Posted on 03/26/2005 7:53:23 AM PST by Valin
A young historian's book on the 1937 atrocity unleashed a tide of repressed anguish and international recriminations that continue even after her suicide
THOSE who knew Iris Chang used to worry about how she could cope with the gloom of her chosen work. But when they visited the house in California that she shared with her husband and saw him playing with their two-year-old son by the swimming pool in the backyard, they were reassured.
The 36-year-old historian would sip lemonade with her friends at a Chinese café called the Tea House and, for a while, the torrent of terror that she frequently invited into her life would seem far away.
Were it not for the crinkled maps of China, the pictures of mass graves and the two desperately overstuffed Rolodexes on her desk, Chang might have been just another former high school homecoming queen from the aptly named Sunnyvale. But she had become one of the foremost young historians of her generation after publishing, seven years ago, a bestselling account of the Rape of Nanking, one of the worst episodes of human cruelty in recent history.
Her book brought international acclaim and controversy, and many spoke of a stellar future. It was not to be. In November she killed herself, no longer able to bear the weight of horrors from seven decades ago.
The Rape of Nanking in 1937 began with the march of invading Japanese soldiers up the Yangtse River. They occupied the Chinese capital of the time and soon conquest was followed by bloodlust. Soldiers slaughtered between 100,000 and 300,000 civilians sheltering in a few city blocks. Slowly.
Over a six-week period, up to 80,000 women were raped. But it wasn’t so much the sheer numbers as the details that shock — fathers forced at gunpoint to rape daughters, stakes driven through vaginas, women nailed to trees, tied-up prisoners used for bayonet practice, breasts sliced off the living, speed decapitation contests.
During the war the massacre was well known, but both Tokyo and Beijing preferred not to mention it over the four decades that followed.
Iris Chang was pitched into this maelstrom of history as a child when her immigrant parents, who had escaped from wartime China to the US, told their daughter how the Japanese “sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths”. In the introduction to her book she wrote: “Throughout my childhood [the massacre] remained buried in the back of my mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil.”
When, at 27, she read one of the few accounts of the atrocity still circulating in the West, she sensed a mission in life. “I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it.”
Chang soon made her first trip to China and sought out Sun Zhaiwei, a history professor in Nanjing, as Nanking is known today. “I provided her with an assistant and fixed appointments with some of the survivors,” he says. Chang was given free lodgings and unlimited access to archives on the tree-lined campus near where the Japanese breached the old city wall before beginning their slaughter.
When the book based on her research — The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II — was published two years later, it sold more than half a million copies and Chang became an instant celebrity in America. Hillary Clinton invited her to the White House and Stephen Ambrose, the doyen of US historians, described her as “maybe the best young historian we’ve got”.
She was also widely praised for the emotion and commitment she brought to her work. On book tours the slim, ponytailed author spoke with an intensity that few listeners expected. Many broke down by her side, feeling compelled to recount their own tales of horror even if these were unrelated to her subject.
Orphans, rape victims and Holocaust survivors all wanted to bare their souls to her, finally relieving themselves of agonies sometimes decades old. They felt encouraged by the passion that she brought to the sort of grievances few of them could tackle on their own.
Chang cried when they cried. She was enraged even when they no longer were. It was unthinkable for her just to pass the paper tissues and wait until people had composed themselves again. Chang invited memories of atrocity and abuse with a seemingly limitless appetite.
Dan Rosen, who heard Chang at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, said: “As with many speaking programmes there, it was 50 per cent elderly Jews, many of them war survivors, in the audience. I was overwhelmed by the warmth and immediacy with which they embraced and applauded Chang. It was an instance of bearing witness, of never forgetting, which is holy to the Jewish community. They related to her like a daughter, and vice versa.”
But her success had its price. The book became a touchstone of renewed rivalry between Japan and China. Both nations had been content to allow the massacre to fade into the past, but in the 1990s China found itself in the ascendant and a long-suppressed sense of outrage burst out. Anti-Japanese museums sprang up across the country. Japanese nationalists responded by attacking the book and its author. Death threats were issued.
Nobukatsu Fujioka, a right-wing commentator, campaigned to prevent publication of her book in Japan by citing a list of errors. He also published a book denouncing Chang as a propagandist funded by Japan-haters. The two volumes are still on prominent display in his Tokyo office.
“The pressure on her from Tokyo was unbearable,” says Yang Xiaming, one of Chang’s research assistants in Nanjing. “She was afraid of travelling to Japan because she feared for her life.”
