By Nicolaus Mills
Published in The American Prospect
January 20, 2005
One week after the American presidential election, Iris Chang — the celebrated author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II — was found dead inside her own car on a stretch of highway south of Los Gatos, California. Before turning the gun on herself, she had left a carefully written note at her home in San José, and had taken the trouble to ensure that her body would be found by the police rather than by her husband or her two-year-old son.
The reports that followed gave her age — only thirty-six — and explained the success of The Rape of Nanking, the most important of her three books, which had sold more than half a million copies in the United States alone. But the attention paid to Iris Chang’s death was, for the most part, missing two things: a serious assessment of her work, and an honest reckoning with the moral and intellectual hole she had left behind. Iris’s grandparents fled the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing — at the time the capital — in 1937, in flight from the brutal invasion that was about to overtake it. In a world where most accounts of holocaust and genocide today gravitate toward the spectacle of war, Iris Chang never forgot that her subject was the conquered and the dead.
By writing about the Japanese army’s siege of Nanjing — a campaign that, by later estimate, killed more than 260,000 people — Iris Chang chose a subject that had long been kept buried, by Japan and even by the Western world. After the Second World War, the Japanese turned, predictably enough, to the suffering they themselves had endured under the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; while the United States, committed to rebuilding Japan as a buffer against communist China, was content to let the war crimes its new ally had committed against its new enemy fade quietly from view.
And so the matter remained unaccounted for, unspoken — until Iris’s book appeared. It was published on the sixtieth anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, the year she turned twenty-nine. The book exposed both the silence around what had happened in Nanjing and the way that history was being taught — or was not being taught — in Japanese schools. The atrocities the Japanese committed there during the Second World War had been quietly muted; the killing of tens of thousands of Chinese in the city of Nanjing was still, in the official Japanese term, only an “incident.”
But more than this, what stands at the heart of The Rape of Nanking is the author’s investment in the politics of humanitarian rescue — her assessment of what individuals who still possessed freedom of movement, in that place at that time, did to save the Chinese people; and how those who attempted such rescue, especially the American teacher Minnie Vautrin and the German businessman John Rabe, tried until the limit of their human strength. Vautrin returned to America, suffered a breakdown in 1941, and, in despair over what she had failed to accomplish, took her own life. Rabe submitted a film about the Nanjing Massacre to the German government in 1938 and was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for it. After the Second World War, he lived for a time in Switzerland, surviving on parcels of food sent by the citizens of Nanjing, who had not forgotten him.
Like Vautrin and Rabe, Iris Chang did not believe that what she had done for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre was sufficient — and could not allow herself to feel at peace. She refused to console herself with the honors her book had brought her. During the year she spent on the book tour, she squarely confronted those who questioned her numbers or her accuracy. On television, she challenged the Japanese ambassador to the United States to apologize for the Nanjing Massacre; when he allowed only that the events had been “truly unfortunate,” she was outraged.
Iris Chang’s husband did not release her note, and the news reports did not give us further detail, so we can only guess at what drove her to such despair. But what we can say with certainty, in retrospect, is the heavy burden she had been carrying inside her own body and mind. At the end of her life, she was writing a book about the Bataan Death March and Japanese mistreatment of American prisoners of war — and one wishes, painfully, that she had chosen instead a subject that weighed less. In a world where many international figures — Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, comes immediately to mind — appear content to take on the challenges of human catastrophe in the manner of an athlete, accumulating a record of wins and losses (you may have lost in Rwanda, but never mind, you won in East Timor), Iris Chang’s moral standard stood apart. In the world she lived in, the cost of doing too little fell, always, on those least able to bear it; and she could not be free of the conviction that, for someone like her, the greatest enemy of all was comfort.
Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, and the author of Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial, among other books.
- (Translated by Jim Hao, reviewed by Zoe Sheng.)
