long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang

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Culture & Politics » soc.culture.china » long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang

long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #222520]

So, 09 Juli 2006 22:13

tariq.1.rahim

archived forever, two articles about the beautiful author of 'rape of
nanking' who shot herself in 2004. how could someone so talented, so
lovely, not think life was worth living?

Author: cheers Time: 2005-2-21 01:51 AM Subject: Chicago
Tribune story

FLAMEOUT
BEST-SELLING AUTHOR IRIS CHANG HAD IT ALL. THEN SOMETHING WENT TERRIBLY
WRONG
By Monica Eng

February 6, 2005

On a cold Sunday night last April, I said goodbye to Iris Chang.

I'd driven her back to her hotel after dinner in Chinatown where we
talked about her latest book, "The Chinese in America: A Narrative
History." After she delivered all the tidy quotes a reporter could ask
for, our dinner conversation eased into other things.

Iris was on a 22-city tour for the paperback edition of the book, but
her mind was already on her next topic: a group of World War II POWs
she had been interviewing over the last year. She was clearly excited
about the project but didn't reveal much more. So we talked about
kids-she was so proud of her baby son, Christopher. And we talked
politics-she was incensed about the war in Iraq, the post-9/11 erosion
of civil liberties and the then-current case of Chinese-American Muslim
chaplain James Yee, who was falsely accused of espionage at Guantanamo
Bay. If she ran the world, she said, things would be very, very
different.

Smart, warm, intense and bursting with plans, Chang hardly stopped
talking all night to take a bite.

It was only our second meeting, but it cemented my impression of the
raven-haired author of the controversial 1997 best-seller, "The Rape of
Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II." Chang was a woman in
constant motion; a writer whose focus and work ethic allowed her to do
it all and have it all. One of those rare people who had seemingly
found the secret to balancing work, family and saving the world all at
once.

So my "goodbye" that night didn't mean goodbye so much as "see you when
you next swoop through Chicago."

But the next time I saw Iris she wasn't in Chicago. She was in a casket
in Los Altos, Calif., at her funeral.

On Nov. 9, almost seven months to the day after our dinner, she left
her home in the middle of the night, drove to a nearby town, raised an
antique pistol and ended her life.

Reflecting the huge impact of "Rape of Nanking," which raised one of
history's bloodiest massacres out of obscurity, Chang's death sent
ripples around the world, making headlines in papers from London,
Moscow and Beijing to Tokyo, Sydney and Paris.

In a tribute to Chang on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives
shortly after her death, Japanese-American Congressman Michael M. Honda
(D-Calif.) said:

"As an historian and activist, Chang fought passionately for historical
justice and reconciliation. Her book, 'The Rape of Nanking,' chronicled
the horrific capture of Nanking during the Japanese invasion of China
in 1937, and was instrumental in educating the international community
about Japanese military atrocities during World War II-human rights
violations that had gone unwritten and unacknowledged for decades. Her
efforts to seek redress for the crimes at Nanking brought her in
conflict with the Japanese government and communities worldwide, but
Chang was unwavering in her commitment to justice and truth."

As hundreds of Chang's friends, family and fans gathered in the Silicon
Valley for funeral and memorial services-memorials were also held that
day in Washington, D.C., New York, Beijing and Nanjing (as Nanking is
now spelled)-the mood was of profound sadness and shock. Phrases like
"She was the last person I would have thought . . ." and "I couldn't
believe it when I heard . . ." fell into every conversation.

How could someone so successful, so together, so invested in the future
have taken her own life?

Few could make sense of it, but they tried. Some theorized that Chang
had fallen victim to a swift and deadly depression or that she had
reacted adversely to anti-depressants. Others speculated that she was a
victim of overwork. And many thought she'd simply drowned in the sea of
tragic stories she'd taken in over her career.

Still others saw things in a more sinister light, voicing conspiracy
theories that soon made the rounds on the Internet. Chang had been
murdered, they said. Maybe by the Japanese government. Or even by our
own.

As I left a post-funeral luncheon, Bay Area activist Josephine Chu
clutched my elbow and whispered in my ear: "I don't think this was
suicide," she said. "Something happened to her. She was threatened, I'm
sure of it. You have to check it out."

Far from providing answers, my trip to California only led to more
questions: What happened to that bright, hopeful and engaged woman from
last April?

Where had Iris gone?

It wasn't until I returned to the Midwest-where Chang grew up and was
doing her latest research-that I could begin to make sense of the
mystery, sorting through clues she had been leaving as the months and
years ticked by.

Iris Shun-Ru Chang was born on March 28, 1968, in Princeton, N.J. Her
parents, freshly minted Harvard PhDs from Taiwan, were doing
post-doctoral work at Princeton when the little girl with her mother's
intense eyes and father's long limbs arrived on the scene.

Before she turned 2, the family moved to Urbana-Champaign where her
father, Shau-Jin, landed a job in the physics department of the
University of Illinois and her mother, Ying-Ying, began post-doctoral
work in biochemistry.

Chang's first language was Mandarin, but she soon picked up English in
preschool. Recognizing her promise, Ying-Ying studied books on "raising
a bright child" and Shau-Jin used letter stamps and an inkpad to label
all the objects in the house.

During her early years, Chang typically spent Saturday mornings with
her mother at the Urbana library, checking out piles of books. Sunday
mornings found her tagging along with her father to the computer lab in
the physics building. On very special Sundays, her mother would cloud
up the house with a large batch of steamed buns that young Chang would
Americanize with a slathering of peanut butter.

While showing an early aptitude for computer science, Chang also
displayed a childhood passion for writing, penning her first story when
she was 4-"a to-catch-a-thief tale," her father says.

At the University of Illinois' elite University High School, she hung
out with what her classmate and friend Kathy Szoke calls "the literary
geeks."

"We were in chorus together and we just loved to read and write for the
school literary magazine, "Unique," says Szoke, who now lives in
Arlington Heights. Friends remember Chang as being drawn to poetry and
fantasy stories and say she could sometimes come across as distracted
and aloof-almost as if she were in another world.

Like a lot of other University High kids, Chang skipped a grade and was
ready for college at 17. Although she wanted to attend the University
of Chicago, her parents "thought she was too young and that Hyde Park
was too dangerous for her," Szoke says. So she stayed in town and
attended the University of Illinois, where she was allowed to live on
campus.

Because Chang was so bookish in high school, Szoke was shocked to hear
she'd joined a sorority at the University of Illinois, and even more
surprised to find her on the homecoming court in the fall of 1988.

"That was just not her," Szoke said. "She didn't like to drink and
wasn't a big socializer, but I think she looked at it as a challenge.
She looked at the court as this certain clique of girls and thought,
why shouldn't a shy little Chinese bookworm be able to break into it
too?"

This was part of a pattern that Chang would repeat for the rest of her
life: zeroing in on a formidable goal, setting her mind to achieving
it, and then through hard work, talent, a pinch of naivete and a
mountain of sheer will, simply making it happen.

In eulogizing Chang, her friend Paula Kamen, a Chicago writer, talked
about this modus operandi and how at first she found it frustrating
while competing with Chang for internships in college. Later, she
stopped envying her and started applying the formula to her own life
and work. Today when she addresses young writers, Kamen exhorts them to
"think big, be bold and to simply 'Iris Chang' it."

Chang began her undergraduate career as a mathematics and computer
science major but had switched to journalism by her junior year. She
agonized over how to break it to her parents.

"When we told her that it was OK, she was so surprised," her father
recalls. "She thought we would be so disappointed. We told her that
whatever you do in life you have to love it. She was afraid that we
only wanted her to be a scientist."

And so, with her parents' blessing, Chang turned her path to journalism
and never looked back. She immediately started writing for the student
paper, the Daily Illini, and became campus correspondent for the
Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. By her junior summer, she had
secured an internship at Newsweek.

It was during this same junior year that Chang attended a fraternity
party that changed the course of her life. At the party she met a tall,
red-haired engineering major from downstate Illinois named Brett
Douglas. "Lots of guys were around who wanted to talk to her, but when
I finally got a chance, we talked for hours," recalls Douglas. "She
told me about all her plans, and it was then I knew she was the woman I
wanted to grow old with.

"It took me a few years to convince her of the same thing."

After graduating in 1989, Douglas and Chang relocated to separate
towns, Douglas following his academic adviser to the University of
California at Santa Barbara and Chang moving to Chicago to write for
the Associated Press and later the Tribune. Says Douglas, "A new
invention called e-mail" enabled them to keep up a long-distance
romance.

While at the Tribune as a metro reporter, Chang churned out a mix of
news stories and features. Remembering Chang's time at the paper,
Tribune Springfield reporter Christi Parsons says that, as interns,
they served as each other's "life raft."

At the end of one difficult day, in which Parsons says a particular
editor had humiliated her, Chang took her out to Gino's Pizza near
their Gold Coast apartments.

"She said to me, 'Can't you see him for what he is?' " Parsons recalls.
" 'He is just a condescending man who looks at you like a little girl.'
I don't know what I would have done without her friendship and
support."

In the fall of 1990, Chang left the newspaper for the master's program
in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. Within months of
starting the program, Chang, always a step ahead of her peers, landed a
book contract with Basic Books-becoming, at 23, the youngest author the
publishing house had ever signed. Her task was to tell the story of
American-educated Cal-Tech scientist Tsien Hsue-shen, who was deported
from the U.S. during the McCarthy era and went on to found China's
missile program.

Instead of relaxing on spring break in warmer climes, Chang spent the
week researching Tsien's story, her head buried in documents at the
National Archives. Douglas flew to Baltimore to spend the break with
her, even if it meant taking the train with her into Washington each
day and doing "touristy things" while she worked at the Archives.

When the Johns Hopkins program ended in June, 1991, Chang flew to Santa
Barbara and moved in with Douglas; they were married that August. She
continued to work on her book while he completed his dissertation.

Friends who visited their apartment in Santa Barbara recall seeing
hardly a stick of furniture, but books, bookshelves and banker's boxes
stuffed with documents were everywhere. It was a Spartan, frugal,
grad-student existence and reflected her lifelong attraction to a life
of the mind.

Her mother says that an aversion to shopping for ordinary consumer
goods was true of Chang through most of her life, noting: "She didn't
like to buy anything but books."

"I loved that she was such a hard worker," says Douglas, who was
awarded his PhD in 1993. "She was a role model for me in my own work."

Chang's book about Tsien, titled "Thread of a Silkworm," came out in
1995. It got favorable notices, though it never sold very well.

Its lucid treatment of the creation of China's missile program owed
much to Chang's scientific background. But she would never use that
knowledge again; instead, her career would take a sharp political turn.

The trigger was a 1994 conference in Cupertino, Calif., that dealt with
Japanese war atrocities, particularly the horrors inflicted at Nanking
following the invasion of China by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1937.
At the conference, Chang saw poster-sized photographs of the Nanking
carnage that she described as "almost beyond belief" in a 1998
interview with the Tribune. These included "photographs of women who
[had] been disemboweled or men who were used for decapitation contests,
heaps of bodies that had been burned or were waiting to be thrown in
lakes."

Chang already was familiar with the ghastly history. Her maternal
grandparents had fled Nanking shortly before the invasion and she'd
heard family stories about the Yangtze River running red with blood for
days. That there were no books about these events at her local library
left her puzzled as a child; but it hadn't occurred to her that she
should write such a book until she attended the conference.

"The idea that 60 years later the whole world wouldn't know about it,
wouldn't care, that was very frightening for me," she told the Tribune.

And so it was that two months after turning in her final draft of
"Silkworm" in 1994, Chang began working on an English-language account
for Basic Books of what took place at Nanking.

This shift of focus from science to politics puzzled friends like
Szoke, who in retrospect says she wishes Chang "had followed her first
instinct and written about things that wouldn't have affected her so
personally."

But the die was cast. Chang began the more than two years of intensive
research and writing that went into the 290-page book documenting the
slaughter of an estimated 300,000 Chinese civilians and military at the
hands of the Japanese army during eight weeks in 1937-38.

She sifted through Chinese, Japanese, American and German newspaper
accounts, examined American and German military communications,
corresponded with Japanese soldiers who had engaged in the massacre and
traveled to torrid Nanjing in the summer of 1995 for a grueling month
of interviews with survivors and visits to the various sites of the
atrocities.