But the Japanese attacks were the easy part. With her newfound fame, Chang felt compelled to visit Chinese communities around the globe to hear more horror stories of Japanese occupation, forced prostitution in so-called “comfort houses” and nerve gas experiments on prisoners in Manchuria. After these encounters with people who would often approach her in tears, she felt utterly drained even hours later. Friends said that she was beginning to look frail, and she admitted to them that her hair was coming out. The more of others’ suffering she absorbed, the more her old energy and intensity drained away. Each horror story seemed to pull her down a little farther.
At home in California Chang worked to exhaustion, often until she collapsed in her study. When travelling she became forgetful and irritable. Her mind was preoccupied with earlier decades and haunted by gruesome images. Flashbacks of Chinese photographs that she had uncovered in archives tortured her.
In the months before her death, Chang was researching a new book on Japanese wartime atrocities. Despite feeling unwell, she flew to Kentucky to interview survivors of the Bataan Death March. They recounted to her how thousands of American PoWs were killed during the occupation of the Philippines, some forced to bury their best friend alive or, if they refused, for both of them to be buried alive by a third friend, with the chain continuing until the Japanese soldiers found a PoW who complied.
Eventually Chang broke down and needed to be treated in hospital. Her husband, computer scientist Brett Douglas, was not surprised. “The accumulation of hearing those stories year after year may have led to her depression,” he says.
Douglas sent their two young children to live with their grandparents, and when Chang left hospital he tried to watch her movements. He was worried by her obsessive talk about how people would remember her. She was calling friends one by one in what seemed like a series of goodbyes.
On November 6 she spoke to Paula Kamen, whom she knew from university, and told her that she was struggling to deal with the magnitude of the misery she had uncovered, listened to and written about. She begged to be remembered as lively and confident. It was the last conversation they would have. Two days later, Chang was even more despondent than she had previously been. Her husband tried to calm her down but eventually fell asleep.
At some point in the night, Chang got into her white 1999 Oldsmobile, taking with her a six-round pistol that she had bought from an antique weapons dealer to defend herself from attackers. She drove to a country road, loaded the pistol with black powder and lead balls, aimed it at her head and fired. She was found a few hours later, along with a farewell note to her family.
Yet even in death Chang was not rid of the controversy. In recent memorial services across China, historians have blamed intense hostility from Japan for her death. The People’s Daily in Beijing hailed Chang as a “warrior full of justice” and a “dart thrown against the Japanese rightists”. In April the massacre museum in Nanjing will add a statue of Chang to its commemorative collection, in effect giving her the status of a massacre victim, with a finger pointed firmly across the Sea of Japan. The San Francisco Chronicle seemed to concur: “Many wonder if the gentle, sympathetic young woman was the massacre’s latest victim.”
Meanwhile, Japanese right-wingers interpreted her suicide as belated support for their contention that the massacre never happened. “By the end she must have known that her arguments were without merit. We exposed the lies in her book,” said Fujioka.
In Nanjing, Professor Sun Zhaiwei says that being an historian can be “torture of the mind”.
“Nuclear scientists wear protective clothing and have their health checked by doctors. Perhaps we historians of the extreme need similar measures. Yet for now we have to take care of ourselves.
“Maybe that was Iris’s problem — she cared for the dead but failed to take care of herself.”
As long as it is non-violent, there's no problem. But there's a thin line that separates violence from non-violence when the adrenaline is flowing. When an individual is in a mob, they can get carried away and do things that are out of character. After all, everyone else is doing it. It must be OK.
Underneath the image of modern mankind, there's still an animalistic nature.
At the moment they are portraying the good Japanese where people indulge in the arts and industry.
During the 30s and 40s they were portraying the bad Japanese where people indulge in war and destruction.
Although many societies have the capability of doing this, the Japanese do it more abruptly. The Chinese, in contrast, take much longer and tend to let the two phases overlap.
They all sound equally evil to me. Stalin killed more Jews than Hitler did, many people don't know that, because liberals for years did not want to know about "Uncle Joe".
I agree with wtc911; the invasion and consequent murder of Poles is no big secret--or is it that a majority of people on FR read more than your average liberal DUer?
Been there and know this to be true.
They were early 20th century japs - xenophobic and brutal. Read up sometime on their subsequent atrocities (Bataan, prison camps, so forth). There were many who thought that dropping only two A-bombs on them was a thousand times too few.
