It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.
After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.
Its a wonderful thing to see a segment of our population that is open and eager to learn more about Chinese culture. It has filtered into the mainstream. You see credit-card ads on TV with white couples and Chinese babies.
Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it’s hard to find out when one slides into another.
If the conditions were right there could be great acceptance. Often it is only when they pose an economic or political threat that it turns really ugly.
They probably do have an Asian Barbie.
Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.
The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.
I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills.
I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.
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.
When the Chinese first came to San Francisco, they were actually welcomed by the mayor and they had special ceremonies for them-again this is when their colony was very small, only a few Chinese.
The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.
Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law.
Whatever is not commonly seen is condemned as alien.
Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.
For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people’s civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.
Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.
Perhaps the most fascinating character to emerge from the history of the Rape of Nanking is the German businessman John Rabe. To most of the Chinese in the city, he was a hero, “the living Buddha of Nanking,” the legendary head of the International Safety Zone who saved hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives.
In 1996 I began an investigation into the life of John Rabe and eventually unearthed thousands of pages of diaries that he and other Nazis kept during the Rape. These diaries led me to conclude that John Rabe was “the Oskar Schindler of China.