Chang had serious stomach problems for much of the trip, she told her
friend Kamen in a postcard from Nanjing. But even in the midst of her
physical distress, she wrote triumphantly in the postcard: "I have
already interviewed eight massacre survivors."

One of her biggest coups was obtaining the little-known diary of Nazi
party member John Rabe, "The Schindler of China," who as head of the
Siemens Co. plant in Nanking sheltered thousands during the massacre.

She also focused on Minnie Vautrin, an Illinois-born missionary and
fellow University of Illinois graduate who gave sanctuary to thousands
of Chinese during the mass bloodletting. Deeply affected by what she
had witnessed, Vautrin suffered a nervous breakdown and returned to the
U.S., where she committed suicide in 1941.

While finishing the writing on "Nanking," Chang and Douglas moved to
Sunnyvale, Calif., where he took a job at Cisco Systems and Chang
continued to research and write. She kept "college student hours,"
Douglas says, "waking at noon and then staying up and working late into
the night. She liked that because then she could work for long
stretches without interruptions."

It was during these late-night writing sessions, as she pored over
diaries, interviews and photos depicting unspeakable acts of rape,
murder and torture, that her work began to take its toll. She told
people that clumps of her hair fell out, she lost weight, suffered
nightmares, often became sick and frequently broke down weeping at her
computer.

"She could really identify with the victims," her mother says. "I
definitely think it affected her mentally."

Chang was frank about her problems in a 1997 interview with Johns
Hopkins Magazine. "I was weak during the whole time I was writing the
book," she said. "I was very unhappy."

Was it a bout of depression? "I don't think so," her mother insists. "I
think she just identified too much with the victims."

"Nanking" came out in 1997 and remained on The New York Times
bestseller list for 10 weeks. It was excerpted in Newsweek. It was
favorably reviewed in the mainstream press, landing Chang on the cover
of Reader's Digest and on such TV shows as "Nightline" and "Good
Morning America." On "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer," she boldly
demanded that Japanese Ambassador Kunihiko Saito apologize to the
victims of Nanking. He declined.

Chang was suddenly a celebrity. Some felt it soon became a burden to
her.

In 1998, after a year of non-stop book promotions, Chang told her
hometown paper, the News Gazette: "I guess I've gone from hell to
heaven, haven't I? But that's not an entirely correct analogy. It's
more like being strapped to a roller coaster and not being able to get
off."

In the same interview, she told of having Asian Americans, Native
Americans, African Americans and Holocaust survivors share personal
stories with her during her book-store appearances. "This is why I
often find it so physically and psychologically draining," she said.

Yet some who saw her at the time thought she was enjoying herself. "She
stayed at my house in Washington during the height of it and The New
York Times came over to take her picture," says Diana Zuckerman,
president of the National Research Center for Women & Families. "I
think initially she was enjoying the fame."

Along with fame came honors and invitations, including one to attend
President Bill Clinton's Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head, S.C. There
were meetings with high-level Washington figures. Columnist George Will
called the Nanking massacre "perhaps the most appalling single episode
of barbarism in a century replete with horrors-yet it had been largely
forgotten until Iris Chang made it her subject."

But fame also brought backlash. The Japanese right wing denounced the
book as propaganda by an "agent of China." Ambassador Saito went so far
as to hold a Washington press conference in April 1998 to denounce the
book as "contain[ing] many extremely inaccurate descriptions and
one-sided views on the case. It's not a good thing that such a book has
been published and has attracted great attention."

Chang challenged the ambassador to a debate on CNN or to cite specific
inaccuracies. He declined.

Chang acknowledged errors in her book and said she corrected at least
10 of them in later editions, including misspellings and incorrect
dates. Though she publically minimized their importance, telling the
Los Angeles Times that it was "ludicrous" to suggest they gave
ammunition to revisionists who would deny the massacre, in private
e-mails she agonized over the mistakes, as she always did with
inaccuracies.

Still, the main points and accounts of Chang's book are widely accepted
as accurate, even if debate continues over certain details and
captions.

"Nanking," which sold some 400,000 copies, was translated into 13
languages but never Japanese, even though a Japanese publishing house
was keenly interested. In a San Francisco Chronicle article at the
time, the head of the publishing house, Hiruko Haga, was quoted as
saying he believed he was putting himself in "a life-threatening
situation" by publishing the book, but was determined to proceed if
Chang would correct what he saw as errors. In the end, their
negotiations ended in stalemate and the book was not published.

In the summer of 1998 academics from some of Japan's top universities
participated in a Tokyo conference convened to denounce Chang and her
book as a fraud. One scholar, whom Chang quoted in a piece published in
Harper's Magazine, called the book "the most outrageous world-class
lie."

Congressman Honda, an acquaintance and frequent ally of Chang on
several issues, says he was not surprised at the opposition to her work
from the Japanese Right. "There was a particular Japanese writer who
did research similar to hers [on the Rape of Nanking] and had to walk
around in disguises in public because people considered him a traitor,"
Honda says.

When it became known that a Japanese translation would not go forward,
postings on conservative Japanese chat sites gloated over the victory.
Such triumphant remarks were echoed on the Internet when the news of
Chang's death broke around the world last fall.

One writer, using the screen name "mad god," said on the Web site
"Japan Today": "Good riddance to a writer whose individual agenda and
mental instability did not allow her to write a coherent or factual
history."

Another identified as "Ryuhei" wrote: "She probably killed herself . .
.. because she was writing books full of lies and deceiving people."

Although she didn't appear to dwell on it, Chang was disturbed by what
she said were ongoing threats from critics. In 1998 she told the
History News Network that "not a single week goes by when I don't
suffer harassment from some vicious right-wing Japanese group."

Even if, according to Douglas, she never received a direct death
threat, she firmly believed that Japanese writers and politicians had
been killed for similar research and it kept her on her guard.

Her friend Gregory Rodriquez, a behavioral scientist and expert on
World War II prisoners of war and with whom she served on panels about
Japanese war crimes, says Chang would "become tearful and tell me about
her fear of being assassinated and them getting away with it because
she was Chinese, just a 'chink.' " Rodriquez said.

In 1999, Chang embarked on a new project, "The Chinese in America." It
took four years to write and blended broad historical trends with
personal tales to depict the fate of an American minority over 150
years. Persecution of Chinese-Americans over that period emerges as a
recurring theme in the book, but Chang defended herself against those
who labeled it unpatriotic.

"I see this as my love letter to America," Chang said over dinner last
April. "Many people believe that to criticize the government is not
patriotic, but I think it is the most patriotic thing you can do."

I'd met Chang for the first time the previous May, during her tour for
the hardcover version of "The Chinese in America." With the war on
terrorism under way and the campaign in Iraq just two months old,
Chang, in a speech at the Harold Washington Library, compared the
persecution of Muslims in the U.S. to the persecution of Asians during
times of war and economic difficulty. She decried the erosion of civil
liberties implicit in the Patriot Act and literally shook her fist
while delivering her speech to the crowded room.

After the talk, Paula Kamen, who had been my editor as well as Chang's
at the Daily Illini, introduced us and we went out for pizza. I didn't
see her again until the following spring, when she returned to Chicago
and we had our Chinatown dinner. She seemed perfectly well-if a little
tired-but I would find out later from her e-mails that she had been
coming down with a bad case of flu. She also was suffering from
insomnia and seemed vulnerable to infections.

Some who knew her better than I said they were surprised to learn she'd
passed through town on the tour without calling. And a friend she did
call during a Texas stop said she seemed a bit odd.

"When she came to Dallas she asked me to come to a reading because she
just needed a friendly face there," recalled Dallas Morning News
columnist Esther Wu, who covers Asian-American issues. "That night she
asked me if people like us would ever be able to break out of the
responsibility of writing about our community. She said that she didn't
think we could."

Chang's family says that after the grueling paperback tour of 2004, she
never seemed the same again. According to Douglas, she returned
exhausted and drained. But she fought it off, he says, believing she
was in a race against time.

The time pressure had begun in the spring of 2003 when Sgt. Tony
Meldahl, of the Ohio National Guard, contacted Chang with an idea for
her next book. He wanted the author, who had long been active on behalf
of America's World War II ex-POWs, to examine their experiences through
the stories of a single unit of mostly Midwestern men, the 192nd
(Provisional) Tank Battalion.

It was one of two U.S. tank units captured in the Philippines and
forced by the Japanese to endure the Bataan Death March, subsequent
weeks on Hell Ships and eventual slave labor for Japanese industrial
firms.

The book Meldahl proposed would go beyond these overseas experiences,
however, and include the treatment the men received once they came
home.

Chang was well-acquainted with the effort among remaining Bataan
survivors to seek compensation from the Japanese firms for whom they
performed slave labor-even though the U.S. had seemingly waived such
compensation as part of its 1951 peace treaty with Japan.

Citing specific articles in the treaty and the compensation that
Holocaust survivors had received from Germany, the veterans felt they
had a case, but they met stiff opposition from the U.S. government.

A leader of the POW movement, Chicago native Lester Tenney, told the
Senate Judiciary Committee in 2000: "I once again feel that I have been
taken prisoner, but this time by my own country. The Japanese beat me
with guns and swords. My country is humiliating me, and the memories of
those who did not survive, with words."

After many legal filings by the POWs had been struck down, Reps. Honda
and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) introduced the "Justice for American
WWII POWs Act of 2001" as part of a spending bill in Congress. The
provision sought to block the U.S. State Department and the Department
of Justice from stepping in, as they had throughout the process, on
behalf of the Japanese companies.

The bill overwhelmingly passed both houses, but in conference
committee, the White House-citing the need to maintain a united
coalition in the war on terrorism-successfully pressured the conferees
to strip the provision from the spending bill.

"It was outrageous," said Linda Goetz Holmes, Chang's friend and the
author of "Unjust Enrichment," about Japanese companies that benefited
from POW slave labor.

The action prompted Chang to write a passionate op-ed piece in the New
York Times that concluded: "Our leaders must not be permitted to sell
out the men who gave so much for our freedom . . . If we are to have
another 'greatest generation' we must duly honor the rights of the
first one."

Chang continued to follow the POWs' case closely, showing up at
hearings in California and Washington. By 2003, responding to Meldahl,
she began visiting sick and elderly veterans to collect their stories.
Her objective: a book with the working title "The Bataan Tankers."

Chang traveled widely to meet the men from the battalion, all of whom
had been National Guardsmen from Janesville, Wis., Maywood, Ill., Port
Clinton, Ohio, and Harrodsburg, Ky.

By last summer, she had collected about a dozen videotaped interviews
that told stories of boyhood friendships in the 1930s, subsequent
enlistment and camaraderie, and wartime horrors followed by alleged
betrayal by the U. S. government of its own servicemen.

Accompanying her on these journeys were Meldahl and two teachers from
Maywood's Proviso East High School, Ian Smith and Jim Opolony. The
teachers knew many of the vets through a Web site they had produced on
the 192d, which now features some of Chang's interviews.

"I could see that this story clicked with her," says Sgt. Meldahl.
"With 'The Rape of Nanking,' she could relate to the people because
they were her distant roots, but here she could relate because they
were all from small towns in the Midwest, like her. When they first saw
her, she looked Chinese, but when she opened her mouth, they knew she
was one of us. And, boy, did they love her."

These stories of brothers watching brothers endure torture, friends
forced to bury friends alive and young Americans used for human medical
experiments began to affect her deeply. But, says one friend, it was
what happened to the men upon their return that infuriated Chang.

"Her outrage had shifted from the Japanese government to our own
government and how they treated the POWs," says Goetz Holmes.

The final blow came in the summer of 2003, when Sen. Orrin Hatch
(R-Utah) sponsored a provision that would have granted one-time,
$10,000 payments to each surviving POW. Overwhelmingly passed in the
House and Senate, the provision was gutted from the appropriations bill
it was attached to in conference committee at the request of the White
House.

Last August, despite pleas from her family not to leave because she was
clearly spent, Chang boarded a plane for Kentucky to talk to POWs
there.

"She didn't sleep for three nights before she went," says her father.

"We should have stopped her but we didn't know how serious it was at
the time," adds her mother.

