Woman Who Could Not Forget (37 page)

A
lthough
The Rape of Nanking
was Iris’s second book, this was the first time she had been on a long book-signing tour. Iris kept us informed along the way by calling and e-mailing us about her activities.

The news of her discovery of John Rabe’s diary had broken a year before, and Chinese-Americans in this country and in Canada were electrified by the news of both the diary and Iris’s forthcoming book. She received many invitations from university student organizations and Chinese communities in the U.S. and Canada who were eager to hear her story. She had carefully planned her itinerary to make every possible stop and fulfill all her invitation requests. At Virginia Beach, her first stop for the book tour, she told me she had received the warmest welcome, and her book had sold out in just a few minutes. Many people bought multiple copies and said that they wanted to give the book to their children to read.

After Virginia Beach, Iris flew to Washington. Her longtime friend Marian Smith, a historian at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, kindly hosted her in her house. Iris went to a book signing at Trover’s bookstore near the Capitol. She was telling me that she hoped Illinois congressman William Lipinski or one of his aides would show up, since the bookstore was right on Capitol Hill. That summer, Lipinski was sponsoring a bill demanding that the Japanese apologize and pay reparations for the World War II atrocities they had committed, much like the other Axis powers did immediately following World War II. The bill was a result of the efforts of many Chinese-American activists and human rights groups. Iris was also wondering whether the Japanese embassy in D.C. would send someone to the store to gather information on her book. However, none appeared.

Iris continued on to Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University Law School, and Princeton University. Every event was packed, and Iris continued to be well-received. Shau-Jin’s brother Shau-Yen, who lived in New Jersey, saw Iris at Princeton and said that her book was the most popular book among all the books on display during the signing.

Some controversy erupted at the Princeton University conference when the well-known revisionist Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata spoke and asserted that the death toll in Nanking claimed by the Chinese could not be trusted. Many people in the audience loudly protested. The conference almost spiraled out of control several times, according to the
World Journal
(a major Chinese-language U.S. newspaper), but, in the end, decorum prevailed and overall it was a huge success and a testament to how passionate people were about Nanking.

Shau-Yen, who had been in the audience, called us that night to describe the excitement. In response to Hata, Iris had given her reasons why using burial records to estimate the death toll was the best way, under the circumstances, to estimate the numbers. The estimated number of people killed in the Nanking Massacre ranged from 260,000 to 350,000, based on all the sources Iris had collected. Every time Iris spoke, her eloquence and tenacity won loud applause from the audience.

Uncle Shau-Yen was very proud of Iris. After the conference, he gave her a ride to the Princeton train station where Iris would go on to New York, her next stop. On the train station platform, Iris interviewed Shau-Yen about his experiences when he escaped from Communist China in 1949. Shau-Yen later told us he was quite impressed by the hard-working style of his niece. He said that Iris had taken out a reporter’s pad and a pen from her bag and, right there on the bench of the Princeton train station, began to record the adventures of her uncle and her grandpa in 1949! Because she wanted to finish the interview, she decided to skip the train she was supposed to get on and take the next one.

Iris spent Thanksgiving in New York City with her friends—one of a few times that she was not with her family on the holidays. She called from New York on Thanksgiving Day, and we talked for a long time. She was so excited about the fact that
Newsweek
finally had published her book excerpt. She also told us that ABC’s
Good Morning America
had asked her to fly to New York on December 7 for an interview.

After returning home from the East Coast, Iris had a signing in the San Francisco area. Then she had to fly back to New York for her
Good Morning America
interview. December 7, 1997 was the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, which is why ABC wanted to interview Iris and introduce her book on that date. Although we were told we could see her on
Good Morning America
on the morning of December 7, New York time, the program was mainly broadcast on the East Coast. Besides, we did not subscribe to cable TV. All we could do was to ask my sister Ling-Ling in New York City, my brother Bing in New Jersey, and my sister Ging-Ging in Maryland to watch and record it for us. When the time came and Iris was on the program talking, Bing called and put his telephone receiver near the TV screen so we could hear.

We finally got to see the ABC
Good Morning America
interview a week later when Bing mailed the tape to us. Iris did extremely well on the show. We were surprised to see her answering questions in a very professional way, thinking back to when she’d been a shy little girl. She looked so young and fresh, and with the help of TV studio makeup, she looked like a rising star!

Next, Iris flew to Vancouver by the invitation of BC-ALPHA (British Columbia Association for Learning and Preserving the History of WWII in Asia) president Thekla Lit, who organized many events to publicize her book. After several well-received events in Vancouver (a city with a huge Chinese-Canadian population; wherever Iris went, she was mobbed by fans), Iris flew to Toronto, where Joseph Wong, the president of the Toronto chapter of ALPHA, picked her up. Dr. Wong, whom I had never met, called me and said Iris wanted me to know that she had arrived safely. He added that he would take good care of her—he was a medical doctor and Iris should be safe with him. I was very grateful for someone who really understood a mother’s concern. Iris always kept her promise to let us know she had arrived safely in a new place.

On December 11, the day Iris arrived in Toronto, she called us late in the night from a restaurant bar and told us that Ted Koppel’s
Nightline
program would show “The Good Nazi,” the story of John Rabe, that night, and she was in it. We quickly turned on the TV and waited for the program to begin. Sure enough, there was Iris on the screen with William Kirby, the Harvard history professor, and Ursula Reinhardt, the granddaughter of John Rabe, and others.

