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 that time, had little apparent knowledge of or interest in Sino-Japanese political and military affairs (with some exceptions, such as the Han Fuju incident, p. 41) until they affected her directly. Firstly, foreign observers at that time were hindered by their inadequate grasp of East Asian languages; Vautrin had some knowledge of Chinese, but she bemoaned her inability to communicate throughout the diary. Second, like other foreigners, Vautrin was primarily focused on her religious mission, not the development of Chinese nationalism and its conflict with the expanding Japanese empire. At times, Vautrin seems at a loss when she notices despondency among her Chinese friends following the Nationalist retreat and the establishment of a provisional government under Japanese control (p. 102). Although her feelings for the Nationalist government were unclear, raising the collaborationist regime's flag and burning New Life Movement documents (p. 139) did not seem to disturb Vautrin.

Vautrin was most pleased when there was order, even if it was under the Japanese authorities. Thus, placing Vautrin's text within the testimonial literature of the war may lead to some confusion on the part of readers unfamiliar with Chinese and Japanese accounts of this historical event. While Vautrin indeed decried the horrible acts of Japanese troops in the city, she also expressed great respect for some Japanese working for the collaborationist regime, sympathy for the Japanese people (whom she believed were kept in the dark about the nature of the war), and even applauded the “discipline” of the infamous Japanese military police (kempeitai, see her letter on p. 113). These sentiments can be explained by her relatively isolated view of the mammoth struggle going on around her, but it is also a problem with any study of Asia that relies primarily on the accounts of foreigners.

These reservations aside, as a researcher who uses many wartime diaries I found the book to have many points of interest. Firstly, the diary itself was intended to be an official account of the religious mission and the school, not a “private” diary. Like many of the “official” diaries I have read in China, Japan, and the US, however, the author fails to restrict herself to formal record, often using the space for personal reflection, with conflicting narrative styles. Even though Vautrin, as a Christian, abhorred violence (against Chinese or Japanese), she occasionally revealed sympathy for anti-Japanese patriots (p. 211). Her respect for her colleagues and concern for the welfare of the victims of war (both in China and Japan) show that missionary work, especially education, could attract some of the most high-minded people. Unfortunately, it was probably Vautrin's sincere, almost naïve devotion to her vision of building the Kingdom of God that made her especially vulnerable to the psychological effects of war. The walls of Ginling could not keep out the ugly reality of the conflict, and Vautrin's Christianity was, at this moment, an insufficient vehicle to express her rage and despair at witnessing the systematic and even cynical victimization of non-combatants in Nanjing. Despite her frequent insistence on the value of faith in times of turmoil, in eventually preferring “death to insanity,” Vautrin became yet another idealistic person struck down by the massacre.

This book will immediately communicate the severity of the massacre to a general audience, but readers should also be aware of the limitations of such an account. Above all, the terrible psychological effects of the Japanese invasion on such a good-hearted person come across vividly, and are difficult to forget.