Iris was awarded the San Francisco Chinatown Community Children’s Center (CCCC) Role Model Award in March 1999. She went to San Francisco for the occasion and took the opportunity to talk to Him Mark Lai at his home. On March 19, she wrote:
Dear Mom,
I just got home tonight, after spending the last few days in San Francisco. It’s been a busy last few days.
On Tuesday afternoon, at 3 p.m., I visited Him Mark Lai at his home in San Francisco. He lives on a hill on Union Street, . . . they are really wonderful, generous people. Him Mark is also a walking encyclopedia of Chinese American history. . . . He is well educated (he studied at UC Berkeley and used to work as an engineer). . . . He is constantly writing scholarly articles about Chinese American history, yet he toils outside of the world of academe, without much concern for title or recognition. He and his wife probably don’t have much money.
I spent a few hours talking to him, jotting down notes, browsing through his library, and then I drove to the gala fundraiser at the Asian Art Museum. Because of my tight schedule, I actually changed into my black evening gown in Him Mark Lai’s tiny bathroom.
At the museum, I gave my ten-minute speech and received the Chinatown Community Children’s Center Role Model award. Fred H. Lau, chief of the San Francisco Police Department, received the Community Service award. Lau is the highest ranking Chinese American police officer in the country. . . .
The gala organizers had actually assigned escorts for us. Lau was flanked by two Miss Chinatowns: Miss Chinatown USA and Miss Chinatown San Francisco. They looked pretty conspicuous in their tight satin chipaos and sparkling rhinestone crowns. I was to be escorted by “Mr. Asia,” but somehow he couldn’t make it, so the CCCC hastily brought in another handsome young man to replace him. Predictably, the press showed up to take pictures. (Him Mark Lai told me later that the Chinese newspapers raved about the elegance of my gown. I wonder if they actually reported anything that I SAID.)
I have to admit that I was delighted with the free hotel accommodations that I received as a result of accepting this award. Weeks ago, I told the CCCC that I needed to stay in a hotel in SF so I wouldn’t have to drive back to Sunnyvale late at night, when I was tired. Also, I wanted to take the opportunity to do some research around Chinatown. A board member of the CCCC saw to it that the Renaissance Parc 55 would donate a room for me for two nights. This room—#3164—turned out to be one of their luxurious, VIP corner suites. The place was bigger than my apartment in Sunnyvale!
On Wednesday, I slept late, and then visited the Gum Moon Woman’s Residence and Cameron House. Both were rescue missions during the early part of the century for Chinese women and children. Before, Gum Moon served primarily as an orphanage for young girls; today, Gum Moon operates as a Chinese boarding house with very reasonable rates (about $90 a week). Cameron House, which used to shelter girls who had been sold into prostitution, has become something of a YMCA-style center for Chinese youth.
The people at Gum Moon were kind to open their files for me. I spent the afternoon poring over the journal of the missionary Carrie Davis, written around the turn of the century, and leafing through the personal files on some of the former tenants at Gum Moon. (The stories broke my heart—stories of battered wives, women sold into prostitution, abandoned and neglected babies, little girls who had been raped or who themselves had been the product of rape, etc.) Just a few blocks away was Cameron House, and the staff there showed me the entrance of one of the underground tunnels that used to hide Chinese women from the tongs.
I spent the rest of Thursday back at Him Mark Lai’s home, where I asked him a million questions and took notes. He and his wife then invited me to dinner at Mon Kiang, a Hakka cuisine restaurant. I insisted on paying the bill because Him Mark had been so generous with his time. He told me that he was eager to help me because he knows I will do an excellent job, judging from my track record with THREAD OF THE SILKWORM and THE RAPE OF NANKING. Moreover, general histories on the Chinese in America are rare, he said. They place too much emphasis on the Cantonese-speaking Chinatown populations, and neglect to describe the migration of the Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese. In fact, not much has been written about the lives of the Chinese during the last 50 years, he told me.
