Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  In January 1998, Susan Rabiner, Iris’s former editor at Basic Books, became Iris’s agent. After Susan left Basic Books, she had established her own book agency in New York. She sold the paperback rights for The Rape of Nanking to Viking Penguin in January 1998. Then Susan encouraged Iris to think about her next book project.

  With careful consideration, Iris decided to next write on the Chinese immigration experience in this country. She was able to write the book proposal in between tours. At the end of the summer of 1998, she had already handed her book proposal, “Chinese in America,” to Susan. Sometimes I wondered how she could manage to do so many things in such a short time. Her work ability and energy were amazing.

  On October 22, 1998, Professor John Cronan handed me a letter and informed me that he had previously recommended that the Department of Microbiology appoint me a Research Associate Professor. Just that day, the department had confirmed my appointment. (Probably because he didn’t want me to be disappointed, he had not let me know of his recommendation until the department passed the confirmation.) I was overjoyed, to say the least. Although I had decided that I was going to retire in 2000, to receive this title was still very gratifying. I wrote an e-mail to tell Shau-Jin, Iris, and Michael the good news immediately. Iris returned my e-mail right way with exciting—and even better—news of her own. She wrote:

  Dear Mom,

  Congratulations!!!! You certainly deserve this title—especially after all these years of hard work and research. I’m so proud of you. And so happy that John Cronan spoke up on your behalf to get you this title.

  Your email came through just as I was checking my messages from the Radisson Empire hotel—how fortuitous.

  This afternoon, I had a wonderful lunch at the Savore restaurant with the top brass of Viking Penguin, and then signed the contract for the third book in my editor Caroline White’s office. (Susan Rabiner even took a picture of me signing the contract because of the huge sums involved! We joked about this being “a historic moment.”) So this has definitely been a marvelous day . . . for both mother and daughter!!!

  In a few minutes, I have to get ready to go to a New Yorker party. If I’m not too exhausted, I’ll call you tonight and tell you all the exciting things that have been happening in my life in Manhattan!

  Love you, Iris

  Iris called from New York later to talk about all the wonderful news. The most exciting news was that she’d gotten a huge advance for her third book, The Chinese in America, from Viking Penguin—an amount so large that she did not want to disclose the exact amount to us yet. She was on another month-long book-signing and speech tour and was now in New York on the way to Boston. She said as soon as she finished this tour, she would start working on her next book and keep the momentum going.

  The fact that The Rape of Nanking had hit the New York Times “Best Sellers” list fulfilled Iris’s prediction for herself that one day she would become a best-selling book author; and, because she had made the list, she got a huge advance for her next book, which finally would alleviate some of the financial stresses that had still been weighing on her. It turned out that her writing profession was not necessarily a money-losing business after all; but it had certainly not been without a hard journey and many struggles along the way. I still have to give her a big round of applause for her belief in herself, even when things seemed bleakest.

  Now, with the advance for her third book, Iris would be able to write for the next ten to twenty years without worrying about having to take extra jobs to support herself. I am saddened whenever I think about how her own life was cut short and that she was not able to enjoy the fruits of her own achievements and hard work.

  After the excitement of the debate with the Japanese ambassador on December 1 was over, I thought there would be no more public appearances for Iris for the year. But I was wrong. Iris told me that the San Francisco-based organization on preserving the truth of the Sino-Japanese War and the UN Northern California Chapter had invited her to appear on December 9, 1998 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She appeared with Martin Luther King III, the son of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and Arun Gandhi, grandson of the legendary Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, at the San Francisco Masonic Center in front of five hundred people. Iris told the audience that truth is one antidote to genocide, and that she believed “crimes against humanity must never be forgotten or denied.”

  When Christmas 1998 was approaching, Iris told us that she and Brett had been invited to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, for a Renaissance Weekend retreat at the end of December. Iris explained to us that Renaissance Weekend was an annual event hosted by Linda LeSourd Lader and her husband Philip Lader, former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Renaissance Weekend is a family retreat for innovative leaders from diversified fields across the nation. They come to the retreat to exchange views in lectures, seminars, panel discussions, and workshops. Iris was very excited about it because she could meet many intellectuals and the brightest minds in the nation. And she also told us that President Clinton and Hillary Clinton came to the retreat every year, so she had the chance to meet them, too.