Theories have circulated that Chang was threatened by someone in
Kentucky or was spooked during an interview. But those close to her say
she never made it to the interviews. The only time she left her hotel
there, they say, was to be hospitalized for a mental breakdown. A few
days later, she returned to San Jose and started seeing a therapist.

At Chang's request, her family has revealed little about her illness.
Douglas will only say that, despite "up and down periods," her
condition became progressively worse.

She was hospitalized again in September and by October, Christopher,
the couple's 2-year-old son, was sent away to live with his paternal
grandparents in downstate Illinois.

Chang's own parents, who had moved to San Jose in 2002 and often looked
after Christopher, said the boy was sent away because, "At that point,
we couldn't take care of Christopher; we had to take care of Iris."

After each hospitalization, says Douglas, Chang would immediately
resume her work on the POWs, telling friends that she was racing
against the clock, against the mortality of the survivors and against
injustice.

"She wouldn't take a break," Douglas says.

Records and exchanges with colleagues show that Chang was examining
transcripts for the POW book as late as a week before her death. But
she told others she was finished with the research. "I just can't go on
with it. It is too dark," she told a friend.

Four days before Chang took her life, she reached Kamen on her cell
phone. The conversation deeply disturbed her old friend, who wrote in
her journal, "I think Iris is in danger."

The danger Chang spoke of to Kamen, though, was not from her own hand
but from "people in high places who would not like what she was
uncovering."

She told Kamen that she feared for her life and that "If something
should happen to me, I want you to let everyone know it was all about
the work I'm doing, about external circumstances. Not internal."

Kamen says Chang spoke in a tired monotone and referred to a "sickness"
she suffered that they both understood to be depression. Kamen tried to
assure Chang that this was not a permanent condition and they would
talk more in a few days, when Kamen returned to Chicago.

It is only in retrospect that some of Chang's words haunt
Kamen-comments such as, "I want to thank you for being such a good
friend." Referring to Kamen's painful migraine headaches, Chang asked:
"Have you ever just wanted to stop it permanently, to put the lights
out?"

The call to Kamen was one of several she made to friends that week as
part of a "to-do" list that her family thought might help lift her
depression. It now appears they became a way to say goodbye.

On the morning of Nov. 8, Chang dropped into Reed's Sport Shop in San
Jose and told the clerk she was an author researching antique weapons,
according to Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department Sgt. Dean Baker.

She asked a lot of questions, took detailed notes and bought a Ruger
Old Army .45-caliber pistol for about $460.

Because it is considered an antique gun, albeit a modern-made replica,
the pistol was not subject to the usual background checks, waiting
periods or registration. Ever the researcher, Chang had checked out
this loophole and exploited it.

Within an hour, she had jammed the weapon, which was not hard to do
because loading it involves inserting a lead ball and gunpowder into
the chamber and then tamping them down.

She soon found a gunsmith in Santa Clara who worked out of his home and
said he could help. He said Chang seemed unfamiliar with guns and "very
distracted" as he cleared the gun and, without using real gunpowder,
showed her how to load. Chang wanted to go to a shooting range right
away, but the gunsmith did not have time. They made an appointment for
the next day. She would never show up.

Sometime that day she returned home and made more long calls to close
friends, including her agent, Susan Rabiner, and fellow author Barbara
Masin.

Rabiner says she spoke to Chang for "about two hours" that night, and
portrayed the author's mood as just "incredibly sad and black. She was
certainly lucid but just very sad. I don't know how else to describe
it."

Both Rabiner and Masin note that before Chang hung up the phone with
them, she said, uncharacteristically, "I love you."

Despite her deep sadness and the clues she was leaving with friends,
Douglas told the San Francisco Chronicle "there were up and down
periods but actually we thought the suicide risk was low."

The couple had plane tickets for a vacation in San Antonio the
following week. Rabiner says they were working on a children's version
of "The Chinese in America." And her parents say she still had plans to
make "Nanking" into a movie.

Chang was at home when Douglas went to sleep that night. As usual, she
stayed up writing, but on this night, her text was a suicide note.
After writing and revising this final work, Chang left a printout on
her desk next to the computer.

Somewhere around 2:30 a.m. she slipped out of the couple's townhouse
and drove off in their white 1999 Oldsmobile Alero.

At around 2:50 a.m., she bought gas at a Texaco station in Los Gatos
about six miles away.

At around 5 a.m., Douglas awoke, found the note and called the police
to report his wife missing. He and her family tried frantically to
reach her.

Medical evidence suggests that sometime between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m.,
Chang pulled off Highway 17 and onto a small private gravel road just
outside Los Gatos. It was there, at the foot of the Santa Cruz
Mountains, that she took out the shiny pearl-handled gun she had bought
the previous morning, placed the barrel in her mouth and took her life.

At about 9 a.m., a passing commuter discovered Chang in her car and
called 911.

By examining computer records, Chang's family found at least three
versions of her note. The only excerpt they will release says she
wished to be remembered as the woman she was before the illness,
"engaged with life, committed to her causes, her writing and her
family."

Despite the sheriff's reports concluding Chang's death was a suicide
(the Santa Clara County Coroner's office was still awaiting toxicology
results at this writing), many still have their doubts. Common refrains
on Web sites say: "She had everything to live for. It just doesn't make
any sense."

But if you look at the statistics on suicide among female Asian
Americans, Chang's death makes a little more sense.

For many reasons, "Asian-American women between 15 and 34 have a
suicide rate that is twice as high as their white counterparts," says
Betty Hong, executive director of Asian Community Mental Health
Services in Oakland, the country's largest provider of mental health
services for Asians. "And Asian-American adolescents have the highest
suicide rate among all women between 15 and 24 years of age. We are at
the highest risk of any group."

Contributing factors, Hong says, are the high demands "model
minorities" put on themselves and the expectation that Asian working
mothers be superwomen both at home and on the job. Perhaps most
dangerous, says Wong, is the deep stigma of mental illness in the
Asian-American community, where such problems might sometimes be blamed
on ancestors' misdeeds or demonic possession.

Many who learned that Chang had a toddler at the time of her death
theorized that she had suffered from post-partum depression. But
Douglas says, "She didn't get bad until our son was about 2 years
old"-far past the time that most experts agree post-partum can occur.

Douglas says that, like most working mothers, Chang felt the strain of
balancing work and family after her son was born. "That was hard for
her," he says. "She wanted to be the best possible mother and the best
possible writer, and so she pushed herself even harder."

One sign often associated with post-partum depression that Chang did
display was inordinate self-blame about "bad parenting." She had
expressed concern--- to Kamen- that a routine vaccination she allowed
Christopher to receive had made him autistic. But this only seemed to
show her slipping grip on reality. Christopher is reportedly healthy,
with no signs of autism.

Class-action suits against the makers of certain anti-depressants have
claimed that the drugs have led users to commit suicide. Some speculate
that Chang's was such a case. But her family is not commenting on the
medication she had been prescribed. Douglas says only that because the
time between her breakdown and her death was relatively short, and
anti-depressants can take up to a month to have an effect, "We didn't
have a lot of chances."

Hong says that the one bit of good news to come out of Chang's case is
that, since early November, her Oakland office has seen a twofold
increase in the number of suicidally depressed Asian women seeking
help. "Her death has created quite an awareness," she says.

While she was alive, though, Chang's family says she asked that only
seven people know about her mental illness. Relatives who discovered
her condition only after she was gone felt angry and betrayed, Douglas
says. But he felt obliged to abide by her wishes even as he watched the
Iris he knew vanish before his eyes.

"If you had told me last March that she would do this in November, I
would not have believed it was possible," he says. "There was just
nobody who wanted to do more with her life than Iris."

Andrew Solomon, who is a depression sufferer and the author of "Noonday
Demon," an exhaustive text on the subject, writes: "When you are
depressed, the past and the future are absorbed entirely by the
present, as in the world of a 3-year-old. You can neither remember
feeling better nor imagine that you will feel better."

Says Kamen of their talk on the phone: "I told her that [depressed] was
not how I saw her, that the Iris I knew was energetic, a hero, an
inspiration, and that this illness would pass. But she didn't say
anything. I don't think she believed it."

Driving through the mountains and valleys of Iris Chang's world in
Northern California, I could see how a Midwestern girl could easily
fall in love with the place.

Cold, gloomy mornings miraculously gave way to warm, sunny afternoons
nearly every day I was there. Who couldn't be charmed by this magical
transformation, this daily argument for optimism?

But as I learned more about Chang's profound depression, it became
clear that nothing would have been enough-not miraculous weather, love
of friends and family, the satisfaction of exposing injustice, nor even
the prospect of Christopher's tiny arms around her neck once more.
Nothing could penetrate the darkness that had consumed her and made her
lose her way.

Even if-as some have suggested-she had been fending off depression for
many years, this recurrence was different. When that bitter chill
rolled in this time, it settled somewhere deep inside her and promised
it would never leave.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/magazine/chi-05020603 64feb06,1,467877.story?ctrack=1&cset=true\

HEADLINE: Chicago Tribune Monica Eng column

BYLINE: By Monica Eng

BODY:
SUCCEED OR DIE TRYING: There they were looking out from the back page
of the Tribune's main section Wednesday. Those brainy bespectacled
young Asian women who "year after year ... outpace their peers on state
tests," the story said.

And there they were on the front page of the New York Times Sunday
Styles section last month: two Korean sisters flogging their book "Top
of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers--and How You Can
Too."

And then there I was at my desk Wednesday reading an e-mail from a
stranger who reminded me that exactly one year ago the high-achieving
Asian-American author Iris Chang escaped it all by ending her own life.

That's when I knew I had to write this little rant.

You see, as much as the mainstream press wants to applaud
Asian-American emphasis on high achievement and never bringing "down
the whole race" with "a B," as one Asian student said to our reporter,
we rarely look at the downsides of such pressure.

Those downsides can include extreme fear of failure, unpleasantly
competitive natures, withdrawal from society, stress-related disorders
and most sadly, Asian-American women holding the highest suicide rates
in the nation among women age 15 to 24--an American age category that
holds the highest general suicide rates to begin with, according to the
National Center for Health Statistics.

Between December 2003 and April 2004, the Chicago-based Asian American
Suicide Prevention Initiative anecdotally recorded six suicides in the
Chicago area of Asian-Americans under age 30, according to Aruna Jha,
the agency's founder and a professor at University of Illinois at
Chicago.

And an article in the latest issue of the journal Suicide and Life
Threatening Behavior states that for reasons not clear, Asian students
are 1.59 times more likely to seriously consider attempting suicide
than their white peers.

This isn't big news in the Asian-American community, but rather our
dirty little secret.

Just about everyone knows someone whose relative died mysteriously. But
no one wants to talk about it. And for some who are living with the
terrible shameful secret, they couldn't talk about it even if they
wanted to.

Just last month a fellow Asian journalist told me about a local Korean
mother who spent an afternoon sobbing in the journalist's car as she
recounted her daughter's suicide at an Ivy League school. No one in the
community knew about it. And she was forbidden by her husband to speak
of it. So for years she's kept her daughter's story locked up inside,
just as her daughter kept her frailties locked up inside until she saw
no escape from high expectations except in death.

Later in an e-mail, the journalist, who was from New York, told me that
she, in fact, met three such Korean mothers during her visit to
Chicago.

But the pressures don't just come from parents. In the United States,
where the model minority myth is peddled regularly by the media, and in
books such as "Top of the Class," the stereotypes begin to perpetuate
themselves. Luckily, Asians and others familiar with the issue are
starting to talk back.

The New York Times' interview with "Top of the Class" authors Soo Kim
Abboud and Jane Kim noted that, "Some educators believe such a
single-minded focus on achievement can be harmful." It quoted
anthropologist and Asian studies professor Kyeyoung Park, who observed
that some Asian-American kids can seem lost and disoriented when they
get to a university.

Still, the angry letters came flowing in the following week. Ruchika
Bajaj, the mental health policy coordinator for the Coalition for Asian
American Children and Families in New York, wrote, "The Kim sisters
believe that strict households and associating failure with family
dishonor is the best way to raise a successful child. Taking this
position, they do a disservice to the Asian community by perpetuating
the model minority myth that all Asians are successful and
over-achievers. The results reported provide an image of success that
is only skin deep. By stressing the model minority myth, we are placing
undue academic, social and emotional burdens on youth and further
supporting unrealistic stereotypes."

