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.
Overcoming Obstacles
The 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.
In China in the 1930s, the telegram industry usually used only minimal necessary words to save time and money encoding and decoding each Chinese character during the transmittal process. For this reason, at that period of time in the telegraphy field, there was a group of Chinese characters, each of which was used to represent a certain defined meaning, such as the hour and the date at which the telegram was sent. If people did not know this convention, then it would be almost impossible to understand a telegram. This convention was abandoned after the war with the new developments in telegraphy technology.
When I first read the telegram exchanges between Chiang and Tang, I had difficulty understanding them fully. Fortunately, Shau-Jin had learned this convention in grade school, so he and I together were able to translate the desperate telegrams that Tang had sent to Chiang Kai-shek on December 9 and 11, describing the severe damage to the gate of the wall surrounding Nanking by the brutal attacks of the Japanese military. We read how Chiang Kai-shek ordered Tang to retreat at the last minute, even though Chiang had asked Tang to defend the city to the end in the beginning of November. The telegrams are brief but hold tremendous historical meaning.
Shau-Jin and I sat on the futon in Iris’s small apartment in Sunnyvale and dictated our translations to Iris, who was writing them down on her notepad. She also showed us the collection of photos she intended to include in the book. I had difficulty looking at the gruesome photos of the massacre that she laid down on her bed to show us. I also remember that I had reminded her that she should check the source of each of the photos carefully. She said that all the photos were from archives and that most of them had previously been published in the news media.
Our visit to Iris and Michael in California was short but was memorable, with the sixtieth birthday party for Shau-Jin proving to be a fun and festive occasion. Iris, Brett, and Michael surprised Shau-Jin with a big ice-cream birthday cake at the end of the dinner, and it was great for all of us to be together.
Iris was continuously revising her manuscript, and on January 22 she wrote to me:
Dear Mom:
Thank you for your inspirational email. I’ve been working on my book all week and feel more confident about my material. . . .
The sections [of the book] are so short that I organized each chapter as I would a speech. . . . Thinking of the chapters as speeches forces me to distill each idea into a tiny, hard gem.
Lately, I’ve been reading many of the world’s classic speeches for inspiration. They are breathtaking in their power—and so much more pungent than prose! In the evenings, when I read the speeches of Napoleon or Clarence Darrow or Winston Churchill, I feel engaged in actual conversation with them. Words are the only way to preserve the essence of a soul. What excites me about speeches is that even after the speakers are dead and buried, their spirit lives on. This, to me, is true religion—the best form of life after death. (And, for now, probably the ONLY form of life after death.) This is the first time I have ever devoted much attention to speeches. My previous reading had consisted mainly of essays, plays, novels and poetry.
. . .
Love, Iris
On February 20, Iris wrote to me that she had finished the revision of the main section of the book and was going to spend the rest of the month working on the introduction and the section about the cover-up. We received the revised manuscript that Iris sent us for our comments. She had improved it tremendously, and we told her so.
In March, Iris finished the Introduction. It took another month for her to finish the chapter about the cover-up. In every revision, she would send us a copy via e-mail or U.S. Mail for our comments. In the end, we received no fewer than four or five different versions of the manuscript before she and Susan settled on the final version. The manuscript printouts were bad because of her old over-used printer: the letters “a” and “o” were totally black. Also, at the margins of the manuscript, the ink was so dark that sometimes we couldn’t read words discernibly. She needed a new printer, but she didn’t have the time, and maybe the money, to buy a new one—it was a hard life for an independent writer under the pressure of time and financial strain.
Finally, in May, Iris mailed the whole revised manuscript to us. After I read her Introduction, I was moved by her passion, something that had been missing from the original draft. She genuinely wanted to be the voice for the victims, and now it was coming through in print. As Iris had told us, we found that Susan had edited her Introduction and other sections of the book brilliantly. In reading the “Second Rape” chapter, I clearly saw the Japanese right-wing groups’ ongoing attempts to hide the truth of the massacre from the Japanese people and the world. Although I was applauding Iris’s efforts and courage to disclose the cover-up, I was also very worried about her safety. This worry was not without basis. We had long learned from Chinese history that the Japanese imperial government had used intimidation and violent methods such as assassination during the war to eliminate many Chinese leaders in the Japanese struggle to conquer China. I told Iris those stories and asked her to be careful. She assured me that she would be all right and that there was no way she could omit the chapter on the cover-up from her book. But I knew that after publication of the book, she would be a thorn in the side of the Japanese right-wing groups.
In April, my mother’s health had further deteriorated. Shau-Jin and I planned to visit her around Mother’s Day. When Iris heard about her grandma’s poor health and our plan to go to New York, she immediately made a plane reservation to join us there.
Iris was very considerate and mailed me a beautiful Mother’s Day card before she left for New York. The card was purple with a beautiful iris flower, a thoughtful tribute to her namesake. Inside, she wrote:
Mom—I’m really touched by all the work you have put into The Rape of Nanking—the proofreading, the translation, the countless hours of invaluable discussions. You’re the kind of mother most authors can only dream of having—wise, passionate, endlessly supportive, inspirational. I love you more than I can say. Iris.
My eyes started to well up with tears. Those words really touched my heart!
On May 9 we arrived in New York, and the next day we all went to see grandma. We were appalled to see that Po-Po, always so feisty and full of life, had shrunk to a skeleton. It was hard for me to see her in such a condition. On Mother’s Day, we gathered around her hospital bed with flowers decorating the room. That was the last Mother’s Day I was with her.
Iris stayed in New York several more days to see Susan Rabiner and other people at Basic Books. After we
retuned home, Iris told us what had happened at Basic. Apparently, big changes were in progress. Basic would be taken over by Perseus Books Group, and the whole house was being restructured. Most of the people who currently worked there would be let go, including Susan. Iris was very surprised—and scared. She wondered whether her book might be cancelled. Susan assured her that her book would be published, but told her that she should finish it as soon as possible. Iris said the entire Basic Books office looked like a funeral home. People looked grave and were whispering in low voices. Susan told Iris she was leaving at the end of June; after that, Iris would have a new editor.
As I heard this bad news, I was worried for Iris. Besides the fact that she and Susan had such a wonderful working relationship, if Perseus Books decided that they did not want to publish the book after all, then Iris would have wasted at least two years of her precious time and the story of Nanking would still remain untold.
Twelve days after we came home from New York, on May 23, Shau-Jin and I flew to Los Angeles to attend Shau-Jin’s nephew Eric’s wedding. At the end of the wedding ceremony on May 24, when we returned to our hotel room, we received very bad news from my brother in the form of a telephone message saying that my mother had passed away that evening at 7:40 P.M., New York time. At that moment, Iris and Michael were in the room. The four of us immediately discussed what to do. Shau-Jin and I decided to go back to Urbana immediately, regroup, and then go to New York for the funeral. I spent a lot of time on the phone canceling the old itinerary and making a new one, but perhaps keeping so busy helped distract me from my grief. On May 30, all my sisters and brothers, their spouses and their children, and Shau-Jin, Iris, and Michael were at the funeral home in New York to say good-bye to Po-Po. She was eighty-three years old.
Woman Who Could Not Forget Page 24