Woman Who Could Not Forget (34 page)

In China in the 1930s, the telegram industry usually used only minimal necessary words to save time and money encoding and decoding each Chinese character during the transmittal process. For this reason, at that period of time in the telegraphy field, there was a group of Chinese characters, each of which was used to represent a certain defined meaning, such as the hour and the date at which the telegram was sent. If people did not know this convention, then it would be almost impossible to understand a telegram. This convention was abandoned after the war with the new developments in telegraphy technology.

When I first read the telegram exchanges between Chiang and Tang, I had difficulty understanding them fully. Fortunately, Shau-Jin had learned this convention in grade school, so he and I together were able to translate the desperate telegrams that Tang had sent to Chiang Kai-shek on December 9 and 11, describing the severe damage to the gate of the wall surrounding Nanking by the brutal attacks of the Japanese military. We read how Chiang Kai-shek ordered Tang to retreat at the last minute, even though Chiang had asked Tang to defend the city to the end in the beginning of November. The telegrams are brief but hold tremendous historical meaning.

Shau-Jin and I sat on the futon in Iris’s small apartment in Sunnyvale and dictated our translations to Iris, who was writing them down on her notepad. She also showed us the collection of photos she intended to include in the book. I had difficulty looking at the gruesome photos of the massacre that she laid down on her bed to show us. I also remember that I had reminded her that she should check the source of each of the photos carefully. She said that all the photos were from archives and that most of them had previously been published in the news media.

Our visit to Iris and Michael in California was short but was memorable, with the sixtieth birthday party for Shau-Jin proving to be a fun and festive occasion. Iris, Brett, and Michael surprised Shau-Jin with a big ice-cream birthday cake at the end of the dinner, and it was great for all of us to be together.

Iris was continuously revising her manuscript, and on January 22 she wrote to me:

Dear Mom:

Thank you for your inspirational email. I’ve been working on my book all week and feel more confident about my material. . . .

The sections [of the book] are so short that I organized each chapter as I would a speech. . . . Thinking of the chapters as speeches forces me to distill each idea into a tiny, hard gem.

Lately, I’ve been reading many of the world’s classic speeches for inspiration. They are breathtaking in their power—and so much more pungent than prose! In the evenings, when I read the speeches of Napoleon or Clarence Darrow or Winston Churchill, I feel engaged in actual conversation with them. Words are the only way to preserve the essence of a soul. What excites me about speeches is that even after the speakers are dead and buried, their spirit lives on. This, to me, is true religion—the best form of life after death. (And, for now, probably the ONLY form of life after death.) This is the first time I have ever devoted much attention to speeches. My previous reading had consisted mainly of essays, plays, novels and poetry.

. . .

Love, Iris

On February 20, Iris wrote to me that she had finished the revision of the main section of the book and was going to spend the rest of the month working on the introduction and the section about the cover-up. We received the revised manuscript that Iris sent us for our comments. She had improved it tremendously, and we told her so.

In March, Iris finished the Introduction. It took another month for her to finish the chapter about the cover-up. In every revision, she would send us a copy via e-mail or U.S. Mail for our comments. In the end, we received no fewer than four or five different versions of the manuscript before she and Susan settled on the final version. The manuscript printouts were bad because of her old over-used printer: the letters “a” and “o” were totally black. Also, at the margins of the manuscript, the ink was so dark that sometimes we couldn’t read words discernibly. She needed a new printer, but she didn’t have the time, and maybe the money, to buy a new one—it was a hard life for an independent writer under the pressure of time and financial strain.

