Woman Who Could Not Forget (33 page)

In the meantime, the activist group, Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, was going to put an ad in the
New York Times
and asked Iris to write up a short summary about her book on the Rape of Nanking and on Rabe’s diary. This summary would be included in the ad.

On November 17, 1996, Iris wrote me in an e-mail: “A 600-word article of mine about the Rape of Nanking, complete with byline and description of my book, will be published in a giant
New York Times
advertisement sponsored by Chinese activists nationwide. It may appear anytime next week, but probably next Sunday. Susan Rabiner is thrilled about all this publicity and said that Basic Books hopes my book will become a blockbuster (by their standards, of course), selling 25,000 to 75,000 or even 100,000 copies.”

On the first weekend of December 1996, Iris attended the conference on the Rape of Nanking as the MC, sponsored by Chinese-American activist groups on the Stanford University campus. She said it was a great experience for her, since she had never had the chance to speak in front of several hundred people before. She said in her e-mail, written at midnight on Saturday, December 7, 1996:

. . . the conference is going well, and everyone is impressed by my duties as MC—more details later. I’m exhausted by the entire event, as well as by giving interviews to the media. The
New York Times
is going to run a long story about my discovery of the Rabe diaries on 12-12-96, the
Asahi Shimbun
’s story should appear on 12-8-96, and the
Metro
is almost certain to print a cover story on me. I’ve been mentioned in the World Journal already, and the
Christian Science Monitor
is probably going to quote me in their story on the conference. Tomorrow I will be interviewed by a Japanese TV station at Stanford.

Indeed, as Iris said, a big article on her was published in
Metro
, a free Santa Clara Valley weekly newspaper, on December 12. We were delighted to see that Iris’s face was on the front cover of the newspaper. The article must have made a big impact on the readers in Silicon Valley, as the buzz about
Nanking
continued to grow.

A press conference was held in New York on December 12, organized by Shao Tzeping, because December 12, 1996 was the day before the fifty-ninth anniversary of the fall of Nanking and, subsequently, the beginning of the massacre. After Shao talked to Iris, he contacted Ursula Reinhardt in Germany and invited her to New York to formally announce and introduce her grandfather’s diary to the world.

When we saw the big article published on December 12 in the
New York Times
, I wondered why Iris was not going to New York for such an important press conference. I immediately called her, but she said that long before the event she had already reserved a plane ticket and paid the fee for a scriptwriting class in Los Angeles and was scheduled to fly there that weekend. She did not want to change her plans at the last minute.

Fortunately, before December 12, the reporter from the
New York Times
, David Chen, got hold of Iris and interviewed her extensively on the phone. The article on Rabe’s diary and his life story occupied half of the International page, with a headline that read “At the Rape of Nanking, A Nazi Who Saved Lives.” The subtitle was “The 1937 diary of an unlikely hero bears witness to Japanese atrocities.” With the article, there was a photo of John Rabe and a number of Safety Zone members standing in front their office in the Safety Zone in 1937. The article mentioned Iris: “The diary has only now come to light because of the efforts of Iris Chang, a Sunnyvale, Calif., author. While researching a book on the Nanjing massacre a few years ago, she stumbled upon a few references to Mr. Rabe’s humanitarian efforts.” At the end, the article quoted Iris: “. . . to me, John Rabe is the Oskar Schindler of China, another example of good in the face of evil.”

During the press conference on December 12, Reinhardt donated a copy of John Rabe’s diary to the Yale University library. The event was reported not only by the
New York Times
, but by almost all major newspapers and TV and radio stations throughout the world. It was major international news. Shau-Jin was in Taiwan for a meeting, and he brought home all the Chinese newspapers in which the news of discovery of Rabe’s diary was prominently reported.

Iris did not realize that the news would be so hot internationally, and now she had some regrets that she had missed the New York press conference. On the other hand, she was very interested in learning scriptwriting at the time, and it was difficult for her to give up the opportunity—especially because she had already paid for the class. Iris said the publicity department of Basic Books wished the announcement of the discovery of Rabe’s diary could have been held off until October of the next year, just before her book hit bookstores—that would have been ideal. But we knew the discovery could not wait that long. Iris said both Susan Rabiner and the publicist were thrilled by the
New York Times
article and said that the publicity would still help her forthcoming book tremendously.

After the copy of John Rabe’s diary was donated to Yale, Iris had asked Yale to make a copy of the diary for her; in turn, she made two more copies. On March 11, 1997, we received a box of several thousand pages of a Xerox copy of John Rabe’s diary from Iris. She was worried the diary would be destroyed by some unforeseen cause in the future. An extra copy stored in a different place would be safer, she said. The copy of Rabe’s diary was stored in our basement for more than five years, until 2002, when we moved to California. We donated that copy to the University of Illinois Archives in the summer of 2002, with Iris’s permission.

Another copy of the diary was donated to the Memorial Hall for the Victims in Nanjing. As early as October 1995, after Iris returned home from her research trip to China and Taiwan, she made a huge effort to make copies of many important materials she had found in the U.S. National Archives and the Yale University library and donated them to the Memorial Hall for the Victims in Nanjing. Those materials included John Rabe’s report to Hitler, the diaries and letters of Minnie Vautrin and other missionaries in the Safety Zone, and the records of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE). Iris did this voluntarily when she found out that the Memorial Hall in Nanjing lacked Western source materials. She spent many hours of her time and a good amount of money copying those materials, consisting of thousands of pages, for them. Iris felt that it would be a shame if the museum in Nanjing, where the massacre had occurred, did not have those documents. I thought it was a very generous act. I was impressed that she was willing to share her findings and make the information available to other scholars and researchers, when her book had not yet even been published. She was more concerned with sharing knowledge.

