[
  
    {
      "title"  : "A Life of Shau-Jin Chang",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/Shau-Jin/",
      "date"   : "26 January 2025",
      "image"  : "/images/Shau-Jin.jpg",
      "content"  : "By Ying-Ying ChangJanuary 26, 2025Shau-Jin Chang passed away at his home in San Jose, California, at 5:15 in the morning of January 25, 2025. He was 88 years old. Shau-Jin was the father of Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. In October of last year he was hospitalized for five weeks after a fall, and at the end of December he was admitted to the hospital again, with pneumonia.Shau-Jin was born on January 7, 1937, in Suqian, Jiangsu Province. His father, Chang Nai-fan, was at the time the magistrate of Suqian County. His mother, Tsao Ti-chen, was a native of Huaiyin, Jiangsu. Before the Japanese army’s massacre of Nanking, Shau-Jin’s family withdrew with his parents to Chongqing, and he grew up there during the years of the war against Japan. While he was still in primary school, his teachers and his parents told him what had happened in Nanjing. That history lodged itself deeply in his memory, and he later passed it on to his daughter — and it was that, more than anything else, that gave Iris the resolve to seek out the truth of the Nanjing Massacre.In 1951, Shau-Jin followed his mother to Taiwan. He graduated from Wenshan High School and entered the Department of Physics at National Taiwan University, ranking first in the science track of the entrance examination. After graduating with distinction, he completed a master’s degree at the National Tsing Hua University Graduate Institute of Physics in Taiwan. In 1962 he received a fellowship to come to Harvard, where he studied under the Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger and earned his Ph.D. in 1967. In 1964, while still a graduate student, he married Ying-Ying Chang, also at Harvard. From 1967 to 1969 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, working on high-energy theoretical physics. He then accepted a position in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he taught for thirty years, retiring in 1999. In 2003 he and his family moved to San Jose, California. Professor Chang published nearly one hundred papers, primarily on the theoretical physics of high-energy particles. His textbook Introduction to Quantum Field Theory was published in 1990 and was widely admired.Professor Chang was a serious scholar and a devoted teacher. He received the Department of Physics’ best-teacher award at Illinois several times. He was a member of the American Physical Society, and was honored by the National Taiwan University Department of Physics with its Distinguished Alumnus Award.In 1999, Iris Chang wrote, in a letter for her father’s retirement banquet:  “…My father is also my role model. He is perhaps the most idealistic person I have ever known — there are very few people left in this world who study purely for the sake of knowledge, without personal ambition. Money, power, social standing — none of these mean anything to him. So long as he can quietly enjoy a life of the mind and do the two things he loves most — research in physics and the teaching of young people — my father is content. I think he was fortunate, because at the University of Illinois he found exactly that life.  My father also has an extremely strong sense of justice. I have always believed that, had he not been a physicist, he would have made an outstanding judge. He is acutely sensitive to fairness, and he is able to see a question from many angles at once. He carries a deep compassion for others; he understands human weakness, has sympathy for those who have been defeated… The sight of a helpless creature being harmed has always wounded him, and the abuse of power leaves him in honest fury.  What I admire most in my father is that he has never lost his child’s eyes for the world. In an age of cynicism, that is rare indeed. My father has always been curious about the mysteries of the universe. For him, education is for life. Like a student, he reads voraciously: biology, computer science, literature, history, astronomy, psychology — and these are only part of what interests him. He is the kind of high-minded scholar Einstein once described — one who learns for the same reason a child does: for love, for curiosity, for the quiet thrill of discovery…”Perhaps these are the truest words that have been written about who Shau-Jin Chang was.Shau-Jin was the fourth of his brothers. The eldest, Chang Shao-yuan, lived in New York and predeceased him (1928–2003). The second, Chang Shao-da, died of meningitis in Chongqing during the war. The third, Chang Shao-chien (b. 1935), is a retired civil engineer living in Los Angeles.Shau-Jin and his wife Ying-Ying were married for sixty years. Besides their daughter Iris, they have a son, Michael Chang, a computer engineer, and his wife, Aimee Lu, and their son, Nicolaus Chang, all of whom live in San Carlos, California, and visited often. A grandson, Christopher Douglas, lives in Illinois.After cremation, Shau-Jin’s ashes will be buried in the Gate of Heaven cemetery, Holy Family Section, beside his daughter."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "The Enemy of Comfort",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/the-Enemy-of-Comfort/",
      "date"   : "02 August 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/111025015937-nicolaus-mills.png",
      "content"  : "By Nicolaus MillsPublished in The American ProspectJanuary 20, 2005One 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.)"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "The Unbearable Sadness of Other People's Pain",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/Unbearable-sadness-of-others-pain/",
      "date"   : "02 August 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/irischang._Unbearable_sadness_of_others_pain.png",
      "content"  : "By Laurie BarkinPublished in the San Francisco ChronicleNovember 23, 2004Iris Chang, the thirty-six-year-old author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, had spent more than a decade buried inside the experiences of those who survived the Japanese army’s massacre of three hundred thousand of their countrymen in Nanjing in 1937. More recently, she had been interviewing survivors of the Bataan Death March. After listening to the testimony of an American veteran in Kentucky, she suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized for three days. Back at her home in the Bay Area, even with medication, she ended her own life on November 9.Compassion fatigue. Secondary trauma. Vicarious trauma. These are the terms commonly used to describe the disorientation that overtakes a person of Iris Chang’s compassionate temperament after she has borne witness to inhuman cruelty inflicted by human beings on other human beings. After five years of working as a psychiatric trauma nurse consultant, I myself began having unending nightmares, tightness in the chest, and a steadily mounting fear for my own children’s safety. I attended a conference on psychological trauma, and there I heard, for the first time, the term vicarious trauma. I began to understand my own symptoms — and to understand that I needed to step away from the work for a while.Trauma specialists use the word dose to refer to the impact of a traumatic event upon a person who has been exposed to it. Recent research lets us describe the changes that occur in the human brain in response to psychological trauma. Even secondary exposure — and especially the heavy, sustained dose of the kind Iris Chang absorbed — can leave clear, measurable changes in the brain. Police, firefighters, psychotherapists, journalists, and front-line medical workers are all in the same high-risk group.There are workable treatments. They work better when one steps in before the symptoms appear. They include a supportive workplace, a stable home, regular exercise, a balance between work and rest, and time spent with friends — especially the kind of friends who can make you laugh.The people who mourn Iris Chang say of her that she was someone who felt the pain of others as her own, and that she was tireless and would not let go of a task once she had taken it up. Some have said: for Iris, nothing was undoable. Perhaps that is exactly why, faced with the evil of the world, Iris Chang gave herself, without holding back, to the work of changing it. I can imagine how the cries of the wronged dead must have kept her from sleep, kept her from food; how each survivor’s testimony pulled her further in; how, in order to set their bottomless pain into words, she made herself carry what no one ought to have to carry; how she shouldered the suffering of others so that we might learn from it and become better people.The only problem is that we do not want to listen. We do not want to hear, we do not want to believe. To speak of one’s inner feelings has, in this country, always been treated as something embarrassing. We would sooner give people pills, or get them drunk, than open our hearts to them. We have not been taught how to attend to the emotional needs of others. When someone we know expresses pain or grief, we feel uneasy. We avoid the situation, because we are afraid we will say the wrong thing, or because we are afraid we will lose our own footing. But recognition, care, and consolation are exactly what those who have witnessed need. At times, even loving family and faithful friends are not enough to pull a person back from the depths of someone else’s pain.The life of Iris Chang lit up the lives of many — and at the same time it cost her her own. Like the firefighters who ran toward the towers on September 11, she searched, sleepless and tireless, through the ruins of a tragedy not her own. We need to nurture the kind of people who, like her, throw their lives into the pursuit of truth without looking after their own safety. We must allow them to rest. We must praise them. We must listen to what they say. And we must catch them, before the abyss of despair pulls them down.Laurie Barkin is a clinical psychiatric nurse specialist at work on a book about survivors of psychological trauma.  (Translated jointly by Jian Shuhui and Ma Haining.)"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "A Letter to Iris Chang",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/Hann-Shuin-Yew/",
