Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  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!

  Struggles of a Young Writer

  Although 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.

  In 1998, after The Rape of Nanking had been published, one Japanese reporter, Kinue Tokudome, interviewed Iris and asked her, “Why did you decide to write this book?”

  Iris replied: “When I was a little girl, my parents shocked me with the story of the Rape of Nanking. They told me that the Imperial Japanese Army massacred thousands of civilians in the capital of China—and butchered even small children. This left a powerful impression on me, and I went to the local libraries to learn more details. But I couldn’t find a shred of information on the subject. There was nothing in my local school libraries, or public city libraries, or in my world history textbooks. Still worse, my teachers were completely ignorant of this event.

  “The event remained a question mark in my mind for years, until I saw an exhibit of photographs on the subject in 1994. The horror of those photographs inspired me to write the book.” Indeed, prior to that, Iris thought we might have exaggerated what had happened in Nanking in 1937-1938 when we told her those stories all those years ago.

  At the Cupertino conference, Iris learned that, so far, there was no English-language book to deal with this subject exclusively. She had learned that many American missionaries, journalists, and military officers had recorded their views of the event in diaries, films, and photographs, which were stored in archives and libraries. Immediately, with the help of the Bay area activists and the organization Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, she was introduced to several activists on the East Coast. She wanted to go to the National Archives in D.C. and the Yale University Divinity School Library to do research on the materials.

  On January 4, 1995, we flew to Los Angeles to see Shau-Jin’s parents and then drove to Santa Barbara to see Iris and Michael. This was a kind of annual ritual after Christmas, since now both children were not coming home for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Besides, California weather was so nice in the winter, and this was another way to escape the cold in Urbana. However, January 1995 was bad for Los Angeles. As soon as we arrived, it had the worst rainy season on record. Throughout the trip, it rained almost every day.

  Iris told us she was planning to go to the East Coast in a few days. Everything had been arranged, with the help of activists in the Bay area. She left for Washington on January 8 while we were still in Los Angeles. When we returned home, I had written Iris an e-mail asking whether she’d reached D.C. safely. On January 24, Iris replied from the Yale Divinity Library computer that she was fine and just too busy to answer my e-mail in more detail. After she returned home on February 12, five weeks later, Iris said there was a stack at least three feet tall of mail waiting for her, including boxes of photocopied documents that she had sent from the East Coast to herself. The visit to Yale was extremely successful: she found a lot of source material for the book. Iris said she owed us a long letter about the trip, and she was going to write to us once she found the time.

  On March 12, Iris mailed us a twenty-five-page, single-spaced typed letter about the trip—which, by itself, could have been expanded into a major article. She described the trip in such detail as to the house where she lived and the people she met and each person’s characteristics. She said she had written us such a detailed letter so it would also serve as her diary, to remind herself of the details later. Indeed, as she said before, such a letter gave us a full understanding of her thoughts and her life at the time. It was a historical record of her research on the book The Rape of Nanking.

  In the letter, Iris said that she flew to Washington on January 8 and reached Dr. S. Y. Lee’s home at 11:30 pm. Iris did not know Dr. Lee at all and had been introduced by Bay area friends. Dr. Lee and his wife graciously allowed Iris to live in their house while she was doing her research in the National Archives. She wrote:

  Dr. Lee and his wife were an elderly Chinese-American couple who had lived in the Washington, D.C., area for decades. He talked past midnight about their early years in China and how when he was a sophomore in college his university literally packed up and moved inland during the Sino-Japanese War. Typical of many Chinese-American professionals, Dr. Lee and his wife fled to Taiwan before the 1949 revolution and later migrated to the United States. After getting his PhD in chemistry, Lee worked as a chemist in a number of government research institutes, such as NASA.

  Now retired, the Lees devote their time to publishing the Chinese American Forum, a journal they founded for the purpose of airing the opinions and stories of Chinese-Americans from all professions and ages. Dr. Lee eagerly hoped that I might contribute to the journal in the future. Lee told me how gratified he was to see someone working on this book and said there was no such book like it in the English language. Even the ones in Chinese are distorted, he said.

  Then Iris described her daily life in D.C.:

  I stayed at Lee’s home for one week, sleeping in a guest room on the second floor of his house. There was a wooden desk in the room, on which the Lees had placed several books on the Sino-Japanese War for me to read along with articles about the Nanjing massacre. The Lees rarely saw me except in the evenings, for I spent almost every waking moment at the National Archives.

  On a typical day, I would rise between 7 and 8 am and take the bus to the Silver Spring metro station. Fortunately, there was a bus stop directly across the street from Lee’s house. The trip to the National Archives took about 45 minutes on public transportation, and the building was open by 8:45 a.m. I spent my mornings in the military reference branch of the archives on the 13th floor, looking through finding aids and filling out cards to request archival boxes from different collections of papers. Dozens of boxes would be pulled from the shelves, placed on carts and made available to me in the second floor reading room, which stayed open until 9 pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. I was usually there in the afternoons and evenings, scanning the documents, tagging the ones that pertained to the Nanjing massacre and xeroxing them as quickly as possible.

  At the end of the day, Lee would pick me up at the Silver Spring train station. If I worked late, I had to rely on him to give me a ride because the buses stopped running after a certain hour. In the beginning, I felt bad to trouble him in this way, but he insisted that it was all right because he had nothing much to do anyway. Besides, Lee was curious about my daily findings at the Archives and relished our long discussions about the Sino-Japanese War in the car on the way back to his house. For instance, he was fascinated by the question of how the Japanese soldiers could have been so polite at home and so brutal abroad. The answer, he believes, lies in the history of the Japanese samurai culture, which he thinks is nothing less than a cult like religion.

  Iris also wrote details about the National Archives and the archivist, John Taylor:

  The records on the Nanjing massacre were voluminous and scattered throughout many holdings in the National Archives. The person who guided me through them was the same man who helped me on the Tsien book: John Taylor, a white-bearded elderly archivist with sagging jowls, baggy clothes and an encyclopedic memory. After fifty years of service in the archives, he had worked his way up to the highest rungs of the m
ilitary reference branch and proved indefatigable in his efforts to help me and all the other scholars in his office. He introduced me to the recently declassified American intercepts of messages from the Japanese Foreign Office, the complete collection of transcripts from the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial), the investigative files for the prosecution of the IMTFE, the Shanghai Municipal Police Records, and the microfilmed records from the Department of State and military intelligence for 1937-1938.

  Taylor is one of the hardest working employees of the federal government, even though he is past retirement age. He is the first one in the office and the very last to leave. He even eats his lunch at his desk so that he will never miss a phone call. One of my most vivid memories is watching him play the phone like an operator with one hand while holding a sandwich with the other. Once, when I was staying at Marian Smith’s home and got sick for a day, John Taylor actually called me at her home to see if I was all right. On the day of my illness, I was supposed to have taken the shuttle bus to the Suitland branch of the National Archives from the main building at 8:15 am. Mr. Taylor noticed that I wasn’t at the bus stop at the side of the building and grew concerned. His phone call to Marian’s home signified to me two things: one, that Taylor was concerned enough about my general welfare to make the call, and two, he was actually in the vicinity of the National Archives as early as 8 a.m. to notice my absence! (In a city where many federal employees work ten to three with two hours off for lunch and who are reported by their secretaries as either “not in yet,” “busy at a meeting,” or “gone for the day,” whenever you call, it seems inconceivable that someone like John Taylor actually exists.)