Angol
In 1937, with the Japanese poised to invade Nanjing, Minnie Vautrin - an American missionary and the dean of Jinling Women's College - decides to remain at the school, convinced that her American citizenship will safeguard the welfare of the Chinese men and women who work there. She is painfully mistaken. With the onset of the invasion, Minnie oversees the use of the school as a refugee camp that provides shelter, food, medicine, and a home to 10,000 women and children. Even when order and civility are eventually restored, Vautrin remains deeply embattled, and she is haunted by the lives she could not save. Using Vautrin's diaries and the records of other foreigners who witnessed the Japanese occupation, Ha Jin evocatively recreates the terror, the harrowing deprivations, and the menace of unexpected violence that defined life in Nanjing during the occupation. At once epic and intimate, Nanjing Requiem is historical fiction at its most resonant.
