Woman Who Could Not Forget (38 page)

We learned that her book had actually reached the list on January 14, but it took almost two weeks for that to show up in the newspaper. We don’t know exactly why it’s like this. Maybe publishers like to delay the information for two weeks so that they can make sure they have enough stock for potential buyers. On January 25, we went to a Barnes & Noble to buy a copy of the
New York Times
to see with our own eyes that her book was really there.

From that day on, Shau-Jin and I faithfully checked the list every week. Since we could find the list on the
New York Times
Web site, we printed out the list each time Iris’s book appeared. The book became number 14, up from number 15, the next week, and number 11 for the following three weeks. It remained in the top fifteen for ten straight weeks. At the time, Iris was only twenty-nine years old. Her editor told her that she was the first Chinese-American to become a best-selling author on the
New York Times
list at such a young age—and for such an unprecedented length of time!

Why did Iris’s book become a best seller? In retrospect, I have my own conclusions. First, the Rape of Nanking was not known in the West, even though it had been front-page news in the
New York Times
in 1937. This was partly because the West emphasized the European theater of the war and largely ignored the Asian-Pacific side of World War II, and partly because of the Japanese government’s deliberate cover-up of their World War II crimes after the war ended. The Rape of Nanking was forgotten by the outside world until Iris exposed it.

Second, China became an increasingly important and powerful geopolitical player in the 1990s; that gave China a strong position to sort out the past neglected history such as the Rape of Nanking which had never been properly addressed before. Third, Chinese people born in the 1930s who had gone through World War II had now reached retirement and had the time and resources to reflect on their lives, and they wanted to preserve their war memories. That included Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Canadians.

Fourth, in the 1990s, Americans were prosperous, so they had the resources to pay attention to history and culture events that did not necessarily immediately affect their day-to-day lives. And fifth, Chinese activists of grassroots organizations in the U.S. and Canada, having been in the redress movement regarding the Sino-Japanese War for many years, had strongly supported Iris’s book as the consummation of years of hard work trying to bring exposure to this period of history.

In short, Iris was very lucky to be writing at the right time and in the right place! But the most important of all, from numerous articles and reviews about her book, almost everyone agreed that it was the massive materials that she had unearthed from archives that made the difference; also, her eloquence and passion for historical truth and social justice expressed in the book reverberated with and impressed readers.

O
nce Iris’s book was on the
Times
“Best Sellers” list, her publisher’s goal was to keep it there as long as possible, which was also the goal for grassroots Chinese-American organizations such as the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, based in Cupertino, California. To maintain the momentum of the book sales, Ignatius Ding, the Executive VP of the Global Alliance, in January of 1998 sent out thousands of e-mails via his vast e-mail address list to ask every member to support Iris’s book and encouraged them to forward the message to their friends via their own address lists.

We too forwarded his message to friends and students via our e-mail connections. Ding’s e-mail must have traveled back and forth across the U.S. many times since I got the same message from students and faculty from other parts of the country long after I read his original e-mail to me. Iris’s book generated enormous interest and awareness among Chinese-Americans as well as interest from the general public for this forgotten history of World War II in Asia, and it looked as if people had finally realized that there was a chapter in history that needed to be re-addressed, the history of World War II to be rewritten and reconsidered.

In the meantime, in response to the Toronto ALPHA chapter’s movement to donate Iris’s book to public libraries, organizations in the U.S. did the same thing. Many people bought multiple copies of the book in response to the call. Chinese newspapers also urged readers to send Iris’s book to members of congress, senators, and local government officials to help push for political action and a formal apology from Japan.

In January 1998, Iris went to Los Angeles and San Diego for more book signings. When she was signing in Los Angeles and its suburban towns like Monterey Park (where many Chinese-Americans lived), more than a hundred people showed up at the bookstore. Iris told us that many bookstore owners told her that they had never seen a scene like it before!

On January 8, Ye-Ye, Shau-Jin’s father, suddenly died at the age of ninety-three. He lived in Santa Monica, California, and had been sick with a serious case of the flu for a week. He collapsed one evening and died shortly thereafter. We were shocked and went to Santa Monica for the funeral a week later. Iris had a tight schedule at the time. She was at a book signing in southern California but was scheduled to fly east for a number of TV and radio interviews, including one by PBS’s Jim Lehrer for his
News Hour.
However, she said she wanted to fly back to California on January 16 for the funeral and would scramble to make the proper arrangements.

After the book hit the
New York Times
“Best Sellers” list, the Perseus Book Group, which owned Basic, began seriously putting some effort into promoting the book and gave her financial and material support. They promised that they would provide Iris escorted transportation services and hotel accommodations in each city. I had always worried that her tight schedule of book signings and media interviews would wear her out. I had written to her former book editor, Susan Rabiner, and voiced my concern. Before the change, during the book tour Iris was living in her friends’ houses at night at almost every stop, and driving a rental car to the stores by herself. Now with her publisher committed to help her with transportation and accommodations, she could concentrate on preparing her talks and reaching out to more media.

Iris usually gave a half-hour speech before each signing. Her speeches were always stimulating and forceful, according to newspaper reports and our friends who attended the book signing. Iris told us that at the end of her speeches, many people asked her questions. Furthermore, in each book signing someone invariably would come up to her and tell her their personal stories about the atrocities they had experienced or witnessed during the war. Those who had gone through it were eager to share their emotions and their frustrations. Perhaps that’s another reason why so many people wanted to show up to her signings: to finally open up about their own past. However, Iris told us that while she liked listening to those stories and supporting those people, she was emotionally exhausted afterward.

