Woman Who Could Not Forget
Read Woman Who Could Not Forget Online
Authors: Richard Rhodes
IRIS CHANG BEFORE AND BEYOND
The Rape of Nanking
Ying-Ying Chang
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK
To my husband, Shau-Jin, for his patience, support, and love
and
To Christopher, so he will know his mother
Iris Chang: An Introduction
BY RICHARD RHODES
10.
The Photos that Changed Her Life
16.
Research on Chinese in America
17.
Struggles for a Baby and a Movie
Requiem for Iris Chang
BY STEVEN CLEMONS
AN INTRODUCTION
by Richard Rhodes
T
his book celebrates the life of a remarkable young woman. It was a life cut short by early death, but it is no less worthy of celebration because of that fact. “Any man’s death diminishes me,” the English poet and cleric John Donne wrote in his most celebrated meditation, “. . . because I am involved in mankind.” Any woman’s death as well, but every man and woman’s
life
increases us, because every human life is an expression of the nearly limitless possibilities of human invention, compassion—of human love. Even those whom we consider evil, those who perpetrate evil acts, reveal human possibilities, however much we tremble to know them.
Iris Chang found her first full voice as a writer, and her purpose as a young Chinese-American, exhuming the horrors of the Japanese massacre of Chinese civilians in Nanking in December 1937 and January 1938. I have written about other horrors—the early “bullet holocaust” of the Jews of Poland and the Soviet Union following the German invasion of those countries in 1939 and 1941, the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and know how painful the work of reading documents and interviewing witnesses and survivors can be. Secondary trauma is a hazard of such a project. As did Iris, I experienced nightmares and mild depression, which I took for a sign that I was entering, if only distantly and safely, into the experience of the victims I was writing about.
I know why I chose to explore such terrible events. I don’t know why Iris did, but I suspect her deepest purpose was to embody the compassion she felt for the victims, and her outrage at the perpetrators, in careful, thoughtful witness. She was as well indignant that the Nanking Massacre had been half-forgotten in the West and minimized, if not actually denied, by the Japanese government. Her cultural background helped her to frame her perspective on this complicated history. So did her equal facility in Mandarin and in English.
But to mention only her best-known work is to leave out another rich part of Iris’s life: her life as a person—as a child, a daughter, a young adult, a wife, and a mother. In the course of our lives from birth to death we fill multiple roles. None is complete without the other; each complements the other. Whatever your religious beliefs, at minimum those we have lost survive in our memory of them. In this memoir Iris’s mother, Ying-Ying Chang, shares her memories of that other part of Iris’s life, the part that was private. Writing it, Ying-Ying tells us, helped her work through her grief at her daughter’s death. For those who knew Iris only or primarily through her books, learning more about her life enlarges our sense of who she was and how she came to her celebrated work.
I met Iris only once, and knew her otherwise through her work and through correspondence, but what an afternoon that meeting was! I had not yet moved to California; I was visiting San Francisco on a book tour. Iris and I had previously been in touch, probably on the grim subject of massacres, and I had invited her to join me for lunch. We did, at the hotel where I was staying in downtown San Francisco, on a quiet day that I recall as a Sunday. Iris’s first appearances must have always been surprising. Certainly I was surprised (and delighted) by her remarkable presentation: she was tall, striking, articulate, intense.
We lingered at table for something like three hours. The restaurant emptied out; the table was cleared; the waiters probably changed shifts. We compared notes about writing. We complained about our publishers, as all professional writers do when their readers probably expect them to be discussing more literary matters (but writing is almost always financially a thin string and worrisome). Iris was troubled about the attacks on her book. I remember wondering if she was concerned unnecessarily—the attacks she described seemed so unlikely in America at the turn of the millennium. I see from this memoir that she was not. There was reason for her concern, attacks that continue online to this day. When Iris was alive they were direct and personal—and from her perspective, threatening.
I had a chance to know Iris personally. Now that I also know her parents, I see where her intelligence and her courage came from. In this brave memoir you will meet a unique young woman and her family and share in the celebration of a life. When the loss of someone dear to us or of some public personage such as a writer or artist moves us, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once wrote, “we suffer much the same sense of irreparable privation that we should experience were
Rosa centifolia
[i.e., the rose species] to become extinct and its scent to disappear forever.” Memoir can’t bring Iris Chang back, but it can at least allow us to experience her presence again. It was always a vivid presence, full of the courage of her convictions, full of life.