      "date"   : "02 August 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/Hann-Shuin Yew.png",
      "content"  : "By Hann-Shuin YewPublished in the Library of CongressDear Ms. Chang,This is a late letter. It should have arrived in your hands two or three weeks ago, while you were still here to read it — so that you might have heard me say how much your work has meant to Chinese people all over the world, and so that I might have told you, in my own voice, how much I owe you. Now Nanjing has one more death to its account, and this is something I cannot stop grieving.Like you, Nanjing was always there, beneath the surface of my growing up. My parents would mention the words Nanjing Massacre in passing, but they would not tell me how my own great-grandparents and great-uncle had died at the hands of the Japanese soldiers. Even so, I came to know — mostly through the controversies that erupted after your Rape of Nanking was published — that something beyond all reason had happened in that city during the Second World War.To my regret, that knowledge did not really touch me when I was a child. The Nanjing Massacre was a subject buried in the older generation, a thing too terrible to be reached for. The older generation, for me, meant my maternal grandmother, who hated the Japanese, who spoke a dialect I could not follow, and who did things I could not understand — refusing to step inside a Japanese restaurant, weeping when I played a Japanese pop song on my CD player. Yes: Nanjing belonged to a generation I could not reach.I learned why my grandmother hated the Japanese only after she had died. At her funeral, an uncle told me that she had watched her own parents being tied to a tree and beaten to death by Japanese soldiers. That had not happened in Nanjing — it had happened in a small, nameless village in the middle of China. The killing the Japanese carried out was not confined to Nanjing. In hundreds of forgotten villages across China, men and women had been murdered and tormented in the same way. The wound of Nanjing runs through China; the smaller, forgotten massacres were repeated, in different forms, almost everywhere.Why must we wait for death before we can learn so much?To be honest with you, Ms. Chang — until you were gone, I had not been able to finish reading The Rape of Nanking. I could not. When I read the cruelties you had set down, when I saw those scenes in my mind, the horror and the nausea forced me to put the book away. I, too, lost relatives in this “forgotten holocaust”; every sentence in your book, every photograph, struck a place in me that already knew the answer. It took me four years to read the first four chapters. Each time I picked the book up again, I went cold all over at the banality of evil you had laid bare.But what you must have felt was incomparably worse. You looked at the rawest evidence — at the films, at the testimonies, at the photographs of suffering. For years, day after day, you lived inside the fear and pain that the victims had lived through. How did you do it? Where did your fearlessness come from?When I read in the newspaper that you had taken your own life, I knew I must read your book. If you had had the courage to write it, I owed you, at the very least, the courage to read it through. So I sat on a bench, in the wind, with your now-worn book in my hands, and I thought of you.This time, somehow, I could read it all the way through. I no longer tried to hold the horror at a distance. I no longer tried to protect myself from the smell of the suffering and the sound of the cries. Instead, when I let myself sink into Nanjing, I saw John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin and Dr. Robert Wilson — and you — standing before me. I saw the living Bodhisattvas of Nanjing rescuing the thousands of victims. And I saw you drawing aside the bamboo curtain that had stood for so long between the world and Nanjing.Thank you, Ms. Chang, for the courage that allowed you to bring out the truth. Even though you can no longer read this letter, I hope, before you went, you understood the great change you had wrought in the world. So I thank you.Yours sincerely,Hann-Shuin Yew      Hann-Shuin Yew, 16, a high school junior        I was born in Singapore, and as I was growing up my family moved to several different cities — Shanghai, Vancouver, and now San José, in California. I have had the chance to live among different cultures and to see how Chinese communities live in different parts of the world. This has given me a great love for history and literature, especially the works that have helped me understand my own cultural inheritance. My other interests include word puzzles, brain teasers, origami, and, now and then, writing poetry.        (Translated by Yang Hui, reviewed by Jian Shuhui, August 6, 2018.)        This letter won first place in the California high-school category of the 2005 Library of Congress essay contest, “Letters About Literature: A Letter to an Author Whose Book Has Changed Your Life.”"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "Adele Suslick at the Iris Chang Memorial Service",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/Adele-Suslick/",
      "date"   : "02 August 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/2_Adele Suslick.png",
      "content"  : "December 2, 2004, 4 PMSpurlock Auditorium, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignOn the morning of November 10, 2004, at seven o’clock, as I was driving to school, the host on WILL AM 580 announced the news of Iris Chang’s death. Disbelieving, stunned, I pulled the car over and called my husband — I needed to talk to someone about what I had just heard, to try to make sense of the tragedy.I had always loved Iris very much.The word “multifaceted” is not enough to describe her. She was the most passionate person I have ever met — fully attentive, fully present, throwing the whole of herself into whatever she had taken on.I first met Iris in 1983, when she and Bob Winter were editing the Lab High School literary magazine, UNIQUE. Iris had set out to revive the magazine, which had not been published since 1980, and she asked me to be the faculty adviser.She was also my student in twelfth-grade English in 1984-85, the year Russell Ames was on the school board and Warren Loyer was principal. I remember the punk look was everywhere among the seniors that year, and “McJobs” were what the students were chasing.Iris’s first published piece was, I believe, a short poem that appeared in UNIQUE in 1980-81:TimeGoing steadily onDestroying, mysterious, conqueringNever stoppingBecoming eternity.She kept writing throughout her years at Lab High. In 1983-84 she published two more poems, and in 1984-85 several others. Most of these early pieces turned on the theme of change and impermanence.Beside her senior portrait in the 1984-85 yearbook, she set down a sentence by the Victorian writer Matthew Arnold: “Poetry is the most beautiful, deepest, and most effective expression of things, and that is wherein its importance lies.” And another, from Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”Iris perhaps did not believe knowledge was the highest thing — but in advanced English class, she displayed a breadth of reading on a wide range of subjects. More importantly, she had a natural gift for public speaking, and a knack for arguing with persuasive evidence. I remember the meticulous detail of her note cards. She was not chasing a grade; she was after a complete understanding. And when she spoke, she always looked you straight in the eye. There was no doubt that she believed in what she was saying — and she wanted you to believe it too.In 1998 I spent a remarkable weekend with Iris. She had just come back from her home in San Jose to receive the 1998 Lab High Excellent Alumni Award. At the opening she gave a wonderful speech. In it she said:  “When I wrote The Rape of Nanking, I was struck by how badly the