Iris Chang

Iris Chang
Author photograph by Jimmy Estimada, 2003 Author photograph by Jimmy Estimada, 2003
Born	(1968-03-28)March 28, 1968 Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Died	November 9, 2004(2004-11-09) (aged 36) south of Los Gatos, California, USA
Occupation	author, journalist
Nationality	USA
Period	1995 – 2003
Subject	Tsien Hsue-shen, Nanking Massacre, Chinese Americans
Spouse	Bretton Douglas
Children	2
Website
www.irischang.net

Iris Shun-Ru Chang (simplified Chinese: 张纯如; traditional Chinese: 張純如; pinyin: Zhāng Chúnrú; March 28, 1968 – November 9, 2004) was an Chinese American historian and journalist. She was best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking Massacre, The Rape of Nanking. She reportedly committed suicide on November 9, 2004. after a depressive episode resulting from a nervous breakdown.. Chang is the subject of the 2007 biographical book, Finding Iris Chang, as well as the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking.

Early life

The daughter of two mainland China-born university professors who emigrated from Taiwan, Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey and was raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where she attended University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois and graduated in 1985. She earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, a master's degree in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and later worked as a New York Times stringer from Urbana-Champaign, in which capacity she wrote six front-page articles over the course of one year. After brief stints at the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune, she began her career as a writer, and also lectured and wrote articles for various magazines. She married Bretton Douglas, whom she had met in college, and had one son, Christopher, who was 2 years old at the time of her death. She lived in San Jose, California in the final years of her life.

Works

Chang wrote three books that documented the experiences of Asians and Chinese Americans in history. Her first book, titled Thread of the Silkworm (1995), tells the life story of the Chinese professor, Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Although Tsien was one of the founders of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and helped the military of the United States debrief scientists from Nazi Germany for many years, he was suddenly falsely accused of being a spy, a member of the Communist Party USA, and placed under house arrest from 1950 to 1955. Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen left for the People's Republic of China in September of 1955 aboard the merchant ship President Cleveland. Upon his return to China, Tsien developed the Dongfeng missile program, and later the Silkworm missile, which ironically would later be used against the United States by the Iraqi army during the Persian Gulf War and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

The Rape of Nanking, Chang's most famous work

Her second book, The Rape of Nanking:The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), was published on the 60th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre, and was motivated in part by her own grandparents' stories about their escape from the massacre. It documents atrocities committed against Chinese by forces of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and includes interviews with victims. The book attracted both praise from some quarters for exposing the details of the atrocity, and criticism from others because of alleged inaccuracies. After publication of the book, she campaigned to persuade the Japanese government to apologise for its troops' wartime conduct and to pay compensation. The work was the first English-language full-length nonfiction account of the atrocity itself, and remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for 10 weeks. Based on the book, an American documentary film, Nanking, was released in 2007.

Her third book, The Chinese in America (2003), is a history of Chinese-Americans which argued that Chinese Americans were treated as perpetual outsiders. Consistent with the style of her earlier works, the book relied heavily on personal accounts, drawing its strong emotional content from each of their stories. She wrote, "The America of today would not be the same America without the achievements of its ethnic Chinese," and that "scratch the surface of every American celebrity of Chinese heritage and you will find that, no matter how stellar their achievements, no matter how great their contribution to U.S. society, virtually all of them have had their identities questioned at one point or another."

Public notability

Success as an author propelled Iris Chang into becoming a public figure. The Rape of Nanking placed her in great demand as a speaker and as an interview subject, and, more broadly, as a spokesperson for an entire viewpoint that the Japanese government had not done enough to compensate victims of their invasion of China. This became a political issue in the United States shortly after the book was published; Chang was one of the major advocates of a Congressional resolution proposed in 1997 to have the Japanese government apologize for war crimes, and met with First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1999 to discuss the issue. In one often mentioned incident (as reported by the The Times of London):

...she confronted the Japanese Ambassador to the United States on television, demanded an apology and expressed her dissatisfaction with his mere acknowledgement "that really unfortunate things happened, acts of violence were committed by members of the Japanese military". "It is because of these types of wording and the vagueness of such expressions that Chinese people, I think, are infuriated," was her reaction.

Iris Chang's visibility as a public figure increased with her final work The Chinese in America, where she argued that Chinese Americans were treated as perpetual outsiders. After her death she became the subject of tributes from fellow writers. Mo Hayder dedicated a novel to her. Reporter Richard Rongstad eulogized her as "Iris Chang lit a flame and passed it to others and we should not allow that flame to be extinguished."

Depression and death

Chang suffered a nervous breakdown in August 2004, which her family, friends and doctors attributed in part to constant sleep deprivation. At the time, she was several months into research for her fourth book, about the Bataan Death March, while simultaneously promoting The Chinese in America. While on route to Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where she planned to gain access to a "time capsule" of audio recordings from servicemen, she suffered an extreme bout of depression that left her unable to leave her hotel room in Louisville. A local veteran who was assisting her research helped her check into Norton Psychiatric Hospital in Louisville, where she was diagnosed with reactive psychosis, placed on medication for three days and then released to her parents. After the release from the hospital, she continued to suffer from depression and was considered at risk for developing bipolar disorder. Chang was also reportedly deeply disturbed by much of the subject matter of her research. Her work in Nanjing left her physically weak, according to one of her co-researchers.

On Tuesday, November 9 2004 at about 9 a.m., Chang was found dead in her car by a county water district employee on a rural road south of Los Gatos and west of State Route 17, in Santa Clara County. Investigators concluded that Chang had shot herself through the mouth with a revolver. At the time of her death she had been taking the medications Depakote and Risperdal to stabilize her mood.

It was later discovered that she had left behind three suicide notes each dated Monday, November 8, 2004. "Statement of Iris Chang" stated:

I promise to get up and get out of the house every morning. I will stop by to visit my parents then go for a long walk. I will follow the doctor's orders for medications. I promise not to hurt myself. I promise not to visit Web sites that talk about suicide.

The next note was a draft of the third:

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. It is far better that you remember me as I was — in my heyday as a best-selling author — than the wild-eyed wreck who returned from Louisville... 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.

The third note included:

There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand. Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do. I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me.

Days before I left for Louisville I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the government's attempt to discredit me.

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.

Reports said that news of her suicide hit the massacre survivor community in Nanjing hard. In tribute to Chang, the survivors held a service at the same time as her funeral at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Cupertino, California on Friday, November 12 2004 at the victims' memorial hall in Nanjing. In 2005, the victims memorial hall in Nanjing, which collects documents, photos, and human remains from the massacre, added a wing dedicated to Chang.

See also

• John Rabe
• Tsien Hsue-shen
• Nanking (film)

External links

• IrisChang.net — the official home page of Iris Chang
• Iris Chang papers at the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives
• Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia — an NGO, co-founded by Iris Chang, whose mission was to educate the world about the unrecognized wartime horrors committed by Japan in the Pacific theater
• "Nightmare in Nanking", an essay by Sue De Pasquale about Chang's book The Rape of Nanking, Humanities and the Arts, John Hopkins Magazine
• Iris Chang radio interview — June 22, 2003 on KQED FM Forum
• Iris Chang The Movie - A feature film following the story of Iris Chang
• Iris Chang Memorial Fund - The fund is committed to carrying out Iris Chang's unfinished dreams and preserving her legacy
• "The Passion of Iris Chang", an interview of Anne Pick and Bill Spahic about their docu-drama ‘Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking.’ about Iris Chang and her book on the Nanking massacre, AOL Entertainment Canada