Woman Who Could Not Forget (28 page)

Iris called us often and tried to find out more about her grandma’s condition. She wanted to call her in the hospital, but I advised her to make the calls short since Grandma needed rest. She also continued to update her work on Tsien’s book:

May 14, 1995

Dear Mom,

I just finished all the footnotes—what a long, tedious process it was! In the future I plan to write more books based on my personal experience so I never have to deal with footnotes again. . . .

You might want to mention to Dad that the relatives of Minnie Vautrin have given their consent for me to edit her diary. It’s the kind of project that might take only a few months of my time. If I’m lucky a commercial publisher will be interested in putting out the diary, but I think this is a university press-type book. My agent wants me to work on this only after I have written my third book because she doesn’t want it to compete with the Rape of Nanking book for sales.

Next Wednesday, I will interview the former KMT general who disguised himself as a monk and witnessed the massacres in Nanjing. He is in his 90s and living in Monterey Park, LA.

Have a wonderful Mother’s Day—I may call you tomorrow.

Love, Iris

Then, miraculously, my mom’s condition was stabilized. After she stayed in the Calvary Hospital for three weeks, where she was supposed to die, she became well enough to go home. I feel it was largely due to Ling-Ling’s hard work taking care of our mother all those many long months.

On May 20, I had to present a research paper in a national microbiology meeting in Washington, D.C. After the meeting, I traveled to New York and arrived at Calvary Hospital on May 25 to help Ling-Ling bring my mother home. Mom was so happy to see me. Indeed, she looked better than the last time, when she was in Memorial Hospital. That night I stayed in the hospital too, with Ling-Ling beside our mom. In the wee hours and in the dim light of the hospital room, I heard the most horrible and painful sounds of all kinds from the patients’ ward. It was terrifying. No wonder my sister and mom insisted that they go home no matter what, now that she was stable. Mom said she preferred to die in her own home.

Iris wrote to me that she and Brett would come home over the Memorial Day weekend for her 10th Uni High School reunion in Urbana, and also Brett could pay a visit to his parents. On May 28, when I got home from New York, they were already in Urbana. At the high-school reunion, Iris told us she had met many of her former classmates. Many of them had changed, not only in their looks but also their attitudes. She said they seemed very impressed by the fact that Iris was now a book author and surprised that her book would be published soon. I was very pleased to hear that Iris was now confident in front of her classmates.

On June 4, 1995, Iris wrote to us about several pieces of good news, the most important that she’d gotten a formal contract from HarperCollins to write the book
The Rape of Nanking:

Dear Mom and Dad,

Wonderful news awaited me when I got home! The Pacific Cultural Foundation offered me a grant for the Rape of Nanking project, albeit smaller than my original request for $12,000 (the maximum one can ask for) due to “limited funds”; the grant was $2000, enough for a plane ticket to Taiwan. In addition, there were several urgent messages from representatives of HarperCollins concerning the interest of a Chinese publisher to translate and publish the Tsien biography. . . .

Over the phone I gave my approval for Commonwealth to publish my book in Chinese. . . .

The contract for the second book has already arrived in the mail, so Laura Blake and Susan Rabiner have moved faster on this project than I had predicted. I am seriously thinking about turning your home into “a writer’s retreat” during your trip to Copenhagen and India and working quietly in Urbana for a few months. You have no idea how relaxing and therapeutic I found last week to be. . . .

Love, Iris

Shau-Jin was qualified for his sabbatical for the fall of 1995, and he wished to go to the University of Copenhagen Niels Bohr Institute of Physics and to India. In both places he had physics friends who had collaborated with him before. I tried to look up whether there was any opportunity for me to work in the Department of Molecular Biology at Copenhagen University. As both of us were busy making arrangement for visiting Copenhagen and India, Iris was making arrangements for her forthcoming research trip to China and Taiwan for the book
The Rape of Nanking;
she wanted to interview the survivors of the Nanking Massacre in Nanjing. Michael was planning a trip to China, too! He was taking a Chinese class at UC Santa Barbara and would join a Chinese language and culture tour to China.

