Interviewing Minnie Vautrin

We left New Jersey on a clear July morning. The sky was wide and blue, and the highway stretched west for miles. In the back seat I had placed a small bouquet of lilies. They were for her.

She wasn’t family, but I knew her name: Minnie Vautrin. She is remembered for saving more than 10,000 people during the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, most of them women and girls. And Nanjing, the city she refused to leave, appears often in my own family’s stories too.

We drove thirteen hours through fields of summer corn. By evening, we reached a small town in Michigan called Shepherd. As the sun dipped below the horizon, we turned down a quiet, empty road toward Salt River Cemetery. It was a large cemetery. Hundreds of headstones, with shadows stretching long from the pines. We split up to search, walking slowly, reading name after name.

And then, there she was.

Under a tall tree stood a dark brown headstone carved with her name and some lines, “Goddess of Mercy,” “Missionary to China,” and “28 Years.”

I knelt down and placed the lilies there, along with a thank-you card signed by my family.

“Miss Vautrin,” I whispered, “I came to see you.”

Q：Why did you stay?

In the summer of 1937, as war pressed closer to Nanjing, women and children were being evacuated. My great-grandmother, clutching my four-year-old, boarded a boat heading up the Yangtze River toward the inland city of Wuhan. Japanese warplanes circled overhead. My grandfather remembers little from that journey. He recalls only that the waves were high and everyone feared the boat would sink.

The U.S. Embassy in China sent word, twice, that it was time for American civilians to leave Nanjing. The warnings grew more urgent each time: the danger was real, and if anything happened after this, the U.S. government would not be able to protect them. And yet you stayed.

In your diary on August 28, 1937, you wrote:

They are asking all men and women to evacuate. It was a very clear emphatic statement.

Even so, you continued in that same entry:

I personally feel that I cannot leave... I feel that my eighteen years in Ginling... enable me to carry certain responsibilities which it is my duty to carry on. Men are not asked to desert their ships when they are in danger, and women are not asked to leave their children.

Your resolve held. Even in November, when Mr. Paxton warned of “the possibility of looting soldiers and the danger to foreigners” and urged that as many people as possible should leave at once, preparing to escape on the U.S.S. Panay if the city fell, you responded simply: “Searle and I feel that our responsibilities make it necessary to stay through.” Your explanations were accepted and respected.

Q：Were you afraid?

In late August 1937, you admitted in your diary that you were afraid. “I think that we are beginning to be able to differentiate between the sounds made by the Chinese and Japanese planes,” you wrote. “Your heart stands still when a [Japanese] plane goes above you.”

Days later, you added, “We are fearful when the siren calls out the warning, and perhaps just as fearful when we do not hear the siren for a time.” It wasn’t just the bombing raids themselves — it was the tense waiting in between.

And yet, you kept going, and little by little you learned to live inside the fear, even found joy for others. On October 13, 1937 — two months before Nanjing fell — you received a gift of twelve apples and decided that was reason enough to throw a small tea party. You invited the Ginling women staff and their children for an afternoon of dim sum and tea. Throughout the gathering, everyone “kept an ear out” for the air-raid siren; again and again someone thought she heard the start of a warning. Finally, the party ended as, “naturally, for Nanking these days,” the alarm did sound, and all of you hurried down to the basement of the college’s main building while the servants shut the doors and windows and ran out to their trench shelter. In your diary you noted with pride that the party simply continued downstairs: “We really continued our party in the basement, for we had a good time playing games with the children.”

I can’t help picturing it: twelve apples, a cluster of women and children laughing in a basement, everyone flinching at each distant wail of the siren echoing above the city.

Kneeling at your grave, lilies still in my hand, I understood you stayed because you simply couldn’t imagine doing otherwise. And yes, I believe you were afraid. But you chose to stay and comfort others.

Nanjing fell to the invading army on December 13, 1937. From that time on, generations of Chinese would remember you as a hero of those days. But the question I carried was not about what you did for others; it was about what those events did to you.

Q: What weighed on your mind in those days?

In the weeks following the fall of Nanjing, you lived through weeks of horror. At night, you didn’t dare change out of your day clothes, because something could happen at any moment. “None of us took off our clothes for fear something might happen,” you wrote one night. You stayed dressed through the dark hours, listening for the knock on the door.

A few days before the city’s collapse, you had summed up the mood around you: “Such deep indignation at such destruction and suffering rises within me.” By December 16, three days into the occupation, endurance had turned to desperation: “We are responsible for about 4,000 women and children tonight. We wonder how much longer we can stand this strain. It is terrible beyond words.” “Went to gate at 7:50… A stream of weary, wild-eyed women were coming in,” you noted on December 17. “They said their night had been one of horror; that again and again their homes had been visited by soldiers.”

I cannot help wondering if, in another world, my great-grandmother might have been among them — standing at the gate of the refugee camp, asking to be let in.

