Watch Out

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.”