Another passage from the Times interview read, "The authors themselves
acknowledge that Asian career values can be hazardous to one's health
if taken to an extreme degree, as in Japan, where pressures to excel in
an exam-focused educational system have been linked with high dropout
rates, social withdrawal and suicide.

Jha says many Asian-American students don't feel like they have the
freedom to tell parents what they really want to do in life, "So the
students are performing but not necessarily in arenas that they enjoy."

A grain of truth

Indeed, when we yellow scribes get together at Asian American
Journalism Association conferences, there is almost always a crack
during some speech that goes like this: "I think it's clear why we are
all here today. [Pause] Because we were no good at science and math."

Sure, we all crack up because we see a kernel of truth in it, but the
fact that a bunch of Asian-American journalists are meeting at all
makes it clear that not all of us have gone the lucrative smarty-pants
route. And that we--the disappointing losers who went into a low-paying
profession like writing--can be reasonably happy too, even if our
parents probably lie to their friends about what we do.

But as the immigrant generations march on and greater acceptance of
Asians-Americans in non-traditional fields grows, so may a greater
acceptance of non-traditional Asian academic mediocrity.

State test result day also happens to be report card day for Chicago
Public Schools, a day that inspired terror in some of my Asian-American
pals growing up. In my Asian-Hispanic household, however, it was never
a big deal. When I get home tonight to look at the report card of my
one-quarter Asian son who started 1st grade in CPS this year, I will
applaud his good grades and discuss the bad ones. But I won't love him
any less for them. As a half-Asian parent, sure I'd like my son to be a
high academic achiever, but most of all I'd like him to be a kind and
happy little guy.

.

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223204 ]

Mo, 10 Juli 2006 00:21

XXs4Eyes

After all the info in that article, how can you seriously ask, "how
could someone so talented, so lovely, not think life was worth living?"

To live for what?

The lovelier you are the harder it is to live in this turd-fest,
shithole called mortal life.

Material success & critical acclaim mean nothing to a tender heart.
This pisshole you call "life" is cancerous to a tender heart.
It's a heartbreaking existence for anyone who is not reptillian.

http://www.lulu.com/newport

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223213 ]

Mo, 10 Juli 2006 01:14

tariq.1.rahim

belatedly discovered them.

Richard Fangnail wrote:
> I also liked Iris Chang but why did you post those articles that are
> over a year old?

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223232 ]

Mo, 10 Juli 2006 03:04

Komin

Iris Chang [ the money grabber ] was right when she killed
herself.

tariq.1.rahim [at] spamgourmet.com wrote:
> belatedly discovered them.
>
>
> Richard Fangnail wrote:
> > I also liked Iris Chang but why did you post those articles that are
> > over a year old?

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223239 ]

Mo, 10 Juli 2006 03:41

Notifier Deamon

Post removed (X-No-Archive: yes)

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223255 ]

Mo, 10 Juli 2006 06:46

chen

When CIA repeates the liaer message, they believes that it will became
fact. Iris Chang (was murdered) by US dead squard. Don't try to fool
again, it won't work.

