Inspiration
As a child, Chang was told by her parents that during the Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese "sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths." Her parents had escaped with their families from China to Taiwan and then to the United States after World War II. In the introduction of The Rape of Nanking, she wrote that throughout her childhood, the Nanjing Massacre "remained buried in the back of [her] mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil." When she searched the local public libraries in her school and found nothing, she wondered why no one had written a book about it.[7]
The subject of the Nanjing Massacre entered Chang's life again almost two decades later when she learned of producers who had completed documentary films about it. One of the producers was Shao Tzuping, who helped produce Magee's Testament, a film that contains footage of the Nanjing Massacre itself, shot by the missionary John Magee.[8] The other producer was Nancy Tong, who, together with Christine Choy, produced and co-directed In The Name of the Emperor,[9] a film containing a series of interviews with Chinese, American, and Japanese citizens.[8] Chang began talking to Shao and Tong, and soon she was connected to a network of activists who felt the need to document and publicize the Nanjing Massacre.[10]: 8–9
In December 1994, she attended a conference on the Nanjing Massacre, held in Cupertino, California, and what she saw and heard at the conference motivated her to write her 1997 book.[11] As she wrote in the book's introduction, while she was at the conference:
I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it.[10]: 10
Research
Chang spent two years on research for the book.[5] She found source materials in the US, including diaries, films, and photographs of missionaries, journalists, and military officers who were in Nanjing at the time of the massacre.[10]: 11 Additionally, she traveled to Nanjing to interview survivors of the Nanjing Massacre and to read Chinese accounts and confessions by Japanese army veterans.[12] Also, she incorporated the most recent work on the subject by Chinese and Chinese-American historians by including many disturbing photographs and a myriad of translated documents.[13]
Before publication, the book was reviewed by Rana Mitter and Christian Jessen-Klingenberg of the University of Oxford; Carol Gluck of Columbia University; and William C. Kirby of Harvard University.[14] At the time of writing, the Japanese government classified Japan’s World War 2 archives, making archival records unavailable to investigators.[15]
The diaries
Chang's research led her to make what one San Francisco Chronicle article called "Significant Discoveries" on the subject of the Nanjing Massacre, in the forms of the diaries of two Westerners who were in Nanjing leading efforts to save lives during the Japanese invasion.[5] The diaries documented the events of the Nanjing Massacre from the perspectives of their writers, and provided detailed accounts of atrocities that they saw, as well as information surrounding the circumstances of the Nanking Safety Zone.
One diary was that of John Rabe, a German Nazi Party member who was the leader of the Nanking Safety Zone, a demilitarized zone in Nanjing that Rabe and other Westerners set up to protect Chinese civilians.[16] Rabe's diary is over 800 pages, and contains one of the most detailed accounts of the Nanjing Massacre.[17] Translated into English, it was published in 1998 by Random House as The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe.[18]
The other diary belonged to Minnie Vautrin, the American missionary who saved the lives of about 10,000 women and children when she provided them with shelter in Ginling College.[19] Vautrin's diary recounts her personal experience and feelings on the Nanjing Massacre; in it, an entry reads, "There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today."[20] It was used as source material by Hua-ling Hu for a biography of Vautrin and her role during the Nanjing Massacre, entitled American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin.[21]
Chang dubbed Rabe the "Oskar Schindler of Nanking" and Vautrin the "Anne Frank of Nanking."[22][5]