historical record itself had been disfigured by acts of genocide and bloodshed. My education — at Lab High, at Illinois, at Johns Hopkins — had given me no real preparation for confronting the story of Nanjing and other atrocities. I was shocked, not only by the stories themselves, but by how readily people allow such things to slip from memory, and by the threat that this kind of forgetting poses to human civilization. The thought that some people would be moved by my book has been, more than once, the single thing that kept me going.”We were indeed moved — and so were many other readers across the country, enough to keep the book on The New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks.The next day, Iris and I decided to meet at an antique shop to talk. She told me a great deal about her plans for children. At the time she expected that pregnancy and the demands of her career would be her next priorities. As it turned out, what she did instead was write another remarkable book — The Chinese in America. I shared that book with my senior class last year, and this year I will use it alongside The Joy Luck Club with my new freshmen. Time has gone by. Iris’s son is two years old now.Because of her education at University Lab High, Iris Chang has, over the past decade, become the most powerful voice of Chinese Americans. In her first published book, Thread of the Silkworm, she inscribed for me:  “Thank you for teaching me the research skills I needed to write this book! Your advanced debate class had a profound influence on my life.”And in return, she gave Lab High a tremendous influence. She has shaped the way Lab High students understand the history of twentieth-century Asia; she has taught them not to remain silent in the face of injustice. Her writing turns up regularly in classroom discussion.In a real sense, Iris Chang is still alive at Lab High. Our students know her, and they cheer for what she accomplished. They see her as a woman who changed the world in a meaningful way. More than anything, she has given Lab High students a deeper sense of social justice. They want to inspire others, as she did. They want to tell a story worth telling. They want their lives to count for something.When they go and do these things, I know they will be affirming the life and the dream of Iris Chang. To close, I have chosen a few lines from a poem about the dawn that Iris wrote in eleventh grade:At the ends of the earth,Drive away all the darkness,To open a new day…Sunlight, alive and growing,With goldPaints the purple-red firmamentInto blue.  (Translated by Yang Hui, reviewed by Sheng Jie, August 6, 2018.)"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "A Thank You Note to Iris Chang",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/A-Thank-You-Note-to-Iris-Chang/",
      "date"   : "02 August 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/36412-81002.png",
      "content"  : "My Memory of the Last Time I Saw Iris ChangBy Da Hsuan FengDa Hsuan ColumnMay 26, 2018Two days ago, someone on Facebook noted that it was Holocaust Remembrance Day. The two words I associate with that day I first heard fifty years ago, when I was a new arrival in America: Never Again. Reading the post took me back to 2004 — to the Chinese-American community in Richardson, Texas, just outside Dallas, where I had the privilege of meeting Iris Chang.Iris Chang was a Chinese-American writer of extraordinary reach. The book that made her name, and that struck readers all over the world, was The Rape of Nanking. The book set down, in plain and unsparing detail, what had been done to the city of Nanjing during the Second World War.On April 1, 2004 — April Fool’s Day — the Chinese-American organizations of Texas had invited her to Dallas to speak. I was at the time the Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Dallas, and the local Chinese-American community honored me by asking me to introduce her before her lecture. I was glad for another reason as well: Iris Chang’s father, Shau-Jin Chang, is a distinguished theoretical physicist, and as a colleague I had had the chance to know him a little.The Chinese translation of my introductory speech is attached below.April 1, 2004 was the second time I met Iris Chang. As I said goodbye to her that night, we exchanged a few sincere words. I did not know then that those words would be our last. Rest well, Iris Chang.Thank You, Iris ChangIntroducing Iris ChangA speech delivered in Richardson, Texas, near Dallas — April 1, 2004By Da Hsuan Feng — Vice President for Research, University of Texas at DallasLadies and gentlemen, good evening.As a writer of profound and global influence, Iris Chang needs no introduction. And precisely because she needs none, what I find I can truly say here is one word, said from the heart: thank you.In 1964, when I was a freshman newly arrived in New Jersey, a classmate invited me to a lecture on campus. He told me the speaker was a survivor of the Holocaust. I had never heard the English word before.To this day, that lecture and the photographs that accompanied it are burned into my memory — they are something close to a wound. There was nothing human in those photographs. I remember clearly the last two words the speaker said: Never Again.That night I went back to my room and I could not stop thinking about that English word, Holocaust. I wondered whether the word could only be used for what the Jews of Europe had endured — that ordeal of mind, body, and soul.I took my Cambridge dictionary off the shelf, and the entry read:“The Holocaust” was the systematic murder of many people, esp. Jews, by the Nazis during World War II.Reading that, I understood for the first time that the word Holocaust could be used for any massacre.After the Second World War, my mother taught music at Ginling Women’s College in Nanjing. I remember she once told me, very briefly, about the Nanjing Massacre. But the events were so terrible that she would not — could not — speak of them in any detail. After hearing what little she said, I was filled with anger, and at the same time with a feeling of helplessness, because there was nothing then in my reach that could let me understand what had really happened in Nanjing.Slowly I let the matter drift to the back of my mind. What brought it back, years later, was reading Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking.The book made it clear to me that, although I am not a Jew, I could feel the same anger and stand in solidarity with the Jews who suffered during the Second World War. The book made it clear to me that the Jews and I — we — are one human family.I have come to believe deeply that anyone who reads Iris Chang’s book — whether Chinese or not — will feel the same anger.Iris Chang’s book is a cry for justice on behalf of the countless people who suffered horribly in Nanjing.And so, however small I am, I would like to speak on behalf of all of humanity, and say to you, Iris Chang: thank you.(Da Hsuan Feng — Da Hsuan Column, May 26, 2018. Compiled by Zoe Sheng and Lily Yao.)"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "A Tribute to Iris Chang",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/Michael-Makoto-Honda/",
      "date"   : "01 August 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/Michael Makoto Honda.jpg",
      "content"  : "Congressional Record108th Congress · House of RepresentativesA Tribute to Iris ChangNovember 17, 2004Hon. Michael M. Honda, Representative from CaliforniaMr. Speaker, today I rise to honor the memory of Iris Chang — a courageous historian and writer, a defender of the history of Asia and Asian Americans, of human rights, and of the historical record itself. In a brief but extraordinary career, she gave voice to the wrongs and the cruelties that history had forgotten or had been content to overlook, and she moved the hearts of countless readers. In her private life, she was a devoted wife and mother, a close friend, and an example to many. Iris Chang is survived by her husband, Dr. Brett Lee Douglas; her son, Christopher Douglas; her parents, Shau-Jin Chang and Ying-Ying Chang; and her brother, Michael Chang.Iris Chang was born on March 28, 1968, in Princeton, New Jersey. She studied journalism at the University of Illinois and then earned a master’s degree in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. While at Hopkins she devoted herself to a study of Tsien Hsue-shen — the Chinese-American scientist who, during the Cold War of the 1960s, was deported back to China amid the political fear of communism, and who would go on to found China’s missile program. That research became the foundation of her widely praised first book, Thread of the Silkworm: The Life of Tsien Hsue-shen, a careful account of the paranoia and the racial prejudice of the McCarthy era.As a historian and a public advocate, Iris Chang spent her life in pursuit of historical justice and reconciliation. Her book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II set down, in detail, the atrocities the Japanese army committed in Nanjing in 1937, and became a major source of public education about the Japanese army’s wartime crimes — crimes whose