More on Iris Chang

As mentioned in the backblogs by Naomi Hirahara, the San Francisco Chronicle has further details on the tragic suicide of Iris Chang, who appears to have been deeply affected by her current project looking at current US prisoners of war:

Ignatius Ding, an activist who worked with Chang for several years in seeking to have Japan acknowledge and apology for atrocities it committed during World War II, said Chang's current project videotaping the former U.S. prisoners of war had been emotionally taxing for her.

"She was doing research recently in Kentucky and ran into some problem," he said. "She got really upset, and she flew home." Chang lived in San Jose with her husband, Brett Douglas.

Ding, who heads the Cupertino-based Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, said he did not know what kind of problem Chang might have encountered or whether it was a factor in her death.

He noted that she "took things to heart" and usually became emotionally involved in the tragic stories she wrote about.

Just reading further details saddens me more. It sounds like the world needed more women like her, not fewer.

Comments

[Naomi]

To get a taste of the treacherous waters Iris was navigating through, look at some of the amazon.com comments (more than 500!) for The Rape of Nanking. While the numbers of deaths and other statistical details can be debated ad nauseam, there is no doubt (at least to me) that the genocide occurred in Nanjing. I know that Mo Hayder has tackled the same topic in her mystery Tokyo. (I have yet to read it.) I wonder if she'll have better luck in getting her book translated in Japan. In this case nonfiction may be more powerful (and definitely more threatening) than fiction.

[Alina Adams]

The Rape of Nanking was horrible. Genocide is horrible. But there was nothing Iris Chang could do about that. Her primary responsibility was not to the people she was researching, but to her two year old son.

The "world" may have needed more historians like her, but her son needed a mother, first.

And yes, this is the same Alina Adams who started off a firestorm of discussions in August on this very site about how motherhood was being overexalted in present day literature. I don't believe being a mother is anything heroic, but I do believe that if you chose to have a child, your primary responsibility is to them. And while I am deeply sympathetic to the mentally ill, as Ms. Chang clearly seems to have been, I have no use for romanticizing what she did. You either believe that she had no control over what happened to her, and thus her death was no different than a death from cancer or any other disease, or you believe that she was "driven to it" by her passion or her work or other "artistic" reasons, in which case, she betrayed her family. And, in that case, the world most definitely does not need more women like her.

[Naomi]

Alina:

You've brought up a good point: what happens when our sense of social responsibility impacts our personal responsibility? I have no definitive answers. But what if someone is so outraged about an injustice and responds accordingly, putting the family at risk?

Of course, in the case of Iris Chang, we are talking about the fragile line of mental health. Many a passion has driven a person to the edge. I don't think how she ended her life was heroic, but certainly her contributions to bringing a tragedy to light was. Would she have killed herself if she hadn't been doing this kind of work? Would her son still have a mother if she slowed down and took more time to address her mental health issues? The same could be asked in numerous other cases. There is a lesson here regarding living a balanced life, but for those struggling with depression, it may not be easily grasped.

I don't think that that a writer can singlehandedly stop genocide, but I do think Iris's work has forced the Japanese to put the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities into their textbooks.

[David Montgomery]

Suicide is sad particularly because it's generally the result of clinical depression. It's such a shame because it could nearly always be prevented if the person would only seek treatment. I feel deeply for her children.

[Elaine Flinn]

Reading about Iris Chang had much resonance for me. Not that I've ever suffered from depression, or even contemplated suicide, but some years ago I embarked on a research project for a family saga - ala Robert S. Elegant - encompassing the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March up to the end of World War II. By the time I'd completed my research and interviews, and had written much of the book, my sense of outrage was becoming difficult to overcome. A man that I had inteviewed advised me to put the book away. The atrocities of both events were too great, he'd said, for public consumption. It's still in a box. I only wish someone had said the same to Ms. Chang.

[Rebecca]

IS the Rape of Nanking in Japanese textbooks nowadays? I spent a summer in Japan in 1993, and I recall a case that got a lot of attention when I was there. A local history teacher had sued the Mombusho (Ministry of Culture, that approves all textbooks) in the mid-sixties because they had (at that time, 30 years earlier) insisted on excising the word "invasion" to describe Japan's activities in Manchuria in the thirties and forties. (We're not even talking loaded terms like "rape" or "genocide." "Invasion" for crying out loud.) The case dragged through the Japanese courts for nearly 30 odd years and in the summer of 1993 the Japanese high court passed a verdict RULING AGAINST THE TEACHER AND IN FAVOR OF THE MINISTRY'S DECISION TO NOT USE THE WORD INVASION. A friend teaching in Japan four years ago (when the movie "Pearl Harbor" was released) noted that her students tended to be very fuzzy on the details of WWII. So, quite frankly, how effective would a Chinese American woman whose work "drew criticism from scholars on Japan" be? And does pitching her work to a mostly American or Chinese audience really make her heroic? And how is it "socially responsible" to kill yourself, thus making certain that you can't even bear witness to the tragedies of the past, much less do anything to redress the wrongs of the present?

Just my way of saying that I'm with Alina on this one again, as with the firestorm on mommy-lit.

[sailormars]

I just read about Chang's death today and it was truly a shocker to me. As a person who was born and raised in Hong Kong, I was already quite familiar with the history about the Nanking massacre during WW2 before Chang's book came out. Of course the Japan government still denies the truth about its own shameful past till this day and it continually misleads its newer generations about the role their country played during WW2 and the kind of diabolic acts of crime their troops committed throughout Asia and all over the world in that period of time.

When Chang's "Rape of Nanking" came out, I was glad to see that there is an author/historian in this side of the world who cared enough about the subject matter and had the courage to write a book about it. That book has certainly opened a window of this regrettable past to many of its Western readers. Just for this reason alone, Chang should be highly praised.

When I see Chang's face in a picture now, I see a woman who is filled with vitality, strength and wisdom. It is really unfortunate that she decided to give up her life in this way. I believe she deserves much better than that. The saying that "every person has their own stories in life" truly echoes in my heart now.

God bless you Iris Chang, I hope that you can find peace and happiness from our heavenly Father now.