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In what was undoubtedly a labour of love, Suping Lu has provided a moving account of Wilhelmina "Minnie" Vautrin, an American missionary and educator trapped in Nanjing during the Japanese occupation. In his introduction, Lu identifies the importance of the text as a part of a testimonial literature by witnesses of the Nanjing Massacre and, perhaps most importantly, by individuals who were also citizens of "neutral countries" (p. xvi). Accounts by Chinese and Japanese witnesses are thus presumably more vulnerable to criticism by skeptics of the massacre's severity. Furthermore, Lu explains, previous documentation of the massacre by individuals in the Nanjing Safety Zone (for refugees) did not have the personal appeal of Vautrin's diary.
It is undeniably a powerful account, but I would argue it is mostly so due to the personality of Vautrin, not the facts of the massacre. Vautrin was an intelligent, sensitive, and serious person from the American Midwest, hardworking and earnest - a personality very familiar to me - driven by her faith and love of learning to do good works with relatively little fear. Still, Vautrin, like many foreigners in Nanjing at...