tariq.1.rahim [at] spamgourmet.com wrote:
> archived forever, two articles about the beautiful author of 'rape of
> nanking' who shot herself in 2004. how could someone so talented, so
> lovely, not think life was worth living?
>
> Author: cheers Time: 2005-2-21 01:51 AM Subject: Chicago
> Tribune story
>
> FLAMEOUT
> BEST-SELLING AUTHOR IRIS CHANG HAD IT ALL. THEN SOMETHING WENT TERRIBLY
> WRONG
> By Monica Eng
>
> February 6, 2005
>
> On a cold Sunday night last April, I said goodbye to Iris Chang.
>
> I'd driven her back to her hotel after dinner in Chinatown where we
> talked about her latest book, "The Chinese in America: A Narrative
> History." After she delivered all the tidy quotes a reporter could ask
> for, our dinner conversation eased into other things.
>
> Iris was on a 22-city tour for the paperback edition of the book, but
> her mind was already on her next topic: a group of World War II POWs
> she had been interviewing over the last year. She was clearly excited
> about the project but didn't reveal much more. So we talked about
> kids-she was so proud of her baby son, Christopher. And we talked
> politics-she was incensed about the war in Iraq, the post-9/11 erosion
> of civil liberties and the then-current case of Chinese-American Muslim
> chaplain James Yee, who was falsely accused of espionage at Guantanamo
> Bay. If she ran the world, she said, things would be very, very
> different.
>
> Smart, warm, intense and bursting with plans, Chang hardly stopped
> talking all night to take a bite.
>
> It was only our second meeting, but it cemented my impression of the
> raven-haired author of the controversial 1997 best-seller, "The Rape of
> Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II." Chang was a woman in
> constant motion; a writer whose focus and work ethic allowed her to do
> it all and have it all. One of those rare people who had seemingly
> found the secret to balancing work, family and saving the world all at
> once.
>
> So my "goodbye" that night didn't mean goodbye so much as "see you when
> you next swoop through Chicago."
>
> But the next time I saw Iris she wasn't in Chicago. She was in a casket
> in Los Altos, Calif., at her funeral.
>
> On Nov. 9, almost seven months to the day after our dinner, she left
> her home in the middle of the night, drove to a nearby town, raised an
> antique pistol and ended her life.
>
> Reflecting the huge impact of "Rape of Nanking," which raised one of
> history's bloodiest massacres out of obscurity, Chang's death sent
> ripples around the world, making headlines in papers from London,
> Moscow and Beijing to Tokyo, Sydney and Paris.
>
> In a tribute to Chang on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives
> shortly after her death, Japanese-American Congressman Michael M. Honda
> (D-Calif.) said:
>
> "As an historian and activist, Chang fought passionately for historical
> justice and reconciliation. Her book, 'The Rape of Nanking,' chronicled
> the horrific capture of Nanking during the Japanese invasion of China
> in 1937, and was instrumental in educating the international community
> about Japanese military atrocities during World War II-human rights
> violations that had gone unwritten and unacknowledged for decades. Her
> efforts to seek redress for the crimes at Nanking brought her in
> conflict with the Japanese government and communities worldwide, but
> Chang was unwavering in her commitment to justice and truth."
>
> As hundreds of Chang's friends, family and fans gathered in the Silicon
> Valley for funeral and memorial services-memorials were also held that
> day in Washington, D.C., New York, Beijing and Nanjing (as Nanking is
> now spelled)-the mood was of profound sadness and shock. Phrases like
> "She was the last person I would have thought . . ." and "I couldn't
> believe it when I heard . . ." fell into every conversation.
>
> How could someone so successful, so together, so invested in the future
> have taken her own life?
>
> Few could make sense of it, but they tried. Some theorized that Chang
> had fallen victim to a swift and deadly depression or that she had
> reacted adversely to anti-depressants. Others speculated that she was a
> victim of overwork. And many thought she'd simply drowned in the sea of
> tragic stories she'd taken in over her career.
>
> Still others saw things in a more sinister light, voicing conspiracy
> theories that soon made the rounds on the Internet. Chang had been
> murdered, they said. Maybe by the Japanese government. Or even by our
> own.
>
> As I left a post-funeral luncheon, Bay Area activist Josephine Chu
> clutched my elbow and whispered in my ear: "I don't think this was
> suicide," she said. "Something happened to her. She was threatened, I'm
> sure of it. You have to check it out."
>
> Far from providing answers, my trip to California only led to more
> questions: What happened to that bright, hopeful and engaged woman from
> last April?
>
> Where had Iris gone?
>
> It wasn't until I returned to the Midwest-where Chang grew up and was
> doing her latest research-that I could begin to make sense of the
> mystery, sorting through clues she had been leaving as the months and
> years ticked by.
>
> Iris Shun-Ru Chang was born on March 28, 1968, in Princeton, N.J. Her
> parents, freshly minted Harvard PhDs from Taiwan, were doing
> post-doctoral work at Princeton when the little girl with her mother's
> intense eyes and father's long limbs arrived on the scene.
>
> Before she turned 2, the family moved to Urbana-Champaign where her
> father, Shau-Jin, landed a job in the physics department of the
> University of Illinois and her mother, Ying-Ying, began post-doctoral
> work in biochemistry.
>
> Chang's first language was Mandarin, but she soon picked up English in
> preschool. Recognizing her promise, Ying-Ying studied books on "raising
> a bright child" and Shau-Jin used letter stamps and an inkpad to label
> all the objects in the house.
>
> During her early years, Chang typically spent Saturday mornings with
> her mother at the Urbana library, checking out piles of books. Sunday
> mornings found her tagging along with her father to the computer lab in
> the physics building. On very special Sundays, her mother would cloud
> up the house with a large batch of steamed buns that young Chang would
> Americanize with a slathering of peanut butter.
>
> While showing an early aptitude for computer science, Chang also
> displayed a childhood passion for writing, penning her first story when
> she was 4-"a to-catch-a-thief tale," her father says.
>
> At the University of Illinois' elite University High School, she hung
> out with what her classmate and friend Kathy Szoke calls "the literary
> geeks."
>
> "We were in chorus together and we just loved to read and write for the
> school literary magazine, "Unique," says Szoke, who now lives in
> Arlington Heights. Friends remember Chang as being drawn to poetry and
> fantasy stories and say she could sometimes come across as distracted
> and aloof-almost as if she were in another world.
>
> Like a lot of other University High kids, Chang skipped a grade and was
> ready for college at 17. Although she wanted to attend the University
> of Chicago, her parents "thought she was too young and that Hyde Park
> was too dangerous for her," Szoke says. So she stayed in town and
> attended the University of Illinois, where she was allowed to live on
> campus.
>
> Because Chang was so bookish in high school, Szoke was shocked to hear
> she'd joined a sorority at the University of Illinois, and even more
> surprised to find her on the homecoming court in the fall of 1988.
>
> "That was just not her," Szoke said. "She didn't like to drink and
> wasn't a big socializer, but I think she looked at it as a challenge.
> She looked at the court as this certain clique of girls and thought,
> why shouldn't a shy little Chinese bookworm be able to break into it
> too?"
>
> This was part of a pattern that Chang would repeat for the rest of her
> life: zeroing in on a formidable goal, setting her mind to achieving
> it, and then through hard work, talent, a pinch of naivete and a
> mountain of sheer will, simply making it happen.
>
> In eulogizing Chang, her friend Paula Kamen, a Chicago writer, talked
> about this modus operandi and how at first she found it frustrating
> while competing with Chang for internships in college. Later, she
> stopped envying her and started applying the formula to her own life
> and work. Today when she addresses young writers, Kamen exhorts them to
> "think big, be bold and to simply 'Iris Chang' it."
>
> Chang began her undergraduate career as a mathematics and computer
> science major but had switched to journalism by her junior year. She
> agonized over how to break it to her parents.
>
> "When we told her that it was OK, she was so surprised," her father
> recalls. "She thought we would be so disappointed. We told her that
> whatever you do in life you have to love it. She was afraid that we
> only wanted her to be a scientist."
>
> And so, with her parents' blessing, Chang turned her path to journalism
> and never looked back. She immediately started writing for the student
> paper, the Daily Illini, and became campus correspondent for the
> Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. By her junior summer, she had
> secured an internship at Newsweek.
>
> It was during this same junior year that Chang attended a fraternity
> party that changed the course of her life. At the party she met a tall,
> red-haired engineering major from downstate Illinois named Brett
> Douglas. "Lots of guys were around who wanted to talk to her, but when
> I finally got a chance, we talked for hours," recalls Douglas. "She
> told me about all her plans, and it was then I knew she was the woman I
> wanted to grow old with.
>
> "It took me a few years to convince her of the same thing."
>
> After graduating in 1989, Douglas and Chang relocated to separate
> towns, Douglas following his academic adviser to the University of
> California at Santa Barbara and Chang moving to Chicago to write for
> the Associated Press and later the Tribune. Says Douglas, "A new
> invention called e-mail" enabled them to keep up a long-distance
> romance.
>
> While at the Tribune as a metro reporter, Chang churned out a mix of
> news stories and features. Remembering Chang's time at the paper,
> Tribune Springfield reporter Christi Parsons says that, as interns,
> they served as each other's "life raft."
>
> At the end of one difficult day, in which Parsons says a particular
> editor had humiliated her, Chang took her out to Gino's Pizza near
> their Gold Coast apartments.
>
> "She said to me, 'Can't you see him for what he is?' " Parsons recalls.
> " 'He is just a condescending man who looks at you like a little girl.'
> I don't know what I would have done without her friendship and
> support."
>
> In the fall of 1990, Chang left the newspaper for the master's program
> in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. Within months of
> starting the program, Chang, always a step ahead of her peers, landed a
> book contract with Basic Books-becoming, at 23, the youngest author the
> publishing house had ever signed. Her task was to tell the story of
> American-educated Cal-Tech scientist Tsien Hsue-shen, who was deported
> from the U.S. during the McCarthy era and went on to found China's
> missile program.
>
> Instead of relaxing on spring break in warmer climes, Chang spent the
> week researching Tsien's story, her head buried in documents at the
> National Archives. Douglas flew to Baltimore to spend the break with
> her, even if it meant taking the train with her into Washington each
> day and doing "touristy things" while she worked at the Archives.
>
> When the Johns Hopkins program ended in June, 1991, Chang flew to Santa
> Barbara and moved in with Douglas; they were married that August. She
> continued to work on her book while he completed his dissertation.
>
> Friends who visited their apartment in Santa Barbara recall seeing
> hardly a stick of furniture, but books, bookshelves and banker's boxes
> stuffed with documents were everywhere. It was a Spartan, frugal,
> grad-student existence and reflected her lifelong attraction to a life
> of the mind.
>
> Her mother says that an aversion to shopping for ordinary consumer
> goods was true of Chang through most of her life, noting: "She didn't
> like to buy anything but books."
>
> "I loved that she was such a hard worker," says Douglas, who was
> awarded his PhD in 1993. "She was a role model for me in my own work."
>
> Chang's book about Tsien, titled "Thread of a Silkworm," came out in
> 1995. It got favorable notices, though it never sold very well.
>
> Its lucid treatment of the creation of China's missile program owed
> much to Chang's scientific background. But she would never use that
> knowledge again; instead, her career would take a sharp political turn.
>
> The trigger was a 1994 conference in Cupertino, Calif., that dealt with
> Japanese war atrocities, particularly the horrors inflicted at Nanking
> following the invasion of China by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1937.
> At the conference, Chang saw poster-sized photographs of the Nanking
> carnage that she described as "almost beyond belief" in a 1998
> interview with the Tribune. These included "photographs of women who
> [had] been disemboweled or men who were used for decapitation contests,
> heaps of bodies that had been burned or were waiting to be thrown in
> lakes."
>
> Chang already was familiar with the ghastly history. Her maternal
> grandparents had fled Nanking shortly before the invasion and she'd
> heard family stories about the Yangtze River running red with blood for
> days. That there were no books about these events at her local library
> left her puzzled as a child; but it hadn't occurred to her that she
> should write such a book until she attended the conference.
>
> "The idea that 60 years later the whole world wouldn't know about it,
> wouldn't care, that was very frightening for me," she told the Tribune.
>
> And so it was that two months after turning in her final draft of
> "Silkworm" in 1994, Chang began working on an English-language account
> for Basic Books of what took place at Nanking.
>
> This shift of focus from science to politics puzzled friends like
> Szoke, who in retrospect says she wishes Chang "had followed her first
> instinct and written about things that wouldn't have affected her so
> personally."
>
> But the die was cast. Chang began the more than two years of intensive
> research and writing that went into the 290-page book documenting the
> slaughter of an estimated 300,000 Chinese civilians and military at the
> hands of the Japanese army during eight weeks in 1937-38.
>
> She sifted through Chinese, Japanese, American and German newspaper
> accounts, examined American and German military communications,
> corresponded with Japanese soldiers who had engaged in the massacre and
> traveled to torrid Nanjing in the summer of 1995 for a grueling month
> of interviews with survivors and visits to the various sites of the
> atrocities.
>
> Chang had serious stomach problems for much of the trip, she told her
> friend Kamen in a postcard from Nanjing. But even in the midst of her
> physical distress, she wrote triumphantly in the postcard: "I have
> already interviewed eight massacre survivors."
>
> One of her biggest coups was obtaining the little-known diary of Nazi
> party member John Rabe, "The Schindler of China," who as head of the
> Siemens Co. plant in Nanking sheltered thousands during the massacre.
>
> She also focused on Minnie Vautrin, an Illinois-born missionary and
> fellow University of Illinois graduate who gave sanctuary to thousands
> of Chinese during the mass bloodletting. Deeply affected by what she
> had witnessed, Vautrin suffered a nervous breakdown and returned to the
> U.S., where she committed suicide in 1941.
>
> While finishing the writing on "Nanking," Chang and Douglas moved to
> Sunnyvale, Calif., where he took a job at Cisco Systems and Chang
> continued to research and write. She kept "college student hours,"
> Douglas says, "waking at noon and then staying up and working late into
> the night. She liked that because then she could work for long
> stretches without interruptions."
>
> It was during these late-night writing sessions, as she pored over
> diaries, interviews and photos depicting unspeakable acts of rape,
> murder and torture, that her work began to take its toll. She told
> people that clumps of her hair fell out, she lost weight, suffered
> nightmares, often became sick and frequently broke down weeping at her
> computer.
>
> "She could really identify with the victims," her mother says. "I
> definitely think it affected her mentally."
>
> Chang was frank about her problems in a 1997 interview with Johns
> Hopkins Magazine. "I was weak during the whole time I was writing the
> book," she said. "I was very unhappy."
>
> Was it a bout of depression? "I don't think so," her mother insists. "I
> think she just identified too much with the victims."
>
> "Nanking" came out in 1997 and remained on The New York Times
> bestseller list for 10 weeks. It was excerpted in Newsweek. It was
> favorably reviewed in the mainstream press, landing Chang on the cover
> of Reader's Digest and on such TV shows as "Nightline" and "Good
> Morning America." On "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer," she boldly
> demanded that Japanese Ambassador Kunihiko Saito apologize to the
> victims of Nanking. He declined.
>
> Chang was suddenly a celebrity. Some felt it soon became a burden to
> her.
>
> In 1998, after a year of non-stop book promotions, Chang told her
> hometown paper, the News Gazette: "I guess I've gone from hell to
> heaven, haven't I? But that's not an entirely correct analogy. It's
> more like being strapped to a roller coaster and not being able to get
> off."
>
> In the same interview, she told of having Asian Americans, Native
> Americans, African Americans and Holocaust survivors share personal
> stories with her during her book-store appearances. "This is why I
> often find it so physically and psychologically draining," she said.
>
> Yet some who saw her at the time thought she was enjoying herself. "She
> stayed at my house in Washington during the height of it and The New
> York Times came over to take her picture," says Diana Zuckerman,
> president of the National Research Center for Women & Families. "I
> think initially she was enjoying the fame."
>
> Along with fame came honors and invitations, including one to attend
> President Bill Clinton's Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head, S.C. There
> were meetings with high-level Washington figures. Columnist George Will
> called the Nanking massacre "perhaps the most appalling single episode
> of barbarism in a century replete with horrors-yet it had been largely
> forgotten until Iris Chang made it her subject."
>
> But fame also brought backlash. The Japanese right wing denounced the
> book as propaganda by an "agent of China." Ambassador Saito went so far
> as to hold a Washington press conference in April 1998 to denounce the
> book as "contain[ing] many extremely inaccurate descriptions and
> one-sided views on the case. It's not a good thing that such a book has
> been published and has attracted great attention."
>
> Chang challenged the ambassador to a debate on CNN or to cite specific
> inaccuracies. He declined.
>
> Chang acknowledged errors in her book and said she corrected at least
> 10 of them in later editions, including misspellings and incorrect
> dates. Though she publically minimized their importance, telling the
> Los Angeles Times that it was "ludicrous" to suggest they gave
> ammunition to revisionists who would deny the massacre, in private
> e-mails she agonized over the mistakes, as she always did with
> inaccuracies.
>
> Still, the main points and accounts of Chang's book are widely accepted
> as accurate, even if debate continues over certain details and
> captions.
>
> "Nanking," which sold some 400,000 copies, was translated into 13
> languages but never Japanese, even though a Japanese publishing house
> was keenly interested. In a San Francisco Chronicle article at the
> time, the head of the publishing house, Hiruko Haga, was quoted as
> saying he believed he was putting himself in "a life-threatening
> situation" by publishing the book, but was determined to proceed if
> Chang would correct what he saw as errors. In the end, their
> negotiations ended in stalemate and the book was not published.
>
> In the summer of 1998 academics from some of Japan's top universities
> participated in a Tokyo conference convened to denounce Chang and her
> book as a fraud. One scholar, whom Chang quoted in a piece published in
> Harper's Magazine, called the book "the most outrageous world-class
> lie."
>
> Congressman Honda, an acquaintance and frequent ally of Chang on
> several issues, says he was not surprised at the opposition to her work
> from the Japanese Right. "There was a particular Japanese writer who
> did research similar to hers [on the Rape of Nanking] and had to walk
> around in disguises in public because people considered him a traitor,"
> Honda says.
>
> When it became known that a Japanese translation would not go forward,
> postings on conservative Japanese chat sites gloated over the victory.
> Such triumphant remarks were echoed on the Internet when the news of
> Chang's death broke around the world last fall.
>
> One writer, using the screen name "mad god," said on the Web site
> "Japan Today": "Good riddance to a writer whose individual agenda and
> mental instability did not allow her to write a coherent or factual
> history."
>
> Another identified as "Ryuhei" wrote: "She probably killed herself . .
> . because she was writing books full of lies and deceiving people."
>
> Although she didn't appear to dwell on it, Chang was disturbed by what
> she said were ongoing threats from critics. In 1998 she told the
> History News Network that "not a single week goes by when I don't
> suffer harassment from some vicious right-wing Japanese group."
>
> Even if, according to Douglas, she never received a direct death
> threat, she firmly believed that Japanese writers and politicians had
> been killed for similar research and it kept her on her guard.
>
> Her friend Gregory Rodriquez, a behavioral scientist and expert on
> World War II prisoners of war and with whom she served on panels about
> Japanese war crimes, says Chang would "become tearful and tell me about
> her fear of being assassinated and them getting away with it because
> she was Chinese, just a 'chink.' " Rodriquez said.
>
> In 1999, Chang embarked on a new project, "The Chinese in America." It
> took four years to write and blended broad historical trends with
> personal tales to depict the fate of an American minority over 150
> years. Persecution of Chinese-Americans over that period emerges as a
> recurring theme in the book, but Chang defended herself against those
> who labeled it unpatriotic.
>
> "I see this as my love letter to America," Chang said over dinner last
> April. "Many people believe that to criticize the government is not
> patriotic, but I think it is the most patriotic thing you can do."
>
> I'd met Chang for the first time the previous May, during her tour for
> the hardcover version of "The Chinese in America." With the war on
> terrorism under way and the campaign in Iraq just two months old,
> Chang, in a speech at the Harold Washington Library, compared the
> persecution of Muslims in the U.S. to the persecution of Asians during
> times of war and economic difficulty. She decried the erosion of civil
> liberties implicit in the Patriot Act and literally shook her fist
> while delivering her speech to the crowded room.
>
> After the talk, Paula Kamen, who had been my editor as well as Chang's
> at the Daily Illini, introduced us and we went out for pizza. I didn't
> see her again until the following spring, when she returned to Chicago
