Why do people say she was an *ultra* liberal? Yeah, she stook up for Chinese American causes, but I never read anything that suggested she was a Michael Moore type of person. No one who praised Anne Applebaum's "Gulag" could possibly be an ultra leftist, considering the denial of Communist atrocities was a prerequisite to the "Jean Paul Sartre" mindset.
Here's her initial comments after 911, published 9-16-01 in the SF Chronicle:
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IRIS CHANG, AUTHOR OF "THE RAPE OF NANKING," SAN JOSE
I was in bed suffering from a mild case of the flu, which I'd gotten after speaking at a conference last week in San Francisco called "50 Years of Denial: Japan and her Wartime Responsibilities." My husband woke me with the news. It turns out that my uncle had walked through the WTC a minute before it collapsed! It was very scary.
Strangely, it made me feel sicker. I cried, got a terrible headache, but eventually started calling friends in New York, who thankfully are all OK. Just that day I had been planning to write an open letter to Colin Powell, after hearing him speak on TV of wartime issues, about the death toll in the Japanese war of aggression and the peace treaty of 1951. I was so angry.
After this, I think certainly that airport security will be tightened. And I think if the U.S. decides to bomb another country, it will be done with a sense of moral righteousness, which concerns me. I also think this will give the government the opportunity to erode our rights. They've been talking about the need for us to curtail individual rights for the greater security of the country, and that chills me to the bone.
They called this an act of war. But this is not war; it is terrorism. The hawkish elements of our government want to retaliate, but we should act prudently, so that the world knows that we do not also perform acts of terrorism. In my experience, the most dangerous threat to democracy is too much power in the hands of an elite few.