Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  Besides reading and writing books, Iris also watched many movies in her leisure time. She was a true movie buff. She told me she was interested in scriptwriting, too. She realized very early on that the greater the power of a movie, the greater the impact the movie could have on viewers. She watched Oscar-winning movies systematically. She had been studying movie scenes segment by segment. “The movies I like are tightly structured, beautiful cinema graphic films with survival themes,” she would say. She mentioned the movies she liked such as Terminator, Apollo 13, The River Wild, and Witness. “My favorite movies are ones in which the central character wants something badly, takes her fate into her own hands, overcomes obstacles, fights against odds, and succeeds at the end!”

  She also mentioned movies about class struggle or class envy or war in epic films such as Gone with the Wind, A Place in the Sun, Giant, and Shane that she enjoyed. She said that a book she would like to write in the future would be also along the lines of a survival theme. She would always tell me a number of ideas for her next book. It seemed that her well of inspiration and curiosity were limitless.

  On February 12, 1996, Iris called us in panic after she saw a Newsweek cover story on baby’s brains. She had a book idea on “how to raise baby’s IQ” or “how to raise a genius,” which now seemed to be overtaken by the Newsweek cover story. We told her, “You have hundreds of ideas, but you can only work on a few. You can’t write two books at the same time.” “The man who runs after two hares will get none,” Shau-Jin added. We advised her that the book she was currently writing was an important, serious book, and she needed to finish it with her full attention. “You should not be distracted,” we said to her.

  At this point in Iris’s life, she felt she had reached a goal she’d set for herself, or at least she had become what she wanted to be, a book author. She now tried to help Brett excel in his career. Iris said Brett was very smart and should go to a business school to obtain an MBA. He could be a CEO, she said. The next thing I knew, Iris had persuaded Brett to apply to the country’s best business school—Harvard Business School, and she was quite energetic in helping Brett with the application. On May 19, Brett was informed by Harvard Business School that he had been admitted to the school for the fall of 1996. Iris was overjoyed, but Brett also had several good job offers from high-tech companies, and he wanted to work in Silicon Valley. Iris was insistent that Brett should go to HBS, so Brett finally agreed to enroll at HBS by delaying a year and also under the condition that Iris secure a big book advance for her next book, and thus their finances would remain secure while he was at school.

  To secure a big advance for her next book became Iris’s major concern in 1996. She toyed with ideas for her next book proposal almost all the time, besides working on her book The Rape of Nanking. Iris had expressed to me repeatedly over the phone that she felt life was unfair for a woman such as she, who had a dream and ambitions but was limited by her biological clock—the time to have children coincided exactly with the time she could write most productively in her life. She felt trapped because she was a woman. “By the time I reach the point when I’m commanding six-figure advances, I’ll have to slow down to have babies!” she shouted. Thus, the next book idea on women’s biological clocks was born. The book she was going to propose, she said, would find a solution so career women and female intellectuals could have both family and career. Iris believed that if there was no biological clock barrier for women, they could compete with men equally. And there was modern technology available for women who wanted to delay or prolong their biological clocks. She began active research on the topic and tried to perfect the book proposal.

  To her dismay, when Iris mentioned the idea to Susan Rabiner, Susan disliked the idea right on the spot. At that time, Iris told us she had found a new agent—Mel Berger, of William Morris Agency (now William Morris Endeavor), to be her next book agent. According to Iris, Mel was a powerful book agent with a number of famous clients. Iris said he had represented the author of Apollo 13 and had helped make the book into a successful movie. She believed Mel would help her to get a big advance for her next book. Iris was thrilled that when she contacted Mel, he agreed to represent her. Mel told Iris that she could submit any book ideas to him; apparently he was impressed by Thread of the Silkworm. Iris mentioned her idea on the biological clock, and Mel asked Iris to write it up and send him the proposal.

  On Mother’s Day, a cheerful call to me ended up with her admission in tears. She confessed that she felt caught between two arenas—to excel by her own merit and to excel as a woman married to a successful man. She felt she was caught in her own biological clock.

