Undaunted Women of Nanking: The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang

Aftermath

166 AFTERMATH  Law and order began to be restored in Nanking in late February of 1938.1 Yet, acts of rape, looting, and murder still occurred in the city, on a smaller scale, even in 1939. Incidents of Japanese soldiers’ brutalities were prevalent in the occupied city, and people lived in fear under the military rule. For instance, on March 15, 1938, Minnie Vautrin and Rev. John Magee went to the south side of the city to take pictures of a woman of forty-eight who had been raped eighteen times and her seventy-eight-year-old mother who had been raped twice. On May 9, two soldiers forced their way through a window into Liu Lao Tai’s home near San Pei Lou. They demanded Liu’s two daughters-in-law. When the old lady refused, the soldiers stabbed her to death. Another example: During the New Year’s holiday of 1939, a Ginling student returned to her home for a three-day vacation. Soldiers came to her door every day looking for young women. She was so frightened that she spent the entire three days in hiding.2 Japanese soldiers still looted things from private homes, even in the poorest neighborhood. One old nun told Vautrin on May 23, 1938, that the soldiers had come to her nunnery more than one hundred times, taking all her bedding, cooking vessels, and kitchen knives.3 Also, Japanese soldiers beat and even killed civilians on the street at will. For instance, on May 10, 1939, four soldiers killed a rickshaw man for no apparent reason. The following day, a carriage man was severely beaten by a Japanese army truck driver solely because the man did not get his vehicle out of the way fast enough.4 After continually hearing tragic stories daily in Nanking, Vautrin recorded in her diary of May 13, 1938, “One cannot wonder that people ask you pitifully, ‘How long will this terrible situation last? How can we bear it?’” On April 6, 1938, the International Relief Committee hired several hundred workers to help the Chinese charity organizations bury dead bodies. Because there were still so many unburied bodies piled on the streets and because soldiers still committed crimes, the Japanese military authorities prohibited +X$IWHUPDWKLQGG $0 167 AFTERMATH foreigners, except for some medical personnel and diplomats, from returning to the city until June. It was then that some of the Ginling faculty members started to return to the campus.5 The International Relief Committee closed the remaining six refugee camps on May 31, 1938. Vautrin decided Ginling would continue to protect 800 young women, who were either the neediest or lived in areas that were often preyed upon by the Japanese soldiers. The committee agreed to subsidize only the young women’s living expenses. If Vautrin wanted to offer classes for them, she would have to raise the funding herself, and she did. She offered a ten-week session to enhance the young women’s knowledge and refine their minds and bodies. The curriculum was modeled after the Danish-style people’s school, including such subjects as Chinese, music, arithmetic, and history. Because of a shortage of teachers, both Vautrin and Tsen had to teach some of the classes themselves. In September of that year, with Tsen’s help, Vautrin started two six-month projects, a homecraft-industrial project and a secondary education project. The former was designed for the neediest women who had no skills to make a living; the latter for the high-school-age girls who had been staying in refugee camps or hiding in the city. All the funding was raised by Vautrin from various sources. She even went to Shanghai and other places to find the best qualified people to teach the classes. For the homecraft-industrial project,6 only one hundred of the neediest women were chosen because of limited classrooms, teachers, and funding. These women altogether had thirty children, and Vautrin set up a separate nursery school for them. The curriculum of the project consisted of three parts: 1. Learning to live together: The students were taught how to cook for a large group of people and how to take care of their living quarters. They took turns cooking for the rest as well as cultivating and salting vegetables from their own garden. 2. General education and home training: The students were divided into six groups according to their educational background, ranging from illiterate to the sixth grade. They...