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Remember Nanking

Chang recounts the forgotten holocaust of the Chinese people

By Pam Marino

In despair, he screamed his beloved's name--"Yi-Pei!"--to the heavens. Then, like an echo from far away, he heard a reply. It came from one last sampan approaching the docks in the distance, a tiny sampan bearing his wife, his daughter, and several of my grandmother's relatives. My mother always told me that their reunion was a miracle.

Iris Chang
The Rape of Nanking

Had it not been for the miraculous reunion of Iris Chang's grandparents as they fled the Chinese capital of Nanking in November, 1937, the local author probably would never have been born.

Chang's grandparents escaped Nanking just weeks before the Japanese army marched on the city and committed some of the most horrific acts against humans in the 20th century. Chang and others estimate 350,000 people were killed by the army over a seven-week period. Thousands were dumped in mass graves or into the Yangtze River. Evidence shows the people, young and old, soldiers and civilians, were also tortured and mutilated; tens of thousands of women and young girls were raped.

Yet the Great Nanking Massacre, or Nanjing Datusha, while deep within the consciousness of the Chinese people, has gone unnoticed by the rest of the world. For various political and social reasons, what happened in Nanking was temporarily forgotten in the West, which had turned its attention to Auschwitz and the death camps of Germany.

Nearly 60 years after her grandparents escaped Nanking, Chang, 30, wrote a book about what happened, The Rape of Nanking. Cupertino-based Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War helped Chang with research for the book.

The Rape of Nanking spent five months on The New York Times bestseller list earlier this year. Chang has traveled the country addressing packed audiences. She is on the September cover of Reader's Digest. There is even talk of a movie.

At 2 p.m. this Saturday, Aug. 29, Chang will appear at a book-signing at SuperCrown, 789 E. El Camino Real, in Sunnyvale.

As a child, Chang's parents--university professors in Illinois where Chang grew up--told her about the Rape of Nanking, when the Yangtze River ran red with blood.

"It left a very powerful impression, to say the least," Chang said last week. "What shocked me was I couldn't find anything in my school library or in history books."

Chang was puzzled, but eventually left the puzzle alone. She became a journalist and embarked on a book writing career. Her first book, Thread of the Silkworm, is the story of Tsien Hsue-shen, father of the People's Republic of China's missile program.

After Chang had married and moved to California, the Rape of Nanking came back into her life. She learned from a friend about a documentary on the event, which reawakened her interest.

Then in 1994 Chang came to Cupertino to attend a conference about Nanking sponsored by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia.

Looking at photographs from the massacre, the stories she had heard as a child took on new meaning. She discovered there had never been an English-language book written on the subject. Chang became determined to write that book.

It took her two years to write it. She traveled to Asia to gather evidence, and she corresponded with family members of survivors. Thanks to her own detective work and some fate, she found the diaries of a German man, John Rabe, who, she found out, was the "Oskar Schindler of China," referring to the man who saved Jews from extermination during World War II and was later immortalized by Steven Spielberg in Schindler's List. Ironically, Rabe was a Nazi who had no idea of the true intentions of Adolph Hitler. As head of the Nanking International Safety Zone, Rabe saved thousands of Chinese from torture, rape and death.

"It really moved me that they [the safety zone committee] could risk their lives for others," she said.

The descriptions of the atrocities provided by Rabe and others who witnessed them were so stomach-churning and horrible Chang said it was extremely stressful to catalogue it.

"It was terrible," she said. "I don't have as much hair as I used to. I lost a lot of weight."

She steeled herself for the job by reminding herself that what the survivors of Nanking went through was far worse.

The atrocities Chang documented included Japanese soldiers using Chinese for bayonette practice, and in one case a killing contest between Chinese officers. People were beheaded, their heads used as trophies. Women, including pregnant women and young girls, were captured and raped, sometimes gang raped, and murdered. Families were sometimes forced to watch. Chang said she had enough reports to fill a book thousands of pages long.

She in part blames the Japanese military system at that time which exalted leaders, cruelly treated soldiers, and indoctrinated a sense that the Chinese people were worthless. In fact, for years Japanese school children had been told they would one day be enlisted to kill Chinese people.

"I felt a very strong moral urgency to write this story," she said. "I had to write it if it was the last thing I ever did in my life."

In another one of the twists of fate that has followed Chang throughout, The Rape of Nanking almost didn't see the light of day once at the publishers.

"I think it's a miracle that this book was published at all," Chang said. The book's editor was fired during a major upheaval at the publishing company, which was eventually sold. Other authors who had books at the company saw their contracts canceled.

"I just wanted it to be in the bookstores," Chang said of her work. "I never dreamed it would be a bestseller."

The response Chang has gotten has been powerful, she said. Audiences weep when Chang recounts what happened in Nanking. People at book-signings have told her how grateful they are to her for writing the book.

The response from Japan has been harsh, however. To this day the Japanese government has not acknowledged that the event ever happened. Because the West was anxious to make Japan its ally during the Cold War, no pressure was ever brought to bear on the government to pay reparations to China. Right-wing members of Japanese society are so bent on denying what happened at Nanking, Chang said, anyone who brings it up is threatened with harm and even death. She has been called a fraud and was even vilified in a political cartoon.

Chang, who drew on thousands of sources from the United States, Germany, China and Japan for her book, is not deterred by her Japanese detractors, however.

Nor does she have any ill will toward the Japanese people. In her book she is careful to point out that what happened in Nanking, and the rest of China during Japan's 14-year occupation of the country when more than 10 million Chinese were killed, was the result of the policies of the Japanese government at that time.

Chang is not the only one who is bringing the massacre to light. In what The New York Times called a cottage industry, there are dozens of groups working the Internet to publicize it, as well as recent documentaries, novels and exhibits.

Locally, the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War, based in Cupertino, has become a nationally recognized authority on the subject. Using the Internet and a Website as its main tools, the group has collected large amounts of information--pictures, films, interviews with survivors, resource material--which it shares with media organizations, scholars, authors, and others. Chang utilized the group's resources in researching her book.

Two weekends ago the group participated in an historic Webcast at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Former Japanese soldiers participated in the real-time Webcast from Japan, telling of their involvement in the Nanking Massacre.

For both the Alliance and Chang, telling the truth of what happened in Nanking is important. The goal, they say, is that people not forget, so that it cannot be repeated.

"[People] just have to realize that we are much more capable of committing these atrocities then we like to believe," Chang said.

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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, August 26, 1998.
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