Minnie Vautrin
Minnie Vautrin | |
---|---|
Born | 27 September 1886 Secor |
Died | 14 May 1941 (aged 54) Indianapolis |
Resting place | Shepherd |
Alma mater | |
Occupation | Missionary |
Employer |
Wilhelmina "Minnie" Vautrin (September 27, 1886 – May 14, 1941) was an American missionary, diarist, educator and president of
After surviving in the Nanking Safety Zone from 1937, she returned to the United States in May 1940.[2] One year later, she sealed her house tightly, turned on the gas and committed suicide in America due to extreme stress and trauma from the Nanjing Massacre.[2] Vautrin was awarded the Order of the Blue Jade[3] by the Chinese government for her humanitarian work during the Nanjing Massacre.[4]
Early life and education
Wilhelmina Vautrin was born in
When Minnie was six years old, her mother died of unrecorded causes. After this, Minnie was sent to several different foster homes. Three years later, the courts permitted her to return home to her father, where she assumed many household chores as well as excelled in school. A teacher later remembered Vautrin, commenting that "Minnie was a born student...She could excel in most anything she tried, and was a genuinely Christian girl."[6] After primary school, Vautrin attended Secor High School. During that time, Vautrin worked several part-time jobs to save for further schooling, as well as volunteered at local churches.[citation needed]
Vautrin was accepted to
Missionary career
The university pastor recommended Vautrin to the recruiters of the Foreign Christian Missionary Society, who requested that she replace a teacher in China.[7] Iris Chang, writer of The Rape of Nanking, notes that Vautrin was "Tall and Handsome in her youth, with long dark hair, she was a vivacious and popular woman who attracted numerous suitors," but who decided that instead of getting married she would become a missionary.[9]
When Vautrin received this request in 1912, Christian missions to China, facilitated by groups such as the Foreign Christian Missionary Society, had begun to flourish as a result of the treaties ending the
In 1918, after serving for a period of six years in China, Minnie returned to the United States for furlough. She enrolled in
At Ginling College, Vautrin decided to extend her one-year agreement. She created courses on education administration and management, an innovative student-teaching program, and handled the planning and funding of the new campus by the West Gate of Nanjing. During the fall semester of 1922, Vautrin hosted a fundraiser to build an elementary school for 150 local, mostly illiterate children who lived in the homes near Ginling College's campus. The biographer Hua-ling Hu writes that, while at Ginling College, Minnie "attempted to lead the students to fulfill the spirit of Ginling's motto, 'abundant life,' by making them walk out of the 'ivory tower' to see and understand the suffering of the poor and by encouraging them to devote their lives for the betterment of the society."[11] However, some of the college's staff members and students did not support Vautrin's methods, and found her overbearing, conservative, and self-righteous.[10] This may be due to her "watchful and interfering administrative style."[10]
In 1926, after Vautrin returned from a brief visit to her family in America, the
However, Vautrin remained at Ginling College, and served as its president until the Nationalist government mandated that all colleges in China have native-born presidents. She was replaced by a Ginling graduate, Dr. Wu Yi-fang, in September 1928. In 1931, Vautrin returned to the United States on furlough and in order to care for her aging father. She returned to Ginling in 1932. On June 21, 1937, Vautrin received word that her father, Edmond, had died at the age of 83.[citation needed]
Upon hearing of the
I personally feel that I cannot leave... Men are not asked to leave their ships when they are in danger and women are not asked to leave their children.
By September, only three Ginling students remained on campus. Due to financial strains, the salaries of the fifteen remaining faculty members at Ginling College were halved. Anticipating a direct Japanese assault on the city, the foreigners who chose to stay in Nanjing organized the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone (ICNSZ) on November 15, 1937. The committee requested that the Japanese and Chinese governments treat a refugee zone of Nanjing as neutral, and both nations agreed and granted the ICNSZ neutrality. The Japanese placed one condition on the neutrality, requiring that the neutral zone would be made void if Chinese military personnel were found hiding within it.[5]
In the first few nights of the Japanese attack on the city, 850 refugees came to Ginling College, which was designated as one of the twenty-five refugee camps in Nanjing.
