Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  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.

  After the speech, Iris signed books. There was a long line, and many newspaper and TV reporters were there. Then one of the reporters came up to inform Iris that Nien Cheng was there. Nien Cheng was the famous Chinese-American author of Life and Death in Shanghai. Iris was shocked—in a good way, of course—to see her. The photo of Cheng and Iris shaking hands, with Iris’s surprised but delighted expression, was published in almost every Chinese newspaper that day. Later, Iris told me she felt greatly honored that Nien Cheng would come to greet her, especially considering that Cheng was so old (though she was beautiful and looked much younger than her age). After then, they were good friends for the rest of Iris’s life. (Unfortunately, Cheng died in November 2009 at the age of ninety-four.) Iris said Cheng gave her a lot of useful advice and became a sort of mentor to her. Nien Cheng was a very strong woman. She had gone through the devastating Cultural Revolution in China, in which she lost her daughter.

  The evening after the Holocaust Museum talk, Iris was greeted by five hundred people at a Chinese-American-organized banquet in a Chinese restaurant in Washington. I was also invited, so I witnessed this unforgettable evening. During the dinner, Iris was introduced, and she gave a short speech thanking the local Chinese-American community for supporting her. Iris recounted her early days in 1995, three years before, when she had come to Washington to do research on the Nanking Massacre in the Library of Congress archives and had lived in Dr. S. Y. Lee’s home. Dr. Lee also spoke and told everyone that when Iris had stayed in his home, he would pick her up at the Metro station after a long day at the archives. Dr. Lee said he always asked her what materials she had found that day, and she would describe the numerous records of the atrocities that she had discovered. She had cried when she described what she had read and the photos she had seen. It was a very touching moment when the banquet hall, with hundreds of people filling it, became silent while listening to the story.

  Another memorable event in D.C. was my surprise in seeing that the article that I had submitted to the Chinese newspaper World Journal Weekly Magazine had been published on March 15, the day Iris had delivered her speech at the Holocaust Museum. I also remember that on that day, my sister and I toured the Museum just before Iris’s talk. I was terribly impressed by the Museum’s having preserved the Jewish Holocaust memories, and I wished that one day a similar museum, dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Asian Holocaust of World War II, could be built in Washington too.

  Iris continued her book tour. She had asked the publisher not to schedule anything for the week of March 23-27, when she planned to return home to celebrate her thirtieth birthday with Brett and friends. This was the peak of her career—her book had been on the New York Times list for ten weeks, all before she reached the age of thirty.

  Near her birthday, on March 21, I carefully selected a beautiful birthday card and mailed it to Iris for her birthday. The words in the card were exactly what I wanted to transmit to her (which I recorded in my diary):

  Life holds so much beauty, but none more glorious than the beauty of a daughter’s smile.

  Life holds bright moments, but none more rewarding than that of raising a daughter.

  Life holds many gifts, but none more precious than the wonderful gift of having a daughter like you to love.

  Shau-Jin was taking advantage of the university spring break from March 21 to 29 to go to Taiwan. The Taiwan National Science Council had invited him to evaluate several proposals on their science projects. When he returned from Taiwan, he told me Iris’s book was well known in Taiwan and was also on the best-seller lists there too. When the head of the National Science Council met Shau-Jin, he jokingly said “I’d prefer to see your daughter rather than you!”

  On April 10, Iris arrived in Urbana, her hometown, for a book signing as part of her Midwest book tour. She went to the local bookstore, Pages for All Ages, the same bookstore that had sponsored her first book signing in 1995 for Thread of the Silkworm less than three years before. This time the bookstore really did a lot of publicity surrounding the event, including a big ad in the News-Gazette. On that day, many of our friends showed up at the bookstore. Many of our friends’ children had grown up with Iris and were asking to take a picture with her. One of the staff at the store told us that she had never seen so many people lined up for the signing of a book, except maybe for a football player who had stopped by many years before.

  After the Midwest book tour, Iris returned to California, and on April 16 she gave a speech at Stanford. The best news, she told us, was that her book had been adopted by the graduate program of the Stanford Psychology Department and would be taught in the classroom.

