I read it yesterday from New York Times:
U.S. Author of 'Rape of Nanking' Commits Suicide
By REUTERS
Published: November 11, 2004
Filed at 2:10 p.m. ET
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The author of ``the Rape of Nanking,'' an acclaimed
history of Japanese brutality against China in the 1930s, has committed suicide,
officials said on Thursday.
Iris Chang, 36, published ``The Rape of Nanking,'' a graphic account of the
1937 Japanese Army invasion of China. After it appeared in 1997, the book
helped prompt Japan to reexamine this dark history.
Police found her body in a car on a road south of San Francisco and said she
died from a single bullet to the head. Her husband reported her missing on
Monday and police identified the body on Tuesday morning, said Terrance Helm of the
Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department.
``Our detectives determined it was a suicide,'' he said.
Her agent, Susan Rabiner, said Chang had suffered from ``classical clinical
depression'' and had been hospitalized earlier this year. She said Chang left
a note to her family asking that she be remembered as she was before her
illness.
The release of her best-selling book came on the 60th anniversary of the
Japanese capture of the Chinese capital of Nanking. She wrote graphically of
the result in a book her agent said sold about half a million copies.
``An estimated 20,000-80,000 Chinese women were raped,'' Chang wrote. ``Many
soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail
them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters and sons their
mothers as other family members watched.''
``Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs and the roasting
of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced.''
Japan has been slow to acknowledge the scale of the atrocities, and her account
sparked anger from conservative Japanese. In 1998 Japan's ambassador to the
United States created a diplomatic stir by calling Chang's book misleading.
Her book was never published in Japan although it was translated into a number
of foreign languages. ``I think the right-wing assaults on the Japanese publish
ing houses have sent a chill across the entire industry,'' she told Reuters in
2001.
Chang spent two years working on the book when she was in her late 20s,
interviewing aged survivors in China. The effort gave her an unusually high
profile for a young historian, and her Web site lists more than two dozen
public appearances for the period between March and May this year.
``A lot of people, when Iris would tour and talk about the Rape of Nanking,
would come to her with their stories of unhappiness, atrocities, violence, on
any side,'' said Wendy Wolf, one of her editors at Viking Penguin. ``It sort of
opened minds to talking and sharing their own experiences.''
Her agent Rabiner said she was working most recently on a book about U.S.
forces who fought on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines in World War II.
Born in Princeton, New Jersey, to Chinese immigrant parents, Chang grew up in
Illinois and graduated from the University of Illinois in 1989. She worked for
the Associated Press wire service and the Chicago Tribune before becoming an
historian full time. She lived in Sunnyvale, California.
Her most recent book was ``The Chinese in America: A Narrative History.'' She
is survived by her husband and two-year old son.
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