—Richard Rhodes
“T
he Power of One” was the credo Iris stood by and often shared with her audience and fans through her rigorous writings and hundreds of speeches from coast to coast during her meteoric and yet brilliant career.
That was one of the reasons for which Iris was so driven and dedicated to certain causes in her life, devoted her complete energy and every waking moment to think, strategize, promote, strive, evaluate, and then retry in order to make a difference, more often than not, as a lone ranger with “
The Power of One
”!
She was also a great team player. For the years since Iris walked into our lives in the heart of Silicon Valley, specifically in a community center in the City of Cupertino in California, during an international conference in December 1994, that slender and photogenic young woman with a ponytail as many have seen in the docudrama film, “
Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking,
” constantly talked and wrote to us (the most active members of the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII in Asia—a North America-based community group), shared with us her meticulously gathered, documented, and researched historic facts, and took part in related academic activities in the U.S. and Canada. She never failed to stay in touch wherever she was, whether at home or in a hotel room miles and miles away from the nearest airports. The crisp sound of her keyboard strokes over the phone, documenting every word that we exchanged, is still reverberating in the back of my mind to this day. Hundreds and thousands of her e-mails to many, years before the majority of Americans discovered the word “Internet,” certainly qualify her as a great communicator and a fellow “cyber warrior” of mine. The bulk of this book is based on the huge e-mail archive that her mother, also an outstanding and meticulous scholar, has kept over the years.
Evolved from shy to shine. As she rose to become an international bestseller author for her book exposing the horrific history of Japan’s unprecedented rampage in eight weeks in 1937 and 1938—massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians, raping women and girls of all ages, looting and burning down China’s defenseless ancient capital, Nanking, Iris quickly transformed herself from a seemingly nerdy bookworm and prolific journalist into a top-notch public speaker at all occasions, including in the presence of the president of the United States and the first lady at a
Renaissance Weekend
. It used to take her all day to prepare for a fifteen-to-twenty-minute presentation when “
The Rape of Nanking
” was published in December 1997. A year later, a memorable moment took place on MacNeil-Lehrer’s
PBS Newshour
program—Iris turned a stuttering Japanese ambassador to the United States, Kunihiko Saito, into jelly in less than thirty seconds in a live televised debate.
Message to all the Japanese right-wingers: “Iris was neither an agent of the Chinese government nor an American spy as you have absurdly suggested, just an agent of change”!
All-around human-rights champion. While most people are familiar with her exceptional writing, Iris however wasn’t just passionate about certain subjects with her relentless advocacy—such as her pursuit of justice for those who were brutally victimized or murdered in Asia and the Pacific theater by the Imperial Japanese war machine during WWII. She also held deep and unwavering conviction to civil rights and human rights at home and abroad.
For example, Iris was extremely disturbed by the widespread Muslim-bashing in the country immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and George W. Bush’s unjust invasion of Iraq. She took part in a TV cable public forum along with Jewish and Arabic activists who shared her serious concerns even though Iris was at the time intensely involved in her vast book research and numerous speeches at universities and national television/radio stations. Her gloomy face reflected her profound feeling for those victimized by racial prejudice and hatred as she discussed how history sadly repeated itself in America and elsewhere—from the past discrimination against immigrants (Irish, Jews, Chinese, etc.), to the unconstitutional internment of Americans of Japanese descent, to the modern-day bashing of ethnic minorities.
Spoke from her heart and soul. It is also interesting to note that her writing style rankles some who have criticized her as a historian with bias and rage. Well, Iris inked the words that virtually placed herself in the shoes of her subjects as if she were in the room or courtyard with them as the victims faced their suffering and ultimate doom. Iris was a perfectionist and always held true and faithful to historical facts, but she presented her findings in a very dramatic, often unpleasant, way that some would rather choose to reject than accept how any human being could become absolutely devilish, given certain circumstance.
Caring and responsive at all times. It’s human nature that we are all corruptible by power, wealth, and fame. Iris, however, never let fame shear her humanity and good next-door-girl nature. Yearly after her passing, her readers, mostly strangers, have spoken of the e-mails or phone calls that they received from Iris in response to their random questions. Many high-school and college students were inspired by her personal messages. A number of her fellow authors, including some well-known bestseller writers, also have expressed their gratitude for her generous contributions of either review or unreserved assistance to help publish their work.