On December 13, the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of the Nanjing Massacre, Chinese organizations in Toronto held a big memorial service for the victims of the Massacre. Iris was the keynote speaker of the event, and there was a choir from China specifically for the occasion. A music program was composed and dedicated to the memory of the victims and their suffering. After the event, Iris called me from her room in Toronto. She said, “Mom, you can not believe how many people were in the auditorium, my guess is six to eight hundred people! At the end of my speech, people gave me such long applause . . . I could not hold my tears back when the choir was singing.” I could not hold my tears back either, on the other end of the telephone.

That night, I wrote down my emotions and described what a mental journey it had been for me over the past two years with my daughter working on this book. I recounted beginning with the conversation we’d had, encouraging her to write
The Rape of Nanking
at my parents’ New York apartment the night of May 18, 1992, more than five years before, to the research trip she’d taken to the East Coast in 1995; from the incredible train ride to Nankng interviewing survivors, to the sudden change of hands of Basic Books in 1997. I dedicated the article to my parents in Heaven; I wanted them to know that their granddaughter had written a book exposing the Rape of Nanking, the epicenter of the forgotten, atrocious war crime, to the whole world, and displayed great courage fighting for justice on behalf of those voiceless victims. I submitted the article to the weekly magazine of the
World Journal
Chinese newspaper. That article was finished in a few hours, the fastest I have ever written in my life.

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
became a
New York Times
best seller in January 1998, a fact that many people thought unthinkable. A dark horse, you may say. Yes, it wasn’t in our wildest dreams (or Iris’s either)! But it happened!

It was originally Iris’s idea to publish the book on the sixtieth anniversary of the Nanking Massacre, and that idea really paid off. A couple of months before the book’s official release, the publicity of the new book had already started, and it was due completely to Iris’s efforts. From the November issue of the Johns Hopkins alumni magazine’s lengthy article with her photo on the cover, to her self-planned book tour in coordination with the conferences organized by university students and grassroots Chinese organizations in the big cities of the East Coast, Canada, and the West Coast, and, later, to the Chinese and English newspapers and magazines and the national TV and radio interviews that followed: there was a perfect storm around the book. I faithfully kept track of the public responses and collected all the media coverage about her. Our friends all over the U.S. also sent many local newspapers with coverage of her. I can’t describe how excited we were. It seemed that at the time, our life’s main interest was following her in the news. Iris was also in close contact with us to let us know what exciting things were happening each day.

After the December 1 issue of
Newsweek
excerpt, several major English newspapers had reviewed her book, including the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
. In his moving article on December 11, 1997, Ken Ringle of the
Post
wrote: “Few knew what took place in 1937 Nanking, but it’s blazed in one woman’s soul.” The article showed a picture of Iris holding her book during the interview. The article also ran a photo of Japanese soldiers using Chinese prisoners for bayonet practice, plus another photo of a Japanese soldier executing a Chinese captive while other Japanese soldiers stood by, laughing.

On December 14, the day after the sixtieth anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, in the
New York Times Book Review
, Orville Schell, University of California professor at Berkeley and an expert on East Asian studies, wrote a lengthy and positive review of Iris’s book. He wrote: “In her important new book,
The Rape of Nanking
, Iris Chang, whose own grandparents were survivors, recounts the grisly massacre with understandable outrage.” Again, the article was accompanied by the big photo of Japanese soldiers using Chinese prisoners for targets at bayonet drill, an image that is difficult to erase from one’s memory and still shocks and sickens, no matter how many times one sees it.

On the Chinese media side, North American Chinese newspapers reported on Iris’s new book that December. Across the Pacific Ocean, in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, all newspapers prominently reported the book too, including Hong Kong’s influential English newspaper
South China Morning Post
, the PRC’s
People’s Daily,
and Taiwan’s major newspapers. The book was translated into Chinese by Commonwealth Publishing in Taiwan and released in January 1998, but book excerpts were published in nine segments in a newspaper in Taiwan, from December 2 to 9, 1997.

With all this great publicity, the book sold out quickly across the country. All the bookstores where Iris appeared had shortages, and it was difficult to fulfill demand. When Iris arrived in Toronto in December, Toronto ALPHA president Joseph Wong suggested that his organization raise funds to buy a thousand of her books to donate to Canada’s high schools and public libraries, making the book a rare commodity indeed in the stores. Iris complained to us on the phone that it was a shame, she was seeing so many people who came to her signings and found there were no books available, and she had to sign only bookplates for them while they were waiting for their order. She had complained about this to the publisher many times along the book tour. The publisher told her the book was in its fifth printing two weeks after its publication. They were already printing as fast as they could, but still in only a thousand copies per printing. They had no idea that her book was on the way to the best-seller list!

With her book in such high demand, we started to pay attention to the
New York Times
“Best Sellers” list. On December 21, we found that Iris’s book was listed in the “And Bear in Mind” section at the bottom of the
New York Times
“Best Sellers” list. Those books listed in “And Bear in Mind” are editors’ choices of other recent books of particular interest, in addition to the best sellers. We were very happy. It meant that Iris’s book was on the rise and had the potential to make the list.

We were in a very impatient mood over the Christmas holidays of that year. We understood that during the holiday season many people would be busy traveling or celebrating and perhaps no one would pay attention to book reviews or worry about buying books. But even during the holiday rush, several newspapers, such as the
San Jose Mercury News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Wall Street Journal,
and
Los Angeles Times
published favorable reviews of her book.

Finally, the Christmas holidays were over, and Iris resumed her book tour. First she went to southern California, Los Angeles and San Diego. On January 14, she flew to Washington for a TV interview with PBS. At the San Francisco airport, she left a telephone message for us and said that she’d gotten a call from her publisher that her book was number 15 on the
New York Times
“Best Sellers” list! Her voice told us she was weeping—I’m sure they were tears of joy! Shau-Jin and I were jubilant; we could not contain our excitement for many days. In the next phone call, we said “Iris, you’ve made it!”