The award-winning author of Waiting and War
Trash returns to his homeland in a searing new novel
that unfurls during one of the darkest moments of the
twentieth century: the Rape of Nanjing.
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 help her safeguard the
welfare of the Chinese men and women who work there. She is
painfully mistaken. In the aftermath of the invasion, the
school becomes a refugee camp for more than ten thousand
homeless women and children, and Vautrin must struggle, day
after day, to intercede on behalf of the hapless victims.
Even when order and civility are eventually restored,
Vautrin remains deeply embattled, and she is haunted by the
lives she could not save.
With extraordinarily
evocative precision, Ha Jin re-creates the terror, the
harrowing deprivations, and the menace of unexpected
violence that defined life in Nanjing during the occupation.
In Minnie Vautrin he has given us an indelible portrait of a
woman whose convictions and bravery prove, in the end, to be
no match for the maelstrom of history.
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