Woman Who Could Not Forget (25 page)

We flew back home right after my father’s funeral, but Iris stayed in New York for several more days. She went to see Susan Rabiner, and Susan gave her a timetable and urged her to give her a completed section of the book, which she would then edit and help Iris polish and revise. Iris also showed Susan the incredible photographs she had collected for the book, and they discussed the title and subtitle of the book. Iris was also wondering what name she would use as the book’s author: Iris Chang, or Iris Douglas, or Iris Chang Douglas. She had thought about that for a while. She said she had been using Iris Chang as the name on all her previous publications and she might just keep her name as it was.

The most important thing, though, was that Susan wanted Iris to give her the first draft of the entire manuscript by August 1994, just four and a half or five months away. Iris said Susan praised her writing lavishly and said that, so far, she had found her writing “marvelous! Impressive!” This gave Iris tremendous confidence and the stamina for the final push in her research and writing.

The next day, Iris went to see her book agent Laura Blake at Curtis Brown. Laura Blake was very satisfied with the progress of the book and praised Iris highly for her writing skill. Laura said her next book advance should be much higher than this one; maybe as high as $50,000. It turned out that her next advance, for
The Rape of Nanking
, was $60,000, which was double the advance of her first book and would give Iris a little more of the financial security she needed to keep researching and writing at a high level with minimal distraction.

At this time, Iris disclosed to me her worry about the fact that she had become more materialistic. Perhaps the financial strain she had been under for the past few years had helped bring this on. She told me that she did not care about money, only the experiences and adventures money could bring. She said she just couldn’t stand the idea of someone sneering at her, simply for her lack of money. I asked Iris if California could be the wrong place for them to live, because when she’d been in Urbana, money had never been in her thoughts. Indeed, I suspected that Brett and Iris were influenced by the more materialistic culture in California.

Iris told me that she had recently joined a local writer’s group and met many interesting people. Some were retired entrepreneurs, professors, or novelists, and some were even movie stars. Talking to them, she said, broadened her horizons. She told me she’d been invited to a local Celebrity Author’s Luncheon in March, and she said people there had been impressed by her youth and surprised to learn that she had already landed a book contract. The people she met were also impressed by her book ideas and her opinions. She also met a number of famous contemporary authors around Santa Barbara, and she sought their advice on book publishing and other aspects of the writing “life.”

Iris told me that she also continued reading many books, such as Jonathan Spence’s
Search for Modern China
, David Brinkley’s
Washington Goes to War,
and Walter A. McDougall’s
The Heavens and the Earth.

For my own life, in the next few months after my father died, I was in a sad mood. On April 22, former president Nixon died, and on May 22, Jackie Kennedy died. I was super-sensitive to the word “death”; it seemed that I could not expel my father’s death, or death in general, from myself.

To move past my grief, I decided to go with Shau-Jin to Taiwan in the middle of May. Shau-Jin had been invited to the Academia Sinica in Taiwan to give lectures at a physics workshop. We stayed in Taiwan for a month. This was my second trip to Taiwan since I’d first left home in 1962. The first trip had been in 1982, when Iris was in high school and the whole family was visiting there for two months. Twelve years had passed since our last trip to Taiwan, and it had changed completely. When I visited my old house where we used to live, in the suburbs of Taipei, the house was gone and the surroundings were barely recognizable. I did not take a photo of this new landscape, because I wanted the memory of my childhood to live forever.

On May 27, 1994, while we were in Taiwan, Iris wrote us a long e-mail:

Dear Mom and Dad:

It was great to receive your E-mail letters. . . .

Carolyn came to visit the very weekend you left for Taiwan. We went to the Channel Island on May 14. . . . The trip was an all day affair. . . .

During the past week, I’ve been writing additional chapters of my book and looking at the chapters Susan Rabiner has edited. She thinks my writing is “fabulous” “terrific” “charming.” She couldn’t edit it at first—she was too absorbed by the story. Lately, she’s had nothing but good things to say about my book, which, of course, may be her way of keeping me confident and motivated as I finish the rest of the material.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I plan to attend the American Booksellers Association convention in Los Angeles. From what I’ve heard, some 30,000 to 50,000 people will be there: authors, agents, editors, publishers, bookstore owners, and representatives from the biggest book chains—how exciting! I’m sure I will learn much about the business of books there. All my other writer friends from Santa Barbara will be present.

Keep in touch—I’ll write back to you sometime next week. Hope to hear from you soon. Love, Iris

In Taiwan, we met Professor C. N. Yang, the Nobel laureate in physics, at a banquet after a conference. He asked Shau-Jin about Iris’s book progress. We were impressed that he still remembered that Iris was writing a book on Dr. Tsien. Iris had written to Professor Yang in 1991, more than three years earlier, at the beginning of her book project, to inquire about Dr. Tsien. We told Iris about our meeting of Professor Yang in Taiwan, and we encouraged her to finish the book as soon as possible since “the world was waiting to read the book, including a Nobel laureate!” we joked in our e-mail.

At the end of our stay in Taiwan, we went to Tianjin in northern China for a physics conference, and then to Beijing. This was the first time I had returned to mainland China since 1949, when my parents had brought the whole family to Taiwan to escape the Communists—that was forty-five years ago. I left China as a little nine-year-old girl and returned as a woman of fifty-four!

