Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  Although I knew my mother was going to die one day, especially since she had been sick for so long, I was still devastated when her death eventually came. She had fought breast cancer for eighteen years, going through various types of treatments and suffering. Her spirit, the way she never gave up hope and never stopped her fight to live, was an inspiration to me.

  When I returned to the lab to work after my mother’s funeral, I could not overcome my sadness over her death. I kept thinking about how many things I could have done for my mother while she was alive. A sense of guilt and regret overwhelmed me. I blamed myself—why had I never quit my job for a while to be with her in her final days? How selfish I was! My mother had sacrificed so much for me and our family, but I could not give up a few months of my job to be with her. I couldn’t sleep at night thinking about all the things I could have done for her. The strangest thing was that I was not able to shed any tears like I had when I’d been on the airplane to my father’s funeral. It was a deeper hurt this time. My face must have been distorted by my sadness. The unusual silence I exhibited in the lab caused John Cronan’s concern. One day he patted me on my back and said softly, “I know how sad you are for your loss, but death is inevitable at the end of life’s journey.” Then the tears really gushed out from my eyes.

  Iris also knew how sad I was, and she sent an e-mail and asked: “How are you feeling these days? I hope you haven’t been too depressed over Grandma’s death. I know you were very close to her (like I am to you), and the death of a mother is always worse than the death of a grandma.” She continued: “We were fortunate to have her as long as we did. When I was in grad school, most of my classmates had already attended at least one of their grandmothers’ funerals.”

  It was kind of her to be so in tune with my grief, as Iris faced her own crisis now that Basic Books was gone. Because of the sudden change staff of Basic Books, Iris was working extremely hard to finish the book as soon as possible. On June 6, she wrote:

  Dear Mom,

  You have no idea how hard I’ve been working since I’ve returned! Earlier this week I stayed up 30 hours straight (I was so intensely focused I couldn’t fall asleep). I hope to be finished by this weekend. . . . Every minute of this week has been devoted to the book (copyright issues, captions, photo layout, Susan’s comments, etc.) but I’m thrilled to say that everything is coming together rapidly. Thanks to you, I’ve been able to secure most of the names in Chinese characters. People have also been faxing me their cards with Chinese names all week, and now I seem to have everything I need in Chinese. . . .

  Love, Iris

  The Commonwealth Publishing Group in Taiwan, the same publisher that had translated Iris’s first book, Thread of the Silkworm, obtained the translation rights to The Rape of Nanking and intended to publish a Chinese version of the book in 1997, at the same time it was published in America. That was why Iris had asked me to fax her the Chinese characters of the names of the people and places that appeared in her book.

  On June 16, 1997, Iris wrote to me:

  Dear Mom,

  Happy birthday! I’ve been so absorbed in my work I almost forgot . . . I’ll definitely call you tonight, after your celebration with Dad.

  Today, I’ve been trying to find all the names and addresses of all my blurb contacts. Last night I talked with Dale Maharidge, who said he would be delighted to give me a blurb. He was shocked to hear the news about Susan [Rabiner, leaving Basic], and told me more depressing news:

  Two famous writers—Anthony Lukas (author of Common Ground) and Michael Dorris, husband of the novelist Louise Erdrich (her sister Heidi was in my class at Hopkins) both committed suicide recently. Lukas killed himself because he just finished a book and thought it was terrible (his editor, however, exclaimed it was fantastic) and Dorris did it because his marriage was breaking up and his wife had accused him of molesting one of his daughters (a charge he denied in his suicide note).

  Compared to most writers, Dale and I are relatively well-grounded. . . .

  Love, Iris

  Iris always thought suicide was horrible and incomprehensible.

  Iris told us that her new editor, Paul Golob, had informed her that her book’s publication date had been pushed back to November 7. I reminded Iris that the book must be published on or before December 13, the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre, to maximize the publicity of the book, and she should not let Basic push the date back any further. Iris also said that the cover had been redesigned and Golob thought it looked much better now and would fax it to her. Iris promised to send a copy to us as soon as she got it, because back in April, she’d said that she was very disappointed with the original book cover design, and it had stimulated many discussions among us and her activist friends. Many of her friends had volunteered to design her book cover or at least offer up new ideas that Iris could relay on to Basic.

  On June 25, we received a photocopy of the new cover, and it was much more in line with what everyone thought best fit the book: the background was a photo of bodies from the massacre littered at the bank of the Yangtze River. A big Japanese flag and a Japanese imperial soldier were at the front. We felt the design was the best among all the possible ones we had seen so far. I told Iris that it was very conspicuous and attracted attention. The cover really captured the essence and passion of the subject matter because, when it was displayed in bookstores months later, the bloody crimson and the Japanese flag stood out on the shelf and outshone all the books around it.

  Several days later, a thick copy of the final version of the manuscript arrived. I had lost count of how many versions she had sent to us for our comments. Shau-Jin and I used our July 4 holiday weekend to read it carefully and gave her a list of any errors we spotted plus our questions, but at this stage most were just typos. I wrote her: “I love the final version and no doubt this is much better than the first or the second version. I like the Introduction and the Epilogue the best. You summarize it very well; very strong and eloquent. I wonder what the other people think. Have you gotten any feedback from other reviewers yet?”