violation of human rights had, for decades, been left unrecorded or unacknowledged. She actively pressed for redress on behalf of the Nanjing victims, which brought her into open conflict with the Japanese government and certain organizations — but none of this could shake her commitment to justice and to truth.Her most recent book, The Chinese in America, is a documentary work that traces the feelings, the perspectives, and the lived experiences of the Chinese-American community. A few weeks ago, East West Bank donated four hundred and twenty copies of The Chinese in America to schools across California, in order to spread understanding of the historical challenges Chinese Americans have faced.Beyond the books in which she pressed both American and international society on the historical and social wrongs done to Asians and Asian Americans, Iris Chang served as a member of the Committee of 100 — a national, nonpartisan organization of Chinese-American leaders devoted to the major issues facing the Chinese-American community. For her work, she was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Award for Peace and International Cooperation. She was also named Woman of the Year by the Organization of Chinese American Women.We will remember Iris Chang’s record and her remarkable contribution to the Asian-American community. The millions of people moved by her writing and her activism will never forget the moral seriousness with which she confronted the injustices of history; nor her lifelong work for peace among peoples of different origins; nor the public influence that work has had. Iris Chang carried a strong pride in her Chinese-American heritage — a pride that stirred those around her, that made the case that, no matter what one’s ancestry, one can be a true American. With Iris Chang’s passing, our Asian-American community has lost a model and a dear friend; and the world has lost one of the most outstanding and most passionate advocates ever to have stood up for social and historical justice.(Translated by Chen Xin, reviewed by Ma Haining and Yang Hui.)"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "*Life is Brief as the Morning Dew* — For a Memory That Cannot Be Forgotten",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/ren-sheng-zhao-lu/",
      "date"   : "24 July 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/WechatIMG96.jpg",
      "content"  : "This recorded interview is part of the work Life is Brief as the Morning Dew, directed by Zong Tian’ai. All of its content (including, but not limited to, video, audio, text, and images) belongs in copyright to the director Zong Tian’ai and to the providers of that content. The subject of this interview is Mr. Liu Yu of the Iris Chang Studio. Without written authorization, no organization or individual may, in any form, repost, excerpt, copy or use the material for commercial purposes. Material used under prior authorization shall be used only within the scope of that authorization, and the source shall be clearly named.Any unauthorized use of the content of this video shall be considered an infringement of copyright. The director Zong Tian’ai and the providers of the content reserve the right to pursue, by lawful means, any such infringement — including, but not limited to, the cessation of the infringement, the removal of the infringing content, and the recovery of damages.This declaration is in accord with the Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China and with the relevant laws and regulations, and takes effect from the day of its issuance.Copyright © 2024 Director Zong Tian’ai and content providers. All rights reserved.Student journalistHu XinyiIris Chang Studio, person in chargeLiu YuDirector: Zong Tian’aiProducerSun ShengwenCinematographyXiao Yutian, Zhang TingtingArt / ContinuityLiu LiqiPost-productionTang MengWith particular thanks toIris Chang StudioIris Chang Memorial Hall, Huai’anMemorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese InvadersScoreThe Debate — Guo SidaIris Chang’s Writing — Guo SidaDeath and Eternal Life — Guo SidaA Song for Iris — Yoyo ShamSome footage drawn from1937 Nanjing MemoryIris Chang: The Rape of NankingA Dove’s Journey to Nanjing"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "Iris Chang: A Brief Life and a Guide to Her Books",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/10-iris-chang/",
      "date"   : "09 July 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/111.jpg",
      "content"  : "A Brief Life and Bibliography of Iris Chang      Born March 28, 1968, in Princeton, New Jersey. Both parents were university professors. Her father held a doctorate in physics from Harvard; her mother, a doctorate in biochemistry from Harvard.        In 1985, Iris Chang graduated from the University Laboratory High School, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.        In 1989, she received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She had begun in mathematics and computer science, then transferred and graduated with a Bachelor’s in Journalism. Bachelor in Journalism, 1989, University of Illinois.        In May 1991, she received her master’s in writing from Johns Hopkins University. Master in Writing, Johns Hopkins University, May 1991.        On August 17, 1991, Iris Chang married her college sweetheart, Bretton Lee Douglas, in the chapel on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus.    In 1995, Iris Chang published her first book, Thread of the Silkworm, with Basic Books.The title carries several layers of meaning:  The missile that Tsien Hsue-shen helped develop in China was named the “Silkworm missile.”  The Tsien family had once been merchants of silk in Hangzhou.  Tsien Hsue-shen’s life was, in itself, a story of the patient unwinding of threads — the way one draws silk, one strand at a time, off a cocoon. The title was widely admired, though it also gave rise to some confusion — the most amusing being that some readers assumed it was a popular-science book about silkworm farming.              Photo by Brian on WebA Taiwanese Chinese translation (translated by Zhang Dingqi and Xu Yaoyun, published by China Times Publishing in Taipei) appeared in 1996. Both translators rendered the work with great care. This edition has not been published in mainland China, reportedly because it lays out a fact: that Tsien Hsue-shen had already applied for U.S. citizenship before the persecutions of the McCarthy era forced him to return to China — a fact that is at odds with the official narrative, which holds that he returned out of patriotic devotion.A mainland Chinese translation (translated by Lu Yi, published by CITIC Press) appeared in 2011. Regrettably, the passages in which Iris Chang offers criticism of Tsien Hsue-shen were removed, leaving certain sections of that edition slightly disjointed.A few related book reviews:Thread of the Silkworm — Foreign AffairsIn December 1997, she published her second book — the work that would carry her name across the world:  The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War IIBasic Books. 290 pages. ISBN 978-0-465-06835-7              Photo by Brian on WebThere are several Chinese editions. The pre-2007 editions are not recommended. We recommend the 2007 Eastern Press edition, translated by Yang Xiaming and reviewed by Ying-Ying Chang; and the 2012 reissue from CITIC Press.  In August 2002, her son Christopher was born in San Jose, California.In March 2003, she published her third book — a less-discussed but historically broader work:  The Chinese in America: A Narrative History, Penguin              Photo by Brian on WebThe traditional Chinese edition was published in Taiwan by Walkers Cultural Publishing on October 3, 2018, under the title The Chinese in America.The Chinese in America sets out the 150-year struggle of Chinese immigrants in the United States — from railroad laborers to Nobel laureates — and traces their distinguished contributions, in field after field, that have transformed both their own lives and the fabric of American society.Working from a great body of historical material, Iris Chang outlines the difficulties and the injustices Chinese-Americans have faced, and shows their notable achievements in politics, society, the economy, and the arts; and along the way, she sets aside the many myths attached to the Chinese-American story.The book is not only a chronicle of the Chinese immigrant epic — it is a deep examination of American multiculturalism, and a redefinition of what it means to be “American,” restoring to Chinese-Americans the indispensable place they have held in U.S. history.While she was writing her fourth book — about the Bataan Death March — Iris Chang fell into breakdown and depression. During treatment with the antipsychotics Risperdal and Abilify, and the antidepressant Celexa, the side effects of those medications were a factor in her death by suicide.  On November 9, 2004, she ended her own life in Los Gatos, California. She is buried in the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Los Altos, California.The grave is located in the Holy Family section, plot 22-85 / 86. (Two minutes’ drive from the front entrance; her stone is toward the upper right of the Holy Family section.)The address is 22555 Cristo Rey Dr, Los Altos, CA 94024, adjacent to Rancho San Antonio.Online memorial:Find a Grave — Iris ChangThis article was assembled by Liu Yu, drawing on the WeChat notes of the Iris Chang Bay Area Memorial Group. The original was gathered by Lily Yao from a wide range of sources — internet archives, books, and the precious recollections of Mrs. Ying-Ying Chang shared in the group. Special thanks to Mrs. Chang for her patient threading-together of facts, for the materials she made available, and for her careful verification; and warm thanks to the members who took part in the discussion and the writing — in particular Ann Li, Cathy, Eva Pang, Jim Hao, Li Bei (Sui-Yuan), Li Mulan, Lin Shidong, Mi Ning, Da Hsuan Feng, Jian Shuhui, Shelly, Ma Jingyan, Yan Lili, Yang Hui, and Zhang Kang."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "Iris Chang Photo Exhibition",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/iris-flickr/",
