Woman Who Could Not Forget Read online

  The Woman Who Could Not Forget

  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

  Contents

  Iris Chang: An Introduction BY RICHARD RHODES

  Foreword BY IGNATIUS Y. DING

  1. The Shock

  2. The Birth

  3. Childhood

  4. A Passion Emerges

  5. The High-School Days

  6. Standing Out in Crowds

  7. Fresh Out of College

  8. Starting Over at Twenty-Two

  9. Struggles of a Young Writer

  10. The Photos that Changed Her Life

  11. The Biological Clock

  12. The Breakthrough

  13. Overcoming Obstacles

  14. Becoming a Celebrity

  15. A Roller-Coaster Life

  16. Research on Chinese in America

  17. Struggles for a Baby and a Movie

  18. A New Book and a Son

  19. The Breakdown

  20. An Untimely Death

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Notes and References

  Appendix

  Requiem for Iris Chang BY STEVEN CLEMONS

  Acknowledgments

  IRIS CHANG:

  AN INTRODUCTION

  by Richard Rhodes

  This 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

  FOREWORD

  “The 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 “cyb
er 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.

  Not without fear! Her admirers praise Iris as a fearless crusader. That is only partially true, though. Iris was a fighter. That’s for sure. But she incessantly lived on edge and in fear of unpredictable harm to herself and her family rising from the constant threats from rogue history deniers. She did not ever let the fear overcome her determination to pursue justice, though. This young woman somehow harnessed the ultimate courage of a spirited soldier to charge forward nevertheless.

  An insightful book. This memoir was written from a loving mother’s perspective in chronicling Iris’s life and career, many of her joyful moments, love of life and literacy, deepest fear, courage, and her succumbing to the weight of depression in the end. Readers will learn facts that were previously unknown to most of us, the ups and downs in the life of a small-town girl from the Midwest who became a bigger-than-life star in modern American literacy. With Iris’s firm belief: “anyone can do it,” we should and must follow her steps to strive for greatness.

  Public service. Despite the social taboo in discussing mental illness and the excruciating recount of Iris’s final journey through depression and a nervous breakdown, Ying-Ying has painstakingly documented all turns of events, day by day and sometimes hour by hour. It is to inform readers how and what might have happened to an apparently outgoing and all-around healthy woman psychologically. She has thoroughly recorded what Iris went through and how the family dealt with the difficult situation, from the sudden news of Iris’s breakdown during a research trip, through months of treatment with their desperate attempt to learn and cope with something totally unknown to the family members as often happening to others caught up in comparable circumstance. She has documented the diagnoses, their interactions with doctors, and various medicines used.

  In addition, Ying-Ying has also included in the epilogue the findings and valuable references from her follow-up studies after Iris passed away. Her intent is to offer this book about mental illness, related treatments, choices of medicine, and precautionary measures as a public service so others would hopefully be benefitted from taking appropriate preemptive actions to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

  One must understand how hard it was for Ying-Ying to go through her recollection, relive her nightmare once again, and spend several years to compile and document the relevant information. It was very honorable on her part to do so. This is a great gift to the public. It is done to honor the memory of her beloved daughter, Iris Chang.

  —Ignatius Y. Ding

  The Woman Who Could Not Forget

  The Shock

  I want to forget that day. But I never will.

  It was Tuesday, November 9, 2004. The phone rang at 8:30 A.M. Our son-in-law, Brett Douglas, told us that our daughter, Iris, had slipped out of their home during the night. Her white 1999 Oldsmobile Alero was not in the garage.

  We rushed to their townhouse, just a two-minute walk from our own home. A San Jose police officer had already been there, talked to Brett, and left. Brett showed us a printed note he had found next to Iris’s computer. It was addressed to Brett; my husband, Shau-Jin; Iris’s brother, Mike; and me. She had printed out the note at 1:44 A.M. It read, in part:

  Dear Brett, Mom, Dad and Mike:

  For the last few weeks, I have been struggling with my decision as to whether I should live or die.

  As I mentioned to Brett, when you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years; when you do not, you live not just by the day—but by the minute.

  ou don’t want someone who will live out the rest of her days as a mere shell of her former self. . . . I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts.

  I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead. Each breath is becoming difficult for me to take. . . . The anxiety can be compared to drowning in an open sea. I know that my actions will transfer some of this pain to others, indeed those who love me the most. Please forgive me. Forgive me because I cannot forgive myself.

  Love, Iris

  My heart was pounding in my chest so loudly, I could hear it. I could barely breathe. I told Shau-Jin and Brett we needed to go find her, to bring her back.

  In the past few weeks, Iris had often talked about how she didn’t want to live any longer. She had been severely depressed since she’d returned from Louisville, Kentucky, where she had gone to interview American POWs
of World War II for a book on the Bataan Death March. Before she went to Kentucky on August 12, she had barely slept for four straight nights and had eaten almost nothing. Soon after arriving in Louisville, she’d had what seemed to be a nervous breakdown in her hotel room. Shau-Jin and I had jumped on a flight and brought her back to San Jose, where she had seen three psychiatrists for depression and taken antipsychotic drugs and an antidepressant. In October, Iris’s two-year-old son, Christopher, went to live with Brett’s parents in Illinois.

  My husband and I couldn’t understand how Iris’s life had unraveled so quickly. That spring, she had gone on a whirlwind five-week trip to promote her latest book, The Chinese in America. Before Iris had left for the book tour, she’d seemed perfectly fine. When she returned home in early May, she became apprehensive and preoccupied, believing someone wanted to harm her. After she had the breakdown, three months later, her paranoia had worsened.

  On October 28, after I discovered an application to own a gun and a firearms safety manual in her purse, I found out she had visited a gun shop in east San Jose. When I confronted her, she realized I was watching her closely and became distant. She didn’t return my phone calls or answer my e-mails. I brought flowers and food to her doorstep, but she didn’t even allow me to come into her home or get near her.

  Now she had left a suicide note and disappeared. But I still held out hope. Maybe she had changed her mind about killing herself and would soon come home—as she had in September, when she had checked into a local hotel for the day but returned that evening. I had never really been a religious person, but as my knees shook and my hands trembled, I started to pray.

  Shau-Jin and I returned home and got ready to leave. But we soon realized that it would be impossible to find her without a plan.