Woman Who Could Not Forget (48 page)

On May 3, 2000, she went to Los Angeles for the Committee of 100 meeting and met several people in the movie industry. It made her realize that her movie sub-agent had not been capable of getting her a movie deal for over a year due to a faulty plan. Iris called us to complain that a year had been wasted and she needed to ask her movie agent and sub-agent to revert the movie rights back to her. She confessed to us that she was devastated to find out that she had lost more than a year of time, a prime time at that, when her book was still on the best-seller list. She became extremely depressed over this movie issue and almost got sick thinking of the lost time. We told her that she should not blame herself, and we reminded her that she’d been extremely busy at the time traveling to promote her book, and had had no time to think about the movie project. We said to her that lessons are learned by going through failures, after all.

Iris was determined, however, to make a movie happen and spent June actively looking for a new movie agent and finding possible producers and directors for the movie version of her book. She updated us from time to time that she had met several potential movie producers and directors; but by the end of the year, she still had not gotten a concrete result. She admitted that the movie industry was quite different from the publishing business.

Watching movies was still a major pastime for Iris whenever she wanted to relax and take her mind off writing. She not only went to see movies in the theater with Brett and friends, but she often rented videos to watch at home. Because she was obsessed with making her Nanking book into a movie, our conversation turned to movies most of the time. Sometimes she was devastated to have to tell me that some of the books on the
New York Times
“Best Sellers” list at the time as hers—for example,
The Perfect Storm
and
Into Thin Air
—had already been made into movies.

When she saw movies such as
Braveheart
and
Gladiator,
she was very impressed. On the other hand, after she saw a movie called
Romeo Must Die,
she told me it was one of the most offensive movies she had ever seen. According to Iris, the Chinese-Americans in the movie were portrayed as foreigners, not Americans. And worse yet, almost all the Chinese in the movie were brutal, cruel, and evil. This led her to reiterate her conviction that more Asian-Americans needed to enter the field of entertainment.

Iris told me that her friend, a Chinese-American actress who appeared in the movie
The Joy Luck Club,
complained to her that there were not many opportunities for Asian actors in Hollywood. Iris expressed her opinions on the issue in an e-mail:

. . . about Asian actors in Hollywood, I’m convinced that this situation will not change until (a) we get more Asians in those key “money” positions in the industry and (b) Asians THEMSELVES support films that portray them with dignity. Perhaps the Chinese community itself is to be blamed for not encouraging their sons and daughters to pursue careers in show business. We need not only more Asian actors, screenwriters, and directors, but more Asian producers, distributors and studio heads. Also, we need [a] loyal constituency of viewers—Asian or otherwise—who are willing to go out, in droves, to support a movie with multi-dimensional Asian characters. Only when Hollywood sees hard evidence, in cash, that this viewership exists (and I believe it does!) will Hollywood change.

Iris’s interest in film and scriptwriting never wavered, and she continued to hone her screenwriting skills. Back in October 1999, she had flown to Burbank to take David Freeman’s screenwriting class over the weekend. I admired her passion in pursuing her interests; she was a person who never passed up a chance to learn and was never afraid to meet a challenge.

We visited Iris and Michael at the end of June and liked Iris and Brett’s townhouse very much. The townhouse complex was located in quiet North San Jose and was surrounded by white pines, sweet gums, and pear and cherry trees. I particularly liked the location because it was not far from a major Chinese grocery shop, in a shopping center with many Chinese restaurants. Iris entertained us by taking us to the Santa Cruz beach. It was the July Fourth weekend, and everywhere we went was full of people. On the way to Santa Cruz, she drove us to see the house in the Los Gatos Mountains where they had made an offer the year before that did not go through. The road to the house was winding and narrow. I told Iris that it would have been very inconvenient to live there, and they were fortunate that they did not end up buying it.

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 telephone 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.