Minnie Vautrin's Burden-Nanjing, China
K. Masser Independent Research in Nanjing, China History 7840 “Minnie Vautrin’s Burden” Summer 2011 2 Preface I began working on this research paper as part of an independent reading course that I took as part of my study abroad trip to China in June, 2011. Over the course of one month, I travelled through many different places, including Beijing, Xian, Guilin, Hong Kong, Macau, and Shanghai, but our ‘home base’ was in Nanjing. Initially I was only interested in the history of the city of Nanjing, but after visiting the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, I met Minnie Vautrin. That particular museum was one of the most graphic I’ve ever visited and my experience there was quite profound; it memorialized the victims of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, in heart-wrenching detail. The details of this significant event in Nanjing have been disputed by the Chinese and Japanese governments and have been a source of contention for the last seventy-five years. However, during the last two decades, scholarship on the Rape of Nanking has flourished as previously under-used sources, sometimes translated, became more widely used by scholars, arguably because of the work of Irish Chang. Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII in 1997, on the 65th anniversary of the Massacre. Motivated by the experience of her grandparents and by the dearth of scholarly work on the Massacre, Chang’s bestseller told the story from three perspectives: the Japanese soldiers, the Chinese civilians, and the foreigners in the safety zone.
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