American ‘Goddess of Mercy’ in the Nanjing Massacre: Minnie Vautrin and the Afterlife of Her Wartime Diary

ABSTRACT

This article examines the life and diary of the ‘American Goddess of Mercy’—Minnie Vautrin, who managed an all-women refugee camp during the notorious Nanjing Massacre in China. Starting with a concise biography of Vautrin, this article probes her embodiment of cross-cultural identities and pioneering role in Chinese women’s educational reform. In particular, I highlight the dual function of her wartime diary and how her descriptions of sexual violations unveiled the convoluted gender and racial power politics in the refugee camp. For the past few decades Vautrin’s diary has inspired a myriad of literary and cinematic works featuring the Nanjing Massacre transnationally. I examine the afterlife of Vautrin’s diary by mainly focusing on the characterisations of Vautrin and Chinese heroines in a constellation of novels and films which manage to reimagine stories out of the silence, gaps, and aporia in her diary. I contend that such a way of writing out of silence and fissures in Vautrin’s life writings revisits the American Goddess of Mercy myth and gives voice to the violated Chinese women who are usually marginalised in official historical discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Minnie Vautrin
• wartime diary
• the Nanjing Massacre
• refugee camp
• afterlife

Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by the Institute of Nanjing Massacre History and International Peace (No. 19YJY014).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On December 13, 1937, the invading Japanese imperialist Army occupied the Republic of China's capital city, Nanjing, and launched more than forty days of mass murders, looting, and raping on Chinese POWs and civilians inside Nanjing city. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, known as the Tokyo Trial (May 1946–November 1948), estimated that at least 200,000 Chinese people were killed and approximately 20,000 Chinese women were raped during the six weeks after the fall of Nanjing (Yoshida 2006, 51).

2 For more information about the discovery of Vautrin’s diary, see Hu and Zhang 2010, 14–17.

3 For more information about Vautrin’s biography, see Hu 2000.

4 ‘Mother says pain of daughter's death 'will never subside’’. http://www.china.org.cn/china/2015-09/07/content_36515120.htm.

5 Lu Chuan said that at the beginning of writing the screen script, he read a lot of historical records, but the most inspiring one was Minnie Vautrin's diary. Though he admired John Rabe's kindness, Lu Chuan claims that Minnie Vautrin and Iris Chang were the greatest heroines in the historical memories of the Nanjing Massacre.

6 For more information about this incident, see ‘Woman detained in Nanjing for enshrining Japanese war criminals at temple; pure individual act out of selfish motive, probe says’. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202207/1271305.shtml.

Additional information

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Pingfan Zhang

Pingfan Zhang teaches in the College of Foreign Languages of Zhejiang Gongshang University. Her research interests include Nanjing Massacre studies, Asian American literature, gender and race studies. Her recent articles appeared in Camera Obscura, ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Literatures in Chinese, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video. She is at work on a manuscript about the transnational literature and cinema portraying the Nanjing Massacre.