Iris Chang, 36, author-historian
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Iris Chang was spurred to write her best seller "The Rape of Nanking" after her parents told her the story of her grandparents, who fled the Chinese city as the violence began.
Chang, who learned in late 1994 of the crimes by Japanese forces, recalled: "I was walking around in a state of shock."
Chang
Chang, one of America's leading young historians, died last week. She was 36.
She took her own life Nov. 9 near San Jose, Calif., where she and her husband and young son lived, her literary agent Susan Rabiner said.
Rabiner said Chang suffered a breakdown about five months ago during a research trip for her fourth book about the Bataan Death March. In a note to her family, Chang asked to be remembered as the woman she had been before her breakdown and depression — engaged with life, committed to her causes, her writing and her family.
"This was a tragedy, way beyond words," Rabiner said.
Chang 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 America.
"The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," which Chang spent at least two years researching in the United States 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.
"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 several of its assertions.
Of her book, which was on the New York Times best-seller list 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."
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." She spoke at the University of Hawai'iiManoa in November 1998.
"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 that when one of the show's reporters asked Chang about Nanking, Chang responded: "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 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.
Chang is survived by her husband, Brett Douglas; her son, Christopher, her parents, Shau-Jin and Ying-Ying Chang; and her brother, Michael Chang.
The Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.