That same evening, two Japanese soldiers tried to force their way into the college’s main building. They yanked at a door, insisting it be opened. You told them calmly that you had no key. One of them struck you hard across the face. At the front gate, a Japanese sergeant had gathered a group of refugees and was shouting that all foreigners must leave the campus. You stood your ground. “This is my home,” you told him, “and I cannot leave.”

Not long after, you recorded in your diary an image that would haunt you forever: “Never shall I forget that scene — the people kneeling at the side of the road, Mary, Mrs. Tsen and I standing, the dried leaves rattling, the moaning of the wind, the cry of women being led out.” In that moment, “for what seemed an eternity we dared not move for fear of being shot.” Only later did you learn what happened after you were forced to stand aside: the soldiers had selected twelve young women from among the refugees and dragged them out through a side gate into the night.

Outside the campus walls, the violence continued. “Nanking is but a pitiful broken shell tonight — the streets are deserted and all houses in darkness and fear… Great fires are now lighting the sky… The fruits of war are death and desolation,” you recorded. Even inside the supposed Safety Zone, a truck sometimes roared past carrying girls who had been captured. Once, you heard the cries of about ten young women being driven away, yelling “救命!” — save our lives — as they passed your gate.

Through all of this, you kept an almost clinical record of events in your diary. Like an accountant tallying figures, you noted the numbers: the number of refugees, the number of bodies, the number of air raids, the number of women violated. You even counted gunshots. “From 9:30 to 10:30 this evening I’ve been reading,”you wrote in one entry. “During that time I’ve heard 9 gun shots in the neighborhood. What is the purpose? I do not know.”

That was what you went through: the long nights spent fully dressed, waiting for danger; the endless stream of terrified women pouring through your gates; the slap you endured, buying precious seconds for others; the twelve lives taken away at gunpoint.

At one point you confessed your own weariness in a single, stark line: “Tonight I look 60 and feel 80.

The next morning, we left Michigan and drove about six hours south and west, across Indiana farmlands into the flat expanse of central Illinois, to see where your story began. We arrived in the middle of prairie country, in a little village called Secor, not far from where you were born. The road into town ran through endless cornfields without a break. High above the rows, modern wind turbines turned slowly in the late-summer breeze. The place itself was small and quiet. In the center of the village park, we found your memorial.

A bronze plaque there recorded the dedication ceremony: “April 12, 2023, 1:00 p.m., Community Park, Secor, IL” — Minnie Vautrin Day in Illinois. I had come here to see where you began, to ask how you became that person, and to try to understand why you left the world in the final way you did.

Q：What influenced you?

You were born here, on the Illinois prairie, in 1886, in a tiny farming village surrounded by open land. Your father ran a blacksmith shop, and tended a bit of land on the side. Your mother died when you were six. As the oldest, you took on the work of running the household and looking after your younger brother, yet you still did well in school. Your first teacher later said you “could excel in most anything she tried, and was a genuinely Christian girl”.

Money was scarce, so you found ways to support yourself at Illinois State Normal University and later at the University of Illinois in order to continue your education. To meet the costs, you worked steadily, even knocking on doors to sell Encyclopaedia Britannica sets.

On campus, you joined the Student Volunteer Movement, part of a wave encouraging young people in the Midwest to serve abroad. That call led you, in 1912 at the age of twenty-six, to sail for China as a missionary in education. You arrived in Hefei, Anhui Province, where opportunities for girls to attend school were rare, foot-binding was still practiced, and the old saying persisted that “ignorant women are virtuous women.” Determined to make a change, you started San Ching Girls’ Middle School, working through local doubt and opposition until the school was firmly established and known well beyond the city.

The small girls’ school you built in Hofei still exists over a century later. Today it’s known as Nanmen Primary School. Decades after you founded it, one of its students would go on to become the Premier of China, Li Keqiang (2012–2022). Later, at Ginling College, you also found ways to bring education to young girls from the surrounding neighborhoods.

I never met my great-grandmother; she died in 1995 at the age of 90. But my grandfather told me that in traditional China, girls were not allowed a formal education. It was missionary schools like yours that first opened the doors of learning to Chinese girls. It was at a church school in Nanjing that my great-grandmother learned to read. She never bound her feet, and she loved reading novels all her life at a time when most women of her generation remained illiterate. I like to believe she might have been one of the young students you once taught in Nanjing, though I’ll never know.

Teaching and service were always at the center of your life. Even during the darkest days in Nanjing, you never stopped being a teacher. In late February 1938, with the refugee camp at Ginling still overflowing and the city under occupation, you organized a makeshift school for the refugees. You arranged about twenty classes for everyone who wanted to learn: from little children to illiterate adults. In the midst of terror and despair, you brought a small measure of light and order through education.

You had what people sometimes called the pioneer spirit of Midwestern missionaries: practical, devout, and stubborn in the best way. You learned to lead without fanfare, to write things down carefully, and to keep moving forward even when you had no strength left to spare. All of that was evident later in Nanjing: in the meticulous ledgers you kept at Ginling, in the quiet way you stood firm in doorways, and in the steady, matter-of-fact tone of your diary.

