In the meantime, Iris was disappointed to find that she had not gotten pregnant. She was visiting her OB-GYN doctors and doing various physical tests to find out why. All the tests showed that everything appeared to be normal for her and Brett. By this time, she was really getting discouraged and growing increasingly puzzled. Her inability to get pregnant was compounded by her frustration in the movie project. I had offered my motherly soothing words to her as much as I could. I told her that to be unable to have a baby was not the end of the world, and I asked her to relax.
With all the discouraging events—no pregnancy, and no movie deal—at the end of 2000, Iris was still able to steadily write several pages a day of her book. At the end of the year, she said she had finished about half of the book’s first draft, far from her original plan to finish the first draft of the whole book by then. She admitted that she had a mental block and couldn’t write as fast as she had hoped. She also complained that the topic of the book, “Chinese in America,” was too broad, and she was finding it more difficult to write on a broad subject than on a single specific event like Nanking.
However, I felt that her inability to proceed with her writing plan as scheduled was caused by a number of other distractions too, such as going to conferences and joining human-rights activities, not just the movie and pregnancy. She was invited to many conferences across the country. She had declined many of them, but in some cases she just could not avoid it, such as when the conference was right in California.
In the year 2000, Iris spent a lot of time pushing Senator Dianne Feinstein’s Japanese Imperial Army Disclosure Act, or Senate Resolution S. 1902. She personally wrote to Feinstein, mailed a copy of her Nanking book to her, and telephoned her aides. She spent many hours sending e-mails and her endorsement letters to senators and representatives asking them to support both this bill and a similar one in the House. Iris saw this as her duty, regardless of how busy she was.
On August 3, Iris attended a press conference in Los Angeles and gave a speech urging every Chinese-American to support Feinstein’s bill, S. 1902, the Japanese Imperial Army Disclosure Act, which sought to mandate the declassification of all remaining documents about the Japanese Imperial Army in U.S. government archives.
Iris told media that “history is based on documents! I could not have written The Rape of Nanking without access to primary source documents!” She said, “The historical truth, once released, has a way of changing history on its own. The ugliness of a nation’s wartime record might stimulate a future government to think twice about committing atrocities, especially if that government realizes that these actions might haunt them down the road. If we the people do not insist on the disclosure of historical records, then we are acting as silent accomplices to those in power, and those would prefer that their crimes remain secret forever.”
She reminded people “that the essence of American democracy comes from our ability to question and challenge those in power, and to make them absolutely accountable to the people. It is our duty as American citizens to hold our elected officials responsible. We should be keeping a tally on which politicians support important legislation, and which merely give us lip service. We don’t work for them . . . they work for us.”
Right around this time, Representative Tom Lantos also initiated a similar bill, H.R. 5056, in the House. In a press conference, Lantos announced: “The Imperial Japanese government was involved in heinous war crimes during the World War II era, and it is extremely important that we do all we can to bring those crimes to light. Iris Chang, in her brilliant book The Rape of Nanking, gives an outstanding account of just one instance of these atrocities. We have made great progress in declassifying documents relating to Nazi Germany, but now we need to take major steps to assure that documents in American archives relating to Japanese atrocities are also made public.” Iris was quite happy about it and informed us as soon as she heard the news.
With help from all sides and the “pushing team” of Chinese-American activists, the Disclosure Act finally passed in both Senate and the House in October 2000. On December 26, President Clinton signed it into law. This indeed was a major victory for Chinese-Americans.
Another thing that consumed some of her time was the fact that publishers constantly asked Iris to write blurbs for upcoming books. She could read a book very quickly, but it still used up her time. She insisted on reading the whole book before she would write an endorsement, rather than simply glance through it as most people did.
Iris was sought out to write blurbs for new books not only on Asian history, but also on human-rights violations, and sometimes even fiction books. It gave her the chance to read different kinds of books, but was still a distraction, albeit a pleasant one. Iris was thrilled when the editor of Jim Lehrer’s fiction book The Special Prisoner at Random House asked her to write a blurb for the book. Iris had grown up with the PBS six o’clock evening news with Jim Lehrer, and she felt it an honor to be considered for writing an endorsement for the book.
At the time she was having difficulty conceiving, she was asked to write a blurb for a book called The Lost Daughters of China, by Karin Evans. She was disheartened by the book’s description of Chinese orphanages and the Chinese government’s one-child-per-family policy. Millions of infants, almost all of them female, were abandoned due to Chinese culture’s gender discrimination against females. She said she wept as she read the book. She had expressed a lot of her sentiments and felt the injustice and discrimination against women in some cultures and religions. We had talked about adopting a child from China if she could not get pregnant for whatever reason, but she always felt that to produce a child of her own was one of her utmost wishes.