Oh, God, control the cruel beastliness of the soldiers in Nanking tonight, comfort the heartbroken mothers and fathers whose innocent sons have been shot today, and guard the young women and girls through the long agonizing hours of this night. Speed the day when wars shall be no more. When thy Kingdom will come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
When all other refugee camps closed on February 4, 1938, a large number of women and children again sought refuge at the college and a census in mid-March showed 3,310 refugees were resident there.[citation needed] Vautrin would patrol the campus grounds and repel incursions of Japanese soldiers into the college and rescue and care for refugees. She saw to the burial of the dead and the reception of newborn babies and was successful in tracing missing husbands and sons. Industrial or crafts classes were provided for women who had lost their husbands, so that they might support themselves.[12] One hundred women graduated under this program.[12]
Vautrin recounted the war in her diary in 1937:
There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from language school last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night—one of the girls was but 12 years old. Food, bedding and money have been taken from people. … I suspect every house in the city has been opened, again and yet again, and robbed. Tonight a truck passed in which there were eight or ten girls, and as it passed they called out "救命!救命! Jiuming! Jiuming!"—save our lives. The occasional shots that we hear out on the hills, or on the street, make us realize the sad fate of some man—very probably not a soldier.
On 19 December:
In my wrath, I wished I had the power to smite them for their dastardly work. How ashamed women of Japan would be if they knew these tales of horror.[11]
In 1938, she wrote in her diary that she had to go to the Japanese embassy repeatedly from December 18 to January 13 to get proclamations to prohibit Japanese soldiers from committing crimes at Ginling because the soldiers tore the documents up before taking women away.[11] Near the end of her service at Ginling College, Vautrin wrote several entries that lacked her previous determination and optimism. Among these was April 14, 1940:
I'm about at the end of my energy. Can no longer forge ahead and make plans for the work, for on every hand there seems to be obstacles of some kind.
In the spring of 1940, suffering from severe stress probably due to worry about the fate of Ginling College and its students,[5] Vautrin was accompanied back to the United States by a colleague. After attempting to commit suicide using sleeping pills, Vautrin appeared to recover for a short while. However, she later committed suicide by turning on the gas stove in her apartment in Indianapolis. She was 54 years old.[13] One entry in her journal, recorded shortly before her death, displays her devotion to Ginling College and the people of China, whom she served for 28 years as a Christian missionary:
Had I ten perfect lives, I would give them all to China.
Resting Place:
Salt River Cemetery, 9433 South Shepherd Rd., Shepherd, MI 48883, Michigan, USA
Legacy
Vautrin was awarded the Order of Brilliant Jade on July 30, 1938, by the Chinese government for her sacrifices during the Nanjing Massacre.[14] Her work saving the lives of Chinese civilians during the massacre is recounted in the biographical book, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking, written by historian Hua-Ling Hu.[11] In the 2007 documentary film Nanking, Vautrin was portrayed by actress Mariel Hemingway, who recited excerpts from Vautrin's diary.
The
The hardcore band Hiretsukan honors Wilhelmina Vautrin in their song "Song For Wilhelmina Vautrin" on their 2005 record End States.[16][17]
Other
She is depicted in Lu Chuan's 2009 film City of Life and Death. In the 2009 film John Rabe, Minnie Vautrin is replaced by the fictive Valérie Dupres of an "International Girls College" as an important fellow Nanking Safety Zone committee member. In Nanjing Requiem, a 2011 novel by Chinese-born writer and Boston University professor Ha Jin, Ha writes from the perspective of a fictionalized assistant to Vautrin named Anling Gao. Minnie Vautrin's diaries provided inspiration for the novella 13 Flowers of Nanjing written by Geling Yan, which was the basis for the 2011 film The Flowers of War (金陵十三釵; pinyin: Jīnlíng Shísān Chāi), directed by Zhang Yimou.