> and we had our Chinatown dinner. She seemed perfectly well-if a little
> tired-but I would find out later from her e-mails that she had been
> coming down with a bad case of flu. She also was suffering from
> insomnia and seemed vulnerable to infections.
>
> Some who knew her better than I said they were surprised to learn she'd
> passed through town on the tour without calling. And a friend she did
> call during a Texas stop said she seemed a bit odd.
>
> "When she came to Dallas she asked me to come to a reading because she
> just needed a friendly face there," recalled Dallas Morning News
> columnist Esther Wu, who covers Asian-American issues. "That night she
> asked me if people like us would ever be able to break out of the
> responsibility of writing about our community. She said that she didn't
> think we could."
>
> Chang's family says that after the grueling paperback tour of 2004, she
> never seemed the same again. According to Douglas, she returned
> exhausted and drained. But she fought it off, he says, believing she
> was in a race against time.
>
> The time pressure had begun in the spring of 2003 when Sgt. Tony
> Meldahl, of the Ohio National Guard, contacted Chang with an idea for
> her next book. He wanted the author, who had long been active on behalf
> of America's World War II ex-POWs, to examine their experiences through
> the stories of a single unit of mostly Midwestern men, the 192nd
> (Provisional) Tank Battalion.
>
> It was one of two U.S. tank units captured in the Philippines and
> forced by the Japanese to endure the Bataan Death March, subsequent
> weeks on Hell Ships and eventual slave labor for Japanese industrial
> firms.
>
> The book Meldahl proposed would go beyond these overseas experiences,
> however, and include the treatment the men received once they came
> home.
>
> Chang was well-acquainted with the effort among remaining Bataan
> survivors to seek compensation from the Japanese firms for whom they
> performed slave labor-even though the U.S. had seemingly waived such
> compensation as part of its 1951 peace treaty with Japan.
>
> Citing specific articles in the treaty and the compensation that
> Holocaust survivors had received from Germany, the veterans felt they
> had a case, but they met stiff opposition from the U.S. government.
>
> A leader of the POW movement, Chicago native Lester Tenney, told the
> Senate Judiciary Committee in 2000: "I once again feel that I have been
> taken prisoner, but this time by my own country. The Japanese beat me
> with guns and swords. My country is humiliating me, and the memories of
> those who did not survive, with words."
>
> After many legal filings by the POWs had been struck down, Reps. Honda
> and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) introduced the "Justice for American
> WWII POWs Act of 2001" as part of a spending bill in Congress. The
> provision sought to block the U.S. State Department and the Department
> of Justice from stepping in, as they had throughout the process, on
> behalf of the Japanese companies.
>
> The bill overwhelmingly passed both houses, but in conference
> committee, the White House-citing the need to maintain a united
> coalition in the war on terrorism-successfully pressured the conferees
> to strip the provision from the spending bill.
>
> "It was outrageous," said Linda Goetz Holmes, Chang's friend and the
> author of "Unjust Enrichment," about Japanese companies that benefited
> from POW slave labor.
>
> The action prompted Chang to write a passionate op-ed piece in the New
> York Times that concluded: "Our leaders must not be permitted to sell
> out the men who gave so much for our freedom . . . If we are to have
> another 'greatest generation' we must duly honor the rights of the
> first one."
>
> Chang continued to follow the POWs' case closely, showing up at
> hearings in California and Washington. By 2003, responding to Meldahl,
> she began visiting sick and elderly veterans to collect their stories.
> Her objective: a book with the working title "The Bataan Tankers."
>
> Chang traveled widely to meet the men from the battalion, all of whom
> had been National Guardsmen from Janesville, Wis., Maywood, Ill., Port
> Clinton, Ohio, and Harrodsburg, Ky.
>
> By last summer, she had collected about a dozen videotaped interviews
> that told stories of boyhood friendships in the 1930s, subsequent
> enlistment and camaraderie, and wartime horrors followed by alleged
> betrayal by the U. S. government of its own servicemen.
>
> Accompanying her on these journeys were Meldahl and two teachers from
> Maywood's Proviso East High School, Ian Smith and Jim Opolony. The
> teachers knew many of the vets through a Web site they had produced on
> the 192d, which now features some of Chang's interviews.
>
> "I could see that this story clicked with her," says Sgt. Meldahl.
> "With 'The Rape of Nanking,' she could relate to the people because
> they were her distant roots, but here she could relate because they
> were all from small towns in the Midwest, like her. When they first saw
> her, she looked Chinese, but when she opened her mouth, they knew she
> was one of us. And, boy, did they love her."
>
> These stories of brothers watching brothers endure torture, friends
> forced to bury friends alive and young Americans used for human medical
> experiments began to affect her deeply. But, says one friend, it was
> what happened to the men upon their return that infuriated Chang.
>
> "Her outrage had shifted from the Japanese government to our own
> government and how they treated the POWs," says Goetz Holmes.
>
> The final blow came in the summer of 2003, when Sen. Orrin Hatch
> (R-Utah) sponsored a provision that would have granted one-time,
> $10,000 payments to each surviving POW. Overwhelmingly passed in the
> House and Senate, the provision was gutted from the appropriations bill
> it was attached to in conference committee at the request of the White
> House.
>
> Last August, despite pleas from her family not to leave because she was
> clearly spent, Chang boarded a plane for Kentucky to talk to POWs
> there.
>
> "She didn't sleep for three nights before she went," says her father.
>
> "We should have stopped her but we didn't know how serious it was at
> the time," adds her mother.
>
> Theories have circulated that Chang was threatened by someone in
> Kentucky or was spooked during an interview. But those close to her say
> she never made it to the interviews. The only time she left her hotel
> there, they say, was to be hospitalized for a mental breakdown. A few
> days later, she returned to San Jose and started seeing a therapist.
>
> At Chang's request, her family has revealed little about her illness.
> Douglas will only say that, despite "up and down periods," her
> condition became progressively worse.
>
> She was hospitalized again in September and by October, Christopher,
> the couple's 2-year-old son, was sent away to live with his paternal
> grandparents in downstate Illinois.
>
> Chang's own parents, who had moved to San Jose in 2002 and often looked
> after Christopher, said the boy was sent away because, "At that point,
> we couldn't take care of Christopher; we had to take care of Iris."
>
> After each hospitalization, says Douglas, Chang would immediately
> resume her work on the POWs, telling friends that she was racing
> against the clock, against the mortality of the survivors and against
> injustice.
>
> "She wouldn't take a break," Douglas says.
>
> Records and exchanges with colleagues show that Chang was examining
> transcripts for the POW book as late as a week before her death. But
> she told others she was finished with the research. "I just can't go on
> with it. It is too dark," she told a friend.
>
> Four days before Chang took her life, she reached Kamen on her cell
> phone. The conversation deeply disturbed her old friend, who wrote in
> her journal, "I think Iris is in danger."
>
> The danger Chang spoke of to Kamen, though, was not from her own hand
> but from "people in high places who would not like what she was
> uncovering."
>
> She told Kamen that she feared for her life and that "If something
> should happen to me, I want you to let everyone know it was all about
> the work I'm doing, about external circumstances. Not internal."
>
> Kamen says Chang spoke in a tired monotone and referred to a "sickness"
> she suffered that they both understood to be depression. Kamen tried to
> assure Chang that this was not a permanent condition and they would
> talk more in a few days, when Kamen returned to Chicago.
>
> It is only in retrospect that some of Chang's words haunt
> Kamen-comments such as, "I want to thank you for being such a good
> friend." Referring to Kamen's painful migraine headaches, Chang asked:
> "Have you ever just wanted to stop it permanently, to put the lights
> out?"
>
> The call to Kamen was one of several she made to friends that week as
> part of a "to-do" list that her family thought might help lift her
> depression. It now appears they became a way to say goodbye.
>
> On the morning of Nov. 8, Chang dropped into Reed's Sport Shop in San
> Jose and told the clerk she was an author researching antique weapons,
> according to Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department Sgt. Dean Baker.
>
> She asked a lot of questions, took detailed notes and bought a Ruger
> Old Army .45-caliber pistol for about $460.
>
> Because it is considered an antique gun, albeit a modern-made replica,
> the pistol was not subject to the usual background checks, waiting
> periods or registration. Ever the researcher, Chang had checked out
> this loophole and exploited it.
>
> Within an hour, she had jammed the weapon, which was not hard to do
> because loading it involves inserting a lead ball and gunpowder into
> the chamber and then tamping them down.
>
> She soon found a gunsmith in Santa Clara who worked out of his home and
> said he could help. He said Chang seemed unfamiliar with guns and "very
> distracted" as he cleared the gun and, without using real gunpowder,
> showed her how to load. Chang wanted to go to a shooting range right
> away, but the gunsmith did not have time. They made an appointment for
> the next day. She would never show up.
>
> Sometime that day she returned home and made more long calls to close
> friends, including her agent, Susan Rabiner, and fellow author Barbara
> Masin.
>
> Rabiner says she spoke to Chang for "about two hours" that night, and
> portrayed the author's mood as just "incredibly sad and black. She was
> certainly lucid but just very sad. I don't know how else to describe
> it."
>
> Both Rabiner and Masin note that before Chang hung up the phone with
> them, she said, uncharacteristically, "I love you."
>
> Despite her deep sadness and the clues she was leaving with friends,
> Douglas told the San Francisco Chronicle "there were up and down
> periods but actually we thought the suicide risk was low."
>
> The couple had plane tickets for a vacation in San Antonio the
> following week. Rabiner says they were working on a children's version
> of "The Chinese in America." And her parents say she still had plans to
> make "Nanking" into a movie.
>
> Chang was at home when Douglas went to sleep that night. As usual, she
> stayed up writing, but on this night, her text was a suicide note.
> After writing and revising this final work, Chang left a printout on
> her desk next to the computer.
>
> Somewhere around 2:30 a.m. she slipped out of the couple's townhouse
> and drove off in their white 1999 Oldsmobile Alero.
>
> At around 2:50 a.m., she bought gas at a Texaco station in Los Gatos
> about six miles away.
>
> At around 5 a.m., Douglas awoke, found the note and called the police
> to report his wife missing. He and her family tried frantically to
> reach her.
>
> Medical evidence suggests that sometime between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m.,
> Chang pulled off Highway 17 and onto a small private gravel road just
> outside Los Gatos. It was there, at the foot of the Santa Cruz
> Mountains, that she took out the shiny pearl-handled gun she had bought
> the previous morning, placed the barrel in her mouth and took her life.
>
> At about 9 a.m., a passing commuter discovered Chang in her car and
> called 911.
>
> By examining computer records, Chang's family found at least three
> versions of her note. The only excerpt they will release says she
> wished to be remembered as the woman she was before the illness,
> "engaged with life, committed to her causes, her writing and her
> family."
>
> Despite the sheriff's reports concluding Chang's death was a suicide
> (the Santa Clara County Coroner's office was still awaiting toxicology
> results at this writing), many still have their doubts. Common refrains
> on Web sites say: "She had everything to live for. It just doesn't make
> any sense."
>
> But if you look at the statistics on suicide among female Asian
> Americans, Chang's death makes a little more sense.
>
> For many reasons, "Asian-American women between 15 and 34 have a
> suicide rate that is twice as high as their white counterparts," says
> Betty Hong, executive director of Asian Community Mental Health
> Services in Oakland, the country's largest provider of mental health
> services for Asians. "And Asian-American adolescents have the highest
> suicide rate among all women between 15 and 24 years of age. We are at
> the highest risk of any group."
>
> Contributing factors, Hong says, are the high demands "model
> minorities" put on themselves and the expectation that Asian working
> mothers be superwomen both at home and on the job. Perhaps most
> dangerous, says Wong, is the deep stigma of mental illness in the
> Asian-American community, where such problems might sometimes be blamed
> on ancestors' misdeeds or demonic possession.
>
> Many who learned that Chang had a toddler at the time of her death
> theorized that she had suffered from post-partum depression. But
> Douglas says, "She didn't get bad until our son was about 2 years
> old"-far past the time that most experts agree post-partum can occur.
>
> Douglas says that, like most working mothers, Chang felt the strain of
> balancing work and family after her son was born. "That was hard for
> her," he says. "She wanted to be the best possible mother and the best
> possible writer, and so she pushed herself even harder."
>
> One sign often associated with post-partum depression that Chang did
> display was inordinate self-blame about "bad parenting." She had
> expressed concern--- to Kamen- that a routine vaccination she allowed
> Christopher to receive had made him autistic. But this only seemed to
> show her slipping grip on reality. Christopher is reportedly healthy,
> with no signs of autism.
>
> Class-action suits against the makers of certain anti-depressants have
> claimed that the drugs have led users to commit suicide. Some speculate
> that Chang's was such a case. But her family is not commenting on the
> medication she had been prescribed. Douglas says only that because the
> time between her breakdown and her death was relatively short, and
> anti-depressants can take up to a month to have an effect, "We didn't
> have a lot of chances."
>
> Hong says that the one bit of good news to come out of Chang's case is
> that, since early November, her Oakland office has seen a twofold
> increase in the number of suicidally depressed Asian women seeking
> help. "Her death has created quite an awareness," she says.
>
> While she was alive, though, Chang's family says she asked that only
> seven people know about her mental illness. Relatives who discovered
> her condition only after she was gone felt angry and betrayed, Douglas
> says. But he felt obliged to abide by her wishes even as he watched the
> Iris he knew vanish before his eyes.
>
> "If you had told me last March that she would do this in November, I
> would not have believed it was possible," he says. "There was just
> nobody who wanted to do more with her life than Iris."
>
> Andrew Solomon, who is a depression sufferer and the author of "Noonday
> Demon," an exhaustive text on the subject, writes: "When you are
> depressed, the past and the future are absorbed entirely by the
> present, as in the world of a 3-year-old. You can neither remember
> feeling better nor imagine that you will feel better."
>
> Says Kamen of their talk on the phone: "I told her that [depressed] was
> not how I saw her, that the Iris I knew was energetic, a hero, an
> inspiration, and that this illness would pass. But she didn't say
> anything. I don't think she believed it."
>
> Driving through the mountains and valleys of Iris Chang's world in
> Northern California, I could see how a Midwestern girl could easily
> fall in love with the place.
>
> Cold, gloomy mornings miraculously gave way to warm, sunny afternoons
> nearly every day I was there. Who couldn't be charmed by this magical
> transformation, this daily argument for optimism?
>
> But as I learned more about Chang's profound depression, it became
> clear that nothing would have been enough-not miraculous weather, love
> of friends and family, the satisfaction of exposing injustice, nor even
> the prospect of Christopher's tiny arms around her neck once more.
> Nothing could penetrate the darkness that had consumed her and made her
> lose her way.
>
> Even if-as some have suggested-she had been fending off depression for
> many years, this recurrence was different. When that bitter chill
> rolled in this time, it settled somewhere deep inside her and promised
> it would never leave.
>
> http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/magazine/chi-05020603 64feb06,1,467877.story?ctrack=1&cset=true\
>
> HEADLINE: Chicago Tribune Monica Eng column
>
> BYLINE: By Monica Eng
>
> BODY:
> SUCCEED OR DIE TRYING: There they were looking out from the back page
> of the Tribune's main section Wednesday. Those brainy bespectacled
> young Asian women who "year after year ... outpace their peers on state
> tests," the story said.
>
> And there they were on the front page of the New York Times Sunday
> Styles section last month: two Korean sisters flogging their book "Top
> of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers--and How You Can
> Too."
>
> And then there I was at my desk Wednesday reading an e-mail from a
> stranger who reminded me that exactly one year ago the high-achieving
> Asian-American author Iris Chang escaped it all by ending her own life.
>
>
> That's when I knew I had to write this little rant.
>
> You see, as much as the mainstream press wants to applaud
> Asian-American emphasis on high achievement and never bringing "down
> the whole race" with "a B," as one Asian student said to our reporter,
> we rarely look at the downsides of such pressure.
>
> Those downsides can include extreme fear of failure, unpleasantly
> competitive natures, withdrawal from society, stress-related disorders
> and most sadly, Asian-American women holding the highest suicide rates
> in the nation among women age 15 to 24--an American age category that
> holds the highest general suicide rates to begin with, according to the
> National Center for Health Statistics.
>
> Between December 2003 and April 2004, the Chicago-based Asian American
> Suicide Prevention Initiative anecdotally recorded six suicides in the
> Chicago area of Asian-Americans under age 30, according to Aruna Jha,
> the agency's founder and a professor at University of Illinois at
> Chicago.
>
> And an article in the latest issue of the journal Suicide and Life
> Threatening Behavior states that for reasons not clear, Asian students
> are 1.59 times more likely to seriously consider attempting suicide
> than their white peers.
>
> This isn't big news in the Asian-American community, but rather our
> dirty little secret.
>
> Just about everyone knows someone whose relative died mysteriously. But
> no one wants to talk about it. And for some who are living with the
> terrible shameful secret, they couldn't talk about it even if they
> wanted to.
>
> Just last month a fellow Asian journalist told me about a local Korean
> mother who spent an afternoon sobbing in the journalist's car as she
> recounted her daughter's suicide at an Ivy League school. No one in the
> community knew about it. And she was forbidden by her husband to speak
> of it. So for years she's kept her daughter's story locked up inside,
> just as her daughter kept her frailties locked up inside until she saw
> no escape from high expectations except in death.
>
> Later in an e-mail, the journalist, who was from New York, told me that
> she, in fact, met three such Korean mothers during her visit to
> Chicago.
>
> But the pressures don't just come from parents. In the United States,
> where the model minority myth is peddled regularly by the media, and in
> books such as "Top of the Class," the stereotypes begin to perpetuate
> themselves. Luckily, Asians and others familiar with the issue are
> starting to talk back.
>
> The New York Times' interview with "Top of the Class" authors Soo Kim
> Abboud and Jane Kim noted that, "Some educators believe such a
> single-minded focus on achievement can be harmful." It quoted
> anthropologist and Asian studies professor Kyeyoung Park, who observed
> that some Asian-American kids can seem lost and disoriented when they
> get to a university.
>
> Still, the angry letters came flowing in the following week. Ruchika
> Bajaj, the mental health policy coordinator for the Coalition for Asian
> American Children and Families in New York, wrote, "The Kim sisters
> believe that strict households and associating failure with family
> dishonor is the best way to raise a successful child. Taking this
> position, they do a disservice to the Asian community by perpetuating
> the model minority myth that all Asians are successful and
> over-achievers. The results reported provide an image of success that
> is only skin deep. By stressing the model minority myth, we are placing
> undue academic, social and emotional burdens on youth and further
> supporting unrealistic stereotypes."
>
> Another passage from the Times interview read, "The authors themselves
> acknowledge that Asian career values can be hazardous to one's health
> if taken to an extreme degree, as in Japan, where pressures to excel in
> an exam-focused educational system have been linked with high dropout
> rates, social withdrawal and suicide.
>
> Jha says many Asian-American students don't feel like they have the
> freedom to tell parents what they really want to do in life, "So the
> students are performing but not necessarily in arenas that they enjoy."
>
> A grain of truth
>
> Indeed, when we yellow scribes get together at Asian American
> Journalism Association conferences, there is almost always a crack
> during some speech that goes like this: "I think it's clear why we are
> all here today. [Pause] Because we were no good at science and math."
>
> Sure, we all crack up because we see a kernel of truth in it, but the
> fact that a bunch of Asian-American journalists are meeting at all
> makes it clear that not all of us have gone the lucrative smarty-pants
> route. And that we--the disappointing losers who went into a low-paying
> profession like writing--can be reasonably happy too, even if our
> parents probably lie to their friends about what we do.
>
> But as the immigrant generations march on and greater acceptance of
> Asians-Americans in non-traditional fields grows, so may a greater
> acceptance of non-traditional Asian academic mediocrity.
>
> State test result day also happens to be report card day for Chicago
> Public Schools, a day that inspired terror in some of my Asian-American
> pals growing up. In my Asian-Hispanic household, however, it was never
> a big deal. When I get home tonight to look at the report card of my
> one-quarter Asian son who started 1st grade in CPS this year, I will
> applaud his good grades and discuss the bad ones. But I won't love him
> any less for them. As a half-Asian parent, sure I'd like my son to be a
> high academic achiever, but most of all I'd like him to be a kind and
> happy little guy.
>
> .