  Then Iris attended a conference at UC Berkeley and wrote me a letter on April 20 to describe it:

  Dear Mom:

  The Berkeley conference went beautifully. None of the Japanese participants gave me a hard time (they were all liberal minded); rather, I was treated like a celebrity. I gave lengthy interviews to reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Daily Cal (the student newspaper), and gave an informal talk before Orville Schell and a group of graduate journalism students a few hours before the conference. For two solid days, I was besieged by scholars, students and members of the community who wanted my autograph. The lecture hall in the Man’s Faculty Club buzzed with excitement every time I stepped in (“Iris Zhang is here!” people would exclaim), and I hardly had a m
oment to myself.

  I was amazed by the response to my speech, which was the keynote address for the conference. The room was packed when I walked in: more than a hundred people had reserved tickets for the lecture, and those who did not had to stand in the back or on the balcony. Afterwards, Wakeman and Irwin Scheiner of the Institute of East Asian studies and other scholars had nothing but the highest praise for my talk.

  When I have more time, I’ll call you and tell all the stories (there are many): how the crowd reacted with thunderous applause when I criticized the title of the conference (it was called the conference on the Nanking Incident, rather than the conference on the Nanking Massacre. Even the murder of a few hundred Vietnamese at My Lai was termed a “massacre.” How could the Rape of Nanking be reduced to an “incident”?); how I ran out of the dining room and up to my room to fetch photocopies of IMTPE estimates of 260,000 people killed in Nanking when a Japanese textbook author (not a conference panelist but a member of the audience) insisted over lunch that there was no evidence on the number of deaths in the city (This man hastily bolted from the dining room after I showed him the hard evidence); how Frederic Wakeman regaled me with stories of his wild adventures in Hollywood (his father was a famous film maker) and in China (he broke his hand in a fight during a money changing incident and is now working on a biography of Dai Lai).

  Love, Iris

  This multiple-city book tour continued for another two months before Iris returned to Urbana again in June 1998 to accept Uni High School’s Max Beberman Distinguished Alumni Award at their graduation ceremony. The News-Gazette’s staff writer, Huey Freeman, interviewed Iris for several hours. He described her book tour in an article published in the paper: “For Chang, getting mobbed is becoming commonplace. . . . ‘I don’t have the freedom to go into a city and be undisturbed as I was in the past’. . . . Chang is recognized by strangers in airports, restaurants and even in a police station.

  “Iris said, ‘I went into a Houston police station next to a Chinese restaurant because there were no phones in the restaurant. Two of the three police officers recognized me,’ she recalled, laughing. ‘They congratulated me.’”

  Freeman asked Iris’s feelings about the attention she had received, especially after the emotional turmoil she had gone through while researching the atrocities.

  “‘I guess I’ve gone from hell to heaven, haven’t I?’ she said. ‘But that’s not an entirely correct analogy. It’s more like being strapped to a roller coaster and not being able to get off.’”

  Back in March 1998, we received a letter from the principal of Uni High, Shelley Roberts. Roberts was a new principal who wrote us a congratulatory letter on Iris’s achievement of becoming a New York Times best-selling author. She was very impressed and proud. In the letter, she enclosed the November issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine, in which a big front cover article was written on Iris’s book, The Rape of Nanking. It turns out Roberts herself was an alumnus of Johns Hopkins University, too. In the letter, she said that Iris had already been nominated as the recipient of the Max Beberman Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest award Uni High gave to its alumni. The recipients of the Alumni Award had included several Nobel laureates. Roberts extended her invitation to Iris to be the keynote speaker for that year’s graduation ceremony for the class of 1998 in June.

  In reply to Roberts, we told her that Iris would be back home for a book signing in April, and suggested that she could ask Iris in person.

  In private, after I’d told her about the upcoming invitation, Iris told me that she had already committed to come back home in April; and, in addition, the University of Illinois Journalism Department and other organizations on campus were also planning to invite her to come back in the fall for a campus-wide talk. She said that with the tight schedule of her book tour, she did not feel that she should come back again in June for the high-school graduation ceremony. She said, “Why don’t you and Dad represent me to accept the award!”

  But during Iris’s April book signing at Champaign’s Pages for All Ages bookstore, Shelley Roberts, as I had suggested, did ask Iris to come back in June to receive the award in person. She was so sincere and charming that Iris said she just couldn’t say no right there, and told her that she would give her an answer after checking her schedule.

  In the meantime, I reminded Iris of all the years in high school when she’d felt that she was unrecognized; now it was time for her to come back to show everyone how her belief in herself had made a difference. I told her it was her responsibility to come back to encourage the newly graduated students to use her journey as an example. Finally, Iris wrote to Roberts that she accepted the invitation and would join the class of 1998 for their graduation ceremony on June 6.