Him told me that for years he had considered writing a general history of the Chinese. But now, in his 70s, he feels that his time would be better spent writing journal articles on more specialized topics—ones that other historians tend to ignore because of language barriers. His research requires intensive use of Chinese primary source materials, which many scholars cannot read. He genuinely believes that if he does not write these articles before his death, no one ever will.
As I write this I am suddenly moved—almost to tears—by the image of Him Mark Lai working alone, in relative obscurity, in his cramped little house filled with books and papers . . . an old man who has selflessly, tirelessly devoted most of his life to laying down the foundation for Chinese American history, so that other scholars might reap the rewards.
He said to me: “Your book is the book I should write, but never will.”
Love, Iris
Iris had used all her public appearances to appeal to the Chinese communities to give her any information or materials related to their family immigration experiences, such as personal stories and letters. She wanted to collect as many materials as possible for her book.
In the beginning of April 1999, Iris was going to the East Coast for a month, for a speaking engagement and to do research in the National Archives and Library of Congress in Washington. She wrote me on April 20, 1999:
Dear Mom,
Sometimes I forget how miserable research can be. I spent hours at the National Archives, opening dozens of boxes and flipping through thousands of documents. By the end of the process, my cuticles were bloody (from paper cuts) and my fingertips black with ink. Even now, I have a throbbing headache from the smell of rotting paper. Many of those boxes haven’t been opened for more than a century! Back in the late 1880s, the immigration officials stored documents by folding them into thirds (as you would fold a letter) and then bundling them together with red string. I’m sure the filing system worked well at the time, but it’s disastrous for historians and archivists. Some of the pages were so brittle that the pages would have snapped in two if I had tried to open them! (A couple documents were in such horrible condition they would have crumbled away into confetti.) I alerted the archivists to the problem, and they thanked me and said that the preservationists would work on the documents immediately. Apparently they use humidity or chemicals to relax the pages, and then protect them in transparent sleeves. . . .
Much love, Iris
Then, on April 22, 1999, while she was in D.C., she told us, in an e-mail, “Believe it or not, today Diana Zuckerman and I had a meeting with Hillary Clinton at the White House! More details to come. . . .”
It turned out, on very short notice, that Diana Zuckerman had arranged a private meeting between Iris and the First Lady for that day. Later, Iris told us that she briefed Mrs. Clinton on the Japanese war crimes during World War II and asked her support for a proposed bill on declassified documents on Unit 731. Iris promised to send her more materials to keep her informed. Mrs. Clinton also said to Iris that she’d love to see her next time Iris visited Washington.
After leaving D.C., Iris went to New York, where she attended the Committee of 100 meeting. She had been invited to be a member of the Committee of 100 when she hit the New York Times “Best Sellers” list. The Committee of 100 (or C-100 for short) is a Chinese-American organization established by prominent Chinese-American elites in 1990 (such as world-famous architect I. M. Pei and musician Yo-Yo Ma). In the meeting, Iris was chosen to be on the Role Model panel discussion with several famous Chinese-Americans such as David Ho, the biochemist who discovered the “cocktail” drug recipe for AIDS patients. In the panel discussion, Iris told the audience about her journey to become a writer and why
she had wanted to write The Rape of Nanking.
While Iris was trying to concentrate on her research for her next book, she still could not get away from the distraction generated by the translation of The Rape of Nanking in Japan. The whole thing finally ended in the middle of May when her publisher announced in a press release, “Basic Books and Japanese publisher Kashiwashobo have agreed to terminate their contract for the Japanese edition of The Rape of Nanking.” In the statement, John Donatich, the representative of the Perseus Books group, said: “The contract between us stipulated very clearly that no modifications to the text or artwork of Basic’s edition be made without the author’s consent. We believe a publisher to be neither advocate for nor critic of the book, but an entity that makes the book available for judgment by its public.” The statement also said, “Basic Books regrets that Kashiwashobo will not be publishing The Rape of Nanking and will begin seeking another Japanese publisher for the work. The Rape of Nanking is a fine book with important research and impassioned conviction, deserving publication in Japan.”