It turned out that we eventually abandoned the plan to visit India; instead, we decided to visit Mexico. One of Shau-Jin’s students now was a professor of physics in Mérida, Mexico, and he invited Shau-Jin to give a series of physics lectures there. The final plan for Shau-Jin’s sabbatical was to first visit Copenhagen from August 21 to October 30, and then come home for Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving, we would visit Mexico for three weeks. I was also very lucky that Professor Bjarne Hove-Jesen in the Department of Molecular Biology, Copenhagen University, accepted me into his lab to continue my research at the same time Shau-Jin would be visiting the Niels Bohr Institute.

In the meantime, Iris told me that she was working hard till the early dawn hours on revisions of the source notes section of her Tsien book. She wanted to get the book done in the final stage before her trip to China and Taiwan, and all that time she was also getting things ready for the trip. She wrote me that she got her immunization shots, and she also got a home video camcorder, laptop computer and recorder, many tapes, and so forth. It seemed that she was well prepared.

On July 18, Iris flew to Hong Kong, her first stop. She called us from there, the night she arrived, from her hotel room, where she complained that the noise in the street was so loud that she could not fall asleep. She said she was going to Shenzhen the next day, the city at the border of China and Hong Kong, and would take a train from there to Canton (Guangzhou).

Before the trip, I had been against the way Iris said she would reach Nanjing. I thought to fly there would be the most direct and safe way; however, she wanted to fly to Hong Kong and take a train from Shenzhen to Canton and then to Nanjing. She said that on her first trip to China in 1993, she’d flown directly to Shanghai. She’d always regretted that she did not take a train, as Dr. Tsien had when he was returning to China from the U.S. This time, since she had finished her book on Tsien, she wanted to have the same experience that he had and see the countryside.

When Iris called me from Hong Kong, I asked her to be careful and let us know as soon as she reached Guangzhou. However, we waited and waited and did not hear from her. I started to get worried and called Brett a couple days later. Brett told us that she had taken a train at Guangzhou and had already reached Nanjing, but that she was sick. After we learned that she had already arrived at Nanjing, we called directly to the room where she was staying. Before the trip, Iris had reserved a guest room on the Nanjing University campus for foreign visitors (formerly Ginling Women’s College, where Minnie Vautrin had protected thousands women from rape by Japanese soldiers).

We finally reached Iris in her room in Nanjing and asked her what had happened. She told us the story: As soon as she reached Guangzhou, the biggest city in Guangdong Province, she could not believe that thousands of people, most of them looking homeless, had crowded around the train station. She could not even find the place to buy a train ticket without bumping into someone sitting or lying on the ground. She could speak Mandarin, the official Chinese language, but it was useless in Guangzhou, for most of the people speak the local Cantonese dialect. She asked many people where the ticket window was, but got different answers. It turned out the lines leading to the ticket windows were quite long and no one was sure where to stand. Finally, in confusion and frustration, she saw a policeman who was there to maintain order and she asked him for help. She thought, after all, a policeman must be able to help her. After a struggle to explain it to him, Iris asked whether he could help her to buy a first-class slumber train ticket to Nanjing and she would give him double the money for the ticket. The policeman said he would try and went to the ticket window for some time and came back with a ticket. Iris was so happy and thanked him with the promised amount of money. She finally boarded the train with her big and small luggage, going through the huge crowd on the train platform.

On the train, she started looking for her seat. She started in the first class section, but the people there told her that she should go to the other sections. After passing through several sections, she arrived at another section of the train and realized that her ticket was not first class, but second class. There was no bed; but on the side of the train, there were two hard wooden boards staggered on top each other. One of those hard wooden boards was her bed.

