Woman Who Could Not Forget (42 page)

But it was not all stress and politics—Iris had good times on her book tours, too. On November 4, 1998, Iris e-mailed me that she’d been able to meet three descendants of Nanking Safety Zone committee members at Ann Arbor, Michigan and received a priceless gift—the original Nanking Safety Zone Red Cross flag:

Dear Mom:

I just had a fabulous event at Shaman Drum bookstore in Ann Arbor, as well as a “hou gou” dinner with Harriet Mills, her sister Angie Mills (who came from Chicago to see me), Neal Brady, son of Richard Brady (a surgeon who worked for the safety zone committee after the worst of the massacre was over) and Rob Gray. Neal Brady (who is a doctor, like his father) gave me one of the original Nanking safety zone Red Cross flags, which I showed to an awestruck audience at Shaman Drum this evening. (It was truly exciting for them to meet with three descendants of the safety zone committee—two of whom are daughters of the founder of the zone committee itself. And it was exciting for Harriet, Angie and Richard Brady as well. . . . Harriet had not seen Brady since he was eight years old!!)

Love, Iris

Harriet Mills and Angie Mills are daughters of Wilson Plumer Mills, who was the Presbyterian missionary in Nanking in 1937 and who first suggested that the Nanking Safety Zone be created, according to Iris’s book
The Rape of Nanking,
which cites a letter from Mills’s daughter Angie to Iris; the letter cites a speech given by John Rabe wherein he says that “Mr. Mills is the man who originally had the idea of creating the Safety Zone.” Later, Iris donated the Red Cross flag used at the Safety Zone to the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

On the book tour, Iris met many of our old friends and was also reunited with college and high-school friends. Iris told me that various of her friends reacted to her fame and celebrity status differently. Most of her friends were really happy for her; those she considered her true friends. A few, however, were threatened by her success and turned frosty and unhappy when Iris mentioned her book. But I suppose such things are to be expected from human nature.

She was also amazed that some former authors whom she had worshiped in college now treated her like their peer. Even more surprising was when she got requests from people thirty or forty years older, asking for blurbs and letters of reference. All this had happened in seven years. She said that she still couldn’t quite believe it—it had all happened so fast!

But Iris said her major concern was her loss of time to read. One day, she called me after she’d read an excellent article in the
New Yorker
and felt bad. She asked herself how many hours she’d been able to spend reading new books over the past few months. She hadn’t had time to read for pleasure in a long time. She said she should get back to reading and writing, and recalled the days when she’d been able to read as many books as she wanted. We laughed when we recalled how we’d caught her reading secretly after her light was supposed to be out, so Shau-Jin had to go down to the basement and unplug the electric circuit breaker. She was quite nostalgic about the years when she’d had plenty of time to read. She really felt this loss and supposed that this was a price she had to pay for her new celebrity status.

On top of her busy schedule of book tours, outside people might not realize that besides her traveling, signings and speeches, she was constantly bombarded with additional e-mail requests from news reporters for written interviews. Sometimes there were ten or fifteen written questions for her to answer, so the reporters could write a news article or a profile. Iris still could find time to answer those questions accordingly. She would always mail me a copy to “preserve” in case her computer for some unforeseen cause erased her files. In addition, in the summer of 1998, she had a heavy correspondence with the Japanese publisher Kashiwashobo, who was supposed to translate her book into Japanese, in working out the differences in historical interpretations, which took a lot of time to answer.

From March to July 1998, especially with the heat of the attack from the Japanese ambassador and the Japanese revisionists still sizzling, Iris received many requests from Japanese news reporters for an interview. Reporters from Japanese magazines such as
Bungei Shuju
and some freelance Japanese reporters asked Iris a number of questions, from why she wanted to write this book to questions on the controversy over the death toll in the Nanking Massacre. Some reporters even went into such details as the legal issue of reparation and the words of apology used by the former Japanese prime minister. She patiently repeated her argument, one point after another, never losing her head to pettiness or emotion.

In July 1998, Iris was invited to write for both the Asian and International editions of
Newsweek
to refute the criticisms raised by Japanese revisionists. Her article, titled “It’s history, not a lie,” was intended to set the record straight.

In the article, she wrote:

The revisionists are fighting an ultimately futile battle if they hope to erase the Rape of Nanking from history. Thousands of pages of primary source documents on the subject must be explained away. These documents are available in archives across the globe. They include American missionary diaries, U.S. Naval Intelligence reports, Japanese military diaries, letters and reports produced by the German embassy and the Nazi party in Nanking, declassified American intercepts of Japanese official communications, war-crimes transcripts, 1,700 testimonials from Chinese survivors, and news reports, including front page coverage of the massacre in the
New York Times
. In addition, photographs and newsreel film footage still exist.

In the summer of 1998, Kinue Tokudome, a Japanese reporter who lived in Los Angeles, conducted an interview with Iris via e-mail. Iris took a great deal of time answering her, and Kinue translated the Q&A into Japanese and published it in the October 1998 issue of the Japanese magazine
Ronza
. Among the fifteen questions Kinue posted, the most-asked questions were about the death toll in the massacre, the authenticity of the photos used in the book, and the reparation issue. Iris answered those questions clearly, as she had answered them every other time she’d been asked them before.

Kinue Tokudome asked, “Some said that Japan already had apologized and the issue of compensation had been settled. How do you respond?” Iris replied:

“There have been vague apologies made but there has never been, to my knowledge, a specific apology issued by the Japanese government to the victims of the Rape of Nanking. And the issue of compensation is far from being settled. If you look at the 1951 San Francisco peace treaty you will find that the treaty explicitly states that the issue of compensation is to be postponed until Japan has financial means. I have contacts with many international human rights lawyers and they all tell me that the issue of compensation is far from being settled.”

