an editor of the Journal of Studies of Japanese Aggression Against China for six years. Her publications include three books and over eighty short stories, essays, and historical papers. In 1998 she received the prestigious Chinese Literary and Arts Medal of Honor in Biography in Taiwan for the Chinese language edition of her biography of Minnie Vautrin.

Reviews

Minnie Vautrin was a Christian missionary, a teacher and an administrator at Ginling College in Nanking. Having arrived in China in 1912 at the age of 26, she worked tirelessly for nearly 30 years to expand and maintain the school, to educate Chinese women and to improve the lot of the city's poor. But she served her adopted country best during the Japanese occupation of Nanking in 1937, when the city and its citizens were ravaged by the Japanese. During the occupation, Japanese soldiers raped an estimated 20,000 women; that number would have been higher were it not for Vautrin. Turning the Ginling campus into a sanctuary for 10,000 women and children, she created a small international safety zone. She stood up to the soldiers who demanded women to brutalize, and she did her best to negotiate with their superiors to keep her haven safe. She also brought order and hope to the refugees' lives by organizing classes, as well as Christmas and other celebrations. In the early 1940s, however, Vautrin, feeling like a failure, committed suicide. Unfortunately, despite the drama of Vautrin's story and Hu's use of Vautrin's own letters and diaries, the prose here is dry and almost dispassionate, often bogging down in the details of school administration. Iris Chang's recent The Rape of Nanking is a far more poignant account of this period, to which this book mostly serves as a supplement. Photos, maps. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Where Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking (1997) circulated or where there's curiosity about the work of American missionaries in China before World War II, this biography of Minnie Vautrin, a missionary and educator who displayed courage and compassion in sheltering Chinese women and children at the women's college she headed in the early days of the Japanese occupation, will find readers. Vautrin grew up in rural central Illinois. She worked her way through college and, later, graduate school, taking up elementary education in China in 1912. In 1919, Vautrin was named interim administrator of Nanking's Ginling College, an educational institute for Chinese women, controlled and supported by several Protestant denominations. Hu's primary sources are Vautrin's correspondence (1919^-41) and the diary she maintained during the Nanking siege; the author also draws on government documents, eyewitness accounts by Chinese, Japanese, and American observers, and interviews with Vautrin's family. Hu's style is not graceful, but she succeeds in imparting a clear enough sense of Chinese history to place Vautrin's notable career in context. Mary Carroll

Amidst the rape and carnage of the Nanking Massacre (1937-38), in which more than 300,000 Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese troops, a score of Western residents labored tirelessly to save the lives of Chinese trapped in the doomed capital. The name of Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary educator, is indelibly inscribed on this honor list of foreigners who saw China as their home and Chinese as their fellow humans. Vautrin, a Midwestern farm girl called to missionary service, devoted her life to the education of Chinese women at Ginling College, one of the better-known of scores of Christian colleges in China. In the cauldron of horror that Nanking became, Vautrin, a tower of moral strength, turned Ginling into a sanctuary for 10,000 women and girls, who honored her as their Goddess of Mercy. Hu tells Vautrin's inspirational story in spare but powerful prose. This book deserves a wide audience and belongs in every public and academic library.
-Steven I. Levine,Univ. of Montana, Missoula
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809323036
• ISBN 13: 9780809323036
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232