      "date"   : "25 June 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/154.jpg",
      "content"  : ""
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "The First 'Super Iris' NFT From the Iris Chang Studio Is About to Launch",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/super-iris-1-/",
      "date"   : "20 June 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/160.png",
      "content"  : "On September 3, the seventy-ninth anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and of the World Anti-Fascist War, the Iris Chang Studio will launch its first “Super Iris” NFT, on the Base network.For this release, we will mint 328 “Super Iris” NFTs and distribute them, through a set of designated tasks, to 328 users. Selected users will be notified by official direct message of the receipt of the first “Super Iris” NFT.Base is an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) blockchain, developed jointly by the United States–based crypto exchange Coinbase and Optimism, and was officially released on August 9, 2023. As Coinbase’s first blockchain product, Base aims to provide a secure, low-cost and highly scalable environment for developers to build and deploy decentralized applications (dApps). It is compatible with all wallets built on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), including Coinbase Wallet, and offers a seamless experience for users and developers alike. Running on the OP Stack with Optimism’s technology, Base is regarded as one of the major platforms driving blockchain applications and innovation forward.As a permanently non-profit body, the Iris Chang Studio will distribute the “Super Iris” NFT series, by airdrop, on certain commemorative dates. We invite everyone’s attention and participation."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "On Meeting Richard Rhodes, Author of *The Making of the Atomic Bomb*",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/20240616/",
      "date"   : "16 June 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/164.png",
      "content"  : "By Ying-Ying ChangRichard Rhodes — the famous author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb — once wrote a review of The Rape of Nanking, our daughter Iris Chang’s book. That he would also write the foreword to my own memoir was, in my life, an episode I had never expected.The film Oppenheimer won seven Academy Awards this year, and has been the most discussed film of the past several years; many viewers and critics have written about it, and the discussion online has been considerable. Oppenheimer was adapted from American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. But many readers may not know that, in 1987, Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb was, before that, the canonical and systematic account of the entire process of building the bomb — including, of course, the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer himself. The book made an immediate impression when it appeared, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, the National Book Award for nonfiction, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rhodes became famous overnight. To date he has published twenty-eight books. After The Making of the Atomic Bomb he wrote three more books, all on nuclear weapons, completing the series only in recent years. The Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi, one of the early figures of the atomic age, called the book “a Miltonic epic. I have nowhere else seen the whole story told with such elegance and passion, with so much illuminating detail, and with such simplicity, leading the reader through brilliant and profound scientific discoveries and their applications.” Physicists have long recommended it to ordinary readers as the best account of how the atomic bomb came to be. According to a recent piece in The Atlantic, AI engineers today still carry the 900-page book back and forth.When Iris published The Rape of Nanking in 1997, the publisher invited Rhodes to review it — both because he was, like her, a student of the Second World War, and because Japan’s invasion of China had ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs, a subject not far from his field. Rhodes wrote of The Rape of Nanking: “A powerful, landmark book, whose horror draws the reader in.” After that review, Iris and Rhodes both said, on different occasions, that they had become friends and had met. I knew of the friendship, but had no particular impression of Rhodes — until, after Iris’s death, when I had begun to write a memoir of her, I came back, among the letters Iris had sent us, to a particular one in which she had written about Rhodes, and which now caught my attention.Iris’s letter to me, October 27, 1999:  “Dearest Mom — it was wonderful to talk with you and Dad on the phone a few days ago. There are very few people in this world whose families are like ours, where parents and children love each other and stay in touch almost every night. Heaven really has watched over us, and we must remind ourselves of that every day. So many of my friends do not enjoy speaking with their parents — many simply do not speak with them at all. … And there are many who have no idea who their mothers really are. The other day, after I had had lunch with Richard Rhodes, I quickly turned through his autobiography, A Hole in the World. As you know, when Rhodes was a child his stepmother starved him, beat him, and tortured him in spirit (his mother shot herself; his father turned alcoholic and could not protect his family). Every time I look back at his book, I think it a wonder that Richard Rhodes survived at all…”In 1999, while Iris was alive, I read this letter and let it pass. In 2008, four years after she had gone, I read it again, and the impression was nothing like before. I found myself struck by the fact that Rhodes’s mother had killed herself with a gun — and so had Iris. I went online at once and looked up the autobiography, A Hole in the World. I also discovered that Rhodes had written another book, How to Write. This was important to me, because at the time I was working on my memoir; I bought both books from Amazon. When A Hole in the World arrived, I opened to the first page and read: “When I was thirteen months old, my mother shot herself in the bathroom with a pistol.” A wave of compassion and grief rose up from my chest, and I could hardly draw breath. From that instant, I felt a kinship with Rhodes — we are both people who have been wounded.By 2008 I had drafted the outline of Iris’s memoir, and the writing was mostly done. I was looking for a publisher. But every door closed. The most painful was an editor who said to me: “You have never published a book; English is not your first language; and you are not your daughter — “ The implication was: let it go; you don’t need to write this. He was not wrong, and the words made me see my own deficiencies; I gathered myself and began to study how, in fact, one writes. It was at that point that I discovered Rhodes’s How to Write, and at the end of 2008 I gathered the courage to write him a letter. I told him, plainly, that I was Iris Chang’s mother; that, while she was alive, she had spoken of him and had read his autobiography; and that I was now writing a memoir of her. Within a few days I received a reply. The most important sentences in that letter were these: “You ask how to write. A student once asked me the same. I told them: how to write is begin to write.” He added: “When you have written it, you may send the manuscript to me to look over.”I was overwhelmed. I took up his counsel at once and began to write hard. Nine months later I wrote to him to say that I had finished a draft, and asked him to read it. He was very surprised — perhaps thinking, can it be done so quickly? In truth, I had begun writing soon after Iris’s death, with many starts and stops. After my contact with Rhodes, encouraged by him, I quickened my pace; from that time on, I gave all my hours to writing and revising. The first draft was 230,000 words; after revision, it had come down to about 150,000 — and I sent it to him. Before long, he replied with his suggestions, with notes on what should be cut. