Woman Who Could Not Forget (41 page)

In spite of all this, the summer of 1998 still had something that made Iris very happy. On June 24, 1998, she sent me an e-mail:

Dear Mom:

Your darling daughter is typing this email from the Miramar Hotel in Montecito right now, after delivering a one-hour speech at the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference to an audience of 150-200 people. The topic? My transformation from struggling author to bestselling author. Some women were so moved by the lecture that they broke down in tears! Indeed, it was an exhilarating evening for me, because so many old friends came to congratulate me, weep over me, to hug and kiss me. “Iris, you’ve gone away and come back a star!” The whole evening was one long joyous reunion, and afterwards I went out to the Montecito Inn with Barbara Masin to enjoy some cheesecake dessert.

Santa Barbara really is like a second home to me—after Champaign-Urbana.

I’m ecstatic that my speech in Santa Barbara was so well-received because I hardly had time to prepare my notes. You see, yesterday I really pushed myself write an op-ed article for the
New York Times
(both the
Times
and the international edition of
Newsweek
want articles from me about the Japanese revisionists) and didn’t have the energy to think about the Santa Barbara speech. Yet the audience loved it. Barbara Masin thought the speech was brilliant—a perfect balance of humor, history and personal narrative—and marveled at the improvement in my lecture style. She remembers how nervous I was during my first book signing in Santa Barbara at Barnes and Noble, which just was only two years ago. . . .

Love, Iris

Another happy thing for Iris in June was that
Reader’s Digest
chose her for the cover of their September issue. A couple of months earlier, she had been interviewed by Ralph Kinney Bennett, a writer from the magazine, and they were going to publish a big article on her and
The Rape of Nanking
. For the cover photo, she went to a beauty salon that was recommended by a friend for a makeover. The magazine photographer came to her place and took many photos of her. When the September issue came out in the middle of August, she immediately mailed us a copy. She was quite satisfied with the cover photo. We enlarged and framed it, and it has been on our wall ever since.

The September issue of
Reader’s Digest
stirred up another round of media coverage.
Reader’s Digest
has fifty million readers and is published in nineteen different languages worldwide. Iris had collected and showed us the issues with her on the cover in different languages. She got many compliments from readers and friends on her look for the cover photo, but I think the cover story really did a great service to get the story of the Rape of Nanking known to the world.

In October, Iris was invited back to the University of Illinois to give the prestigious MillerComm Lecture to an audience of eight hundred in the huge auditorium on campus; it was a very successful event indeed. On October 10, Iris was also invited to be one of the panelists of the conference on “War Crime of the East” at the UI campus, one of several events scheduled for her visit back to campus.

During the conference, one of the University of Illinois history professors attacked Iris’s book, which was a complete surprise to all of us. However, I saw that Iris was very calm and presented her argument in a professional way. By this time, she had already written a number of articles to refute the attacks on her book and had answered numerous questions posed by many American and Japanese reporters concerning the Japanese ambassador’s remarks and other Japanese revisionists’ charges. I admired the way she handled the situation, and I realized that Iris had grown and matured into an experienced debater! But I also realized that not only did right-wing forces exist in Japan, but that some of Japan’s right-wing sympathizers in this country could not be ignored either.

When we drove Iris to the Champaign airport and saw her off for the next stop of her book tour, none of us said very much on the way. I noticed that she was still preoccupied with the incident that had happened at the conference the day before—a surprise ambush by a history professor at her own alma mater. Finally, when she was stepping into the flight gate area, she said to us that a public debate seemed inevitable. She said that only through debating could she answer those criticisms of her book. “Starting with the Japanese ambassador!” she said.

In November, Iris was invited by the University of Hawaii to give a speech and sign some books. Since the date was close to Thanksgiving, she decided to take a vacation with Brett on a Hawaiian island afterward. This was the first time in a long time that she was taking a vacation. Two days after she returned from Hawaii, on December 1, she called us suddenly and told us that she would appear on the PBS
MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour
to face the Japanese ambassador to the U.S., Kunihiko Saito!

We immediately turned on the TV and waited for the 6
P.M
. PBS News Hour. After Jim Lehrer reported that day’s major news stories, Elizabeth Farnsworth began mediating the dialogue between Iris and Saito on the current issue of an apology. Iris was at the San Francisco TV station studio, whereas Saito was in Washington, D.C. The issue had arisen in October, when the South Korean president visited Japan, where Japan’s Prime Minister Obuchi did offer a written apology for Japan’s actions during the time it had colonized Korea. Then, several weeks later, when President Jiang Zemin of China visited Japan (the first-ever visit to that country by a Chinese leader), the Japanese prime minister had offered a verbal apology of Japanese wartime aggression against China, but no written statement of apology, infuriating Chinese people worldwide.

Now Farnsworth was asking Ambassador Saito to explain the difference in treatment for these two countries. Saito answered and said he did not see that there was any difference. He played down any difference and insisted that a written and verbal apology were the same. Then Farnsworth turned to Iris and asked why a written apology was so important. Iris replied that if a written apology was the same as a verbal apology, as Saito insisted, then she could not understand why Japan would not issue one to China.

Iris continued: “. . .the Japanese government had delivered an apology to the South Korean government, a written apology, and the Chinese government had expected the same a few weeks ago. And I think that the reason why it became an issue was because that expectation was pretty much dashed during Jiang Zemin’s visit, which was, I think, certainly a loss of a golden opportunity for Japan to properly show its repentance for the crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army across Asia. . . .”

Saito stated that he thought that Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s statement in 1995 had already expressed his deep sense of remorse and had offered sincere apologies to the people of Asian countries.