My family’s journey, after the retreat from Nanking to Chungking (the war capital) during the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, and then to the escape from the Communists in the 1940s, had been all through the southern part of China, so I had never been to Beijing before, although Shau-Jin had been there many times, all at the invitation of physics-related Chinese academic organizations. Yet this was the first time we had been together in Beijing. Of course, in the week we were there, we went to the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and other historical landmarks to pay our respects and show our admiration to the great heritage of our ancestors. It was very emotional for me, since Beijing was the capital of so many legendary dynasties. My father had talked about Beijing a lot, about his love of Beijing from tea house to opera, yet he was no longer alive to see it—nor could I relay my impressions of modern Beijing to him—making my visit bittersweet.

Iris called us after we got back from China and updated us on her progress in writing the book. She said she worked very hard; usually she slept during the day and worked at night. Brett had been working at Sonatech, a company in Santa Barbara, ever since he’d obtained his PhD. They had completely different working hours. When Iris was about to go to bed, Brett was waking up. She got up in the afternoon in time to have dinner with Brett, and they took a walk together afterwards.

Sometimes Iris got frustrated. One day, she called me up to say that she was very tired and could not write as fast as she wished. I had to comfort her and ask her to take a nap; I told her that the next day might be better. Writing was not an easy profession, I thought. She also told me that her car had been broken into when she was in Los Angeles at the book convention. Her pair of eyeglasses and contact lens solution, together with other things in a bag in the car, were gone. Her newly ordered glasses had not arrived yet; it was a bad week on top of an already stressful time.

On September 28, Iris called and exclaimed that she had finally finished her book. It was a milestone, I told her, and I was thrilled for her. But Iris was very tired, and she said she was going to relax for a while. Her recovery plan was to watch lots of movies and eat well and read some good books.

On October 18, 1994, Iris wrote me an e-mail:

Dear Mom:

Yesterday, I printed out a double-spaced copy of my book on the laser printer, which came to 574 pages, and stored the file on two disks. Then I federal-expressed the entire bundle to Susan Rabiner. By the end of the year, I will deliver a final draft with Susan’s revisions, along with footnotes and permission forms to use quotes and photographs. From January to the end of February, I will be working closely with a line editor to perfect the manuscript, and then it is printed in galley form, ready to be reviewed by other authors and the media. At the same time, I am working on applications for teaching positions and ideas for other books. So there is a great deal of work to be done in the next few months. Originally, I had hoped to plan a pool party, but now I don’t think there will be enough time. Brett and I decided to restrict our socializing to going out with couples for dinner or lunch, which is more intimate and less time-consuming, maybe I can throw a party when the book actually comes out in print.

Your E-mail of homecoming brought back warm memories. Can you believe it was five years ago! I supposed much HAS happened during those five years: my job at the
Tribune
and AP, Johns Hopkins, my marriage to Brett and now this book. But it really doesn’t feel like much time has elapsed at all. . . .

Love, Iris

She asked us to visit them at the end of the year, but not during Thanksgiving because she and Brett were going to go to Maui for a vacation, a much-needed break for her, one that I was happy to learn about.

Only a couple of weeks later, she wrote to tell us that she had just submitted a sixteen-page single-spaced letter to her agent describing some of her ideas about a number of possible books she could write in the future. She had told us, not once but many times, about her many book ideas; for example, the Sino-Japanese War, women’s biological clock, Chinese immigrant stories (including everything from smuggling and prostitution rings to the highest achievements, such as Nobel laureates). I was amazed that she could submit her future book ideas immediately after she finished her first book, without any rest in between.

In the meantime, Iris said, she had been interviewed by a professor at California State University at Northridge, for a possible teaching job at their Ventura campus. They needed a teacher in ancient and modern Chinese history, the history of women, the history of California, and possibly the history of Asian-American immigrants. Santa Barbara City College had also expressed interest in hiring her for a part-time teaching job alongside UCSB, which was interested in her as an instructor for their writing program. But all these plans were put on hold once Iris went to a conference in Cupertino in December 1994 and saw a photo exhibition on the Nanking Massacre!

A
lthough Iris talked to us about her many book ideas for her next book while she was writing her first book, her decision to write
The Rape of Nanking
came all of a sudden, in December 1994. As Iris told us, and as described in the book, she made up her mind to write about this most atrocious chapter of history when she was attending a conference in Cupertino, California on December 13, 1994. In November that year, Iris had heard that a documentary film describing the Sino-Japanese War and the war crimes committed by the Japanese military in the 1930s had had problems getting funding. She was curious, and then she connected with a number of people involved in the project. She was informed that there was a conference to be held in Cupertino on the subject. They told her that if she was interested in the subject, she could come up to the Bay area and attend the conference. She was not only looking for a new book topic, she was also extremely interested in this period of history. She had been hearing a lot about the Sino-Japanese War from both Shau-Jin and me since she was little. It was perfect timing, too: she had just finished her biography of Dr. Tsien.

At the conference, there was a photo exhibition of the Japanese war crimes committed in China in the 1930s, taken when the Japanese Army invaded Chinese territory. Iris wrote in her book: “Though I had heard so much about the Nanking massacre as a child, nothing prepared me for these pictures—stark black-and-white images of decapitated heads, bellies ripped open, and nude women forced by their rapists into various pornographic poses, their faces contorted into unforgettable expressions of agony and shame.” And she continued: “In a single blinding moment I recognized the fragility of not just life but the human experience itself.” Later she told us, in a telephone update, that she simply must write about the rape of Nanking for her next book. It was a moral obligation, and it would be justice for the victims as well.