I'm still reading "The Voyage Out," which is excellent and always has me reeling, but I've picked up three books from the library!
They do that old-fashioned writing your name on the card thing at ours, haha.
I picked up:
"China's Examination Hell" by Ichisada Miyazaki (translated)
It's about the examinations and focuses on its most elaborate and dramatic time during the Qing dynasty. Jeez, it was so hardcore. I already started it and it's pretty lively, not like an old history, scholarly book. I feel like the Chinese examination has been in almost every Chinese novel I've read XD
"Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China" by Janet M. Theiss
This looks super interesting! It goes into the politics and laws about sex, rape, assault, losing virginity, marriage, chastity cults, etc at the time. From what I've read so far it reminds me a bit of the "Liberalism in the Bedroom," written about these types of things in colonial Peru. I'm generalizing since I haven't read much of it, but it looks cool so far.
"The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II" by Iris Chang
This looks fantastic! I don't know if anyone's heard of this book, but this is one of the first books published about Nanking, in the 1990s. The author's grandparents survived and growing up she wondered why there were hardly any books about the event, so she wrote one herself.
It's really, really cool. She includes a lot of new information, such as descriptions of what happened by people who were all there, the one surgeon in the area, Nazis, missionaries, professors, etc. She discovered the diaries of people who experienced it (like John Rabe!) and had them translated from German and other languages, also talking to living survivors.
I'm surprised one of the heroes was a German businessman named John Rabe who helped many of the victims and wrote about everything he saw with photos and footage, and he wrote to Hitler about what was happening. He got taken by the gestapo right after that, but got saved by Siemans. He helped established the Nanking Safety Zone which saved ~200,000 people, a lot of people fled into that zone to escape the Japanese. Just reading through his diary entries and seeing his desperation mount every day at the situation is really something.
Having received no answer to his request, Rabe wrote again to Fukui the following day, this time in an even more desperate tone:
We are sorry to trouble you again but the sufferings and needs of the 200 000 civilians for whom we are trying to care make it urgent that we try to secure action from your military authorities to stop the present disorder among Japanese soldiers wandering through the Safety Zone... The second man in our Housing Commission had to see two women in his family at 23 Hankow Road raped last night at supper time by Japanese soldiers. Our associate food commissioner, Mr. Sone, has to convey trucks with rice and leave 2,500 people in families at his Nanking Theological Seminary to look after themselves. Yesterday, in broad daylight, several women at the Seminary were raped right in the middle of a large room filled with men, women, and children! We 22 Occidentals cannot feed 200,000 Chinese civilians and protect them night and day. That is the duty of the Japanese authorities ...
On the February 10, 1938, Rabe wrote in his diary:
Fukui, whom I tried to find at the Japanese embassy to no avail all day yesterday, paid a call on me last night. He actually managed to threaten me: "If the newspapers in Shanghai report bad things, you will have the Japanese army against you", he said... In reply to my question as to what I then could say in Shanghai, Fukui said "We leave that to your discretion." My response: "It looks as if you expect me to say something like this to the reporters: The situation in Nanking is improving everyday. Please don't print any more atrocities stories about the vile behavior of Japanese soldiers, because then you'll only be pouring oil on fire of disagreement that already exists between the Japanese and Europeans." "Yes", he said simply beaming, "that would be splendid!"
There's a book named "The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe" which has all of his diaries entries, I'd love to get my hands on that!
Iris Chang included a lot of horrible photos taken by Americans, Germans, Japanese, etc at the time. The most horrific one for me is the woman on the floor with a rod sticking out of her vagina. There were also pictures of the Massacre Contests they held.
She also writes about Minnie Vautrin, who I had never heard of before until now. She was a missionary who helped save many women at the time, and she did a lot of other things that she was seen as a "Goddess" by the Chinese. She was disappointed in herself for not saving more women, she was traumatized by what she saw, so she killed herself
I can't even imagine what it would be like to see so many women being raped around you and being powerless to do anything.
After Chang published the book, she got a lot of acclaim, awards, etc but she also got a lot of hate from supernationalist Japanese people, including a lot of death threats, and along with her depressing work and mounting depression she shot herself at 36
I'm really impressed by what she did, how she was able to bring light to this event, it's really inspiring.
Duan, a tough middle-aged woman who studied the Nanjing atrocities for years and considers herself a seasoned pro, still has nightmares from the stories she's heard and photos she's seen. Chang, she says, worked incessantly in Nanjing interviewing survivors, immersed in graphic pictures and documents, all the while agonizing over why the story was not widely known outside China. By the time she left Nanjing, Duan says, Chang was physically weak but even more committed to telling the story.
"The subject matter had to affect her. Perhaps she could not bear it," Duan says, her eyes filling with tears as she pulls out a picture of herself and Chang at a dinner in Nanjing.
"We just can't understand why such a great young writer and lovely person would leave the world so early," Duan says, shaking her head.
"I wrote it out of a sense of rage," she said. "I didn't really care if I made a cent from it. It was important to me that the world knew what happened in Nanking back in 1937."
Wow!
All in all it'll be a great read
I think it's important to know about these things.
I demand more free books. 