Farnsworth then turned to Iris. “What would be enough?”

Iris replied: “. . . First of all, for Japan to honestly acknowledge some of the basic facts of these kinds of atrocities, which many revisionists refuse to do; and definitely a written apology, reparation made to the victims . . . inclusion of Japan’s wartime aggression in school textbooks in Japan. . . .”

Iris continued: “And I think that people don’t believe that Japan has properly apologized or atoned for what happened because these apologies don’t come spontaneously and naturally. . . .”

Then she challenged the ambassador. “What I’m curious to know is: can the ambassador, himself, say today on national TV live that he personally is profoundly sorry for the rape of Nanking and other war crimes against China and the Japanese responsibility for it?”

Saito was responding with the usual words that the Japanese government always used: “. . . to the incident in Nanking, we do recognize that really unfortunate things happened, acts of violence were committed by members of the Japanese military. . . .”

Farnsworth wanted to conclude the interview and said “We have time only for a brief response from you.”

Iris started to say that what Saito said was not entirely correct, but she was interrupted by Farnsworth asking her: “The apology?”

Iris at first was not quite sure she’d understood the question and repeated back, “The apology.”

“Did you hear an apology?” Farnsworth asked.

“I don’t know. Did YOU hear an apology? I did not really hear the word ‘apology’ that was made. And I think that if he had said genuinely, I personally am sorry for what the Japanese military had done during World War II, I would have considered that an apology. I think that would have been a great step in the right direction. . . .”

Shau-Jin and I, after watching the program, felt very worried and frightened. On the one hand we were very proud of Iris that she had the courage to ask the ambassador to apologize to the Chinese people on live TV, but on the other hand we felt that the right-wing nationalists in Japan would be angry if they saw it. I could not fall asleep that night. The next day, one of Shau-Jin’s physics colleagues told him that he admired Iris for her courage, but at the end he added that Iris should hire a bodyguard. That comment fed our worries even more.

Right after the PBS appearance that night, Iris was in San Francisco engaging in a public interview with Professor Orville Schell of UC-Berkeley at Herbst Theatre. We did not get her call until later. She called after midnight and told us how successful the San Francisco event had been.

“There were more than eight hundred people in the audience, and most of them had to pay to get in,” she said.

She also told us that everyone she met at the theatre congratulated her and said she had done a fabulous job on TV debating the Japanese ambassador. She seemed not worried about it at all. Actually, she was unhappy when we mentioned that she should be more careful about her personal safety. She said our worry was a burden to her and that we should relax. Then, a few days later, we received a big bouquet of fresh flowers from her with a thank-you card. I think she wanted to comfort our frightened souls.

When Iris’s book became an international best seller, she reached a status most writers can only dream of: she became a celebrity. But she also paid a price for it. In February 1998, after a long book tour, she had already told us that once she came home, she did not want to go out anymore. All she wanted was to stay home with Brett and have a good sleep. After several weeks of continuous book signings, public speeches, and traveling, she said, her life was a nonstop blur of airport—lecture hall—hotel, airport—lecture hall—hotel. The responses to her speeches were overwhelming. Wherever she went, people besieged her after every speech. When she came home, she inevitably came down with a cold or the flu, only to recover just in time for the next book tour. She was physically exhausted.

Not only that, she said, but during the book signings, many old Asian people came up to her: Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Singaporean, Indian—they poured out their personal stories of suffering during World War II in Asia to her. Some of them wept and thanked her profusely for writing such a book. They said “It’s so frustrating to see that Japan to this day hasn’t formally acknowledged their war crimes!” They exclaimed “It’s about time!” Iris said that on the one hand she felt rewarded that she was sought out and greatly respected by many people, but on the other hand she was mentally and emotionally drained after hearing those stories.

On June 29, 1998, Iris wrote:

Dear Mom,

I arrived safely in New York today, after giving a well-received speech in Baltimore to the women doctors. Actually, it was very depressing—during the Q and A, a Pakistani doctor told the audience about the atrocities against Bengali women in 1971, a Filipino doctor described how she escaped the Rape of Manila when she was 12, an Indian doctor discussed the Indian tradition of suttee (burning widows alive), etc. Others talked about the international sex slave industry, the trafficking for women and children, female genital mutilation in Africa—you get the idea.

It seemed that there were endless gruesome stories that people were eager to share with her.

When she was book-signing in one bookstore in San Francisco at the end of March 1998, the store was packed, all seats taken. One woman shouted out at the end of her speech that Iris deserved a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize! She certainly felt flattered. In another bookstore in San Francisco in April, Iris said one man stood up and said “You’ve got guts!” There was long applause, and then he said, “Do you think the Japanese have a contract on your head?” At another speech on the East Coast, one person wrote a comment: “Brilliant to tell such a powerful story! I fear for your life.” Iris said she was very disturbed by these comments, and they did nothing to quell my own worry either.

Some people told her that she was a Chinese Joan of Arc. Some Chinese people told her that she was Mulan, the legendary Chinese woman warrior who dressed in men’s clothes and pretended to be her aged father’s son, going into wars. Still another called her Qiu Jin, the turn-of-the-century Chinese revolutionary woman martyr who led an uprising against Manchus. The success of
The Rape of Nanking
now was not just a publishing phenomenon, but the beginning of a political movement. Iris found that people perceived her as some kind of crusader and activist, and that worried her. Michael, her brother, told her that many of his friends, mostly young Asian Americans, were urging her to go into politics. Michael said to his sister, “All Chinese-Americans look up to you to lead!” But in her heart, she said, she considered herself just a writer and a historian who merely wanted to right some wrongs.