 In December 1994 , she attended a conference on the Nanking Massacre , held in Cupertino , California , and what she saw and heard at the conference motivated her to write The Rape of Nanking . As she wrote in the introduction to the book , while she was at the conference , she 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 . " 