Finally, in May, Iris mailed the whole revised manuscript to us. After I read her Introduction, I was moved by her passion, something that had been missing from the original draft. She genuinely wanted to be the voice for the victims, and now it was coming through in print. As Iris had told us, we found that Susan had edited her Introduction and other sections of the book brilliantly. In reading the “Second Rape” chapter, I clearly saw the Japanese right-wing groups’ ongoing attempts to hide the truth of the massacre from the Japanese people and the world. Although I was applauding Iris’s efforts and courage to disclose the cover-up, I was also very worried about her safety. This worry was not without basis. We had long learned from Chinese history that the Japanese imperial government had used intimidation and violent methods such as assassination during the war to eliminate many Chinese leaders in the Japanese struggle to conquer China. I told Iris those stories and asked her to be careful. She assured me that she would be all right and that there was no way she could omit the chapter on the cover-up from her book. But I knew that after publication of the book, she would be a thorn in the side of the Japanese right-wing groups.

In April, my mother’s health had further deteriorated. Shau-Jin and I planned to visit her around Mother’s Day. When Iris heard about her grandma’s poor health and our plan to go to New York, she immediately made a plane reservation to join us there.

Iris was very considerate and mailed me a beautiful Mother’s Day card before she left for New York. The card was purple with a beautiful iris flower, a thoughtful tribute to her namesake. Inside, she wrote:

Mom—I’m really touched by all the work you have put into
The Rape of Nanking
—the proofreading, the translation, the countless hours of invaluable discussions. You’re the kind of mother most authors can only dream of having—wise, passionate, endlessly supportive, inspirational. I love you more than I can say. Iris.

My eyes started to well up with tears. Those words really touched my heart!

On May 9 we arrived in New York, and the next day we all went to see grandma. We were appalled to see that Po-Po, always so feisty and full of life, had shrunk to a skeleton. It was hard for me to see her in such a condition. On Mother’s Day, we gathered around her hospital bed with flowers decorating the room. That was the last Mother’s Day I was with her.

Iris stayed in New York several more days to see Susan Rabiner and other people at Basic Books. After we retuned home, Iris told us what had happened at Basic. Apparently, big changes were in progress. Basic would be taken over by Perseus Books Group, and the whole house was being restructured. Most of the people who currently worked there would be let go, including Susan. Iris was very surprised—and scared. She wondered whether her book might be cancelled. Susan assured her that her book would be published, but told her that she should finish it as soon as possible. Iris said the entire Basic Books office looked like a funeral home. People looked grave and were whispering in low voices. Susan told Iris she was leaving at the end of June; after that, Iris would have a new editor.

As I heard this bad news, I was worried for Iris. Besides the fact that she and Susan had such a wonderful working relationship, if Perseus Books decided that they did not want to publish the book after all, then Iris would have wasted at least two years of her precious time and the story of Nanking would still remain untold.

Twelve days after we came home from New York, on May 23, Shau-Jin and I flew to Los Angeles to attend Shau-Jin’s nephew Eric’s wedding. At the end of the wedding ceremony on May 24, when we returned to our hotel room, we received very bad news from my brother in the form of a telephone message saying that my mother had passed away that evening at 7:40
P.M
., New York time. At that moment, Iris and Michael were in the room. The four of us immediately discussed what to do. Shau-Jin and I decided to go back to Urbana immediately, regroup, and then go to New York for the funeral. I spent a lot of time on the phone canceling the old itinerary and making a new one, but perhaps keeping so busy helped distract me from my grief. On May 30, all my sisters and brothers, their spouses and their children, and Shau-Jin, Iris, and Michael were at the funeral home in New York to say good-bye to Po-Po. She was eighty-three years old.

Although I knew my mother was going to die one day, especially since she had been sick for so long, I was still devastated when her death eventually came. She had fought breast cancer for eighteen years, going through various types of treatments and suffering. Her spirit, the way she never gave up hope and never stopped her fight to live, was an inspiration to me.

When I returned to the lab to work after my mother’s funeral, I could not overcome my sadness over her death. I kept thinking about how many things I could have done for my mother while she was alive. A sense of guilt and regret overwhelmed me. I blamed myself—why had I never quit my job for a while to be with her in her final days? How selfish I was! My mother had sacrificed so much for me and our family, but I could not give up a few months of my job to be with her. I couldn’t sleep at night thinking about all the things I could have done for her. The strangest thing was that I was not able to shed any tears like I had when I’d been on the airplane to my father’s funeral. It was a deeper hurt this time. My face must have been distorted by my sadness. The unusual silence I exhibited in the lab caused John Cronan’s concern. One day he patted me on my back and said softly, “I know how sad you are for your loss, but death is inevitable at the end of life’s journey.” Then the tears
really
gushed out from my eyes.