At this period of time, besides her research on her next book and the speech engagement, much of Iris’s precious time was spent in dealing with this matter, and we were all glad it was finally over. (Note: It took ten years, until November 2007, the tenth anniversary of the publication of Iris’s book in the U.S. and the seventieth anniversary of the Nanking Massacre, for the Japanese translation of her book to finally be published in Japan.)
There was an unexpected result of the translation dispute. The abrupt halt of the Japanese translation resulted in a boost in paperback sales of the book in the U.S. and even in Japan, though it was only available in English. Caroline White, the book editor of Viking Penguin, told Iris that in March, after the news came out, sales had shot up.
When the Japanese translation issue ended, next came the Cox report—another thing that occupied some of Iris’s time during this period. The Cox report was the January 3, 1999 product of a special committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China. The report alleged that the PRC had stolen some secrets of U.S. nuclear-weapon designs. The redacted report was declassified in May 1999. Iris got a copy of it and found out that her book on Dr. Tsien, Thread of the Silkworm, was cited in the footnotes of the Cox report as a reference nine times. To her dismay, it seemed that her book on Dr. Tsien had been used to indicate that Dr. Tsien was a Communist. They also believed that he was a Chinese spy, and had deported him back to China (in the 1950s). Later, an article in Time magazine about Chinese espionage also implied Dr. Tsien was a spy, using the Cox report as a source. Worse yet, in a similar article in the Washington Times, it simply asserted that Dr. Tsien was a spy. This infuriated Iris and she immediately sought to clarify it in a statement, saying that in her three years of research, Dr. Tsien was never officially charged by the U.S. government with spying. In the 1950s, the U.S. government had not found any evidence that he was a spy. Iris said that instead, he was accused of being a “potential” Communist; however, the U.S. government could not find any concrete proof of that, either. Therefore, Iris said that unless there was new evidence indicating that he was a Communist, the accusation in the Cox report was irresponsible. Iris asked the staff of the Cox report committee for more information proving that Dr. Tsien was a spy, but they said they could not release anything was not in the published report for reasons of national security.
This was during the tense period that Chinese spying and espionage was front-page news in this country almost every week. On March 6, 1999, the New York Times printed a front-page story about a security breach at the Los Alamos National Laboratory involving one of the United States’ most advanced thermonuclear warheads, the W-88. Two days after the March 6 article, Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese-American nuclear physicist working at Los Alamos, was fired and his named leaked to the press as the man under FBI investigation for espionage. The case was compounded by the release of the Cox report.
At this time it seemed that all Chinese-American scientists working on weapons research in this country were Chinese spies, reminiscent of the 1950s McCarthy era’s witch-hunt for Communists! Many Chinese-American organizations and minority groups joined together to protest about the U.S. government for its racial profiling and stereotyping. Iris was particularly unhappy about it, and the Wen Ho Lee case was one of the subjects in her speech and in The Chinese in America.
Eventually, as we later learned, Dr. Lee was charged with only one count of improperly downloading classified (later labeled “restricted”) data. After eight months in solitary confinement in handcuffs and shackles, Dr. Lee was released by Judge James Parker, who offered an apology to Lee for what he called “abuse of power” by the federal government in its prosecution of the case.
In the spring of 1999, Iris told us that she had been invited to give a keynote speech at a conference organized by Bay area Asian-Americans called Aspire 1999. We were already planning to visit her around that time, so she invited all of us to the conference evening gala event.
On May 29, we flew to San Francisco and arrived at the Hyatt near the airport in time for the dinner and the speech. We sat at a table of several distinguished guests to whom Iris had introduced to us: California House Representative Michael Honda, Oregon State House Representative David Wu, entrepreneur John Chen, and others. When we finished the dinner before the dessert, the MC introduced Iris to the podium and Iris delivered her keynote speech.