  Indeed, she had. Iris had sent her final version of the manuscript to many of her friends and reviewers for comments and feedback. She told me that in April she had had a good conversation with history professor William Kirby of Harvard, who was impressed with the manuscript and agreed to write a foreword for the book. A number of well-known historians and writers to whom the manuscript was sent responded favorably, such as Richard Rhodes, Nien Cheng, Ross Terrill, and Frederic Wakeman. They all agreed to write blurbs for the book. Iris also told us she had met an Oxford historian, Rana Mitter, on a plane when she was returning to the U.S. in 1995, and Mitter was also happy to write a blurb for her. Among the writers she and Basic had contacted, Nien Cheng was particularly impressed by Iris’s book. Nien Cheng, the author of the book Life and Death in Shanghai, told Iris that she was eighty-two years old and it gave her great joy to see a young, talented woman write such a book.

  That summer, Iris was also looking for work on the side, and she was very pleasantly surprised that she was hired right on the spot when she was interviewed by the Lloyd-Ritter consulting firm. She told us that the interviewers had been very impressed by her résumé and her ability to answer their questions. She started a nine-to-five work schedule in their Sunnyvale office at the beginning of July. After several days working in an office, she complained that she was very tired, as she was essentially working two jobs: the office job, and the final phase of her book. She would get up 6 A.M. to call Basic Books for a number of things related to her book’s publication such as footnotes, book jacket, and blurbs. Then, after eight hours in the office working and answering phones for the firm, she worked for hours proofreading and checking footnotes and so forth for the book. It was a chaotic time to be publishing a book for Basic, which essentially did not exist anymore. By July, her editor and almost all the assistants originally at Basic were gone, and Iris was doing many things related to the publicat
ion which usually would be done by the publisher.

  She only worked for the consulting firm for a month and then resigned when she could not find time to get enough sleep. Luckily, the company head was very sympathetic and liked Iris very much and told Iris she could come back to work any time she wanted.

  Another reason Iris was so busy was that she was aggressively planning a book tour to promote The Rape of Nanking. Many Chinese-American and Chinese-Canadian communities alongside major universities wanted her to give speeches. Basic Books could only afford to support Iris on a two-city book tour, one city on the East Coast and one on the West, so Iris took the lead and coordinated the whole tour by herself. She essentially depended on relatives, friends, and non-profit organizations in most of the cities she planned to visit by arranging to stay in their homes. The cost of transportation was partially supported by the organizations that invited her, but the planning and coordinating of the tour took much of her time during that period.

  On July 7, 1997, the sixtieth anniversary of Japan’s all-out invasion of China, Iris forwarded several articles to us that reported protesters demonstrating in Hong Kong and Taiwan in front of the Japanese embassy. They demanded a formal apology and war reparations from Japan. A statement released from the PRC also indicated that the Chinese government maintained a stronger stand on the issue than in previous years, warning against resurgent Japanese nationalism and militarism. Apparently, the rise of China as one of the world powers gave it some leeway to sort out its past issues, which it had never been able to do before while it was still struggling with internal political conflicts. This was excellent news for Iris’s book, as China and its history were on many people’s minds.

  On November 3, 1997, Iris told us she had finally received two copies of the published Rape of Nanking. Her hands were shaking when she tore open the brown shipping box. She said she was looking at and flipping through the book for a long time, soaking it all in. I could not blame her for being so intoxicated and exhilarated!

  One of the most exciting bits of news in 1997 was on July 28: HarperCollins sold the first serial rights of The Rape of Nanking to Newsweek magazine, and an excerpt of the book would be published in their November 17 issue, which would coincide with the time the book hit the bookstores. Newsweek was a very popular magazine worldwide, and the excerpt would surely have a tremendous impact on the sale of the book. After we heard the news, we were exuberant. Besides, we have continuously subscribed to Newsweek since before Iris was born and had been loyal readers the whole time. Iris had worked as an intern at Newsweek back in the summer of 1988, so all of us had special feelings about the magazine.

  Our waiting for the Newsweek issue carrying her book excerpt was just like waiting for a grandchild to be born. My anxiety got higher and higher as the date gradually approached.

  While Iris was arranging the month-long itinerary of her book tour from November 14 to December 19, 1997, including multiple stops in the U.S. and Canada, she learned that the contract with Newsweek prevented her from disclosing the contents of her book until Newsweek’s excerpt was published. However, once the excerpt was published, she could speak out and discuss the book’s contents at the first stop on her book tour on November 14 without any reservations.

  Publishing the excerpt in Newsweek turned out to be quite dramatic, with many twists and turns. When Newsweek delayed publishing the excerpt, Iris sent us a day-to-day summary of the events as they unfolded. She asked us to keep the information in case she later needed written evidence to show how things had developed.

  According to Iris, on July 28, 1997, a staffer at HarperCollins e-mailed Iris that she had sold first serial rights to Newsweek, and that the excerpt would be published in the November 17 issue (thus the magazine would be on newsstands or in bookstores on November 10 or 11).