On the subject of blurbs, there was an unfortunate episode that hurt Iris very much at the time. In March 2000, Iris was asked to write a blurb for a book on Japan’s imperial family. The author had actually been introduced to the publisher by Iris, and the book was based on solid research and well written. Iris wrote a very favorable blurb to endorse the book, but in the end she found out that the publisher did not dare use her blurb due to a protest from an established scholar in the field. A professor at a famous university on the East Coast threatened the publisher that if they used Iris’s blurb, he was going to withdraw his own blurb from the book. Not only that, he threatened that he would ask all others withdraw theirs as well. This professor was powerful enough to make the poor author beg the publisher to pull out Iris’s blurb, regardless of the fact that Iris was the one who had helped him and recommended him to the publisher in the first place.
Iris was furious when she learned of this. She told us that although she was disappointed about the author’s collapse under pressure, she had sympathy for him. She could understand that the author had to compromise in order to preserve his academic career in Japanese history. On the other hand, with regard to the other professor, she said that she had never seen a professor stoop so low as to organize a conspiracy among his peers to sabotage a book—merely because the book contained one endorsement by an author he did not like. Iris felt this kind of abuse of academic power was unacceptable and should not be tolerated by publishers. I remember Iris vowing that she would expose this incident in her memoir someday.
Since the publication of the Nanking book, in spite of overwhelmingly excellent and positive reviews endorsing the book, there were still a few attacks. In one instance, Iris told us about Honda Katsuichi’s fine book (English translation) The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame. In the introduction of the book, editor Frank Gibney made an incredible claim and wrote that Iris Chang “hopelessly exaggerates an ‘atmosphere of intimidation’ in Japan.” Then, a few pages later in the book, Mr. Honda wrote: “. . .my 1971 book of reportage, Journey to China, in which I traced the path of the Japanese Army through China . . . I was targeted by Japan’s extreme right-wing forces and received a number of threats which prompted me to move out of my home and keep my address and tele
phone number a secret, a policy that I have continued to this day. Bungei Shunju and other magazines put out by conservative publishers have continued their attacks on me for more than twenty years.” It was well known that Mr. Honda usually wore a wig and dark sunglasses to conceal his identity from Japanese right-wing politicians and activists. Iris wondered why Gibney would criticize her in such manner.
Some of Iris’s friends felt that a few academic “scholars” in Asian studies in this country, particularly in Japanese studies, either out of jealousy or because their research funding came from Japan, might be conspiring in a smear campaign designed to discredit Iris and her book. Indeed, the vicious, although relatively few, attacks on her book made Iris feel there might be a smear campaign to discredit her.
This tumultuous, trying year passed very quickly. For Iris, the year was full of disappointment—failure to produce a baby, no movie deal, and only a half-finished book draft—but she did at least succeed in helping pass the Japanese Imperial Army Disclosure Act and to continue fighting for the cause she cherished.
After Shau-Jin and I retired in 1999 and 2000, Shau-Jin was invited to teach at the Department of Physics and Material Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong as a visiting professor for half a year. Both of us were delighted to go to Hong Kong, because we had lived there briefly from 1950 to 1951. We were eager to visit the place again and renew our memories and travel a bit.
On January 13, 2001, we arrived in Hong Kong and lived in City University’s guesthouse, which was located in the center of the busy district of the city. Shau-Jin was teaching physics at City University and I was learning how to get around the city via public transportation, but most of my time was spent on the computer. I was in constant touch with Iris, Michael, and all my friends in Champaign-Urbana.
On February 11, Iris called us from California and gave us some bad news. As we knew, she had had problems getting pregnant for the past two years. She was determined to find the root of the problem. She was investigating and had done a lot of research. She also saw a number of doctors and ordered many tests. Finally, she found a world-renowned fertility doctor in Chicago who also came to the Bay area once a month. She told us she was fortunate to be able to consult with this doctor and to finally find the root of her infertility problem. It turned out that she and Brett were immunity-incompatible. Her blood test showed she had had miscarriages at least four times without knowing it. And she might have activated Nature Killer (NK) cells, too. All these medical terms were new to me, and it threw me into a research spell. I was constantly on the computer, searching and understanding the problem of infertility and how to resolve it. From what I understood at the time, Brett and Iris had, unfortunately, a mismatch in their immune systems. When the fertilized egg or the embryo was formed, Iris’s body rejected it and saw the embryo as a foreign entity. The result was a miscarriage. The doctor told Iris that her body had a normal and healthy fertility apparatus in every aspect, but the immunity incompatibility with Brett threw them into a two-percent category that meant she had to either receive an immunity treatment or do in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and hire a surrogate mother to bear a baby for them.
This news saddened Iris and us immensely. On the phone, I immediately told her my thoughts about going to adoption rather than fiddling either with immunity treatment or surrogacy. We talked almost two hours and ended up using up the time limit on the phone card. The talk was very emotional. After the phone call, I felt I might have voiced my opinions about adoption too strongly, so I wrote an e-mail to apologize and told her I respected her decision, whatever it would be.
On February 13, Iris wrote back:
Dear Mom,
Please don’t apologize for your reaction over the phone—I know you spoke out of love and concern for me. I appreciate your taking the time to search for information on the Web, but I could save you the time by mailing you copies of my files. In the past few weeks, I have amassed literally hundreds of pages of data. . . .