On January 16, Iris flew to L.A. from D.C., where she had just been interviewed by David Gergen for the PBS
MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour.
She immediately rented a car at LAX and drove to the funeral home just in time for the ceremony for her grandpa. Everyone was delighted to see her, especially me. It was a big relief to see her arrive safely.

After the funeral, when we returned to the hotel with Iris, a huge bouquet of flowers was waiting in her room. The bouquet had been sent by her publisher to congratulate her making the
New York Times
“Best Sellers” list and to express their sympathy for the recent loss to our family.

I had to go back to Urbana to work right after the funeral. Shau-Jin stayed one more day with Iris and accompanied her to a signing at Borders Books in Thousand Oaks, California. Shau-Jin described to me what he saw at Borders. He said there was a big crowd of people coming in; about half were Asian-American. At the end of the book signing, when the crowd was gone, the owner of the bookstore realized Iris had not had lunch and ordered a sandwich for her. That was almost 4:00
P.M
. Iris was eating her sandwich while she continued signing the bookplates for the store, so they could stick them on the books in the next shipment and be sold as author-signed books.

On January 28, Iris called us with excitement and said that Laurel Cook, her Perseus publicist, and Jack McKeown, the CEO of Perseus, had called her in the afternoon to tell her that her book was up to #11 on the
New York Times
list! Her highest spot yet, only two weeks after first making the list. When they called, she could hear wild cheering, whistling, and clapping in the background! She was overjoyed!

Now that the publisher realized her book’s market potential, they made arrangements with all the possible bookstores and TV and radio stations in the country for her to do signings and interviews. Her itinerary from January 18 to March 13 was something like stops in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, Houston, Austin, San Francisco, Washington, and so on. To follow her, I asked Iris to give me a copy of her itinerary. Although the schedule of the book tour was hectic, Iris always maintained her high spirits and worked very hard.

One thing that pleased Iris was an article written by George Will, who was also a native of Champaign-Urbana and a graduate of Uni High School in Urbana. He is a renowned national columnist, and his articles are syndicated to almost every big and small newspaper in the country. One day Iris got a call from his aide, who told her that Will wanted to write an article about her book and wished to interview her. On February 19, his article “Breaking a Sinister Silence” was published in his column of the
Washington Post.
At the beginning of the article, he wrote: “Something beautiful, an act of justice, is occurring in America today concerning something ugly that happened long ago and far away. The story speaks well of the author of the just act, and of the constituencies of conscience that leaven this nation of immigrants.” At the end, he wrote: “Justice delayed is not necessarily justice denied . . . Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate, says that to forget a holocaust is to kill twice. Because of Chang’s book, the second rape of Nanking is ending.” Iris considered this column one of the highest points of her life, an eloquent summation of all that she had worked for over the past several years.

That same evening, Iris was invited to the San Francisco Commonwealth Club to speak. Iris told us it was a very prestigious forum and she considered it quite an honor to be able to speak there. The previous guest speakers were highly regarded world leaders like FDR, Ronald Reagan, and Nobel laureates in peace, literature or sciences.

On March 15 and 17, Iris was invited to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington to give two talks. By this point, I had seen her on TV but had never listened to her speak live, so I decided to go. I was very glad that I did.

I flew to Washington, and on March 15 my sister Ging-Ging and I arrived at the Holocaust Memorial Museum auditorium. I looked at the seats behind my reserved one; my guess was that it would hold five or six hundred people. Iris was scheduled to speak at 3:30
P.M
. Several minutes before that time, the whole auditorium was completely full. Although so many people were there, the room was very quiet. Many people held Iris’s book and were reading it while waiting. The atmosphere was reverently silent mixed with a heavy mood. Around 3:30, Iris had still not arrived. I started to wonder why, and looked up her schedule. She was coming from Palm Beach, Florida, where she had been attending a book festival the day before. She should have arrived in D.C. at 1:30
P.M
., and from 2:00 to 3:00 she should have been in a Borders bookstore for a TV interview and book signing. While I was wondering, Iris and Lydia Perry, the organizer for the talk, appeared. Iris sat down right next to me and said hello to her aunt. I immediately asked her why she was late. She said quickly that the whole schedule was running somewhat late. She handed me a copy of March 12th’s
Palm Beach Post,
with a full-page report on her book. On the top of the article, titled “The Forgotten Holocaust and One Woman’s Obsession to Remember,” was a big black-and-white photo of her. This photo was the one that now almost every newspaper and magazine was using: her clear black-and-white eyes looked straight toward you, with her long straight black hair covering her shoulder. She was dressed in a flowered sleeveless mandarin-collared jacket over a black sweater. She looked solemn, yet sincere and thoughtful. She looked stunningly beautiful, as some of my friends and even strangers expressed to me. Indeed, this particular black-and-white photo (taken by her friend Jimmy Estimada) is my favorite one of her and the one that graces the cover of this book.

After the organizers each gave a short introduction, Iris walked onto the stage. The whole auditorium erupted in hearty loud welcome applause. Iris spoke in a clear voice as she told the audience of this forgotten holocaust. The speech lasted almost an hour. At the end of the talk, many people came to the microphone to ask her questions. From the questioners, you could tell the talk had been well received. Near the end of the Q&A session, one middle-aged Jewish woman stood up and said “We should give Iris Chang a big round of applause for her courage in exposing this atrocity. . . .” The whole auditorium vibrated with thunderous applause. I was quite moved.