  On May 18, 1996, I went to New Orleans for a national microbiology meeting and planned to visit my mother in New York right afterward. My mother’s condition had worsened with time. From my frequent phone calls to her, I found her voice weak and her backache severe due to the cancer. She was crippled and bedridden. I had told Iris and Michael about the condition of their grandma. When Iris heard I was going to New York, she arranged her trip to the East Coast to coincide with my visit, so we could meet in New York. She said she needed to go to the National Archives again to see some documents. She also needed to go to New York to talk to Susan. On May 23, when I arrived in my mother’s apartment at Confucius Plaza, Iris was already there.

  In the little garden in front of the high-rise building that was Confucius Plaza, Iris told me all her worries and concerns. She had apparently lost some weight. Writing The Rape of Nanking definitely had taken a physical toll on her. She said she had lost a lot of hair and she could not sleep well at night. Besides the fact that the story of the Rape of Nanking depressed her, Iris was also unhappy about a number of other things. For one, she was not certain that she could get a big advance for her third book. She was under tremendous pressure. I told her I was amazed that she would drive herself so hard. Why should she torture herself? I advised her that she should concentrate on finishing the Nanking book. I cheered her up by asking her to think about how much she had accomplished so far. Her dad and I were very proud of her, I said. I could see my words lifted her spirit somewhat.

  In June, Brett accepted a job offer from a company called Applied Signal Technology. They were scheduled to move north to Sunnyvale from Santa Barbara in July.

  Before the move, Iris had many boxes of files that she had accumulated in the past few years when she had done the research for Thread of the Silkworm. Iris treasured any written records. Her research files were always neatly organized in folders and in file cabinets and meticulously labeled. She would never throw away even a piece of her research papers, but since the book had been published, there was no point in moving those papers with her. The archivists at UCSB had been eager to acquire Iris’s papers and told her they would start a collection in her name. Finally, Iris decided to donate her collection of research on Dr. Tsien to the Multicultural Center of the UCSB library; her materials would be stored in a room specifically designated in her name. But she admitted that to be separated from the files she had been with for the past three or four years would be emotionally difficult.

  On July 15, 1996, Iris informed us that they had moved into an apartment located at 655 South Fair Oaks Avenue in Sunnyvale, about thirty miles south of San Francisco in the heart of Silicon Valley. Iris described to us how their apartment was in a huge apartment building complex in a courtyard setting, and the residents were young, professional, and culturally and ethnically diverse. She said she couldn’t wait for us to come to visit her.

  Iris also mentioned that she had finished the book proposal on the biological clock just before moving and would mail us a copy for our comments. She was also sending the book proposal to a number of her friends for suggestions. Soon afterward, we received Iris’s book proposal outline, titled Turning Back the Biological Clock: The Fertility Revolution of the Next Millennium. She asked us to give her our honest comments before she sent it to Mel.

  The proposal of twenty-fou
r pages, single-spaced, was divided into three parts. In the Overview, Iris pointed out that “The woman’s fertility clock is probably the final barrier to true female emancipation. It hurts women during years of crucial career development, forcing some of the best, brightest and most ambitious to make the unpleasant choice of stepping out of the fast track or forgoing motherhood altogether. Also, the very fact that women face an earlier deadline for procreation than men casts them in a weaker position in the dating game.” But she added that “Scientists have reached the point, on the eve of a new millennium, of shattering this ancient barrier.” In part one, she said she would “examine the history of the woman’s biological clock—the role it has played in the subjugation of women in the agricultural and industrial age. Part two will investigate the present manifestations of the clock’s influence on our global society—how it continues to oppress women in both work and sexual relationships with men. Part three will forecast the future implications of technological forces that are, at present, eliminating the biological clock and hurtling our society into a new age.”