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner; I had never published a book in my life — and yet he gave his time to guide me. I was deeply moved. It was at exactly that moment, too, that Pegasus Books in New York — the only one of the several hundred I had written to that had said yes — wrote back agreeing to publish my memoir. I had many questions about the publishing contract; he called me on his own initiative to advise. I could hardly believe his generosity. Glad for me that the book would come out, he agreed to write the foreword.Rhodes’s openness to other people, his abundance of positive spirit, has its roots in the tragic legend of his own life. He was still in the cradle when his mother killed herself. He and his older brother lived with their father in many places. The father remarried, and the stepmother abused them; if matters had continued, the boys would either have starved or been beaten to death. One day his older brother summoned the courage to bicycle to the police station and report the abuse (Rhodes has always credited his brother with saving him), and the courts placed them in a Kansas orphanage. There they grew up. Rhodes loved books from a young age, worked hard, and earned a full scholarship to Yale, where he graduated. He then began his career as a reporter and writer. The wounds left by the abuse remained; he has written that it took years of psychotherapy before he could lead a normal life. He has overcome much, has held fast — and only such a life can produce so generous, so open a heart. How fortunate I have been to have crossed paths with him.Rhodes had long lived on the East Coast. Later he moved to Half Moon Bay, in California, not far from us. To thank him for his generosity, my husband and I invited him and his wife Ginger to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Foster City in May 2010. The first time I met Rhodes I was struck by his height and the gravity of his face — but as soon as the conversation began, I found him gentle indeed. Because of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, he knew many physicists; my husband had earned his Ph.D. at Harvard under the Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger and was himself a theoretical physicist, and the two of them spent the evening in talk of the great theoretical physicists of the time — Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, and others. They were so caught up in the conversation that we forgot to take a photograph; fortunately I had brought two of his books for him to sign. We met a second time in June 2011, after Pegasus had brought out my memoir. To celebrate, my husband and I invited him and his wife to lunch at a restaurant in Half Moon Bay. The restaurant sat on the rocks above the sea; through the windows we could see the waves of the Pacific. Before we left, we took a photograph outside the restaurant, the sea behind us. Rhodes and I exchanged letters until 2015. I will never forget his encouragement and his support — without them my memoir would not have come out as it did.In his foreword he wrote: “I had met Iris Chang. Now I have come to know her parents as well; and I can see in them the source of the wisdom and the courage of Iris Chang. In this brave memoir you will come to know an extraordinary young woman and her family, and to know her life. As the French structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once said, the loss of someone close to us, or the loss of a writer or an artist who has moved us, is an irreparable absence — as if a particular rose had ceased forever to bloom, and its scent could no longer be found. A memoir cannot bring Iris Chang back; but it can at least let us feel her presence again. And that presence will always be true — full of courage, full of conviction, full of life.”In a year filled with discussion of the film Oppenheimer, I think back, again and again, to him. It was The Making of the Atomic Bomb that laid down for the lay reader what the building of the bomb meant. How fortunate I am that he wrote the foreword to my memoir. He is the same age as my husband, born in 1937; his birthday is approaching, and I offer this piece to him as a birthday gift, in token of my gratitude.  Ying-Ying Chang is the mother of Iris Chang. She holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard. In 2011 she published her English memoir of her daughter, The Woman Who Could Not Forget; the Chinese translation, Iris Chang: The Woman Who Could Not Forget History, was published in both simplified and traditional editions in 2012."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "The Nanking Massacre: Historical Facts, Photographic Material, World War II Documents, and the Account of Women in the 1997 Book",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/The-Nanking-Massacre-Facts-Pictures-WW2-Documentary-Photos-Women-1997/",
      "date"   : "06 April 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/18.jpg",
      "content"  : "Japanese Wartime Atrocities: Unit 731 and the Cruel ExperimentsIn this period, the Japanese Army committed many other wartime atrocities — including the notorious Unit 731, which carried out cruel experiments on prisoners of war. Together, these events bring into clear view the scale of destruction and the inhuman conduct that marked the period.Documentary Photographs and EvidenceDocumentary photographs and historical records offer evidence of the atrocities of the Nanking Massacre that cannot be denied. Such images and records are essential for the remembrance of the victims, and to ensure that this kind of atrocity is never forgotten.The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War IIThe bestselling book of 1997, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, brought this terrible event into open view. Its purpose was to deepen understanding and awareness of one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century.This history records the cruelty of war and the suffering of human beings, and reminds us, at the same time, to hold peace in dear regard, so that no such tragedy should ever come round again."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "*The Chinese in America*: Iris Chang on UCTV (Chinese Subtitled Edition)",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/the-chinese-in-should-america/",
      "date"   : "28 March 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/14.jpg",
      "content"  : "The author Iris Chang considers, in depth, the lasting influence of Chinese immigration on the history of the United States across the past one hundred and fifty years. The film looks back at the successes and the failures of American democratic practice, and at the lessons that Chinese immigrants have drawn from those experiences — lessons that remain meaningful today. [February 2004] [Programme ID: 8475]UCTV is the broadcast and online platform of the University of California, presenting programming from the system’s ten campuses, three national laboratories, and affiliated research institutes. UCTV brings to a wide audience programming on a range of subjects: science, health and medicine, public affairs, the humanities, the arts and music, business, education, and agriculture. UCTV first went to air in January 2000. By offering programming of high quality and substantial depth, UCTV carries the core mission of the University of California — teaching, research, and public service — beyond the campuses, to viewers throughout the world who seek to learn.(https://www.uctv.tv)"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "*The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II* — Iris Chang — English Audiobook",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/BV1nx4y1s7hk/",
      "date"   : "10 March 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/146.jpg",
      "content"  : ""
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "The Iris Chang Memorial Hall",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/iris-chang-memorial-hall/",
      "date"   : "02 January 2024",
      "image"  : "/images/24.jpg",