The world now knew that Iris was writing a book on the Rape of Nanking and that it would be published in November 1997, and the pressure was beginning to mount.

T
he publication of
The Rape of Nanking
ran over several bumps in the road along the way. On October 25, 1996, Iris told us that she had finished the first rough draft of the book and would mail a copy to us for our comments. She added that there were still two chapters to go on the topic of “cover-up” (later called “The Second Rape”) and the “Fate of the Survivors.” In her e-mail of November 13, 1996, Iris wrote:

Dear Mom,

Thanks for the email! Susan Rabiner is overwhelmed with work right now, but she said she will read my manuscript soon. Let me know what you think of my writing—please don’t hesitate to write in the margins and take notes and to relay your honest opinions to me. I respect your judgment.

Sometimes, when I reread my book, I wondered if I should have inserted more scenes (stories of individuals) into the text. There is still time to include those stories, because I have a surplus of information. I’ll wait until Susan gets back to me.

Love, Iris

I was very busy at the time because the whole Department of Microbiology was in the process of moving into a brand-new building. It took about two weeks in November to set up my workplace in the new lab before Thanksgiving.

It took us a few weeks to read her 140-page, single-spaced first draft. Both Shau-Jin and I gave up our nights and weekends to read her manuscript. Our first reaction to the manuscript was disappointment. We told Iris that some parts of the writing gave too many details, whereas some other parts were oversimplified. Also, we told her that quite frankly, the story was told with a lack of emotion. Iris listened and said she would wait to see what Susan Rabiner said.

Susan did not have the time to read the draft until a month later. Finally, Iris called us and said that Susan was disappointed with the first draft too, and her comments were similar to ours. Iris asked us if she could have somehow lost the ability to write. We tried to lift her spirits by assuring her that she could revise it—that was what drafts were for. Shau-Jin and I also pointed out that there were some parts of the draft that were excellent; it wasn’t
all
bad, by any means. We gave her all the assurances we could and reminded her to look at the specific questions and remarks we had written on each page. Susan also gave Iris many suggestions in the next few months to improve the manuscript. Iris felt that the root of her problem was that she had so much source material that the actual narrative was getting lost. She read every instance of atrocities and felt numb in the end, and it came through stylistically. When an author loses his or her mental sensitivity, it is not possible to write with the proper emotion.

In retrospect, unlike the time when she was writing her first book,
Thread of the Silkworm
, she was doing more than one thing in 1996. That year, Iris was writing not only
The Rape of Nanking
, but she was also writing a proposal for her next book and trying to help the
Thread of the Silkworm
backlist. She was under stress to accomplish many things, and part of the pressure was from herself. Another reason was that
The Rape of Nanking
had a deadline: it had to be finished in two years. Iris and the publisher wanted the book to be published on the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the Nanking Massacre to attract world attention, which was the best marketing strategy.

At any rate, I knew few scholars who could digest so much information in such a short time; besides, the story was so sad and depressing that it took an emotional toll on her as well. I could see why the first draft of the book was somewhat disappointing.

Neither Iris or Michael were coming home for Christmas 1996 and New Year’s Day 1997, and we planned to visit them after the New Year. During the holidays, I translated a number of Chinese articles into English for Iris because she wanted to know what the Chinese media reports said about John Rabe. It took me the entire day before Christmas to translate all of them. I mailed the translations to her that evening with the note, “My God! It took my whole day, Iris, you sure are right; it’s expensive to hire someone to translate. You get it free!”

She replied to me:

Dear Mom,

You were a saint to translate the articles for me. Yes, I know, translation is time-consuming and expensive—this is why Jeff Heynen’s and Barbara Masin’s free translations are so invaluable! I’m really touched that you spent the day helping in this manner. . . . Love, Iris

Shau-Jin and I flew to California on January 3, 1997 to see Iris, Brett, and Michael. January 7 was Shau-Jin’s sixtieth birthday. It was considered an important milestone for a person to reach sixty, and deserved a special celebration in Chinese culture. Iris had urged us to come to California to celebrate—and, at the same time, she said that we could visit her and Brett’s new apartment in Sunnyvale and Michael’s in San Francisco. We had not had a chance to visit them since they moved from Santa Barbara to the Bay area in the middle of 1996. And there was another important reason for the visit—to help Iris translate some more Chinese materials for the second draft of the book.

Iris and Brett’s apartment was one of the units of an apartment complex centrally located in Silicon Valley. As they had described, the apartment complex had a swimming pool and other sports and physical fitness facilities on-site. Their unit was a two-bedroom. My first impression of their rooms was that there were very many bookcases lined along almost all the walls of their small apartment. The bookcases were essentially filled with Iris’s book collections. I was not surprised, because I was totally familiar with Iris’s beloved hobby of reading and buying books. In addition to a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen, they had a small room that served as her office, which had a big desk that was equipped with a computer, a printer, a fax machine, and more books and notebooks. Wasting little time, she showed us the Chinese documents she wanted us to translate. She said she was working on revising the Nanking book according to Susan’s and our suggestions and had no time to waste, as she was currently working on the section that told the Chinese side of the story during the Massacre. She wanted to find out why the Chinese capital, Nanking, had fallen to the enemy so quickly on December 13, 1937. The materials she had collected from the Chinese Archives included the telegram exchanges between Chiang Kai-shek and Commander-in-Chief Tang Sheng-chih, who had defended Nanking in the last hours of the battle. She wanted to know the content of the telegrams and needed to find some clues. To translate Chinese documents into English usually was not too difficult for us, but telegrams were a different story.