  After Iris came home from the Renaissance Weekend, she wrote us a fifteen-page, single-spaced letter to describe her adventure at the retreat. She told us that we could not disclose any of her writing about the Renaissance Week to others, as it could result her in never being invited to Hilton Head again. (It’s a rule.) Iris was surprised that some of the attendants recognized her immediately, because these people themselves were celebrities. Since I cannot disclose any details of what Iris wrote to us, here I will only say that she met many interesting celebrities such as Betty Friedan, the feminist and the author of The Feminine Mystique; Peter Arnett, the CNN correspondent; Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws; Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club; and a number of other famous people. But the most prominent ones were President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. Iris said that at the New Year’s Eve event, they did show up and gave a talk to the crowd. She had the chance to take photos with President Clinton and Hillary, respectively. She also gave a copy of her book The Rape of Nanking, and of the September issue of Reader’s Digest with her on the cover, to the Clintons. She even managed to have a short talk with both Bill and Hillary Clinton at the party. The talk was brief because they were surrounded by other people who also wished to talk to the Clintons. Several months later, Iris received a personally signed thank-you note from President Clinton on his official Presidential stationery to acknowledge that he had received the book. Although Iris was critical of President Clinton regarding some current events, she admitted that she had been overwhelmed with emotion when she was able to be so close to power!

  After Kashiwashobo acquired the rights for the Japanese translation of Iris’s book in the spring of 1998, Iris did not hear anything regarding the actual translations until July. Iris told us she had heard that several Japanese historians and professors had turned down Kashiwashobo’s requests to review the translation, and at least one of them admitted to backing out of the project due to pressure on his family from an “unknown organization.” Iris said this was not a good sign. Around the same time, rumors circulated that Kashiwashobo had received death threats as the news leaked out that they had acquired the rights to The Rape of Nanking.

  Both Shau-Jin and I were quite concerned about the development of the Japanese translation project of her book, so Iris was feeding us the news as soon as she heard anything from Basic and from the publishing house in Japan. Iris mailed copies of most important correspondence with Kashiwashobo to us. At the time, because of the unusual situation surrounding Kashiwashobo, Iris had already expressed that one day when she got old, the publication of the Japanese translation of her book by Kashiwashobo would be one important chapter in her memoir.

  I have combed through the copies of notes and e-mails Iris gave us about the Japanese transl
ation of her book. There are numerous details and twists of the event worth describing, since this will give a glimpse of how strong the pressure of the right wing in Japan is—so much so that it eventually thwarted the Japanese translation of her book such that there was no Japanese edition published for another ten years.

  The first indication that Kashiwashobo wanted to change the contents of her book came in August 1998. That month, Kashiwashobo announced to Basic Books that a “Nanking Incident Research Committee” had undertaken the responsibility of fact-checking her book. Hiraku Haga, the editor-in-chief of Kashiwashobo, wrote to Iris to explain that there were conservative groups in Japan who insisted that the Nanking massacre had never happened. Their strategy was to “pick out detailed, minute mistakes in writers’ comments” and “point out how the errors are an indication of a lack of research . . . the errors are then twisted around to prove that the argument has no validity at all.” Therefore, Haga wanted all errors to be addressed in the Japanese edition before publication. In October, Iris received a long list of annotations to what Kashiwashobo and the Nanking Incident Research Committee considered to be errors in the book. The publisher requested permission to insert these annotations into her book as a separate appendix or between brackets alongside the original text.

  Iris gave the annotations a thorough examination. She found in a few cases that the Committee had indeed found some minor errors in the book, such as misspelled names, and she agreed to let those changes (about ten of them) be corrected. But the vast majority of the annotations were not corrections of errors, but merely additional details of existing facts. Worst of all, according to Iris, many of these annotations were factually incorrect and contradicted several well-established historical accounts of World War II history, such as the Japanese role in the Marco Polo Bridge incident. After reading these annotations, it became clear to Iris that the Nanking Incident Research Committee’s true intent was not to correct her mistakes, but to reinterpret entire sections of her book. Therefore, Iris did not permit Kashiwashobo to make the changes. I remember Iris spending long hours in her busy schedule going through the annotations point by point. In the end, she wrote Kashiwashobo a lengthy, three-part memorandum to explain why most of their annotations were not corrections of her errors after all.

  After Iris e-mailed them, she thought the whole issue would be resolved. However, Haga wrote back that they had asked a history professor to write an Afterword to the Japanese edition of the book. Iris found that they had inserted some of the Nanking Incident Research Committee’s subjective (and erroneous) commentary back into the Afterword. Iris did not want to permit them to do that either.

  Meanwhile, Kashiwashobo voiced their concern about the photographs in the book. They said the Committee could not verify the authenticity of some of the photos. They wanted to delete them or put in a disclaimer to avoid the criticism from the right-wing conservatives. After Iris refused, then they wrote back to her and said they wanted to replace the map of Nanking in her book with a more accurate one. Upon carefully examining the new “accurate” map they provided, Iris found that the execution sites where the massacres occurred were missing from the map. She asked why. They replied, “because authorities cannot prove exact locations.”

  Iris asked us what their exact motives were. Iris felt that Kashiwashobo was cracking under the pressure of right-wing ultranationalists. At a very early phase, Iris said that they had received death threats, and these threats were not to be taken lightly. In January of that year, a right-wing extremist armed with a baseball bat had wrecked the offices of a Tokyo publisher who had published a book, My Nanking Platoon, a diary of a repentant Japanese soldier who had committed atrocities at Nanking. A year earlier, a fanatic had slashed a movie screen with his knife as audiences watched the Chinese-made film Don’t Cry Nanking.

