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March 28th, 2010
Human Atrocity and Suicide Journalist Iris Chang was born on this date in 1968, to a physicist father and a microbiologist mother, and raised in the Midwestern United States.  She’s best known for her 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, published when she was 29 years old, which has sold more than half a million copies. It documents the murder, rape, and torture of Chinese civilians during the second Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s, when Japanese troops invaded the city of Nanjing. Her account was the first full-length book in English on the Nanjing Massacre. The Nanjing Massacre struck a chord as an historical event for Chang because her grandparents had fled that part of China during that time and wouldn’t speak of what they left behind. In only two months, 300,000 civilians were murdered and 80,000 women were raped.  Chang wrote that she had been in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying… would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it.  In her research of the Nanjing Massacre, Chang traveled to China to interview survivors, acquired documents from all over the world, and even insisted that the U.S. government declassify documents about the event. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), received widespread critical acclaim and Iris Chang became a celebrity. Chang was called “the best young historian we’ve got” by Stephen Ambrose. She was interviewed or featured on television shows like Good Morning America, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,and Nightline. Hillary Clinton invited her to the White House to talk about human rights. At the same time, she received hate mail from Japanese ultranationalists and anonymous violent threats. Before and after that publishing success, Chang published two other books, Thread of the Silkworm (1995), the story of a brilliant Chinese-born physicist forced by McCarthyism to leave the US space program, and The Chinese in America (2003), a 150-year history of immigration. She began work on a fourth book, about the Bataan Death March during World War II, where U.S. soldiers were starved and tortured by their Japanese captors in the Philippines, interviewing elderly American veterans who’d been prisoners of war there, and many of whom had not spoken about their horrific experiences for decades or at all, and the interviews were intense and painful. Chang was also an advocate of social justice and civil rights. She wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times warning that excessive fear of the SARS virus could easily lead to discrimination against Asians, and in other articles she denounced government bias against Muslims and other immigrants after 9/11, saying: There are real parallels between how the Chinese were treated during the exclusion era and what Muslims and people from the Middle East are going through now. Her research into human cruelty and injustice became overwhelming. Her friends reported that she was unable to maintain an emotional distance from the brutal atrocities that she wrote about, that these historical events shadowed her own daily life. She became depressed, paranoid and psychotic, and was hospitalized in 2004, diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder I.  A few months later, when she was only 36 years old, Iris Change committed suicide near her home in Los Gatos, California.  In 2007, fellow journalist, Paula Kamen, published the biography, Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind.

Human Atrocity and Suicide

Journalist Iris Chang was born on this date in 1968, to a physicist father and a microbiologist mother, and raised in the Midwestern United States. 

She’s best known for her 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, published when she was 29 years old, which has sold more than half a million copies. It documents the murder, rape, and torture of Chinese civilians during the second Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s, when Japanese troops invaded the city of Nanjing. Her account was the first full-length book in English on the Nanjing Massacre.

The Nanjing Massacre struck a chord as an historical event for Chang because her grandparents had fled that part of China during that time and wouldn’t speak of what they left behind. In only two months, 300,000 civilians were murdered and 80,000 women were raped. 

Chang wrote that she had been

in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying… would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it. 

In her research of the Nanjing Massacre, Chang traveled to China to interview survivors, acquired documents from all over the world, and even insisted that the U.S. government declassify documents about the event.

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), received widespread critical acclaim and Iris Chang became a celebrity. Chang was called “the best young historian we’ve got” by Stephen Ambrose. She was interviewed or featured on television shows like Good Morning America, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,and Nightline. Hillary Clinton invited her to the White House to talk about human rights. At the same time, she received hate mail from Japanese ultranationalists and anonymous violent threats.

Before and after that publishing success, Chang published two other books, Thread of the Silkworm (1995), the story of a brilliant Chinese-born physicist forced by McCarthyism to leave the US space program, and The Chinese in America (2003), a 150-year history of immigration.

She began work on a fourth book, about the Bataan Death March during World War II, where U.S. soldiers were starved and tortured by their Japanese captors in the Philippines, interviewing elderly American veterans who’d been prisoners of war there, and many of whom had not spoken about their horrific experiences for decades or at all, and the interviews were intense and painful.

Chang was also an advocate of social justice and civil rights. She wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times warning that excessive fear of the SARS virus could easily lead to discrimination against Asians, and in other articles she denounced government bias against Muslims and other immigrants after 9/11, saying:

There are real parallels between how the Chinese were treated during the exclusion era and what Muslims and people from the Middle East are going through now.

Her research into human cruelty and injustice became overwhelming. Her friends reported that she was unable to maintain an emotional distance from the brutal atrocities that she wrote about, that these historical events shadowed her own daily life. She became depressed, paranoid and psychotic, and was hospitalized in 2004, diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder I. 

A few months later, when she was only 36 years old, Iris Change committed suicide near her home in Los Gatos, California. 

In 2007, fellow journalist, Paula Kamen, published the biography, Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind.