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!”
We learned that her book had actually reached the list on January 14, but it took almost two weeks for that to show up in the newspaper. We don’t know exactly why it’s like this. Maybe publishers like to delay the information for two weeks so that they can make sure they have enough stock for potential buyers. On January 25, we went to a Barnes & Noble to buy a copy of the New York Times to see with our own eyes that her book was really there.
From that day on, Shau-Jin and I faithfully checked the list every week. Since we could find the list on the New York Times Web site, we printed
out the list each time Iris’s book appeared. The book became number 14, up from number 15, the next week, and number 11 for the following three weeks. It remained in the top fifteen for ten straight weeks. At the time, Iris was only twenty-nine years old. Her editor told her that she was the first Chinese-American to become a best-selling author on the New York Times list at such a young age—and for such an unprecedented length of time!
Why did Iris’s book become a best seller? In retrospect, I have my own conclusions. First, the Rape of Nanking was not known in the West, even though it had been front-page news in the New York Times in 1937. This was partly because the West emphasized the European theater of the war and largely ignored the Asian-Pacific side of World War II, and partly because of the Japanese government’s deliberate cover-up of their World War II crimes after the war ended. The Rape of Nanking was forgotten by the outside world until Iris exposed it.
Second, China became an increasingly important and powerful geopolitical player in the 1990s; that gave China a strong position to sort out the past neglected history such as the Rape of Nanking which had never been properly addressed before. Third, Chinese people born in the 1930s who had gone through World War II had now reached retirement and had the time and resources to reflect on their lives, and they wanted to preserve their war memories. That included Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Canadians.
Fourth, in the 1990s, Americans were prosperous, so they had the resources to pay attention to history and culture events that did not necessarily immediately affect their day-to-day lives. And fifth, Chinese activists of grassroots organizations in the U.S. and Canada, having been in the redress movement regarding the Sino-Japanese War for many years, had strongly supported Iris’s book as the consummation of years of hard work trying to bring exposure to this period of history.
In short, Iris was very lucky to be writing at the right time and in the right place! But the most important of all, from numerous articles and reviews about her book, almost everyone agreed that it was the massive materials that she had unearthed from archives that made the difference; also, her eloquence and passion for historical truth and social justice expressed in the book reverberated with and impressed readers.
A Roller-Coaster Life
Once Iris’s book was on the Times “Best Sellers” list, her publisher’s goal was to keep it there as long as possible, which was also the goal for grassroots Chinese-American organizations such as the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, based in Cupertino, California. To maintain the momentum of the book sales, Ignatius Ding, the Executive VP of the Global Alliance, in January of 1998 sent out thousands of e-mails via his vast e-mail address list to ask every member to support Iris’s book and encouraged them to forward the message to their friends via their own address lists.
We too forwarded his message to friends and students via our e-mail connections. Ding’s e-mail must have traveled back and forth across the U.S. many times since I got the same message from students and faculty from other parts of the country long after I read his original e-mail to me. Iris’s book generated enormous interest and awareness among Chinese-Americans as well as interest from the general public for this forgotten history of World War II in Asia, and it looked as if people had finally realized that there was a chapter in history that needed to be re-addressed, the history of World War II to be rewritten and reconsidered.
In the meantime, in response to the Toronto ALPHA chapter’s movement to donate Iris’s book to public libraries, organizations in the U.S. did the same thing. Many people bought multiple copies of the book in response to the call. Chinese newspapers also urged readers to send Iris’s book to members of congress, senators, and local government officials to help push for political action and a formal apology from Japan.
In January 1998, Iris went to Los Angeles and San Diego for more book signings. When she was signing in Los Angeles and its suburban towns like Monterey Park (where many Chinese-Americans lived), more than a hundred people showed up at the bookstore. Iris told us that many bookstore owners told her that they had never seen a scene like it before!
On January 8, Ye-Ye, Shau-Jin’s father, suddenly died at the age of ninety-three. He lived in Santa Monica, California, and had been sick with a serious case of the flu for a week. He collapsed one evening and died shortly thereafter. We were shocked and went to Santa Monica for the funeral a week later. Iris had a tight schedule at the time. She was at a book signing in southern California but was scheduled to fly east for a number of TV and radio interviews, including one by PBS’s Jim Lehrer for his News Hour. However, she said she wanted to fly back to California on January 16 for the funeral and would scramble to make the proper arrangements.