      "content"  : "The Iris Chang Memorial Hall is the first museum dedicated to the life and work of Iris Chang — Chinese-American writer, daughter of Huai’an, historian, and human rights advocate. The hall stands in Huaiyin District of Huai’an City, on the north bank of the ancient Huai River, on a site of 36,000 square meters with about 1,000 square meters of exhibition space.The hall’s back faces the land of Huaiyin and its front looks east. The architecture is dignified and restrained; the interior, plain and quiet. Its founding intention is fourfold: to keep the disgrace of history alive, to cherish peace, to remember those who stood up, and to call the next generation to do the same. The exhibition is organized around what cannot be forgotten, and is laid out across six galleries:  The Parents’ Country Across the Ocean — the historical roots that bind the Chang family to Huaiyin.  A Chinese Heart in the Diaspora — Iris Chang’s growing up overseas, and her abiding love for Chinese culture.  Facing the Truth: The Rape of Nanking — the historical record of the atrocities of the Japanese army in Nanjing, the discovery of The Rabe Diaries and other primary sources, and the writing of Iris Chang’s defining book.  Defender of History — Iris Chang’s tour of bookstores, lectures, and public debates across North America, all in service of a sense of justice that belongs to everyone.  The Search That Could Not Be Stopped — her later books, Thread of the Silkworm (the life of Tsien Hsue-shen) and The Chinese in America, and the loyalty to Chinese cultural memory that ran through them.  Light Cast on the World — the recognition and remembrance of Iris Chang’s brief, luminous life, both in China and abroad.The hall opened officially on April 7, 2017. The Huai’an municipal government held a formal opening ceremony in honor of Iris Chang’s contribution. The hall stands by the bank of the Huai River, and is held in respect by Chinese readers at home and abroad, and by the international friends who come to learn what she gave us.Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM. Closed Mondays.Address: Intersection of Nanchang North Road and Mu’ai Road, Huaiyin District, Huai’an City (across from the Huai’an Food and Drug Administration).Telephone: +86 0517-84680328."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "The Story Behind the Documentary *Nanking*",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/RapeOfNankingMOVIE/",
      "date"   : "05 November 2023",
      "image"  : "/images/162.png",
      "content"  : "By Ying-Ying ChangWhen I think back to the making of the documentary Nanking, I am forced to say that, in this world, there are some things that happen in ways stranger than we can account for.After our daughter Iris Chang took her own life on November 9, 2004, my husband and I fell into the deep end of grief. For a year we shut ourselves in the house, did not step out, and could not pull ourselves up. Iris’s death brought us a sorrow without limit; it also brought, to many people we had never met, the act of remembering her. But what I never expected was that there was a man who, like us, could not let her death and the story she had laid down in The Rape of Nanking go from his mind. For weeks the book turned over and over inside him, and at last he resolved to bring the story of the Nanjing Massacre to the screen.Early in October 2005, I received a letter from a man named Bill Guttentag. He wrote that he was a documentary director in Hollywood, and that he was preparing to make a film about the Nanjing Massacre. He said he held Iris and her work in deep respect, and asked us to help him. I went straight to the internet to find out who he was. It turned out he was an Oscar-winning documentary director — and at once a feeling of respect arose in me. While Iris was still alive, she had hoped that the history of Nanjing might one day reach the screen; now someone had come forward, on his own, to do it. We could not have hoped for better news, and of course we would help him see it through. Bill arranged to meet my husband and me in a coffee shop near the Stanford campus. We went, as we had agreed. It turned out that Bill not only worked in Hollywood; his home was near Stanford, because he was also a professor there, teaching courses in film. The man sitting across from us with a cup of coffee in his hands struck me, the moment I saw him, as the scholar-gentleman type, with a neatly trimmed white beard around his lips, and not a trace of the bigness of a director — which set my husband and me at ease.Bill told us, slowly, how he had come to take on the Nanjing project. There was, on the East Coast, a wealthy man named Ted Leonsis, who, having been moved by Iris’s book, wanted to put up the money to make a film about the Nanjing Massacre. Ted wanted to hire Bill to direct it; Bill, feeling that the subject was almost impossibly difficult, declined. Ted then flew Bill from California to Washington, D.C., on his private plane, and invited him to attend a game played by his sports team. Faced with that kind of sincerity, Bill could not refuse, and accepted. He had already assembled a production team and read Iris’s book carefully. He and the team were about to leave for China to interview survivors, and he asked us to give the team our help. We agreed at once. Once home, I went straight back to the internet to look up what I could find about Ted.Ted Leonsis turned out to be a Greek-American — a self-made man with a touch of legend in him. His parents were both working-class; his father had hoped that, when Ted grew up, he might do well to find a job in a restaurant. But Ted had learned, from a young age, how to work hard for his own keep. In summer he mowed the lawn of a man who worked in the stock market; that man, seeing Ted’s diligence and intelligence, helped him get to college. Ted graduated from Georgetown University in Washington — the first in his family to attend college. By his industry and his shrewdness, he rose without much resistance to the rank of vice president of America Online (AOL), came to own several professional sports teams, and his net worth eventually crossed into the hundreds of millions. When he was twenty-six, he had survived a plane crash, and that brush with death was a turning point. He decided that, with the rest of the life that had been given back to him, he would do something. That decision became the engine that powered everything afterward. He drew up a list of one hundred and one things he wished to accomplish before he died — and one of them was to make, in his lifetime, a film. After his rise, his wishes began, one after another, to be fulfilled.After we met Bill in October 2005, I gave Bill’s assistant, Violet Feng — who served as the documentary’s associate director — every piece of material we had at home about the Nanjing Massacre, including a great many video tapes, and the entire body of recordings of Iris’s interviews. I also reached out to the directors of the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII in Asia — Ding Yuan, He Yingming, Shao Zhengyin, and others — and everyone gave Bill’s team what materials they had. I helped them to reach Zhu Chengshan, the director of the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing, so that Bill’s team could quickly meet survivors. The shoot in China went smoothly. Bill kept up his correspondence with me throughout, and thanked us, again and again, for the steady support of the Alliance.In October 2006, the Global Alliance held its biennial conference, that year hosted by the Washington, D.C. chapter. After Iris’s death, because of her close ties to the Alliance, my husband and I had joined it, and we attended the meetings in Washington. Through Bill’s introduction, I had been writing to Ted, who lived in Washington; we agreed to meet at the conference. So it was that, for the first time, we met Ted in person. The moment he saw us he came forward with his hand outstretched. Ted was tall, broadly built, with dark hair and brows and bright eyes — the cast of an Eastern European face. At the conference he introduced unedited footage from Bill’s shoot in Nanjing, and asked the chapters of the Alliance, once the film was finished, to help with its promotion. At lunch, he made a point of asking that he be seated with us. Because the Alliance worked on a tight budget, the venue was a modest hotel; the lunch table was small, and Ted sat directly across from us, less than three feet away. Mild and courteous, he turned to my husband and me and explained why he had decided to make this film.Ted said that, at Christmas of 2004, he had been on his private yacht in the Caribbean. There was nothing on board to read, so when the yacht moored at a small island, he bought up a great stack of back issues of The New York Times to read at his leisure. Among them, he came upon the obituary of Iris from November 2004, with her photograph beside it. He said he considered himself a reasonably well-read, reasonably educated man — and yet, until that moment, he had never heard of the Nanjing Massacre. The obituary mentioned Iris’s book The Rape of Nanking, the Nanjing Safety Zone, John Rabe and the international group within the Zone who had saved 250,000 refugees. None of this was familiar to him. From that moment, the history of Nanking gripped him. Before disembarking, he saw the servants tossing the old papers into the trash; the page with Iris’s obituary happened to be on top. As he passed the bin, he found that Iris’s eyes, in the photograph, were following him. He paced back and forth, and her eyes paced with him. As Ted said this, the hairs on my arms stood up. I looked at him intently — there was no trace of exaggeration. Ted said, in earnest: those international humanitarians of the Safety Zone could have, in those dangerous wartime conditions, walked back to a comfortable life in their home countries. Instead, they chose to stay and save refugees. The depth of their humanity was beyond what we owe them in respect. He said: In the darkest hour, there is always one ray of dawn — which became the slogan of the documentary Nanking. And then, pointing at