  Shau-Jin read her proposal more carefully than I because I was so busy with my own research at the time. Nevertheless, I read it as thoroughly as I could and gave Iris my comments. I told her that the book would be for general readers, so she should not go too much into scientific detail, such as the technical details how eggs can be preserved in liquid nitrogen. I also asked her to not stress waiting to have children too long, perhaps only at most to the mid-forties. I told her that if a mother was in her sixties, it would be hard to raise children even if she could have a normal and healthy baby, as, based on my own experience, young children have so much energy that it could be difficult for an older person to keep up.

  A couple of months later, Iris said that Mel told her the proposal had been rejected by most of the publishers he sent to. It was a big blow for Iris. She told Mel that she wanted to revise the proposal and try again. Mel told her he would resubmit the revised proposal for her again, so Iris worked hard trying to make the necessary changes. At that time, we did not realize how much this book proposal meant to her on a personal level. Each time when she called us and talked about it, we asked her about The Rape of Nanking instead. We advised her to concentrate in finishing the Nanking book first before considering anything else. But something outside of books and publishing was bothering her.

  The competitive urge was always deeply rooted in Iris. One day, she complained, “If only I had more time! If only I wasn’t hindered by my own biological clock!” Another day, she told me that Brett and she had written down their goals for the next twenty years. She said it was painful to see how few “productive” years were left for her, and that could have meant either professionally or biologically. I told her she should not drive herself so hard and should not approach life on such a tight schedule. She should relax, I told her. Those things always have a way of coming together, and many women were able to reconcile professional fulfillment with a family.

  On September 12, 1996, Iris mailed us her revised biological clock proposal. Again, both Shau-Jin and I read it over and gave her some suggestions. After that, I did not hear about it very much because an important thing happened at that time in all of our lives—the discovery of John Rabe’s diary in Germany became international news. Iris and the forthcoming book The Rape of Nanking were now in the center of a media maelstrom.

  The Breakthrough

  Nineteen ninety-six was a very complex year for Iris. She had to put the finishing touches on The Rape of Nanking, which was scheduled to be published in 1997. She was also busy promoting Thread of the Silkworm, which had just been published in November 1995. In the meantime, she was also actively revising her proposal for what she hoped would be her next book, on the “biological clock.” But the most exciting thing was the discovery of John Rabe’s diary in the spring—a big breakthrough in Iris’s career and a huge asset to her efforts to tell the full story of the Rape of Nanking, something that was almost in danger of being sidelined by her work on her biological clock proposal.

  Iris first learned of John Rabe when she was doing the research on the Nanking Massacre at Yale in January 1995. His name was repeatedly mentioned in a number of diaries and letters of the missionaries who had stayed in Nanking at the time of the massacre.

  When the Japanese military invaded the Chinese capital, Nanjing (then called Nanking), on December 12, 1937, within just six to eight weeks the Japanese had slaughtered some 260,000 to 350,000 Chinese civilians, and had raped between 80,000 and 200,000 Chinese women and girls in the most heinous and barbaric ways. During the carnage, a group of Westerners—European and American missionaries, scholars, and doctors, who had chosen to stay behind—had established a Safety Zone to protect some 250,000 refugees in a neutral area of two square miles in Nanking. The head of the Safety Zone was a German businessman, John Rabe, who was also the head of the local Nazi Party in Nanking.

  Iris told us that she had always been curious about John Rabe. She had been told by activists in the U.S. and historians in China that Rabe had virtually vanished after he returned to Germany in February 1938. Where was John Rabe now? Was he still alive? If not, did he have descendants? What happened when he returned to Germany? Her curiosity drove her to find out more about him.

  When Iris came back from Taiwan in the summer of 1995, she brought back some documents related to the Nanking Massacre from the National History Archives in Taiwan. The document was a stack of German diplomatic reports about the Nanking Massacre. Since the reports were in German, she needed someone who knew both German and English to translate them for her. A friend of Iris’s introduced her to Barbara Masin, who also lived in Santa Barbara, because Barbara Masin could speak five languages and was fluent in German.

