CPUL Release: Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin H.A.

(From the Washington Post review): It’s a lesson for any wordsmith: How do you fashion art from atrocity? How do you take facts that defy credulity — the slaughter of innocents, the orgies of rape, the lingering stink of a landscape of corpses — and offer them up as an act of the imagination? Is it possible to capture an irrational frenzy in a rationally constructed story with a beginning, middle and end?
That is the task Ha Jin has set for himself in “Nanjing Requiem,” a novel that focuses on six terrifying weeks in Nanjing in 1937, when soldiers of Japan’s Imperial Army overran the Chinese capital and loosed a terrible blood lust on a defenseless population. Consider the facts: President Chiang Kai-shek, in his frantic escape from the advancing Japanese, deliberately caused a flood that killed 800,000 of his own countrymen. The mayor of Nanjing hightailed it to higher ground, leaving his wards to their own salvation. Hundreds of thousands were slaughtered; at least 50,000 were raped. Uncountable girls and women were rounded up in harrowing raids and transported to Japanese army brothels. Infants were violated. Ancients were bayoneted. So much blood ran in the rivers that rice — if anyone was still cooking — was pink, with the pronounced ferric flavor of life itself.
Ha Jin is no stranger to history. He documented the Cultural Revolution in his award-winning “Waiting,” a novel about a man who whiles away 18 years until he can marry the woman for whom he has forsaken his wife. He recorded the phenomenon of Asian immigration in “A Good Fall,” his most American of short story collections. He memorialized the Korean War in “War Trash,” a brilliant chronicle of prison behavior that was a finalist for thePulitzer Prize. He has told the Asian American story in a multitude of incarnations. It is as if his whole purpose in writing is to record the business of jarring cultural change.

This time, his hero is an American. Few of us know it, but one of the leading actors in this sorry episode of history was a woman from small-town Illinois. She was a no-nonsense missionary by the name of Minnie Vautrin, who, by chance, happened to be acting dean of a women’s college in Nanjing precisely when it was mortally dangerous to be female in China. “Nanjing Requiem” not only recounts Minnie’s story, it tells about a tiny expatriate community, which, fighting against time, built a Safety Zone, rescued thousands and documented the grisly evidence eventually brought to light in Tokyo’s war crime tribunals.
A rich store of documents informs this fictionalized account, not least the journals of Vautrin herself — hard to beat in their vivid immediacy. Consider this chilling passage from her diary: “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 8 or 10 girls, and as it passed they called out ‘Jiu ming’ ‘Jiu ming’ — save our lives. . . . We are responsible for about 4,000 women and children tonight. We wonder how much longer we can stand this strain.”

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