See also
- Finding Iris Chang
- Nanking
- John Magee (priest)
- John Rabe
Citations
- ^ Van Maren, Jonathan. "Minnie Vuatrin: The Woman Who Would Not Leave Nanking" Archived 2015-05-26 at the Wayback Machine, Canadian Center for Bio-ethical Reform, April 20, 2012.
- ^ a b "Minnie Vautrin".
- ^ "Memories of the Nanjing Massacre · Minnie Vautrin's Letters · The View from Ginling". mct.barnard.edu. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
- ^ "Memories of the Nanjing Massacre · Minnie Vautrin's Letters · the View from Ginling".
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Masser, K. "Independent Research in Nanjing, China" (PDF). Depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu. Retrieved 2016-06-04.
- ^ a b Hu, Hua-ling. American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000, p. 3.
- ^ a b Lu, Suping. "Introduction". Terror in Minnie Vautrin's Nanjing. Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 2008: xix.
- ^ ISBN 0674627342. Retrieved December 23, 2014.
- ^ Chang, Iris, The Rape of Nanking: The forgotten holocaust of World War II, Basic Books, A Subsidiary of Perseus Books, L.L.C., 1997 p. 130
- ^ a b c Feng, Jin. The Making of a Family Saga: Ginling College. Albany: SUNY University Press, 2009, p. 28.
- ^ ISBN 0-8093-2303-6, pp. 90, 95-96.
- ^ a b Vautrin, Minnie; Shui-fang, Tsen; Hualing, Hu; Lian-hong, Zhang (1937). The Undaunted Women of Nanking: The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang. Carbondale: Southern Illinois. p. 146.
- ^ Lu, Suping & Minnie Vautrin, Terror in Minnie Vautrin's Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38, 2008, University of Illinois Press. pp. xxvii-xxviii
- ^ ""女难民的守护神"—明妮·魏特琳" [Patron Saint of female refugees - Minnie Vautrin]. 南京大学拉贝与国际安全区纪念馆 (in Chinese (China)).
- ^ "23 Missionary Monuments". Peace.maripo.com. Retrieved 2016-06-04.
- ^ "End States". 2008-04-01. Archived from the original on April 1, 2008. Retrieved 2012-10-12.
- ^ "End States ::: Lyrics". 2008-04-01. Archived from the original on April 1, 2008. Retrieved 2012-10-12.
General bibliography
- ISBN 0-14-027744-7(paperback)
- Hu, Hua-Ling, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin. Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8093-2303-6
- Lutz, Jessie Gregory. "Vautrin, Minnie" American National Biography (1999) Vautrin, Minnie (1886-1941), missionary to China
- Secor Centennial Committee, "The Minnie Vautrin Story," in The Secor Centennial Book, 1857–1957, 1957
- Treudley, Mary Bosworth. This stinging exultation (Asian folklore and social life monographs) (1972)
Primary sources
- Hu, Hua-ling, and Zhang Lian-hong. Undaunted Women of Nanking: The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang (Southern Illinois Press, 2010).
- Vautrin, Minnie. Terror in Minnie Vautrin's Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937–38 (University of Illinois Press, 2008).
Further reading
Novels about the Nanjing Massacre, inspired by or featuring Vautrin:
- Galbraith, Douglas (2006). A Winter in China.
- Kent, Kevin (2006). Nanking, BookSurge Publishing. ISBN 1-4196-1602-1.
External links
- "Illinois missionary became heroine in China"
- "Google books copy of Minnie Vautin's diary"
- Original diaries of Vautrin, The Nanking Massacre Project, Yale Divinity School Library
- Hu, Hua-ling. "Minnie Vautrin". National Women's History Museum. 2016.