Iris Chang (1968-2004)
Asian American author of three books including Thread of a Silkworm, a biography of Qian Xuesen, The Chinese in America, and the Rape of Nanking, which garnered her worldwide fame and established her as a human rights activist. Her detailed description of the atrocities and characterization of the massacre as a holocaust brought on the wrath of Japanese rightists and denialists. She committed suicide in 2004 at age 36. At the time of her suicide she was working on a book on the Bataan Death March.
It was shocking to hear that Iris Chang had committed suicide at the age of 36. I heard the news on NPR while driving to work. I could not believe that someone so accomplished would have committed such an act.
I had read Iris Chang’s book Thread of the Silkworm extensively in trying to write the first draft of Geomancer which centered on a Chinese scientist like Qian Xuesen (it wasn’t him) and his deportation. It turned out to be a sojourner story about composite Chinese scientists of the time, some of whom had returned to develop the atom bomb. I had contacted the National Archives to get the FBI files on Qian and remember the archivist telling me that another woman had asked for Qian’s files a couple of years ago.
Iris Chang authored three books. Although Thread of the Silkworm was critically applauded, it was the Rape of Nanking that put her on the New York Times bestseller’s list for weeks. In researching the book, she made a major breakthrough in finding the diary of John Rabe, a Nazi who was an eyewitness to the massacre. I remember her appearance on Nightline to talk about it. She was so confident and articulate for someone who was so young.
In the summer of 2012, I was in the San Francisco public library when I happened upon the 2011 memoir entitled The Woman Who Could Not Forget written by Iris Chang’s mother Ying-Ying Chang. To me, the book was wrenchingly sad, about a mother trying to make sense of probably the greatest loss one could endure.
Then it struck me that Iris had to be in the play. There was already a documentary on Iris Chang that was created by a Canadian production company in 2007 called Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking. The film drew a parallel between Iris and Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary who turned the school she ran in Nanjing into a sanctuary for thousands of Chinese women and girls from the Japanese. Vautrin kept a detailed diary (Minnie Vautrin’s Diary 1937-1940) of what happened to the women and girls of Nanking. She suffered a nervous breakdown and returned to the US for medical help. A year after her return, Vautrin committed suicide. The film showed Iris haunted by the horror of the survivor testimonials, unable to sleep or let go.
The research brought me to reading many accounts of women survivors of the atrocities including Vautrin’s diary and the testimony of the Chinese women who were captured to be “comfort” women of the Japanese army. Many of these women had passed already, often in the midst of trying to get justice.
It was with this research that I wrote Iris Chang into the play.
The summer after the MSG workshop reading of the play, I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara to look at Iris’ papers. According to her mother’s memoir, just before her death, Iris had meticulously arranged for all her papers to be sent to UCSB and Stanford, a deliberate act of preparation.
Iris’ files on Qian were at UCSB while her files on Rape of Nanking were at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. I had never been through papers before but it seemed strange that she had also included many family photo albums.
https://www.library.ucsb.edu/special-collections/cema/chang
Her UCSB papers turned out to be a treasure trove of information on Qian including transcripts of interviews with his colleagues prior to his elevation to National Treasure. She had worked hard to write that book, doing extensive research including traveling to China with very little money. The collection also included personal photo albums that had just passed their sequester period. It was peculiar to see these very personal early photographs of her.
You would think that if there was one piece of commemorative artwork in the Hoover Institute reading room, it would be of Herbert Hoover, for which the institute is named. It was the bust of Iris Chang pictured above. I had the sense that she was watching me as I pored over her papers. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt4b69q94w/entire_text/
The papers showed that a number of people had supported her writing by giving her their research. From that set of papers, you get a sense of how she was hounded by Japanese rightists and called out by critics who were taken aback by the fame and attention she attracted, the sensationalism of her claims and who called for more careful research of the subject. Certainly there was vitriol in many of the attacks. She must have been very confident to stand up to all that.
Included in the papers was a talk she had written about how she became a New York Times bestseller. She obviously kept everything.