After the book hit the New York Times “Best Sellers” list, the Perseus Book Group, which owned Basic, began seriously putting some effort into promoting the book and gave her financial and material support. They promised that they would provide Iris escorted transportation services and hotel accommodations in each city. I had always worried that her tight schedule of book signings and media interviews would wear her out. I had written to her former book editor, Susan Rabiner, and voiced my concern. Before the change, during the book tour Iris was living in her friends’ houses at night at almost every stop, and driving a rental car to the stores by herself. Now with her publisher committed to help her with transportation and accommodations, she could concentrate on preparing her talks and reaching out to more media.
Iris usually gave a half-hour speech before each signing. Her speeches were always stimulating and forceful, according to newspaper reports and our friends who attended the book signing. Iris told us that at the end of her speeches, many people asked her questions. Furthermore, in each book signing someone invariably would come up to her and tell her their personal stories about the atrocities they had experienced or witnessed during the war. Those who had gone through it were eager to share their emotions and their frustrations. Perhaps that’s another reason why so many people wanted to show up to her signings: to finally open up about their own past. However, Iris told us that while she liked listening to those stories and supporting those people, she was emotionally exhausted afterward.
On January 16, Iris flew to L.A. from D.C., where she had just been interviewed by David Gergen for the PBS MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour. She immediately rented a car at LAX and drove to the funeral home just in time for the ceremony for her grandpa. Everyone was delighted to see her, especially me. It was a big relief to see her arrive safely.
After the funeral, when we returned to the hotel with Iris, a huge bouquet of flowers was waiting in her room. The bouquet had been sent by her publisher to congratulate her making the New York Times “Best Sellers” list and to express their sympathy for the recent loss to our family.
I had to go back to Urbana to work right after the funeral. Shau-Jin stayed one more day with Iris and accompanied her to a signing at Borders Books in Thousand Oaks, California. Shau-Jin described to me what he saw at Borders. He said there was a big crowd of people coming in; about half were Asian-American. At the end of the book signing, when the crowd was gone, the owner of the bookstore realized Iris had not had lunch and ordered a sandwich for her. That was almost 4:00 P.M. Iris was eating her sandwich while she continued signing the bookplates for the store, so they could stick them on the books in the next shipment and be sold as author-signed books.
On January 28, Iris called us with excitement and said that Laurel Cook, her Perseus publicist, and Jack McKeown, the CEO of Perseus, had called her in the afternoon to tell her that her book was up to #11 on the New York Times list! Her highest spot yet, only two weeks after first making the list. When they called, she could hear wild cheering, whistling, and clapping in the background! She was overjoyed!
Now that the publisher realized her book’s market potential, they made arrangements with all the possible bookstores and TV and radio stations in the country for her to do signings and interviews. Her i
tinerary from January 18 to March 13 was something like stops in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, Houston, Austin, San Francisco, Washington, and so on. To follow her, I asked Iris to give me a copy of her itinerary. Although the schedule of the book tour was hectic, Iris always maintained her high spirits and worked very hard.
One thing that pleased Iris was an article written by George Will, who was also a native of Champaign-Urbana and a graduate of Uni High School in Urbana. He is a renowned national columnist, and his articles are syndicated to almost every big and small newspaper in the country. One day Iris got a call from his aide, who told her that Will wanted to write an article about her book and wished to interview her. On February 19, his article “Breaking a Sinister Silence” was published in his column of the Washington Post. At the beginning of the article, he wrote: “Something beautiful, an act of justice, is occurring in America today concerning something ugly that happened long ago and far away. The story speaks well of the author of the just act, and of the constituencies of conscience that leaven this nation of immigrants.” At the end, he wrote: “Justice delayed is not necessarily justice denied . . . Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate, says that to forget a holocaust is to kill twice. Because of Chang’s book, the second rape of Nanking is ending.” Iris considered this column one of the highest points of her life, an eloquent summation of all that she had worked for over the past several years.
That same evening, Iris was invited to the San Francisco Commonwealth Club to speak. Iris told us it was a very prestigious forum and she considered it quite an honor to be able to speak there. The previous guest speakers were highly regarded world leaders like FDR, Ronald Reagan, and Nobel laureates in peace, literature or sciences.
Woman Who Could Not Forget Page 27