The title of her speech was “The Human Right to Historical Honesty.” Her powerful and clear voice attracted the attention of all five hundred people in the ballroom. I observed that during her speech no one left their table and only her words filled the air. She touched on the current issue of the Cox report and the ongoing racial profiling of the Chinese for espionage. She said “I am not here to defend or accuse Tsien. I’m not even ruling out the possibility that he was a spy. . . . But if the U.S. government is going to make serious accusations against a man who isn’t here to defend himself, then they should be prepared to back up their accusations with evidence. There’s a big difference between accusation and actual proof!”
She also gave her reason why historical honesty was important; it had direct bearing on our future as an ethnic minority in this country. “As Asian-Americans,” she said, “we have the right to see our people included—both honestly and accurately—in the pantheon of American history.” She continued: “Unfortunately, to this day, there are still few films or books about Asians that are historically honest. We still have images of Asian women as prostitutes or sex slaves, and Asian men as drug lords or spies—or just plain geeks.” She told the audience, “One way to dispel prejudice is to write a book. I’m trying to combat stereotypes with my current work in progress—a narrative history of the Chinese in America.”
She strongly criticized the Cox report and the Washington Times, saying, “Their story reminds me of the kind of irresponsible journalism that marred the Tsien case during the McCarthy era.” She said, “I think the Asian-American community is entitled to historical accuracy and honesty from the U.S. government. If they’re going to call Tsien a spy, then they should open up the records and prove it, especially on a subject that happened fifty years ago. You can’t have a government arbitrarily labeling people as Communists or spies. And you can’t engage in a fair discussion with the U.S. government if they are withholding evidence, or jumping to conclusions without evidence and then insisting, when questioned, that their facts are classified. As U.S. citizens, we have the right to know. At this moment, more is at stake than whether Tsien was a spy or not. If we don’t press our own government for accountability, they may come to believe that they can rewrite history at whim.”
This led to the reason why she had wanted to write The Rape of Nanking. She told the audience, “History is one way to maintain checks and balances to power. . . Historical amnesia only increases the possibility of human-rights abuse and genocide. For it emboldens t
hose who think they could get away with murder, and not be judged for their actions by future generations.” Iris continued: “We have a moral responsibility to speak out against injustice. . . . It was this sense of moral responsibility—and moral outrage—that goaded me to write my second book, The Rape of Nanking.”
I was certainly very moved by her speech. After the party, she was surrounded by young Asian-Americans who asked her questions and started taking photos with her. Her speech impressed many people, and one representative of a famous speakers’ agency came up to her and tried to recruit her as a client.
Besides travel, speech engagements, and research for her next book, she was also writing Op-Ed pieces to newspaper editors whenever she saw fit because at this time, almost two years after the publication of The Rape of Nanking, the book was still subjected to discussion in the media and people still could not stop talking about it. Iris was not scared to fight back when she felt a criticism of her book was unfair.
In a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times on October 17, 1999, she referred back to Joshua Fogel, who had criticized Harriet Mills’s book review of the book The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe. In Fogel’s letter, he wrote that “Iris’s book The Rape of Nanking was not only based on ‘flimsy’ evidence, but roundly criticized by historians who have investigated the topic. . . .” Iris asked in her letter, “Exactly which parts of my research did he find ‘flimsy’? The Rabe diary? The thousands of records kept by American missionaries who witnessed the massacre? The firsthand accounts of both Chinese survivors and Japanese participants? The contemporaneous press coverage?” Iris continued, “Fair disclosure would require Fogel to mention that almost all the historians critical of The Rape of Nanking are Japanese. . . . Outside of Japan, however, the response to my book has been overwhelmingly favorable. . . .”
Woman Who Could Not Forget Page 32