Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  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.

  In the same letter, Iris continued to brief us on her meeting with her book agent and book editor in New York:

  The next day, I met with my agent and editor: Laura Blake in the morning, Susan Rabiner in the afternoon. At the Curtis Brown Ltd office at 10 Astor Place, Laura and I discussed all the possible places for serialization of the Tsien biography: Popular Science, the New York Times magazine, the Wall Street Journal, US News and World Report, etc. She seemed very excited about the Rape of Nanjing book and told me that a scholarly, literary publisher like Basic Books, Alfred Knopf or Farrar Strauss Giroux would be perfect for it.

  After our meeting, I went to HarperCollins. . . . Before my arrival in New York, Basic Books had already held a large marketing meeting about the Tsien book to serve as a pep rally for the sales representatives.

  I gave Susan the thick author questionnaire that she had requested, which contained information about me and the book and lists of potential publications that could review the book in the future: journals and magazines and newspapers about aerospace, Chinese, history, espionage and numerous other topics. The topic of our meeting was marketing and serialization. I was told that the challenge to Basic would be to get orders from bookstores, so it was important for me to as much publicity as possible before the book is released. We discussed three tactics of getting publicity: . . .

  Susan and her team also decided to put me on a six-city tour: San Francisco, LA, San Diego, New York, Boston, Washington, DC. . . .

  Did I tell you that Susan and I have finally agreed on a title for the book? It is THREAD OF THE SILKWORM. After the meeting, Susan brought me to the art department and showed me the cover of the book, which displays a picture of a Chinese rocket over a backdrop of red silk embroidered with a dragon. It was a lovely cover, and I was very pleased with it. Then we went to Susan’s office and spent some time discussing the revisions on the manuscript. The conversation later turned to more personal matters and we talked about my future plans of combining motherhood with authorship. Susan said when she was my age, she had already had her two children. She told me that children grow up fast and by the time they are in school, mothers can return to a more normal work schedule. When I have children, she said, my career will be put on hold for not for the next 20 years but only for about four years.

  Before I left the office, I asked her about the kinds of authors who get the 6-figure advances you read about in the newspapers. Do they have to be famous? I asked. Susan said not necessarily: if the topic is big, and if you can write well and quickly, you can get the money. That’s why many of these advances come with strings attached. If the author can’t make the deadline (which is sometimes only nine months after the contract is signed) then they have to return the money. Certain topics are so timely that if the author can’t produce a book within a short time frame then it won’t sell. Typically, Susan said, these advances go to men because “women have too much sense to commit themselves like that.” Women, she said, prefer to take their time when writing a book, while men are more willing to take risks.

  The next stop was the Yale University Divinity School Library. Iris was introduced to Mr. Shao Tzeping, who lived in Rye, Connecticut. Iris had pre-arranged to meet him in New York’s Grand Central Station. It’s such a small world. I realized later that I knew Mr. Shao Tzeping. Shao’s family had lived close to my parents’ house in Taiwan. My parents knew his parents. I didn’t know him personally, but acco
rding to Iris, Shao became an activist in the East Coast in the movement to preserve the history of the Sino-Japanese War. Iris wrote about her meeting with Shao and his family:

  Shao had promised to house me for the next two weeks so that I could do my research at Yale University. I arrived at the booth shortly before he did, and together we boarded the commuter train to the suburb of Rye. Shao sat across from me, wearing a Russian-style brown hat and holding a black briefcase. . . .

  Rye is a wealthy suburb, and the passengers on the train looked like Wall Street types.

  The train ride took only half an hour, and then Shao and I took a bus down Purchase Street, Rye’s tiny “downtown” section of expensive boutiques, cafes and restaurants. The town seemed quaint and peaceful.

  Shao’s home on Grace Church Street was a few paces away from the church where George and Barbara Bush married. Built in the 1800s, his house was a white, three-story wood and stone structure that was very attractive on the outside. . . .

  For almost two weeks, I spent my evenings in the guest room in their attic. During the day, I pored through missionary diaries and letters at the Yale Divinity School library. Shao lent me his car, an old grey Buick, so that I could drive from Rye to New Haven every day. The commute took me about 50 minutes each way. When I arrived on campus, I would park the car along Canner Street, go up the stairs of the school, pass through the library, curve around a rotunda and emerge in the archives. I spent most of my time in the John Mott room, sitting at a table between walls lined with grey archival boxes. A Xerox machine stood next to a window with a view of the courtyard. The archivists, Martha Smalley and Joan Duffy, were everything the Caltech archivists were not: calm, friendly, trusting of researchers. There I worked—opening boxes and xeroxing documents—until five or six pm. Then I would drive back to Rye, eat dinner with the Shaos and go to bed.

  These records I examined at Yale included the papers of John Magee, a minister who took motion pictures of the atrocities with a camera; Robert Wilson, a doctor at a Nanjing hospital; Lewis Smythe, former University of Chicago sociology professor who was teaching at the University of Nanjing; Minnie Vautrin, who taught at Ginling College and set up a refugee camp for Chinese women. Those were only a few of the foreigners in Nanjing whose diaries and letters ended up at Yale—foreigners who were compulsive writers, meticulously documenting the Japanese atrocities and their own emotions. These missionaries took enormous risks by remaining in Nanjing to help the Chinese. All of them, at some point of their stay in the city, had been slapped or beaten up by the Japanese. One was even thrown down a flight of stairs. Of course, this was nothing compared to what had happened to the Chinese civilians in the city. As I placed one brittle, yellowing letter after another on the Xerox machine, I caught glimpses of sentences about men being machine-gunned by the thousands, women and small girls raped by bayonets, broken bottles or golf clubs.

