Iris Chang, the best-selling author of "The Rape of Nanking" and one of the nation's leading young historians and a human rights activist who became a role model for young American students of Chinese descent, has died. She was 36.
Chang was found dead in her car Tuesday morning on a highway just south of Los Gatos, Calif., Santa Clara County authorities said Wednesday. They said it appeared that Chang, who lived in San Jose with her husband and young son, had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Susan Rabiner, Chang's literary agent, said Chang had suffered a breakdown about five months ago during a research trip for her fourth book. The book focused on the experiences of men who fought in the U.S. tank battalions in the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines and their subsequent imprisonment by the Japanese for the duration of World War II.
After her release from the hospital, Rabiner said, Chang continued to battle depression. In a note to her family, Chang asked to be remembered as the woman she had been before her illness, engaged with life, committed to her causes, her writing and her family.
Rabiner was unaware of Chang having any previous problems with depression. "This was a tragedy way beyond words," she said.
Rabiner, who was Chang's editor for "The Rape of Nanking," views the critically acclaimed 1997 international bestseller as the best of Chang's three published books.
"The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," which Chang spent at least two years researching in the U.S. and China, chronicles the slaughter, rape and torture of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers in the former capital of China in 1937.
She was spurred to write the book after her parents told her the story of her grandparents, who had fled Nanking as the violence was beginning.
When Chang learned of the crimes in late 1994, she later recalled, "I was walking around in a state of shock."
While researching her book in China, Chang discovered that among a small group of Europeans and Americans who stayed behind in Nanking to protect the remaining one-third of the city's Chinese population who had not fled the Japanese army's advance was John Rabe, a German national.
"On a hunch," Rabiner said, "she tracked down his granddaughter and asked, 'Is it possible your grandfather kept a diary?' She found it. That was the first time the diary had been brought to light. Here was an outsider, a European, who recorded his own contemporaneous memories of the atrocities that occurred at that time."