Q：Why did you leave the world that way?

This question is the hardest for me to ask. You were so brave, so steady. How did it come to this?

On May 14, 1941, four years after the massacre, you wrote a final note to your friends. In it you said:

“This failure has been unconscious on my part — not intentional. I cannot forgive myself — so I do not ask you to forgive… I have deeply loved and respected the cause of missions and Ginling College… but alas! I have failed and injured the cause with the one life which has been mine. My remorse and regret are deep and genuine.”

After signing that letter, you ended your own life. Alone in a friend’s apartment in Indianapolis, you turned on the gas from the kitchen stove and quietly succumbed.

I may never fully understand why. Even when you were near despair, you kept giving other people something to hold onto. Back in Easter 1938, only months after the massacre, you had organized a group of refugee girls to put on a little play called “From Dark to Dawn.” A visitor who saw it called it “the brightest spot in Nanking.”[50] Two years later, you were still reminiscing in letters about “that wonderful week in our refugee camp in April 1938.” Hope and grief lived side by side in you.

By the end of your years at Ginling, however, you believed that you had failed. Part of that was the sheer weight of the work and the trauma you carried. As the head of the college, you faced an endless list of administrative tasks, with people coming to you constantly for help. And you were physically worn out. Your diary reveals it in small cracks: notes where you wrote “dead tired” or “no strength”.

Yet for someone as iron-willed as you, there was more at work than fatigue. Only a few months before you finally left Nanjing, you dared to refuse a demand from the Japanese military to commandeer Ginling’s dormitories for hundreds of their soldiers. Most around you thought it wiser to comply. Even your close friend Eva Spicer called you a “silly ass” for risking the occupiers’ anger.

But even as you were fighting to save others, you confessed in a private letter: “That which I would do I do not, and that which I would not do, I do, and there is no goodness in me.” You held yourself to a standard no one could possibly meet in those circumstances.

In 1940, the strain finally became too much. You agreed to leave China and return to the United States for rest, promising yourself and your colleagues that you would come back to Nanjing after recovering. You had turned down many other opportunities to leave before because, as you underlined, “China is my home.”

After you returned to America, you wrote to a friend, “Pray for me, Rebecca, that I may pass through this ‘valley of the shadow.’” And then came the line that sounds as if you were watching a stranger: “Little did I ever think that Minnie Vautrin would be in this sad state.”

When news of your death reached friends, one tribute described you as “a soldier who had fallen on the battlefield.” In a way, that comparison is painfully apt: like a soldier, you lived with wounds and trauma that did not disappear when the gunfire ceased.

Over those months in Nanjing, I counted more than sixty separate atrocities you recorded in your diary. Some you witnessed with your own eyes, like the day you rushed into a room to find “one [soldier] inside already raping a poor girl.” Others you heard firsthand from survivors who came to you for help, like the man at the gate whose wife had been bayoneted to death and whose infant had been thrown from a window. Still others you learned through Nanjing’s desperate whisper network, such as the 43 men from the power plant who were lined up and shot.

We now have a name for some of what you suffered: post-traumatic stress. And another term, “moral injury,” speaks to the wound that remains when one is forced to witness or endure events that violate everything one holds sacred.

The fate of twelve girls taken from your campus haunted you. You marked that date every year. “Just one year ago tonight… a night not to be forgotten in a lifetime,” you wrote on December 16, 1938. “The anniversary of our most terrible experience of last year,” you noted on December 17, 1938. “The second anniversary of our darkest day,” you recorded on December 17, 1939.

And yet, you were never only a tragic figure overwhelmed by darkness. You were also a woman who could note, wryly, “My Vogue Quarterly no longer comes, so I haven’t the ghost of an idea what style to follow in making a new dress.” You loved the natural world and took comfort in it. One peaceful evening, you planted rose bushes on the campus. Afterward you wrote: “And then I had the joy of arranging the roses. They are now out on the grass in the glorious moonlight with the hope that they will revive. My joy is touched with pain, for the beauty of the moonlight will mean air raids for many tonight, I fear.” Joy, touched with pain. But still, joy.

Standing in the Secor village park, in front of your memorial plaque, I thought about how your own family struggled to understand the life you chose. To them, it must have been baffling that you gave your life to a country so far from home. But to so many Chinese people, you changed their lives. One of your students, Wu Yi-fang, became the first woman in China to earn a bachelor’s degree and, as a diplomat, was the first woman to sign the UN Charter in 1945. And perhaps you also touched the lives of many ordinary women like my great-grandmother, who learned to read and write and, until her last day, found comfort in reading novels.

Decades later, when your biographer Hua-ling Hu came to your grave in Illinois, your niece admitted, “You see, there are four Chinese characters on the stone. We still do not know what they mean.”

They are 金陵永生 — “Jinling Forever.”

Acknowledgments: This article draws on Suping Lu’s Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing and Hua-ling Hu’s American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking for both quotations and main accounts of her life.