BOOK REVIEWS

Zhang Kaiyuan, Eyewitness to Massacre: American Missionaries Bear Witness to Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing

We live in a world where the media conveys to us powerful scenes of human suffering. The appalling injustices of the Interahamwe genocide in Nyamata, Rwanda or Israeli army incursions into a Palestinian refugee camp in Jenine are witnessed on our television screens or brought into daily conversation through skilful written imagery in periodicals and newspapers. We cannot say that we did not know of these events, even though we do not see what has not been recorded by an enterprising journalist.

Eyewitness to Massacre, a series of American missionary testimonies of the massacre that swept through the city of Nanking during the early stages of the Japanese occupation (1937-1945), skilfully portrays the scale and brutality of an event which had become just another historical marker. Unlike the regular incursions into our living-rooms of televised violence, this massacre slept on the backburner of history during the Cold War and has only just recently been revived by an interesting array of concerned authors. Iris Cheng’s eloquent, best-selling account appeared in 1997 and was quickly countered by Takemoto Tadao and Ohara Yasuo’s alternative version of the “alleged” massacre((1). Joshua Fogel’s more recent edited volume of the history and historiography of the event brings a sense of perspective to the polemic. He reminds us that the Nanking Massacre is also a phenomenon of the Chinese diaspora, a means to seize and reformulate a history that has been severely misshapen by Cold War propaganda; the event provides an “unassailable and irreproachable” sense of identity that links the diaspora in victimhood((2).

The editor of Eyewitness to Massacre, Zhang Kaiyuan, brings this period back to life with chilling accuracy. Zhang’s volume is unusual in that he lets the American witnesses to this massacre speak in their own voices. Rather than the anguished cries of Chinese survivors, or the cool analysis of an American academic, we read the diary entries and letters home of American missionaries who knew Nanking as well as their Chinese counterparts; this was their city and they testify to the daily, almost banal brutality of bored Japanese troops who systematically terrorised the civilian population for a period of several months beginning in December 1937. Nine Americans, some of them born in China, convey in an almost monotonous fashion the daily strains of the total breakdown of Nanking society under the occupation.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is the re-creation of a world that no longer exists. As a Yale-China fellow in the 1980s, I spent hours pouring over the Yale-China archives before leaving for a two-year stint in the PRC. The same tone is present in these letters and diaries housed in the Yale Divinity School Library next door. A sense of duty pervades each page, a sense that these nine Americans were fighting against unbelievable odds for the survival of what they would have termed “Christian decency”. Their accounts are painstakingly accurate, demonstrating a stubborn belief that “the Truth” would prevail. In his frequent letters to the Japanese Embassy in Nanking during the early weeks of the massacre, for example, Miner Serle Bates systematically enumerates the specific acts committed on his own campus (University of Nanking): “While I was with you in the Embassy today, my own house was looted for the fourth time. Seven other University houses have been looted today, and many have been entered several times.” (December 21st, p. 9). The tone is so methodical that Bates mentions in the same breath in a December 27th letter the Japanese soldiers’ disrespect for the American flag and their raping of three girls, one of whom was 11 (p. 11).

The close links between Chinese Christians and the American missionary community is evident in the many accounts in this book. Minnie Vautrin, who was serving as acting president of Ginling Women’s College at the time of the Japanese invasion, records the names and family members of all her Chinese staff in her diary and demonstrates how tightly the Christian faith came to bind those living through the Massacre: “Words cannot express the value these (prayer) meetings have had in strengthening and binding us together and giving us power to meet the difficult problems of each day” (p. 340). The daily encounters with death and terror through the beginning of the war were too much for Vautrin, however; she left China in 1940 after suffering a nervous breakdown and committed suicide one year later. Perhaps she was still reproaching herself, as she did in her December 1937 review of events for the Ginling College Board of Directors: “I think now that I might have saved those girls but at the time it did not seem possible” (p. 336).

Editor Zhang Kaiyuan formed very close links with what he calls this “new generation” of missionary educators. “Regarding their wide vision and rich knowledge, they were far better qualified than those earlier missionaries and their wives from mid-western America.” (p. xxiii). Zhang’s generation of the Chinese diaspora is able to sharply criticise earlier Western imperialism towards China while clearly identifying with their role models from the West. Miner Serle Bates was Zhang’s history teacher and Eyewitness to Massacre is a posthumous tribute to the honesty and courage of this new kind of missionary. The eulogistical nature of this volume, however, is not only a strength, but also a weakness. Since the editor refrained from intervening in these personal testimonies, the reader is often weighed down by the sheer wealth of monotonous detail which is harvested but not processed by the editor.

This volume is of extraordinary use to scholars of the period since it provides edited access to nine first-hand accounts of the massacre as witnessed from the relatively privileged position of foreign missionaries. But while the tone of the accounts is very even-handed, this is not an unbiased version of events. The author takes a firm stand on a several controversial issues, including the number of victims. Zhang is unapologetically partial in qualifying his book as “the record of the Nanking Massacre, the brutal crime committed by the Japanese invading army, written with the hearts, blood, and tears of this small group of foreign residents.” (p. xxvii). The value of this volume lies in the fact that it focuses on the lived aspect of the massacre. Perhaps the sudden interest in this period on the part of the Chinese diaspora and mainland scholars will allow the full record to enter the public domain. By placing the Nanking Massacre in its specific context, we may better explain why this event has become what journalist Ian Buruma terms the emblem of contemporary Chinese identity((3). Only then will an event which has marked the Chinese psyche be discussed with anything less than passion.