Iris Chang wrote bestselling ‘Rape of Nanking," "Chinese in America" and "Thread of the Silkworm"
Thursday, November 11, 2004 Posted: 1435 GMT (2235 HKT)
LOS GATOS, California (AP) — Iris Chang, a best-selling author who chronicled the Japanese occupation of China and the history of Chinese immigrants in the United States, was found dead in her car of a self-inflicted gunshot, authorities said Wednesday. She was 36.
The late historian Stephen Ambrose described Chang as "maybe the best young historian we’ve got, because she understands that to communicate history, you’ve got to tell the story in an interesting way."
When i was in College, I researched and wrote extensively on the Rape of NanKing as well as Chinese immigration to America, the latter is what I did my thesis on. At the time, all the information was from disparate sources, and very little was published. After that Iris Chang, came along. Another important voice silenced from depression…. So heartbreaking.
"She was passionate and articulate," said Ling-Chi Wang, a faculty member
in Asian American studies at UC Berkeley."She was one of the most visible Chinese American authors, who wrote a landmark book that brought to the attention, at least among her American audience, what was nonexistent as an issue.
Chinese American Author Found Dead In South Bay
SF Gate:
SF Chronical: Wars of Memories
NPR: Iris Chang Dies, at 36 (Listen to her speak)
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 
I heard about this a couple of days ago. The world lost a very good historian and author. Tragic.
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I just saw it on MSN news today. It’s shocking~ I am worried that from now on chinese american is gonna be afraid of talking about the rape of nanking since most people find a connection between her suicide and the book.
this time the bad guys won. the people who made those threatening phone calls won.
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I read about the death, but I somehow didn’t catch that it was Ms. Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking or that it was a suicide. May she RIP..
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What were the threatenning phone calls? I didn’t read about it?? But that’s just gossip. Thing is people who are sick with depression, it’s just warps their mind, so whatever negative things in their lives in that moment becomes bigger. Could be the phone calls. Could be anything.. What I think it the saddest is that she was hospitalized, and they let her out. Or she was so good at pretending she was fine. The saddest part is she was in treatment but it failed her.
Yan
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We are all saddened by her passing. She was still young, and we still need her writing to voice the forgotten and the hidden atrocities against humanity. Thank you for sharing the NPR link.
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Letter to the Editor in LA Times
From time to time, it has been China’s good fortune to have an exceptional daughter. Iris Chang was the Hua Mulan of today. She fought for truth with extraordinary courage and singular purpose. Iris was our good fortune. Rest well, dear daughter, may all your dreams be sweet.
Louise Su Tang
Pasadena
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Nilanjana S Roy: Speakers for the Dead
SPEAKING VOLUMES
Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi November 16, 2004
In the late 1930s, Iris Chang’s Chinese grandparents fled the small city to the northwest of Shanghai where they’d lived all their lives, fearing what advancing Japanese troops might do. They settled eventually in America.
Chang’s parents were both scientists; she grew up listening to the stories—“almost mythical”—of a massacre that turned the waters of the Yangtze river red with blood, in a place called Nanking.
The local libraries had books by the hundreds on the Holocaust, but nothing aside from the odd scholarly monograph on Nanking. In her mid-twenties, Iris Chang wrote the book she’d wanted to read as a child.
The Rape of Nanking came out in 1997 and became one of the most controversial, most feted bestsellers of its kind. Chang was the first historian writing for the lay public to bring what she called “the forgotten Holocaust” of Nanking to light.
The process of writing the book was grim, demanding, exhausting. Japanese troops had marched into Nanking, also called Nanjing, in late November 1937. Of its million-odd inhabitants, 300,000 were slaughtered and approximately 80,000 women raped in the most vicious ways imaginable over the next month.
And until Iris Chang excavated the skeletons of Nanking, it had been all but forgotten. (She called it the second-worst massacre after the Holocaust of the century—the first, as she often reminded interviewers, was the rape and massacre of the citizens of Bangladesh by Pakistani troops.)
In an interview she gave in 1997, Iris described the toll the book took of her. The stories she’d heard as a child were so horrific that they were beyond imagination; they had the same resonance as Biblical, epic massacres, and they were seen by the child Iris through a similar lens of distance.