  If just reading about the violence made me feel physically ill, try to imagine the effect it had on the missionaries, who witnessed it first-hand. David Magee, the surviving son of John Magee, told me it contributed to the early death of his father. One missionary woman went insane. Another woman, Minnie Vautrin, killed herself shortly afterwards. (As I mentioned to you on the phone, Vautrin left behind a 500-page diary that is as compelling as The Diary of Anne Frank. I would like to edit and publish the diary in the future.)

  When I wasn’t at Yale, I worked at Mailbox Etc. or Staples at Rye, xeroxing copies of documents for Shao (he would reimburse me afterwards) or xeroxing papers lent to me by Shao, or mailing big boxes of material back to myself. I must have xeroxed literally thousands of pages of documents.

  In my free time, usually on weekends, I drove around Rye, looking at the big houses and the palatial country club. Rye was the home of CEOs, Wall Street executives, investment bankers, a real bastion of the East Coast establishment. Everywhere about me, I saw WASPY old men in plaid caps, tweeds, and beige trench coats, or elderly women in expensive wool coats lined with fur. The town looked even more monied and exclusive than Santa Barbara.

  During my stay, I tried not to be a burden on the Shao family. I washed the dishes without being asked, babysat the kids whenever the elder Shaos went out, later gave the girls a $30 gift certificate for Barnes and Noble before I left for DC. At the end of two weeks, I felt as if I knew the family pretty well.

  On January 28, Shao and the children accompanied me to the train station in Rye for a final farewell. I traveled to Grand Central Station, and from there took Amtrak to Union Station in DC, where my friend Marian Smith picked me up. I would stay at her home for the next two weeks.

  Iris dug up many documents and records from the Yale Divinity School library. Of course, I would never forget the call Iris made to us while she was there. After she read Minnie Vautrin’s diary, she was so moved that she broke down and cried and right there she called us and told us Minnie’ story. Iris said Minnie Vautrin was born in Secor, Illinois, and, like Iris, had graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana. Her diary vividly and sadly recorded the rapes and the killings and the other acts of brutality she witnessed when she was the acting head of Ginling Women’s College in Nanking. Because of her admirable courage, humanity, and tenacity, she saved thousands of Chinese women and children from rape and other crimes by Japanese soldiers in the Safety Zone. However, after Minnie Vautrin returned to the U.S. in 1940, she took her own life out of sheer physical exhaustion and mental suffering. Minnie’s diary and her suicide had affected Iris greatly, perhaps because Minnie was a woman with such courage, or perhaps because Minnie had also graduated from the U of I as Iris had. In any case, Iris described Minnie’s story whenever the Nanking Massacre and Safety Zone were mentioned in the years to come. Right there on the phone at the Yale Divinity School library, Iris told us that she wanted to publish Minnie’s diary once her Nanking book was done. Minnie’s suffering and suicide was so tragic and her life was continuously haunting Iris. Minnie too was one of the victims of the Rape of Nanking.

  For the next two weeks, Iris stayed with her friend Marian Smith, a historian working in the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Iris had met Marian several years before while doing research for the Tsien book. Iris wrote in the letter:

  From January 28 to February 12, I stayed with Marian and continued my research at the National Archives. This time, I spent most of my time looking at microfilm records on the fourth floor. On weekends the room was crowded with people conducting genealogical research. You heard them chatting about their ancestor’s participation in the civil war or discussing the complexity of trying to find their land property records. Occasionally, I went to the Library of Congress to xerox giant city maps for Nanjing from the year 1937 or to look at microfilm of old newspapers or to examine indexes of microfilmed Japanese records. I spent a day at the Holocaust Museum, working with archivists and scholars to get citations on books about the Jewish holocaust, genocide, and the psychological portrait of wartime killers. I even dropped by to see Frank Winter, a curator of the National Air and Space Museum, because he wanted to give me an unpublished article about Tsien’s leadership in the Chinese satellite program, which had been written by one of Tsien’s former students.

  The most important meeting I had in Washington was with Barbara Culliton, my former professor at Hopkins. On February 8th, I met her at the offices of Nature magazine in the National Press Building and had coffee with her in a cafe on the bottom floor.

  Barbara seemed very happy to see me and we spent the next couple of hours catching up on all the news. She still teaches at Hopkins and she started a new magazine called Medicine for the company that owns Nature and officially resigned from Nature to work on this magazine.

  Barbara was eager to hear more about the Nanjing Massacre book, because she said she has always been more interested in the Asian side of World War II than the European side.

  She urged me to continue writing books, saying that no other student
of hers has been as ambitious and successful in this line of work as I have been. She wondered how some of her other students were doing and wistfully talked about organizing a reunion one day.

  Iris spent five weeks on the East Coast, and indeed it was a fruitful trip. She said she obtained so many source materials for her book that it would take her the next few years to digest all of it.

  The most important thing that happened at this time is that when Iris was in New York visiting Susan Rabiner at Basic Books, she mentioned to Susan her determination to write the book on the Rape of Nanking. Iris told Susan that she wanted to write this book so badly that she would publish it out of her own pocket if necessary. Susan asked her what was the Rape of Nanking and why did she want to write about it? Even Susan did not know the full story of Nanking, making Iris’s need to write this book and tell the world all the more real. Iris described to her the photos she’d seen at the exhibitions and the materials she’d collected in the National Archives and the Yale library. Susan was fascinated with the story and asked Iris to write a book proposal for her immediately.

  Iris told an interviewer later about her passion for writing this book: “I wrote The Rape of Nanking out of a sense of rage. I didn’t really care if I made a cent from it. It was important to me that the world know what happened in Nanking back in 1937.”

  On March 13, 1995, the first anniversary of my father’s death, my mother fell and broke her hip in her New York apartment while my older sister Ling-Ling was busy getting ready to visit my father’s grave in New Jersey. My mother was admitted into the hospital immediately.