They turn-out great animé today, but that's about all they're good for. Iris' books are awesome (well, I've only read 'Rape' and 'Chinese in America') and it's a shame she's not still with us to do more...
Even he said that he can only teach the class for two or three straight semesters before having to take one off from the subject as it gets even to him after a while. Obviously this woman was not able to handle what she was researching and it finally got to her. Either she should have stopped before it reached a point where she totally lost it or she never should have started researching such a topic.
Studying the evil side of human nature is not something many people can do and anyone who plans to do so should seriously examine themselves before proceeding.
Stalin killed ALL groups, intellectuals, skilled workers, farmers, every nationality and religion. EVERY group of Russian felt the crush of his death squads. Russia is a boneyard.
Liberals didn't want to know about Stalin and neither did ANYone because he and the USSR switched sides right after WWII began. Stalin DID enter the war with Hitler....then changed sides. How evil and trustworthy is that?
The USSR did grab half of Germany though and punished them worse than any other country. Parts of east Germany were STILL in rubble decades after the war was over. Imagine, a Germany with rubble after 50 years.
The Germany haters on this site just won't admit to the devastation of what the USSR did to East Gernany. Re-unification was good for the German people, especially after being a USSR satellite for so long, but the cost was/is friggin' unbelievable. The eastern sectors will take generations to catch up -- and most of that price will come off the backs of the western half.
I think you are both right, but we don't see the Polish holocaust on T.V. and in movies, in documentaries, memorials, tributes, parks, statues, books, magazines and so on, several times a year, every year, decade after decade. We didn't get it taught to us in history every year. The Poles didn't get restitution from Germany that they deserved.
Poles remember. I wasn't taught about their holocaust in high school or college history classes, just about the invasion, but I read about it when I got older and took more in-depth history classes. (I was a history minor in college.)
The Axis powers were evil. I think Italy got a pass on all the revenge because their military folded so early. That shouldn't excuse them.
The Russians got a pass because they switched sides so early.
The Japanese got a pass because 1. the holocausts they wrecked on the world was on Asians and who cared and 2. it became p.c. to pay more attention to the incarcerated Japanese here (Each person got $20,000 and an offical apology from America.) and simply forget Tojo and the Imperial ambitions of Japan.
That left the BIG bogeyman -- Hitler and all the Germans, for all the future too. There are still nazi hunters around, even those who were in charge have been dead for a long time.
This will all pass and be forgotten in the distant future. It would be interesting to see America and Europe 500 years from now.
This will all pass and be forgotten in the distant future. It would be interesting to see America and Europe 500 years from now.
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It will indeed--it is happening already. In France, they have a hard time students about the Holocaust of Jews because the islamic students either support Hitler or deny the occurence, and disrupt the class. If they can't teach about the Holocaust that gets, I guess you would call it the most press, how on earth will you get them to sit still for all the other mass murders perpetuated by tyrants and despots?
If America continues to become islamicized the way Europe is, history will become myth. And that will be the end of us as a nation.
I sure don't. Mankind is fallen and full of sin. If Survivor wasn't so rigged, people would be killing eachother. We're all one step away from savagery.
History won't be any more of a myth than it already is.
The victors write history. They always have; they always will.
Muslim students, both Arab and non-Arab (75% of all Muslims are NOT Arabs.), hear about the holocausts in their own history and there were plenty. They still wax poetic about the great battles, wars and conquests of the Crusades, Genghis Khan and Akhbar the Great.
There are a billion Muslims on the planet. The key to keeping Muslims in their own countries is to make those countries more acceptable for them to STAY in. I would say exactly the same about legal/illegal immigration to this country -- make their homelands better so they don't emigrate -- and we get to stay non-Muslim.
She was attracted to Nanking like a moth to a flame. She came too close
Thank you, Valin.
=== actually there is A LOT more to the story and a reason why it is not taught in the US. The US had a fleet of ships in the area and marines who could have stopped this.
Yeah right.
The US collected Japanese war criminals like posies after the war and brought them over here to become esteemed members of the NIH, speak to our military in closed door conferences and even found their own million-dollar deathist blood broker organizations.
With all the attention focused on a handful of Nazi bureaucrat war criminals (the real demons of the piece and the Pink Triangle Boys safely paperclipped into the heart of our scientific and educational establishment), no one was the wiser about demons like Naito, Kitano and Ishii.
=== It's one of the forgotten Holocausts, really.
More like "verboten" holocausts.
Only the one gets capitalized, after all. Pay attention.
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