But there were no barriers when she started researching what happened in Nanking. She lost weight; she was physically ill; she broke down several times and had to be treated for depression.
The Japanese troops in Nanking experimented with the most efficient methods of mass killing; bayoneting serried lines of men was faster than beheading, they discovered. Women were raped until they literally bled to death; those who survived the assault were slaughtered anyway.
They were disembowelled, dismembered; some had their breasts cut off and nailed to walls. A former Japanese soldier attempted to explain: “Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman, but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig.”
And Iris recorded all their stories. She listened. She tracked down a man called “the living Buddha of Nanking”—John Rabe, a Nazi who became something of a saviour to the Chinese—and persuaded his descendants to let her go public with his diary, a chilling chronicle of the worst days of the Nanking massacre.
Her husband, Brett Douglas, says that the process of researching The Rape of Nanking was almost unbearable for Iris. On a wall of her study, she’d put up a map of the city, covered with photographs of torture and killing, pinned to the locations in which they’d occurred.
Those disturbing images haunted Iris; only her anger, her relentless determination not to let Nanking remain another forgotten crime against humanity, saw her through. After The Rape of Nanking came out, to be denounced by many Japanese and to be hailed by many historians, Iris Chang’s next book focused on the history of Chinese-Americans.
A short while ago, Iris began researching the subject of her next book—the Bataan Death March.
She was delving into similar material: the lives of survivors, stories of unspeakable, unbelievable cruelty, trying to make sense, as she had tried with the Nanking massacres, of what might make monsters of perfectly ordinary people. Many of the soldiers who had inflicted terrible violence on innocent citizens had gone on to lead normal, respectable, even decent lives.
No one knows what sent Iris Chang over the edge. Her husband and her literary agent were aware of the intensity and the depth of her depressions, but they had also witnessed the energy she imparted to her work, the ferocity of her belief that some things must not be allowed to fester in darkness.
But no one who knew Iris could have predicted that she would return from a research trip, go for a drive, and shoot herself. She was found this weekend in her car. It appears that she fired a single bullet into her brain.
Survivors of the Holocaust often struggled with the terrible guilt of being alive when so many around them had died. Though some have contested Primo Levi’s suicide, many feel that the author had reached the end of his limits when he died of a fall from his staircase.
Others remember Paul Celan, whose “Death Fugue” was the single most unforgettable poem of the Holocaust: “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown/we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night”, it begins.
Celan, whose parents were Jewish, survived a labour camp, but not for long. In 1970, he drowned himself in the Seine; his calendar carried a simple note. “Depart Paul”, it said.
In Elizabeth Costello, J M Coetzee asked how far one should go in order to plumb the heart of darkness. He made Elizabeth argue that perhaps it was dangerous to explore the nature of evil beyond a certain point, that we could not undertake such an exploration without being tainted ourselves, being changed in fundamental and terrifying ways.
It remains unclear whether the blackness that drove Iris Chang to suicide stemmed from just this cause, or whether there were other unfathomable reasons—beyond a point, all humans, even writers, remain opaque.
A few months before Iris Chang shot herself, an extraordinary book created a sensation in France. Irene Nemirovsky had been an acclaimed author in wartime France; until the Germans invaded and her Jewishness became an insurmountable handicap.
Nemirovsky was arrested in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, where she died at the age of 39. She left behind a battered, leatherbound notebook that her daughters were too distraught and too angry to read until the 1970s.
It was only recently, though, that Denise Epstein came to terms with her mother’s death and decided to allow Suite Francaise to be published. Sixty years after Nemirovsky’s death, her book has spoken so eloquently from beyond the grave that it is being compared to Anne Frank’s diary.
The stories Iris Chang uncovered demanded too much from her; the story Nemirovsky wrote was too painful for her daughter to read for decades. But these stories are the necessary ones.
Iris Chang spoke for the dead when she wrote The Rape of Nanking; Irene Nemirovsky’s dead voice has been brought back to life with Suite Francaise. We cannot afford to forget their stories. Or the price they paid in order to tell them.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-chang11nov11,1,6952892.story
OBITUARIES
Iris Chang, 36; Author of ‘The Rape of Nanking’
By Dennis McLellan
Times Staff Writer
November 11, 2004
Iris Chang, the best-selling author of “The Rape of Nanking” and one of the nation’s leading young historians and a human rights activist who became a role model for young American students of Chinese descent, has died. She was 36.