  On Thursday, November 6, 1997, an editor at Newsweek sent Iris a first draft of the excerpt and asked her for suggestions on how to include certain parts of the book. The editor also asked for permission to print certain photos.

  On November 7, Friday morning, the editor e-mailed Iris the preliminary layout, with the captions, headline, and deck text. The headline read “Exposing the Rape of Nanking”; the subtitle was “Exclusive excerpts from a Chinese-American author’s unflinching re-examination of one of the most horrifying chapters of the Second World War.” Iris spent all day e-mailing versions of the text back and forth. Iris asked the editor if there was any chance that the excerpt would get bumped if tensions escalated between the U.S. and Iraq, which was a distinct possibility that week. She told her no, the schedule was set and it would take something really big to bump her story.

  However, suddenly, that evening at 10:00 P.M., when Iris and Brett got back from a concert in San Jose, she had a phone message from Newsweek that had been left at 7:29 P.M.: “Iris, it’s Tom Maslin at Newsweek. I’m sorry to tell you that we’ve had to hold the excerpt because the magazine has . . . shrunk by four pages, which is what we had for it. We’ll be back in touch with you next week; if you want to speak to me further, please give me a call at. . . .”

  The next morning, Iris called us and informed us of the delay. We were all stunned, to say the least. Iris told us Tom’s voice in the phone message had sounded strained and uncomfortable.

  Iris called Newsweek immediately and asked them why this had happened. They told her that four major ads had been pulled from the magazine at the last minute on Friday evening. They explained to Iris that Newsweek had to have a certain ratio of advertising pages to editorial pages, and that sometimes stories got cut because of lost advertising. They admitted that such incidents were rare and said that the staff had worked all evening to redesign the magazine because of the lost advertisements, but there was very little they could do.

  Iris made a series of phone calls to Newsweek, and one of the senior staff told her that one of the major ads that had pulled out was a Toyota ad. But later he called back and said that the delay had nothing to do with the pull-out. I was not so convinced.

  My analysis, as I told Iris over the phone, was that the news of Iris’s book excerpt had leaked out and somebody was trying to stop it from being published.

  I pointed out to Iris that the leak might have been an interview published in the November issue of the Johns Hopkins alumni magazine. The editor of the magazine, Sue DePasquale, had come to Sunnyvale that summer and met Iris in person for the interview. DePasquale had written an excellent and long article about Iris and her book. The article, Nightmare in Nanking, as published in the November issue occupied five full pages. Not only that, a photo of Iris with a bloodstained Japanese flag in the background was on the front cover of the magazine. Inside, the article was accompanied by several historic photos of the massacre with the title, subtitles, and captions prominently printed. In the article, Iris disclosed to DePasquale that Newsweek had promised that they would run a lengthy excerpt from the book in their November 17 issue.

  The Johns Hopkins magazine was one of the first groups of magazines to be online at the time. One of the readers of the magazine wrote to DePasquale (who later shared this with me via Iris) and indicated that the article had instantly attracted many overseas alumni. One reader wrote:

  Dear JHU Magazine,

  Kudos for putting the magazine online. It’s great for the overseas JHU alumni who have to wait so long to get the paper editions. The article on the Rape of Nanking and Iris Chang was poignant, well-written, and informative. It was particularly interesting since I am now living in Japan and am all too aware of what Iris described, the Japanese unwillingness to confront the more unpleasant aspects of their history. I have taken the liberty of forwarding it to a number of my friends in Japan, both foreigner and Japanese, for discussion and to get the debate started. I hope this will be part of the process that Iris has begun. A small step, but an important one nonetheless.

  Newsweek’s delay, I told Iris, might be due to pressure from Japan once they heard about the excerpt. I reminded
Iris that the article in the Johns Hopkins magazine had circulated in Japan in the beginning of November.

  Iris said that HarperCollins and Newsweek had a contract, and if Newsweek was not going to publish the excerpt, they needed to give her better answers. Iris had called a number of her friends in New York. All comforted her, assured her that her excerpt would certainly be published, and promised that they would make phone calls to find the reasons for the delay.

  On the evening of November 10, we received our usual subscription copy of Newsweek and found that that week’s issue was unusually thick and had exactly twice as many Japanese advertisements as a typical Newsweek issue. By this time, Shau-Jin and I had made a systematic analysis of the advertisements in the magazine. We and Iris all agreed that it was a good sign, because it meant that Newsweek had likely worked out a compromise with their advertisers to make sure that next week’s Japanese ads had been transferred to this issue to avoid obliging those advertisers to sponsor an issue containing an excerpt of The Rape of Nanking.

  On November 11, Iris received an e-mail from a head researcher in the foreign department at Newsweek, telling her that they were not planning to run the excerpt in the November 24 issue either. Iris immediately called Tom Maslin, but he was in Jerusalem. When she reached him and asked him why her excerpt was not going to run, he said that he did not make the decisions and only accepted orders. Right now her excerpt was not slated for the schedule, and they hadn’t told him why either.