  After Iris rejected all their requests for changes, she did not hear any more from Kashiwashobo for a while. Then, in February 1999, Iris began to receive calls from the Japanese media. Reporters were asking her to comment on a “supplement” of “errors” that the Kashiwashobo planned to release with the Japanese edition of The Rape of Nanking. Iris was shocked to hear such news—she did not know anything about it. Iris immediately asked the Basic Books foreign-rights department to inquire about the situation.

  Iris was stunned when Basic Books learned that Kashiwashobo was planning to release another volume, called The Nanking Massacre and the Japanese: How to Read The Rape of Nanking—a book filled with negative reviews of her book and essays from the Nanking Incident Research Committee that challenged her book. The drama soon escalated: when Basic asked for information about the “other” book, Kashiwashobo immediately suspended the publication of both books. To Iris’s dismay, Kashiwashobo told news reporters that Iris had demanded the cancellation of the other book. The fact was that Iris did not even know the other book existed until Basic Books started to inquire.

  Iris told the news reporters that she did not give permission to have a “supplement” or “supplementary volume” attached to the Japanese edition of her book. If Kashiwashobo wanted to publish a separate book about her book, that was none of her business—as long as it was not part of her book.

  Kashiwashobo then made confusing and contradictory statements to the Associated Press in a story released on February 24, 1999. Haga told the AP that Kashiwashobo had “no obligation to consult with her about the other book because it is a different project,” yet insisted that they would cancel Iris’s book if she did not agree to allow the simultaneous release of The Nanking Massacre and the Japanese. “We will not publish her book alone,” Haga said.

  Iris also told us that she had proof that Haga’s original plan was to sell the other book as a supplement—indeed, a “supplement that points out errors in the original.” In February, a press release was posted on the Internet to announce a professional luncheon that would be hosted by Hiraku Haga and professor Akira Fujiwara on February 24 at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Tokyo. (The luncheon was later cancelled when Kashiwashobo postponed publication of both books.) The title of the lunch discussion was to be “Nanking 1937? What Really Happened?” In the announcement, it stated “. . . The publisher picked a highly unusual—and arguably unprecedented—path, combining a faithful, completely word-for-word translation and a separate supplement that points out errors in the original and contains essays on the event. . . .”

  Iris felt that this was a complete breach of contract. For translation, the publishing house only had the right to faithfully translate the original content of a book into a foreign language, and there was nothing in the contract that said that the publisher had the right to reinterpret the book’s contents.

  In a sense we all agreed, and we felt relief when Kashiwashobo stopped the publication of the Japanese edition of Iris’s book. We were glad it was over. We told Iris it seemed it was not the right time for her book to be published in Japan, although the Japanese people deserved to know their own history better. “Like it or not,” Iris said, “it’s their history!”

  Research on Chinese in America

  Iris’s idea to write about the Chinese in America as her next book’s topic came from her many tours for The Rape of Nanking. In her introduction to The Chinese in America, published in 2003, she wrote, “As I toured the United States and Canada giving talks on the subject [the Rape of Nanking], I encountered vibrant Chinese American communities that I had not even known existed. The people I met ranged from descendants of transcontinental railroad workers to new immigrants studying here on scholarships, from illiterate factory workers to Nobel laureates at leading universities, from elderly survivors of Japanese wartime atrocities to baby girls adopted by white parents.”

  She continued: “At first, I feared the subject might [be] too broad, but I couldn’t let go of the idea of exploring the history of my people. Moreover, I believed I had a personal obligation to write an honest history of Chinese America, to dispel the offensive stereoty
pes that had long permeated the U.S. news and entertainment media.” This was a project she was passionate about, and she devoted four years to writing it.

  As promised, when Iris returned from Renaissance Weekend at the beginning of 1999, she began actively working on The Chinese in America. The plan for the book, she said, was to collect as many materials as possible and then to write a detailed outline. She had been contacting many of her friends and asking them to give her leads on how to find source materials. Her friends in immigration research suggested several places to look for the records of Chinese immigrants. Iris planned to visit the U.S. National Archives, Bay area archives in California, and museums such as the Chinese Historical Society in San Francisco, Angel Island, and the San Bruno branch of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. She also told us she was going to the UC-Berkeley East Asian library to do research.

  Iris spent one week at UC-Berkeley in January 1999, intensively copying source materials from Berkeley’s vast Ethnic Studies library. By the invitation of Him Mark Lai, the authoritative historian on Chinese-Americans, she attended the Chinese Historical Society meeting in San Francisco and met many authors who had written Chinese-American histories or stories. She bought $300 worth of books on Chinese-American history at the Society. She said that when she returned home, her car was filled with boxes of books and related materials. I also forwarded her any articles related to Chinese immigration that I found in Chinese or English newspapers and magazines.