Woman Who Could Not Forget (26 page)

In 1998, after
The Rape of Nanking
had been published, one Japanese reporter, Kinue Tokudome, interviewed Iris and asked her, “Why did you decide to write this book?”

Iris replied: “When I was a little girl, my parents shocked me with the story of the Rape of Nanking. They told me that the Imperial Japanese Army massacred thousands of civilians in the capital of China—and butchered even small children. This left a powerful impression on me, and I went to the local libraries to learn more details. But I couldn’t find a shred of information on the subject. There was nothing in my local school libraries, or public city libraries, or in my world history textbooks. Still worse, my teachers were completely ignorant of this event.

“The event remained a question mark in my mind for years, until I saw an exhibit of photographs on the subject in 1994. The horror of those photographs inspired me to write the book.” Indeed, prior to that, Iris thought we might have exaggerated what had happened in Nanking in 1937-1938 when we told her those stories all those years ago.

At the Cupertino conference, Iris learned that, so far, there was no English-language book to deal with this subject exclusively. She had learned that many American missionaries, journalists, and military officers had recorded their views of the event in diaries, films, and photographs, which were stored in archives and libraries. Immediately, with the help of the Bay area activists and the organization Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, she was introduced to several activists on the East Coast. She wanted to go to the National Archives in D.C. and the Yale University Divinity School Library to do research on the materials.

On January 4, 1995, we flew to Los Angeles to see Shau-Jin’s parents and then drove to Santa Barbara to see Iris and Michael. This was a kind of annual ritual after Christmas, since now both children were not coming home for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Besides, California weather was so nice in the winter, and this was another way to escape the cold in Urbana. However, January 1995 was bad for Los Angeles. As soon as we arrived, it had the worst rainy season on record. Throughout the trip, it rained almost every day.

Iris told us she was planning to go to the East Coast in a few days. Everything had been arranged, with the help of activists in the Bay area. She left for Washington on January 8 while we were still in Los Angeles. When we returned home, I had written Iris an e-mail asking whether she’d reached D.C. safely. On January 24, Iris replied from the Yale Divinity Library computer that she was fine and just too busy to answer my e-mail in more detail. After she returned home on February 12, five weeks later, Iris said there was a stack at least three feet tall of mail waiting for her, including boxes of photocopied documents that she had sent from the East Coast to herself. The visit to Yale was extremely successful: she found a lot of source material for the book. Iris said she owed us a long letter about the trip, and she was going to write to us once she found the time.

On March 12, Iris mailed us a twenty-five-page, single-spaced typed letter about the trip—which, by itself, could have been expanded into a major article. She described the trip in such detail as to the house where she lived and the people she met and each person’s characteristics. She said she had written us such a detailed letter so it would also serve as her diary, to remind herself of the details later. Indeed, as she said before, such a letter gave us a full understanding of her thoughts and her life at the time. It was a historical record of her research on the book
The Rape of Nanking.

In the letter, Iris said that she flew to Washington on January 8 and reached Dr. S. Y. Lee’s home at 11:30 pm. Iris did not know Dr. Lee at all and had been introduced by Bay area friends. Dr. Lee and his wife graciously allowed Iris to live in their house while she was doing her research in the National Archives. She wrote:

Dr. Lee and his wife were an elderly Chinese-American couple who had lived in the Washington, D.C., area for decades. He talked past midnight about their early years in China and how when he was a sophomore in college his university literally packed up and moved inland during the Sino-Japanese War. Typical of many Chinese-American professionals, Dr. Lee and his wife fled to Taiwan before the 1949 revolution and later migrated to the United States. After getting his PhD in chemistry, Lee worked as a chemist in a number of government research institutes, such as NASA.

Now retired, the Lees devote their time to publishing the Chinese American Forum, a journal they founded for the purpose of airing the opinions and stories of Chinese-Americans from all professions and ages. Dr. Lee eagerly hoped that I might contribute to the journal in the future. Lee told me how gratified he was to see someone working on this book and said there was no such book like it in the English language. Even the ones in Chinese are distorted, he said.

Then Iris described her daily life in D.C.:

I stayed at Lee’s home for one week, sleeping in a guest room on the second floor of his house. There was a wooden desk in the room, on which the Lees had placed several books on the Sino-Japanese War for me to read along with articles about the Nanjing massacre. The Lees rarely saw me except in the evenings, for I spent almost every waking moment at the National Archives.

On a typical day, I would rise between 7 and 8 am and take the bus to the Silver Spring metro station. Fortunately, there was a bus stop directly across the street from Lee’s house. The trip to the National Archives took about 45 minutes on public transportation, and the building was open by 8:45 a.m. I spent my mornings in the military reference branch of the archives on the 13th floor, looking through finding aids and filling out cards to request archival boxes from different collections of papers. Dozens of boxes would be pulled from the shelves, placed on carts and made available to me in the second floor reading room, which stayed open until 9 pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. I was usually there in the afternoons and evenings, scanning the documents, tagging the ones that pertained to the Nanjing massacre and xeroxing them as quickly as possible.

At the end of the day, Lee would pick me up at the Silver Spring train station. If I worked late, I had to rely on him to give me a ride because the buses stopped running after a certain hour. In the beginning, I felt bad to trouble him in this way, but he insisted that it was all right because he had nothing much to do anyway. Besides, Lee was curious about my daily findings at the Archives and relished our long discussions about the Sino-Japanese War in the car on the way back to his house. For instance, he was fascinated by the question of how the Japanese soldiers could have been so polite at home and so brutal abroad. The answer, he believes, lies in the history of the Japanese samurai culture, which he thinks is nothing less than a cult like religion.