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223256 ]

Mo, 10 Juli 2006 07:06

jswatson

XXs4Eyes wrote:
> After all the info in that article, how can you seriously ask, "how
> could someone so talented, so lovely, not think life was worth living?"
>
> To live for what?
>
> The lovelier you are the harder it is to live in this turd-fest,
> shithole called mortal life.

Obviously if you stick your hand into the tiolet,
you're going to come up with a few turds now and then.

The trick in life is not to dwell to much on the floaters in the
tiolet.

Remember, its not "shit", it's "manure".

Isn't "manure" a much nicer sounding word?
(yes, I'm stealing from "Seinfeld" here ...)

Manure is what makes the world go round! :-)

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223337 ]

Mo, 10 Juli 2006 17:39

delcolja

tariq.1.rahim [at] spamgourmet.com wrote:
> archived forever, two articles about the beautiful author of 'rape of
> nanking' who shot herself in 2004. how could someone so talented, so
> lovely, not think life was worth living?

You're still going on about this?

J. Del Col

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223365 ]

Mo, 10 Juli 2006 22:11

anyone.santos

delcolja [at] mail.ab.edu wrote:
> tariq.1.rahim [at] spamgourmet.com wrote:
> > archived forever, two articles about the beautiful author of 'rape of
> > nanking' who shot herself in 2004. how could someone so talented, so
> > lovely, not think life was worth living?
>
>
> You're still going on about this?
>
> J. Del Col

If you read "The Rape of Naking" you would also want to kill yourself.
It is horrifically difficult to come to terms with the true evil of
men, men who under ordinary circumstances are good citizens. This is
exemplified in the brutal rapes and killings we are seeing in Iraq. We
think our MEN will behave, our fathers and brothers and husbands, we
believe they are civlilized, yet given the chance, a surprisingly
large portion will commit crimes against others, crimes which the human
mind cannot comprehend -- rape, torture, unimaginable brutality. Maybe
Iris was not able to process the things she learned, and could not
cope. Perfectly understandable. The only way to really deal with evil
of this sort is to creatively MOCK the torturing trash, and fight it
every step of the way, making it safe for women and children, and good
men, everywhere, including those in the Dominican Republic.

It's the tubby Tom Leykis and Rush Libaugh who represent the true evil
of the world, with their hate speech against women and others.

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223367 ]

Mo, 10 Juli 2006 22:34

ppp

On 10 Jul 2006 13:11:11 -0700, anyone.santos [at] gmail.com wrote:

>men who under ordinary circumstances are good citizens.

Huh??? Japanese soldiers were good citizens of China?

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223425 ]

Di, 11 Juli 2006 05:33

tariq.1.rahim

Chen wrote:
> When CIA repeates the liaer message, they believes that it will became
> fact. Iris Chang (was murdered) by US dead squard. Don't try to fool
> again, it won't work.
>

Why would the US death squads kill her? she had no journalistic dispute
with Washington.

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223505 ]

Di, 11 Juli 2006 12:59

XXs4Eyes

jswatson [at] yahoo.com wrote:
>
> The trick in life is not to dwell to much on the floaters in the
> tiolet.
>

no, the trick is to avoid believing that any one trick is gonna make
this mortal life something less than the true Hell it is. and since
that too is a trick, it is a trap.

we will suffer here no matter what tricks we use or what traps we
avoid.
if this is not already abundantly clear to you (and it's obviously not)
then you are either
having a nice day or pain-free day or simply haven't lived long enough.
my guess is the former.

http://www.lulu.com/newport

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223554 ]

Di, 11 Juli 2006 17:17

delcolja

anyone.santos [at] gmail.com wrote:
> delcolja [at] mail.ab.edu wrote:
> > tariq.1.rahim [at] spamgourmet.com wrote:
> > > archived forever, two articles about the beautiful author of 'rape of
> > > nanking' who shot herself in 2004. how could someone so talented, so
> > > lovely, not think life was worth living?
> >
> >
> > You're still going on about this?
> >
> > J. Del Col
>
> If you read "The Rape of Naking" you would also want to kill yourself.....

Bullshit. I've read the book and have not felt the slightest urge to
take a Brody.

I was responding to the OP's sudden revisiting of this topic as if it
were news. Chang's been dead for two years.

J. Del Col

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223619 ]

Di, 11 Juli 2006 20:55

anyone.santos

delcolja [at] mail.ab.edu wrote:
> anyone.santos [at] gmail.com wrote:
> > delcolja [at] mail.ab.edu wrote:
> > > tariq.1.rahim [at] spamgourmet.com wrote:
> > > > archived forever, two articles about the beautiful author of 'rape of
> > > > nanking' who shot herself in 2004. how could someone so talented, so
> > > > lovely, not think life was worth living?
> > >
> > >
> > > You're still going on about this?
> > >
> > > J. Del Col
> >
> > If you read "The Rape of Naking" you would also want to kill yourself.....
>
> Bullshit. I've read the book and have not felt the slightest urge to
> take a Brody.
>
> I was responding to the OP's sudden revisiting of this topic as if it
> were news. Chang's been dead for two years.
>
> J. Del Col

Guess we see things, feel things, differently, then.