Chang was found dead in her car Tuesday morning on a highway just south of Los Gatos, Calif., Santa Clara County authorities said Wednesday. They said it appeared that Chang, who lived in San Jose with her husband and young son, had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Susan Rabiner, Chang’s literary agent, said Chang had suffered a breakdown about five months ago during a research trip for her fourth book. The book focused on the experiences of men who fought in the U.S. tank battalions in the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines and their subsequent imprisonment by the Japanese for the duration of World War II.
After her release from the hospital, Rabiner said, Chang continued to battle depression. In a note to her family, Chang asked to be remembered as the woman she had been before her illness, engaged with life, committed to her causes, her writing and her family.
Rabiner was unaware of Chang having any previous problems with depression. “This was a tragedy way beyond words,” she said.
Rabiner, who was Chang’s editor for “The Rape of Nanking,” views the critically acclaimed 1997 international bestseller as the best of Chang’s three published books.
“The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” which Chang spent at least two years researching in the U.S. and China, chronicles the slaughter, rape and torture of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers in the former capital of China in 1937.
She was spurred to write the book after her parents told her the story of her grandparents, who had fled Nanking as the violence was beginning.
When Chang learned of the crimes in late 1994, she later recalled, “I was walking around in a state of shock.”
While researching her book in China, Chang discovered that among a small group of Europeans and Americans who stayed behind in Nanking to protect the remaining one-third of the city’s Chinese population who had not fled the Japanese army’s advance was John Rabe, a German national.
“On a hunch,” Rabiner said, “she tracked down his granddaughter and asked, ‘Is it possible your grandfather kept a diary?’ She found it. That was the first time the diary had been brought to light. Here was an outsider, a European, who recorded his own contemporaneous memories of the atrocities that occurred at that time.”
The diary, Rabiner said, was one of the most important independent validations of the Chinese allegations of Japanese atrocities.
“This is a book I really had to write,” Chang once said in an interview. “I wrote it out of a sense of rage. I didn’t really care if I made a cent from it. It was important to me that the world knew what happened in Nanking back in 1937.”
The book touched a raw nerve in Japan, and some questioned some of its assertions.
Of her book, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks, columnist George Will wrote: “Something beautiful, an act of justice, is occurring in America today concerning something ugly that happened long ago and far away. Because of Chang’s book, the second rape of Nanking is ending.”
The late historian Stephen Ambrose said Chang was “maybe the best young historian we’ve got, because she understands that to communicate history, you’ve got to tell the story in an interesting way.”
Although most book tours are only a couple of weeks long, Chang spent a year on the road speaking at colleges and other forums about “The Rape of Nanking.”
“College students couldn’t get enough of her,” Rabiner said. She recalled that Chang also appeared with the Japanese ambassador to the United States on public television’s “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.”
Rabiner said one of the show’s reporters asked Chang about the Nanking massacre, and Chang said, “We have yet to receive an apology from anyone in a high level of the Japanese government.”
“And they turned to the Japanese ambassador and asked him to speak,” Rabiner said. “As he described it, ‘There were perhaps some unfortunate incidents.’ They looked back at Iris and she said, ‘Unfortunate incidents? Did you hear an apology? I didn’t.’ ”
“The whole place was riveted,” said Rabiner. “She was very courageous and never harsh, never strident, in standing her ground.”
In an interview with the campus newspaper at Stanford University last May, Chang said, “I bring up these crimes to remind us of the potential for evil that lives in us all. The Pacific War was not some tragic flaw but an indication of a universal condition of human nature.”
The daughter of a physics professor and a microbiologist, Chang was born in Princeton, N.J., on March 28, 1968, and grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Ill.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois in 1989 and worked briefly as a reporter for Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune before earning a graduate degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University and launching her full-time career as an author.
She was 25 when she wrote her first book, “Thread of the Silkworm.” Her third book, “The Chinese in America,” described the determination of Chinese immigrants to take their place in the U.S.
Chang is survived by her husband, Brett Douglas; her son, Christopher; her parents, Shau-Jin and Ying-Ying Chang; and her brother, Michael Chang.
Funeral and memorial services are pending.
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