She was angry and shouted out in Chinese, “He cheated me! I should have a first class ticket!” Many people there were starting to surround her and asked what happened. At this time, a train conductor came, a female, and the first thing she said was “Show your identification papers!” After Iris gave her her passport, the conductor said “Oh, you are an American!” Iris felt that her identity had been disclosed and regretted that she had shouted out and made a scene. Iris explained to the conductor what had happened: she’d given the money to someone to buy a first class ticket, but what she got was a second class. The conductor said that although she was sorry, she couldn’t do anything about it and asked her to settle down.

Iris complied. Now she had to climb up to her hard board for a rest. She surveyed her surroundings and found there was no privacy in the car. Over a dozen people were crowded into the space. Some were old men, some women with children, and some were young men and women. Now some were staring at her. Iris thought: “Now they all know I came from the U.S., and I have to be very careful of my belongings. . . .” Poor Iris, she could not close her eyes while sleeping; she was holding tight to her purse and ID while lying on that hard board for two nights.

There was no air conditioning in second class. The window of the train was wide open to allow wind to come in, but so too came the dust, the train soot, and the aroma of buffalo shit and sewage. The weather was hot and humid and the noise from the wide-open window pierced her ears. Each time she needed to go to the toilet, she had to climb up and down from the “bed.” She had not brought any food with her, so she bought food from the vendors on the train. No wonder she was sick by the time she reached Nanjing.

Over the phone, I told her that I was concerned about her illness and asked her to see a doctor immediately. We also called Shau-Jin’s cousin in Nanjing, who was a nurse, and asked her to buy some antibiotics for Iris. We called Iris almost every day for the rest of her stay in Nanjing. Our telephone bill for that month was over $600!

Before we left for Copenhagen, in fear that my mother would die during our trip, I decided to pay her a visit once more. On July 27, while I was visiting my mom in New York, Shau-Jin called and said Iris had called him from Nanjing to say that her diarrhea had stopped, but that she had a stomachache. In addition, she had a sore throat and cough. She did not know whether it was the flu or just allergies to the dust and pollution in Nanjing.

I sat beside my mother’s bed in New York. At my side was my mother lying there in pain from cancer-destroyed bones. Across the continent and the Pacific Ocean, I imagined that Iris must be coughing along with pain in her stomach. My part in all this was to feel such pain in my heart.

As soon as I returned from New York, I called Iris and was relieved to hear that she felt better. She said she had already interviewed several survivors of the Nanking Massacre, and now she was busy transcribing the video interviews from tapes to a Word file on her computer. She had a translator in Nanjing helping her translate the Chinese interviews of the survivors into English orally. Although Iris could understand some of what the survivors said, the Nanjing dialect prevented her from understanding fully. She said she was working very hard and unfortunately had no time to call us if there was nothing major happening.

Iris told us the following about her interviews with the survivors: “Every single survivor I met was desperately anxious to tell his or her story. I spent several hours with each one, getting the details of their experience on videotape. Some became overwrought with emotion during the interviews and broke down in tears. But all of them wanted the opportunity to talk about the massacre before their deaths.”

Iris was heartbroken when she found out that all of the survivors lived in poor conditions. She felt the injustice for the victims and said that writing this book was important and urgent. She also told us that she wished to be a lawyer someday, so she could help those poor victims seek justice in the international court. She said the testimony and eyewitness accounts of the survivors confirmed the accuracy of the records and documents she had read in the archives.

In the meantime, I learned that Iris had been bitten by a swarm of mosquitoes when she and her guides went to inspect massacre sites in the outskirts of Nanjing. She said the execution sites now were covered by weeds and abandoned, even though some of them had had memorial markers built to help preserve the sites. When she returned to her room, she found her legs were covered with red mosquito bites. They were so itchy that she was not able to fall asleep at night. I was also worried about whether she would get malaria. I quickly went online to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to check whether China was in the malaria region. Fortunately, Nanjing was not in the malaria-warning region, but Iris was regretting not bringing mosquito repellent (as I had suggested to her before the trip).