Pity.

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223767 ]

Mi, 12 Juli 2006 15:35

delcolja

anyone.santos [at] gmail.com wrote:
>>
> Guess we see things, feel things, differently, then.

Not really, you're still alive.

OTOH, if you genuinely feel like shuffling off this mortal coil with
every account of human evil you read, you need a lot of help.

J. Del Col

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #223794 ]

Mi, 12 Juli 2006 18:37

Seperatist9

delcolja [at] mail.ab.edu wrote:
> anyone.santos [at] gmail.com wrote:
> >>
> > Guess we see things, feel things, differently, then.
>
> Not really, you're still alive.
>
> OTOH, if you genuinely feel like shuffling off this mortal coil with
> every account of human evil you read, you need a lot of help.
>
> J. Del Col

No, I dont' know where you got that idea.

I read the book, I read how she wrote, I read her interviews about the
subject and it was easy for me to see how she was affected.

I understand WHY she was depressed. I feel sad she could not convert
her feelings of rage and helplessness to a positive action. She was a
worthy woman. I only wish the rapist trash could feel shame, and take
it's own life. Like Yoko, she could have funded or volunteered with
organization that educates young men about rape. There are some
positive things in that area, where young college men are advocating
against rape, on behalf of women.

Never works that way, though, does it? I understand depression.

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #224085 ]

Mi, 12 Juli 2006 23:45

XXs4Eyes

delcolja [at] mail.ab.edu wrote:
> anyone.santos [at] gmail.com wrote:
> >>
> > Guess we see things, feel things, differently, then.
>
> Not really, you're still alive.
>
> OTOH, if you genuinely feel like shuffling off this mortal coil with
> every account of human evil you read, you need a lot of help.
>
> J. Del Col

And what kind of help would that be? And from whom & where?
If you see someone needs help then are you not morally obligated to
provide it?
Or are you just pushed from within to kick them in the teeth with
smart-ass comments like "you need a lot of help". Pretty similar to how
jerk-offs use the expression "get a life".

Did you really believe you were offering your fellow human important
advice by telling him/her "you need a lot of help"? No indeed. You were
being a fucken turd and the world is full of turds like you and
therefore who could blame anyone for wanting to shuffle off this mortal
coil?

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #224104 ]

Do, 13 Juli 2006 00:35

saditha

XXs4Eyes wrote:
> delcolja [at] mail.ab.edu wrote:
> > anyone.santos [at] gmail.com wrote:
> > >>
> > > Guess we see things, feel things, differently, then.
> >
> > Not really, you're still alive.
> >
> > OTOH, if you genuinely feel like shuffling off this mortal coil with
> > every account of human evil you read, you need a lot of help.
> >
> > J. Del Col
>
> And what kind of help would that be? And from whom & where?
> If you see someone needs help then are you not morally obligated to
> provide it?
> Or are you just pushed from within to kick them in the teeth with
> smart-ass comments like "you need a lot of help". Pretty similar to how
> jerk-offs use the expression "get a life".
>
> Did you really believe you were offering your fellow human important
> advice by telling him/her "you need a lot of help"? No indeed. You were
> being a fucken turd and the world is full of turds like you and
> therefore who could blame anyone for wanting to shuffle off this mortal
> coil?
Didn't matter, he misread it, completely.

LIke you.

And I'd tell YOU to fuck off, do0d.

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #224110 ]

Do, 13 Juli 2006 00:53

XXs4Eyes

variousvenues [at] yahoo.com wrote:

> Didn't matter, he misread it, completely.
>
> LIke you.
>
> And I'd tell YOU to fuck off, do0d.

You would, would you?
Well then why don't you, hotshot?

And if you inflate your balls big enough to do so, what will it mean?
Fucking off means nothing, sweetheart---just like your stinky, little,
pathetic existence.

(kiss)

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #224139 ]

Do, 13 Juli 2006 04:21

theresa

Seperatist9 [at] aol.com wrote:
>
> delcolja [at] mail.ab.edu wrote:
> > anyone.santos [at] gmail.com wrote:
> > >>
> > > Guess we see things, feel things, differently, then.
> >
> > Not really, you're still alive.
> >
> > OTOH, if you genuinely feel like shuffling off this mortal coil with
> > every account of human evil you read, you need a lot of help.
> >
> > J. Del Col
>
> No, I dont' know where you got that idea.
>
> I read the book, I read how she wrote, I read her interviews about the
> subject and it was easy for me to see how she was affected.
>
> I understand WHY she was depressed. I feel sad she could not convert
> her feelings of rage and helplessness to a positive action. She was a
> worthy woman. I only wish the rapist trash could feel shame, and take
> it's own life. Like Yoko, she could have funded or volunteered with
> organization that educates young men about rape. There are some
> positive things in that area, where young college men are advocating
> against rape, on behalf of women.
>
> Never works that way, though, does it? I understand depression.

From some of the articles published by her friends, it sounded
as if she had problems before she wrote her book. From their
descriptions, her achievements all seemed to bloom from manic
stages, and then she'd have a depression. She generally pulled
herself out of it (all such phases end) and then another triumph
would reassure her friends that Iris had only "a lapse." But
there have been some questions about medications for such
problems, and if the doses are tailored mainly for Caucasians --
she wasn't happy with the results of her prescriptions and I
understand she stopped taking her pills.

Then there are the issues of Asian American achievement and
parental pressure, shame about the natural blueness that can
arise from the stress of always having to win, and finally, the
harrowing subject matter she chose to report. But I think the
latter was more the proverbial straw that broke Iris, and so
many kids like her.

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #224826 ]

Do, 13 Juli 2006 15:12

delcolja

XXs4Eyes wrote:
> . You were
> being a fucken turd and the world is full of turds like you and
> therefore who could blame anyone for wanting to shuffle off this mortal
> coil?

Don't let me stop you.

J. Del Col

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #224858 ]

Do, 13 Juli 2006 16:27

Notifier Deamon

Post removed (X-No-Archive: yes)

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #224883 ]

Do, 13 Juli 2006 18:08

tariq.1.rahim

here's a tough article to dig up. It appeared in the Fort Worth
newspaper and lexis-nexis did not archive it. i guess the Star-Telegram
is not part of nexis's collection service. let it be archived forever.
since i absolutely refuse to pay for web content, I had to use
waybackmachine to score this sad text by someone who knew iris:

Posted on Mon, Nov. 15, 2004

Iris Chang's death robs the world of a courageous genius

By Jeff Guinn

Star-Telegram Books Editor

At 36, my friend Iris Chang was acknowledged as one of America's best
young historians. She had written three books, including the
controversial The Rape of Nanking, a national bestseller in 1999. She
had a husband and a 2-year-old son. She was brilliant, breathtakingly
beautiful and young enough to have her best years ahead as a human
being and as a writer. She apparently killed herself last Tuesday
morning with a gunshot to the head.

Iris' death is a terrible loss -- to her family most of all, but also
to those who want and need to know about some of the most inconvenient
parts of history, the iniquities and outright atrocities that too often
are deliberately forgotten. Fourteen months ago in Fort Worth, she
alternately charmed and shocked an audience at Scott Theatre as she
explained why she chose to write about massacres (Nanking) and
long-term, ongoing racial discrimination (The Chinese in America).

"I try to tell the stories that many people will neglect or ignore,"
Iris said. "I've always felt that in every writer there is something
that dictates the theme of what she writes. For me, that's injustice."

She told those stories effectively. Shortly before his own death, the
author Stephen Ambrose called Iris "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."

Because her books generated so much controversy, it was inevitable she
would have detractors, too. Since The Rape of Nanking's publication,
some have claimed it was written as anti-Japanese propaganda or that
its description of atrocities committed during the city's occupation in
1937 were exaggerated. Yet she never backed down. Politely, firmly, she
defended her research and conclusions. On one occasion, she appeared on
The News Hour With Jim Lehrer with the Japanese ambassador to the
United States and stated that the Japanese government had never
apologized for its country's crimes in Nanking. The ambassador
responded that perhaps there had been "unfortunate incidents." Iris'
reply was, " 'Unfortunate incidents'? Did you hear an apology? I
didn't."

Yet there was an immense softness to her as well, a genuine empathy for
others. If she felt sweeping indignation for the actions of some, she
felt equally intense pain for the suffering of victims, and I believe
this is what eventually caused her to take her own life. We talked
about this quite often, a few times in person, more often by phone or
e-mail. She would discuss her most recent research efforts -- lately,
she was preparing a book on Japanese mistreatment of war prisoners in
the Bataan Peninsula -- and she never seemed quite able to adopt a
scholar's emotional distance from her subjects. Apparently, at some
point a few months ago on a research trip, the agony she felt for all
those whose sufferings she chronicled finally caught up with her. She
returned home to California, was treated for depression and never
really recovered. Her suicide note asked that she be remembered as she
was before her illness.

Iris Chang was a genius, the most brilliant intellect I have ever
encountered. The advantage of genius is the ability to know and feel
things to a greater degree than everyone else. But that's the penalty
of genius, too. You lose the ability to compartmentalize, to put
harmful things out of your mind, at least for a little while. I'm
certain Iris was finally overwhelmed by the sadness she couldn't stop
feeling for victims whose stories she didn't want forgotten.

Because of her, they won't be.

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #224919 ]

Do, 13 Juli 2006 20:45

XXs4Eyes

delcolja [at] mail.ab.edu wrote:
> XXs4Eyes wrote:
> > . You were
> > being a fucken turd and the world is full of turds like you and
> > therefore who could blame anyone for wanting to shuffle off this mortal
> > coil?
>
> Don't let me stop you.
>
> J. Del Col

I won't, you good-hearted, friendly human being.

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #225013 ]

Fr, 14 Juli 2006 03:41

theresa

tariq.1.rahim [at] spamgourmet.com wrote:
>
> x-no-archive: yes
>
> theresa wrote:
>
> > From some of the articles published by her friends, it sounded
> > as if she had problems before she wrote her book. From their
> > descriptions, her achievements all seemed to bloom from manic
> > stages, and then she'd have a depression. She generally pulled
> > herself out of it (all such phases end) and then another triumph
> > would reassure her friends that Iris had only "a lapse." But
> > there have been some questions about medications for such
> > problems, and if the doses are tailored mainly for Caucasians --
> > she wasn't happy with the results of her prescriptions and I
> > understand she stopped taking her pills.
> >
> > Then there are the issues of Asian American achievement and
> > parental pressure, shame about the natural blueness that can
> > arise from the stress of always having to win, and finally, the
> > harrowing subject matter she chose to report. But I think the
> > latter was more the proverbial straw that broke Iris, and so
> > many kids like her.
>
> You write with such understanding. Are you of East Asian descent?

I'm Mexican-American, but I grew up with Asian-Americans (in
fact, I owe my existence to the Chinese lady who decided to
match-make my parents, as such ladies like to do) and so have
seen first hand the high levels of pressure Asian kids are often
forced to endure. Asian-Americans have been my best friends and
worst enemies, mainly because of that pressure placed on them to
achieve. Depending on individual character, in extreme cases
the competitiveness can be either spewed brutally out or turned
tragically in, the latter I believe occurred with Iris. Add to
this the havoc played by her medications -- I would like to see
more research on not only the physical but cultural effects
taking psychiatric drugs cause in the various races and
ethnicities -- and the traumatic stories she was in the midst of
collecting from American soldiers imprisoned by the Japanese,
Iris's shame seemed to be too much for her to continue to
endure.

Re: long articles about the late (suicide) author Iris Chang [message #227864 ]

Fr, 21 Juli 2006 01:19

Kater Moggin

delcolja [at] mail.ab.edu:

> anyone.santos [at] gmail.com wrote:

> > Guess we see things, feel things, differently, then.

> Not really, you're still alive. OTOH, if you genuinely feel like
> shuffling off this mortal coil with every account of human evil you
> read, you need a lot of help.

O God, your only jig-maker. What should a man do
but be merry? for, look you, how cheerfully my
mother looks, and my father died within's two hours.

-- Moggin

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