  At the time, Iris had been touring across the nation. Close to Mother’s Day, on May 3, she was named Woman of the Year by the Organization of Chinese-Americans in Washington. I called her on the night of May 4, when she was staying with her friend Marian Smith in D.C. She spoke with me for only a couple minutes, but told me that she had thanked me in her acceptance speech at the Woman of the Year Award banquet for raising her to be what she was. I was quite moved and almost cried to hear that she had said that about me at such a huge moment.

  In her May 5 e-mail to me, she wrote:

  Dear Mom,

  I’m sorry that I sounded so rushed when you called me at Marian’s home. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve offended a lot of old friends in the last few months by not returning emails, phone calls and letters. Perhaps many people believe I’ve been corrupted already. . . .

  It’s true that I’ve neglected my loved ones for the last few months. I feel ashamed that I have not yet bought you a Mother’s Day gift, or even a card—only this note that I am hastily writing from my laptop computer, perched upon a bed in Diana Zuckerman’s home. How I wish you could have been there during the Woman of the Year ceremony. I told the audience how you inspired me over the years, how you served as my first role model.

  Please forgive me. I love you dearly, even though I haven’t found the time to talk to you in the last few weeks. And in a few weeks, we’ll all be reunited—and the book tour will finally be over. I feel like a soldier returning from a six-month war!

  Love, Iris

  According to Iris, Diana Zuckerman was a former White House staffer who had invited Iris to stay in her home in Washington. Diane would accompany her to the congressional briefing in the Capitol on May 8. The briefing was for members of Congress and their aides to understand the Japanese atrocities committed in Asia during World War II, including the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731 biological warfare, chemical warfare, and the sex slavery (Comfort Woman) issue. She was also trying to arrange a meeting for Iris with Hillary Clinton.

  Although Iris seemed to be enjoying the success of her book in this country, the right-wing ultranationalists in Japan had begun to criticize the book. Worse yet, in April, the Japanese ambassador had openly criticized her book as “one-sided and erroneous” in a press conference. Iris began furiously and courageously defending herself in the press immediately afterward. We were constantly on the phone, and although we could not speak extensively, we did our best to give her the support she needed. Her decision to return home for the Uni High graduation ceremony was timely; it enabled her to get a short rest.

  She arrived for the Uni High graduation on June 5. On Saturday, June 6, Roberts invited Iris and us to a pre-ceremony luncheon with her former English teachers, Charlene Tibbetts and Adele Suslick, who had helped Iris tremendously in her high-school years. It was a wonderful reunion.

  When we stepped into the Tryon Festival Theatre of Krannert Center for the Performing Arts on the U of I campus for the graduation ceremony, we saw that several hundred people were already sitting there waiting for the ceremony to begin. After several speakers delivered their congratulations to the class of 1998, Iris was introduced as the recipient of the Max Beberman Distinguished Alumni Award. They showed several slides of
Iris in her Uni years. One slide showed her with a group of her classmates, with her head circled in the photo. The picture reminded me of all the things that had happened during that period. Since then, how much had changed!

  While those memories ran through my mind, I saw that Iris had already stepped up to the podium on the stage and accepted the award plaque. Now she was starting to give advice to the graduating class of 1998. My mind could not quite concentrate on her speech. My thoughts were racing back and forth between the past and the present. It seemed like I was in a dream. I could not believe that in the past thirteen years, she had changed from an unrecognized high-school student to the author of a New York Times best seller. I knew some people might think she was just plain lucky, but I knew what a journey she had gone through. Every bit of her success was due to her hard work, her determination, and her conviction, all of which she delivered in her speech that day.

  She said, in a beautiful clear voice, “. . . First of all, please, please, PLEASE believe in THE POWER OF ONE. One person can make an enormous difference in the world. One person—actually, one IDEA—can start a war, or end one, or subvert an entire power structure. One discovery can cure a disease or spawn new technology to benefit or annihilate the human race. You are ONE individual and can change millions of lives. Think big. Do not limit your vision and do not EVER compromise your dreams or ideals. . . .”

  I could not hold back my tears when she said “I must thank my parents, who are in the audience today and who have always believed in me from Day One. They were the ones who inspired me to never set limits for myself in my dreams and who have served over the last few years as my greatest mentors, confidants, and friends. Mom, Dad—I love you and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.” My eyes were wet with tears throughout her speech.