An American hero in Nanking

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

04/19/2010

An American hero in Nanking

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

Illinois native Minnie Vautrin must rank as one of America's greatest unsung heroines. This excellent biography of Vautrin vividly recounts how her superhuman courage prevented Japanese soldiers, wild-eyed with lust and anger, from raping women when they plundered the doomed Chinese city of Nanking in December 1937. That Vautrin stood for dignity during the Rape of Nanking makes her an American idealist in war; her lonely death makes her a tragic figure.

Vautrin was born in Secor, a small farming town in the center of Illinois. Dreaming of being a teacher, Vautrin worked her way through high school and entered college in 1910. The God-fearing prairie girl eventually decided to spread the Bible; she came to the "heathen" Middle Kingdom in 1912.
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