Iris also wrote details about the National Archives and the archivist, John Taylor:

The records on the Nanjing massacre were voluminous and scattered throughout many holdings in the National Archives. The person who guided me through them was the same man who helped me on the Tsien book: John Taylor, a white-bearded elderly archivist with sagging jowls, baggy clothes and an encyclopedic memory. After fifty years of service in the archives, he had worked his way up to the highest rungs of the military reference branch and proved indefatigable in his efforts to help me and all the other scholars in his office. He introduced me to the recently declassified American intercepts of messages from the Japanese Foreign Office, the complete collection of transcripts from the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial), the investigative files for the prosecution of the IMTFE, the Shanghai Municipal Police Records, and the microfilmed records from the Department of State and military intelligence for 1937-1938.

Taylor is one of the hardest working employees of the federal government, even though he is past retirement age. He is the first one in the office and the very last to leave. He even eats his lunch at his desk so that he will never miss a phone call. One of my most vivid memories is watching him play the phone like an operator with one hand while holding a sandwich with the other. Once, when I was staying at Marian Smith’s home and got sick for a day, John Taylor actually called me at her home to see if I was all right. On the day of my illness, I was supposed to have taken the shuttle bus to the Suitland branch of the National Archives from the main building at 8:15 am. Mr. Taylor noticed that I wasn’t at the bus stop at the side of the building and grew concerned. His phone call to Marian’s home signified to me two things: one, that Taylor was concerned enough about my general welfare to make the call, and two, he was actually in the vicinity of the National Archives as early as 8 a.m. to notice my absence! (In a city where many federal employees work ten to three with two hours off for lunch and who are reported by their secretaries as either “not in yet,” “busy at a meeting,” or “gone for the day,” whenever you call, it seems inconceivable that someone like John Taylor actually exists.)

I was so busy I missed the opportunity to take the general tour at the National Archives, which exhibits the nation’s most precious documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. However, I did have the chance to meet an interesting man with whom I corresponded: namely, Arnold Kramish, a nuclear physicist turned author.

Then Iris talked about Arnold Kramish, who later wrote the first blurb praising her book on Dr. Tsien:

Years ago, Kramish started writing to me after a notice of my book appeared in a newsletter for intelligence officers. I didn’t know much about him except that he was a scientist who was also a respected author, and that he had recently written the book
The Griffin,
which was the story of Paul Rosbaud, a science editor for the German firm Springer Verlag, a good friend of the top nuclear physicists in Germany and a pillar of Nazi society. Rosbaud was also Winston Churchill’s most valuable spy during World War II. In many of his letters to me, Kramish offered to take me out to lunch if I visited DC. On January 11, I met Kramish at Luigi’s, a famous Italian restaurant in the city. He was a plump, white-haired gentleman—so exuberant, talkative, and good natured that he reminded me of a beardless Santa Claus.

Like Dad, Kramish once studied under Julian S. Schwinger at Harvard. He later worked for the Manhattan Project during World War II and the RAND Corporation, the US Atomic Energy Commission and other government agencies. At some point in his life he also served as adjunct professor at UCLA and the London School of Economics. He has written at least six books and won a number of prestigious awards in his lifetime. . . . Throughout his lifetime, he has accumulated a number of inside stories about scientific espionage and knows a number of spies personally.

A prolific letter writer, Kramish has a wide range of personal contacts . . . Kramish is the only surviving participant of the Manhattan Project who conducts meticulous historical research about the Manhattan Project in the National Archives. In many ways, he is a real threat to historians who specialize in this aspect of World War II history because (1) he was an eye-witness observer to these events (2) he truly understands the science and (3) is comfortable with the techniques of historical research as well. It makes historians of science nervous.

Next, Iris wrote about her meeting with the independent film producer Nancy Tong in New York City:

After a week in Washington DC, I took a train to New York. On January 15, Martin Luther King Day, I spent the morning looking for photographs of the Nanjing massacre at the Bettmann Archives, one of the biggest photo repositories in the world. Then I met with Nancy, a Chinese-American independent filmmaker who had produced an hour-long documentary on the Nanjing massacre called
In the Name of the Emperor.
We had lunch at a Chinese noodle restaurant to exchange information and contacts.

Nancy worked briefly as a reporter for a Hong Kong television station, but grew so disgusted with the petty politics there that she decided to strike out on her own in New York City as an independent filmmaker. I found Nancy to be talkative, warm and affable, and took a liking to her at once.

Over steaming bowls of soup, Nancy warned me about the problems she had encountered with the PRC bureaucrats. In August 1993, Nancy went to Nanjing by herself to interview the survivors of the 1937 massacre . . . a historian gave her a list of people to contact and recommended a student to accompany Nancy to help translate Nanjing dialect into Mandarin. They took a taxi and talked with four survivors in their homes, most of whom were reluctant to be interviewed.

The first survivor whispered to her in the dark stairway of her compound: “Young lady, if you want to talk to me, go through the proper channels. If you don’t, I will be in big trouble.”

Nancy decided not to interview any of them. She already had the testimony of one woman on film, and didn’t want to risk putting their lives in jeopardy.

“They lived in tin shacks!” Nancy said. “They didn’t even have money for medicine! They had absolutely no furniture! You should see how the former Japanese soldiers live in contrast to their victims in China. They have beautiful homes with beautiful art and gorgeous furnishings and gardens. They received large financial compensation for their services to the Japanese Army. These people are the criminals and here are the victims, who are still suffering from what they did. I could not believe how the victims were treated by the police after talking to foreign journalists. . . .”

After I read Iris’s description of Nancy Tong’s encounter in Nanjing, I told Iris maybe it was not a good idea to go to Nanjing to interview the survivors.