  In December of 1995, Barbara dictated the translated text orally into a tape recorder while Iris took notes. Iris later told us: “As she spoke, the living room of her house reverberated with the stories of hundreds of atrocities.” Iris learned from the reports that John Rabe had permitted some two to three hundred women to live in tiny huts on his property in Nanking. There were numerous stories in the reports that John Rabe had protected those refugees from rape and murder by Japanese soldiers. Rabe toured the city of Nanking and the countryside to record the extent of the massacre. The reports also recorded his departure, in February 1938, back to Germany. Rabe had promised his Chinese friends that he would let his government know what had happened in Nanking. He planned to deliver a report and a film of the Nanking atrocities to the highest power in Berlin: Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler himself. (The film was shot by Minister John Magee, and one copy of the film had been smuggled to the U.S. and later provided the famous images of the Nanking Massacre for Life magazine.) People in Nanking prayed that Rabe’s presentation would compel Nazi leaders to exert pressure on the Japanese government to stop the carnage. Iris was very curious: had the film and the report reached Hitler? And what had happened to Rabe after his presentation of the film and the report?

  From the diaries and letters of the American missionaries in the Safety Zone, Rabe emerged as a man who worked tirelessly to protect Chinese women from rape and Chinese men from execution. He wrote to Japanese officials repeatedly, demanding that they end the violence. Because of his Nazi status, Japanese soldiers were hesitant to commit atrocities in his presence. Rabe was revered among the Chinese refugee community as a savior—the “Schindler” of Nanking, if you will.

  Iris told us that the more research she did on the Massacre, the more she wished to know the fate of John Rabe after he left China. After all, unlike his Safety Zone colleagues, he had not come forward to testify against the Japanese during the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE), and no one ever heard from him again after his return to Europe. Iris had contacted a number of scholars and political activists and descendants of the Nanking Safety Zone committee members, but none of them knew what had happened to him. Iris then determined to embark on
a journey to track him down, while simultaneously working on her book.

  First, Iris told us she had written to the Siemens Company headquarters in Germany, where Rabe had once been an employee. The archivist of the company wrote back and said indeed they had a file on him, but alas, the last information on him was that he had been transferred to the Siemens office in Nanking in 1931. The archivist said they had no information concerning his whereabouts after 1938. However, the file revealed that between 1900 and 1903, Rabe had worked as an apprentice to a merchant in Hamburg, and Iris tried to pick up his trail there. Because of this information, Iris thought he might have had some ties to the city of Hamburg.

  Iris told us she planned to put an advertisement looking for him in the Hamburg newspapers. In the meantime, Iris turned to John Taylor, the archivist in the National Archives in Washington who had helped Iris a great deal when she was doing research there on Dr. Tsien and The Rape of Nanking. He was well connected and seemed to know every historian in the world. Taylor suggested that Iris contact a German history expert in California; from there she was directed to a German lady who knew the history of Hamburg in great depth. On April 26, 1996, this kind lady wrote to Iris that she was able to locate John Rabe’s granddaughter, Ursula Reinhardt. All of these details on how Iris tracked down Rabe’s descendants were recorded in chapter 9, “The Fate of the Survivors,” in Iris’s Nanking book.

  Iris shared every move and every discovery in her research with us. Each time there was big news to share, she would call us immediately, even in the middle of the night. After Iris found Ursula Reinhardt, she corresponded with her constantly. Iris and Ursula exchanged letters that ran for tens of pages. One day in May, Iris called us in excitement and said that Ursula had told her that Rabe had kept a diary about his time during the Nanking Massacre! According to Iris, Ursula was Rabe’s favorite granddaughter. Her mother, Rabe’s daughter, had given Rabe’s diary and other documents to Ursula after Rabe died. Ursula had carefully saved her grandfather’s papers, diaries, and photographs, including invaluable documentation about the Rape of Nanking. Ursula was very generous; in her letters to Iris, she translated several of the last entries in the diary into English. Ursula could speak English, and Iris had talked to her and interviewed her on the phone, sometimes as late as three in the morning (California time). Iris even mailed us a copy of Ursula’s letters to share her excitement!