Iris also knew how sad I was, and she sent an e-mail and asked: “How are you feeling these days? I hope you haven’t been too depressed over Grandma’s death. I know you were very close to her (like I am to you), and the death of a mother is always worse than the death of a grandma.” She continued: “We were fortunate to have her as long as we did. When I was in grad school, most of my classmates had already attended at least one of their grandmothers’ funerals.”

It was kind of her to be so in tune with my grief, as Iris faced her own crisis now that Basic Books was gone. Because of the sudden change staff of Basic Books, Iris was working extremely hard to finish the book as soon as possible. On June 6, she wrote:

Dear Mom,

You have no idea how hard I’ve been working since I’ve returned! Earlier this week I stayed up 30 hours straight (I was so intensely focused I couldn’t fall asleep). I hope to be finished by this weekend. . . . Every minute of this week has been devoted to the book (copyright issues, captions, photo layout, Susan’s comments, etc.) but I’m thrilled to say that everything is coming together rapidly. Thanks to you, I’ve been able to secure most of the names in Chinese characters. People have also been faxing me their cards with Chinese names all week, and now I seem to have everything I need in Chinese. . . .

Love, Iris

The Commonwealth Publishing Group in Taiwan, the same publisher that had translated Iris’s first book,
Thread of the Silkworm
, obtained the translation rights to
The Rape of Nanking
and intended to publish a Chinese version of the book in 1997, at the same time it was published in America. That was why Iris had asked me to fax her the Chinese characters of the names of the people and places that appeared in her book.

On June 16, 1997, Iris wrote to me:

Dear Mom,

Happy birthday! I’ve been so absorbed in my work I almost forgot . . . I’ll definitely call you tonight, after your celebration with Dad.

Today, I’ve been trying to find all the names and addresses of all my blurb contacts. Last night I talked with Dale Maharidge, who said he would be delighted to give me a blurb. He was shocked to hear the news about Susan [Rabiner, leaving Basic], and told me more depressing news:

Two famous writers—Anthony Lukas (author of
Common Ground
) and Michael Dorris, husband of the novelist Louise Erdrich (her sister Heidi was in my class at Hopkins) both committed suicide recently. Lukas killed himself because he just finished a book and thought it was terrible (his editor, however, exclaimed it was fantastic) and Dorris did it because his marriage was breaking up and his wife had accused him of molesting one of his daughters (a charge he denied in his suicide note).

Compared to most writers, Dale and I are relatively well-grounded. . . .

Love, Iris

Iris always thought suicide was horrible and incomprehensible.

Iris told us that her new editor, Paul Golob, had informed her that her book’s publication date had been pushed back to November 7. I reminded Iris that the book must be published on or before December 13, the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre, to maximize the publicity of the book, and she should not let Basic push the date back any further. Iris also said that the cover had been redesigned and Golob thought it looked much better now and would fax it to her. Iris promised to send a copy to us as soon as she got it, because back in April, she’d said that she was very disappointed with the original book cover design, and it had stimulated many discussions among us and her activist friends. Many of her friends had volunteered to design her book cover or at least offer up new ideas that Iris could relay on to Basic.

On June 25, we received a photocopy of the new cover, and it was much more in line with what everyone thought best fit the book: the background was a photo of bodies from the massacre littered at the bank of the Yangtze River. A big Japanese flag and a Japanese imperial soldier were at the front. We felt the design was the best among all the possible ones we had seen so far. I told Iris that it was very conspicuous and attracted attention. The cover really captured the essence and passion of the subject matter because, when it was displayed in bookstores months later, the bloody crimson and the Japanese flag stood out on the shelf and outshone all the books around it.