The doctor’s assistant told me that in the Bay area office, every single one of his patients who chose the gestational surrogate route ended up having children—healthy children. (Most women, however, prefer to use the experimental drugs or IVIG therapy instead of hiring a surrogate. About eighty percent achieve successful pregnancies through immunological treatment.) . . .
Love, Iris
She told us that after hearing this bad news, she could not help but cry quietly by herself, even though Brett continually reassured her that eventually they would have a baby. The doctor told her there were two ways to have a baby in her case: to use IVIG (intravenous immune globulin) therapy together with an experimental drug, Enbrel, or to hire a surrogate mother to carry the baby. The former treatment involved blood products and had some risks and side effects; it could also depend on some other factors since the procedure was still experimental, in the early stages of its use.
In addition to this sad news, at that time stocks had plunged in the U.S. market and the economy seemed to be heading toward a recession. That news made everyone moody, and we were not exceptions; but in such a depressing atmosphere, Iris was still very positive and optimistic. She was trying to comfort me.
On March 15, 2001, she wrote:
Dear Mom,
I thought about our conversation yesterday. Oh, I know you are terribly upset about the stock market plunge. But don’t agonize over anything beyond your control. . . . In Chinese, the character for “crisis” is the same one for “opportunity.” Just remain calm, gather information, and follow a careful strategy.
We have much to be grateful for: our health, our success, our savings and debt-free finances. I have been reading books about Chinese families who had made the fateful—and often fatal—decision to stay in the PRC in 1949. The suffering they endured under the Cultural Revolution is almost as horrific as the history of those who survived the Rape of Nanking. What problems do we have, compared to those people?
Love, Iris
In the meantime, Iris continued to search for ways to overcome the infertility problem. She had also explored alternative medicine such as Chinese acupuncture and Chinese herbs, which also claimed they could overcome infertility. She was visiting a good Chinese acupuncturist who indeed helped her deal with her stress and insomnia, if not the infertility.
Iris also contacted the local supporting group for infertility, called Resolve, and met many couples with similar infertility conditions as hers. In those meetings, she learned that she was not alone, and she obtained much information concerning the pros and cons of each route to fertility. It just felt good to talk to people sharing the same fears and concerns.
On the outside, Iris was very efficient at finding solutions to her problems and stayed relatively upbeat, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going through emotional ups and downs inside. One day she described to me that when she was sitting in a Chinese restaurant waiting for her order, she watched all the tables around her. She saw a mother whose child was sitting next to her, eating joyfully. She saw another mother holding her baby on her lap while eating. She felt a sting behind her nose and eyes and her tears started flowing silently down her cheeks. She felt very sad as she thought about how she could not bear a child of her own. I listened to her with great sympathy. I could not say very much, because my heart went out to her, and I could not think of the right words of comfort. I wished I were not in Hong Kong. I wanted to embrace her and to give her support not only mentally, but physically.
Not all the things that happened at this time were bad, though. Iris reported to us that some movie producers in Hollywood were interested in buying the movie rights to The Rape of Nanking and adapting it into a movie at long last. On February 24, 2001, Iris wrote:
Dear Mom,
As I mentioned earlier, I met with several famous Hollywood producers last Wednesday at the Mayflower restaurant near Ranch 99. (For security purposes, I will keep their names confidential for now.) They flew up to San Jose to see
me, and one was literally taken aback by my age and appearance. (He was astounded—or pretended to be—to meet “such a beautiful author,” and later, in a phone conversation, said he had expected me to be older, scholarly-looking, with glasses: “Instead, in walks this lithe, willowy beauty!” he exclaimed.) Anyhow, they were absolutely passionate about my book, and believe that the film version could be an epic of the same caliber as THE LAST EMPEROR and SCHINDLER’S LIST. They are now prepared to top any offer that my agent at CAA has received so far. By next week, we should have not just one, but two bids for the motion picture rights to THE RAPE OF NANKING.
My work has also inspired a poem, written by one of my fans in New York City, who has developed some kind of obsession for me. He keeps sending letters to my PO box (by the way, I am so glad that he doesn’t have my actual physical home address—I stopped responding to his correspondence years ago). Ever since the publication of THE RAPE OF NANKING, he’s mailed me samples of his writing, cartoons, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, cards, small gifts like pens, and photographs of himself. Now he’s giving me CDs of his poetry. . . . Do you think I should be concerned? I have to admit I was a little troubled by his obsession at first, but I don’t believe he has either the imagination or the resources to track me down. Judging from his picture, he doesn’t seem particularly dangerous or threatening—just a simple, ordinary man with literary ambitions. Still, I’m relieved that I have a PO box to handle my mail. The US postal system has only my last home address, not my current one.
Love, Iris
Over the phone, Iris told me about her conversation with the Hollywood producers and their ideas about the movie, but she also stressed her own vision of it. She said if she was going to be the one to write the script, she wanted it to contain several major characters: Frank Tillman Durdin, Minnie Vautrin, John Rabe, Robert Wilson, Tang Sheng-chih, Li Xiuying, and a Japanese soldier or a Japanese news reporter.
Woman Who Could Not Forget Page 35