Back in February 1998, Iris had been invited by the New York newspaper
Newsday
to write an Op-Ed article, which was published on February 19, 1998. She specifically wrote about the reparation issue. Her article was titled “Japan Must Pay for Its War Crimes.” In the article, Iris wrote:

Japan has argued that all matters related to reparations were settled in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty. But a close reading of the treaty shows that the issue was merely postponed until the Japanese economy, still devastated by war, had the ability to make good on any restitution assigned them. Such an excuse is laughable today. The current financial crisis in Asia notwithstanding, Japan ranks as one of the world’s wealthiest countries.

If Germany can apologize and pay reparations, why can’t Japan? The Germans have paid the equivalent of $60 billion to their victims and they will continue to pay several more billions by the year 2005. Earlier this year they agreed to pay additional billions to victims in Eastern Bloc countries. Indeed, in an era when even the Swiss have pledged billions to pay for the money stolen from Jewish bank accounts, allowing Japan to continue to evade its responsibilities becomes a new assault on the sensibilities of the victims of Nanking—let alone the conscience of humanity.

Iris was one of the first few people to press the issue of monetary reparation from Japan. I could see why the revisionists and the Japanese government were earnestly trying to discredit her and her book, and had even invented the myth that the Rape of Nanking was a “fabrication” or a “lie.” Iris may not have known it, but her quest to force Japan to pay compensation for the war had caused others to perceive her as an activist.

The last question Kinue Tokudome asked Iris was: “Are you planning to go to Japan when your book comes out there?” Iris’s answer showed her sincerity and support for those in Japan who wanted to reconcile the past and present. Iris replied:

I don’t know. All I do know is that I recognize that there are many sincere, wonderful and courageous people in Japan who want nothing more than to promote the truth, and these kinds of people—though in small numbers—can be found worldwide. This is a human quality that transcends ethnicity and nationality. Such people recognize that what happened in Nanking and in other regions of China is a human rights issue, and that patriotism or nationality or ethnicity has no bearing on human rights issues. They see the larger picture. I am one hundred percent behind those people in Japan, and I certainly hope to meet them one day.

One of the most time-consuming e-mail exchanges Iris engaged in at that time was with Charles Burress, a news reporter with the
San Francisco Chronicle
. In the summer of 1998, Burress wrote to Iris and asked her a number of questions about her book. Iris patiently replied, giving him her point of view. On July 26, 1998, Burress’s article “Wars of Memory” was published. In the article, Burress mentioned that the Japanese “academics” and the Japanese conservatives had criticized Iris’s book, but omitted mentioning Iris’s responses to those unfounded accusations. Iris had explained these responses to him in a long course of communications between them. Iris felt that his article was unbalanced. She wrote a letter to the editor in response to Burress’s article, but the
Chronicle
did not publish it.

In this new Internet era, newspapers were no longer the exclusive news outlet. Iris posted her long letter in response to Burress’s article on the Web and promised to give a copy of the letter to any journalist who asked about Burress’s article.

Iris’s e-mail address was open to the public. Whenever she was on a book tour and too busy to check her e-mail on the road, her AOL inbox maxed out quite quickly. Even my e-mails bounced and did not reach her. She had so many fans! In addition to e-mails, she received a huge amount of postal mail from her fans. Whenever she came back from a book tour, her mail was piled up high. At the end, she had several boxes of mail from her fans, not only from the U.S., but from other parts of the world as well. I could not forget how she told me about a young man paralyzed from the neck down due to a motorcycle accident. He saw Iris on TV and listened to her speech and managed to write a moving letter to her, with a request for an autographed copy of
The Rape of Nanking
. Iris was very touched and sent him an autographed book along with copies of magazines carrying her picture on the cover and featuring the book.

Some people sent poems and music to her composed specifically for the victims of the Nanking Massacre. One World War II veteran wanted to give her his Purple Heart decoration, and many asked for her picture. All these things surely made her very happy, made her feel like it was all worthwhile.

Iris usually was good about replying to her fans if they wrote her e-mails; but when she got home from book tours tired and emotionally spent, she was overwhelmed by the mountains of mail. She told me she felt very guilty that she was not able to reply to all of it. She was the kind of person who had always graciously replied to her mail before she became a bestselling author. It took almost two years, but with a helper she finally replied to all those accumulated admiration letters from her fans; she said she had sent out a postcard bearing her photo on one side and a “thank you” with her signature on the other side.

She received some hate mail, too. She did not tell us right away, because she did not want us to worry. When we asked her for details, she said the hate mail was very limited, compared with the huge amount of positive mail she received. She seemed not to worry about it. Only after we moved to California to be near her did we realize that she had received an envelope containing two bullets.

Regarding Iris’s family life, she did not have a whole lot of time with Brett that year; most of her time was spent on the road, promoting her book. In July 1998, Brett’s parents came to California for a visit; they were hoping that Iris would accompany them and Brett to Tahoe and Yosemite for a vacation. Iris was in the middle of the battle defending her book against those Japanese revisionists, and she was also writing her next book proposal, so she had no interest in leaving home once she returned from book tours. In an e-mail of July 18, 1998, she wrote to me: “I think I’ve outraged countless old friends and acquaintances by now . . . simply by being busy. The truth is, interaction with people—even loved ones—can be draining, and I only have so much physical energy these days. After weeks in front of audiences and cameras, I relish being totally alone.”

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.