Hua-ling Hu has taught Chinese language and literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she received a doctorate in history, and modern Chinese history at the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. She served as an editor of the Journal of Studies of Japanese Aggression Against China for six years. Her publications include three books and over eighty short stories, essays, and historical papers. In 1998 she received the prestigious Chinese Literary and Arts Medal of Honor in Biography in Taiwan for the Chinese language edition of her biography of Minnie Vautrin.
"Hua-ling Hu has created a powerful, definitive biography of Minnle Vautrin, one of the greatest heroes of World War II. Meticulously researched and poignantly written, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking describes how a courageous missionary defied the Japanese army to save thousands of Chinese lives-at the eventual cost of her own."-Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking "Vautrin, a Midwestern farm girl called to missionary service, devoted her life to the education of Chinese women at Ginling College.... In the cauldron of horror that Nanking became, Vautrin, a tower of moral strength, turned Ginling into a sanctuary for 10,000 women and girls, who honored her as their Goddess of Mercy. Hu tells Vautrin's inspirational story in spare but powerful prose."-Library Journal"
"Hua-ling Hu has created a powerful, definitive biography of Minnle Vautrin, one of the greatest heroes of World War II. Meticulously researched and poignantly written, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking describes how a courageous missionary defied the Japanese army to save thousands of Chinese lives-at the eventual cost of her own."-Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking "Vautrin, a Midwestern farm girl called to missionary service, devoted her life to the education of Chinese women at Ginling College.... In the cauldron of horror that Nanking became, Vautrin, a tower of moral strength, turned Ginling into a sanctuary for 10,000 women and girls, who honored her as their Goddess of Mercy. Hu tells Vautrin's inspirational story in spare but powerful prose."-Library Journal"
Minnie Vautrin was a Christian missionary, a teacher and an administrator at Ginling College in Nanking. Having arrived in China in 1912 at the age of 26, she worked tirelessly for nearly 30 years to expand and maintain the school, to educate Chinese women and to improve the lot of the city's poor. But she served her adopted country best during the Japanese occupation of Nanking in 1937, when the city and its citizens were ravaged by the Japanese. During the occupation, Japanese soldiers raped an estimated 20,000 women; that number would have been higher were it not for Vautrin. Turning the Ginling campus into a sanctuary for 10,000 women and children, she created a small international safety zone. She stood up to the soldiers who demanded women to brutalize, and she did her best to negotiate with their superiors to keep her haven safe. She also brought order and hope to the refugees' lives by organizing classes, as well as Christmas and other celebrations. In the early 1940s, however, Vautrin, feeling like a failure, committed suicide. Unfortunately, despite the drama of Vautrin's story and Hu's use of Vautrin's own letters and diaries, the prose here is dry and almost dispassionate, often bogging down in the details of school administration. Iris Chang's recent The Rape of Nanking is a far more poignant account of this period, to which this book mostly serves as a supplement. Photos, maps. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
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