Content area
Full Text
by Hua-ling Hu, with a Foreword by Paul Simon. Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. xxiv + 184 pp. US$24.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8093-2303-6
During the Nanking Massacre of 1937-1938, about a dozen Westerners, at the risk of their own lives, defied the Japanese army and saved the lives of thousands of Chinese civilians. Minnie Vautrin (1886-1941), as the only female member of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, devoted herself to the unique and dangerous mission of protecting Chinese women from the invading Japanese soldiers. Out of their gratitude to Vautrin, many of the refugees came to call her their "Living Goddess." Due to the cold war politics of the world following WWII, however, the Nanking Massacre became what some call a "forgotten holocaust" (Iris Chang's 1997 The Rape of Nanking ). As a result, as in the case of other Western heroes in the massacre, the story of Vautrin was buried in the memory of a dwindling number of survivors, and the documents about her heroic deeds were left collecting dust in the archives of Yale University. Hua-ling Hu's American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking is the first complete biography of Minnie Vautrin. (An earlier Chinese version of the book was published in 1997 in Taiwan.) As such, it is not only a welcome part of an ongoing, albeit long overdue, academic effort to do history justice, but also a valuable contribution to the current discourse on Japan's war memories.
The preface...