Publisher's Synopsis
It's 1937. The Chinese are suffering a Holocaust at the hands of the Japanese. But when American forces intervene, the tide begins to turn-and for the next several years, they ultimately begin to win control of the islands located near the main island of Japan and fully succeed in late-1944. And what happens during those few years changes the course of history for both countries. The Chinese Holocaust was even more brutal than the well-known WWII Jewish Holocaust in Germany, but little is known about it in Western Civilization. When the capital city of China is overtaken by the Japanese Army, two sisters-Meiling and Elizabeth-are in their late teens. They are helpless victims of the soldiers as they face brutal rape and possible death. They are just two of the more than forty-thousand Nanking women between the ages of six to seventy-six who are gang-raped openly on the streets every day. After the assaults, most of the females are slaughtered with bayonets... ...that is, except the young pretty ones, who are saved and kept as sex slaves. After Meiling is raped by three men, she escapes and joins Nanking's Organized Resistance Army (NORA) while Elizabeth becomes the willing concubine of the Japanese commandant who, after viewing her naked beauty on the street, saved her for himself. Torn with rage and shame at her sister's betrayal to China and haunted by the slurs of her fellow resistance fighters, Meiling shoots Elizabeth in a risky disobedient solo venture to the Japanese commandant's headquarters. Grief stricken over the painful screams of the sister she once adored, Meiling faces death by firing squad for her insubordination. It's 2007. Through the voice of eighty-eight-year-old Meiling, a nineteen-year-old aspiring male Canadian journalist travels the globe by putting pen to paper. He reports her encounters with Mao Zedong, Norman Bethune, American "Flying Tiger" pilots, Chiang Kai-shek, and Hideki Tojo-the Japanese Supreme Commander, later Japan's War Minister and then, Prime Minister, and the man who conceived the attack on Pearl Harbor.