his own chest, he asked: “In their place, would I have stayed?” That question, he said, had been pressing on him without rest. As he spoke, I was deeply moved.Ted went on: “When I got back home, I went to the bookstore and bought every book I could find on the Second World War, and read them through.” He read Iris’s book through and through. For a long stretch in those days, he said, the history of Nanjing followed him everywhere, and he could not put it down. He could not sleep for nights. His wife told him: “I have never seen you so absorbed in anything.” He spoke to us with such candor and such openness about what was inside him. He was warm, just-minded, and approachable. Not a trace of the rich man’s manner — in fact, talking with him, I forgot completely that he was one of the great men of business, the owner of three sports teams in Washington, of a private plane, of a yacht. And so it was that he made the documentary Nanking the answer to one of the wishes on his list: to make, in his lifetime, a film. He put up a million dollars and engaged Bill, the great director, to make it. He said: if it was to be made, it had to be made well — and so he wanted the best, the first-rank director.By early 2007, Bill had finished cutting the film. He was, as one would expect from an Oscar-winning director, capable of fresh approaches. He invited a number of well-known Hollywood actors of the day, who agreed to work pro bono. I imagine Bill persuaded them by appealing to the spirit of the humanitarians of the Nanjing Safety Zone. Each actor took on the role of one of the international figures inside the Zone, reading aloud from their letters and diaries, which described the suffering of those weeks. Jürgen Prochnow took the role of John Rabe; Woody Harrelson, Dr. Wilson; Mariel Hemingway, Minnie Vautrin.The documentary Nanking was completed in 2007. At the Sundance Film Festival in Utah it received high praise. At that year’s Academy Awards it did not, as Ted had hoped, win Best Documentary, but it was one of the five finalists nominated. It also received the Peabody Award — the highest honor in artistic creation. We and the Alliance worked hard to publicize and promote Nanking, and the film was screened across North America, across Asia, and on the Chinese mainland; its impact on the public understanding of this history has been considerable. At the very end of the film, there is a special remembrance of Iris Chang, with thanks for what she did to bring this history forward. I believe Iris, wherever she may be, is comforted by it.A small story: in November 2007, Ms. Ma Difan, a leader of the Boston Chinese community, wished to hold a public screening of Nanking in Boston, and to invite Mr. Leonsis to introduce the film. I gladly agreed to help her invite him. When Ms. Ma wrote to him, she said that she would cover his travel costs and arrange airport transfers. Ted wrote back that she should not worry about it. Only afterward did we remember he had a private plane. Ms. Ma and I laughed on the telephone for a full two minutes.My encounters with Ted and Bill on the road of life were brief; but I will never forget the story behind this film. How many in this world feel, as Ted did, the sacrifice of those humanitarians inside the international Safety Zone of Nanjing? And how many would be willing to put up the money to make a film to bring this history to the public? When I think back to Ted saying that Iris’s eyes had followed him, that they had taken hold of his heart — was that what religion calls a miracle? Was it what science calls telepathy? Was it accident? Or fate? Or is it that only those who carry the right kind of attention can catch hold of those mysterious instants? It is a phenomenon that, in this world of ours, will never be fully explained.  Ying-Ying Chang is the mother of Iris Chang. She holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard University and is a retired research associate professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois. In 2011 she published her English memoir of her daughter, The Woman Who Could Not Forget. The Chinese translation, Iris Chang: The Woman Who Could Not Forget History, was published in both simplified and traditional editions in 2012."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "Ceremony for the Donation of Iris Chang's Signed Edition Held at Huai'an",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/donation/",
      "date"   : "12 January 2023",
      "image"  : "/images/151.jpg",
      "content"  : "At 2:30 in the afternoon, in the lecture hall of the Iris Chang Memorial Hall in Huai’an, a ceremony was held for the donation of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II — Iris Chang’s signed edition. Liu Yu, founder of the Iris Chang Studio and the donor on the day, the staff of the Iris Chang Memorial Hall in Huai’an, and members of the press took part together in the event.              Liu Yu / Peoples Government of Huaiyin District, Huaian CityTo remember history is to hold the peace that has been hard-won in dear regard. Our generation must strengthen itself, and walk forward along the path that Iris Chang opened — taking history as the lamp by which we see — for the power of one can change the world. (Reporters: Tao Siyuan, Liu Hui)                  Liu Yu / Peoples Government of Huaiyin District, Huaian City  This article is excerpted from the People’s Government of Huaiyin District, Huai’an City."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "The Iris Chang Memorial Park",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/Vwdh-QBPf_4/",
      "date"   : "05 January 2023",
      "image"  : "/images/137.jpg",
      "content"  : "On November 9, 2019, Iris Chang Park opened in San Jose, California, to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the death of the historian Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking. On the day of the opening, residents of the neighborhood, representatives of community organizations, and a number of elected officials gathered to pay their respects to a remarkable historian.Iris Chang Park stands at the corner of River Oaks Parkway and Seely Avenue in San Jose, near the home in which Iris had lived. The park sets aside the conventions of a children’s playground, and gives instead a wide green expanse, a winding path, and six pieces of public art — a quiet “oasis” in form. The art works, with their arcs, ripples, and water lines, stand for Iris Chang’s belief in “the power of one,” and remember the influence she has had on the world.              At the opening, Iriss mother, Ying-Ying Chang, gave an address that moved everyone present. She said she hoped the park would offer those who came a measure of inward peace, and would inspire them to bring change to the world without fear. She recalled that the San Jose City Council had passed the plan for the memorial park in 2015 and that the family had followed its progress for four years. With deep feeling, she said: Fifteen years ago today, Iris left us. But her work and her spirit continue to move countless people. I believe that, in heaven, she takes comfort from this. Mrs. Chang also urged everyone to keep their dreams, to refuse to compromise with society, and she expressed the hope that the park would be a place from which people could draw inspiration in their own lives.San Jose Council Member Lan Diep, of District 4, said that Iris Chang Park was, for San Jose, a kind of green oasis able to bring inward stillness to those who came. People in our age, he said, tend to cling to the past and worry about the future, and so cannot enjoy the present. I hope that, in this new park, everyone will find a moment of stillness, and learn to live in the present. California Assembly Member Kansen Chu thanked the City of San Jose for honoring Iris Chang with the park, and emphasized the importance of attending to mental health.Richard Deutsch, the designer of the park, has many works of public art across the United States, including pieces at Stanford University and in Santa Cruz. While preparing for the memorial park, he came to know Iris Changs work, her character, and her influence in depth. He said that Iriss influence spread out like ripples in water — connecting different communities and different places — and so he chose curved paths to stand for that connection, and several pieces drawn from the idea of ripples to stand for the power of one. He also brought back from a Chinese village a stone mill nearly five hundred years old, in order to insist on the importance of the past.              The opening of Iris Chang Park is more than a deep act of remembrance for a fine historian. It is the carrying-on of the conviction she lived by — that every person has the power to bring change. May this park bring inward stillness, and inward strength, to all who come.* Note: this article is excerpted from the *World Journal*, November 10, 2019."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "The Choreodrama *Deep in Memory* (HD on Xuexi Qiangguo)",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/deep-in-memory/",
      "date"   : "18 September 2022",
      "image"  : "/images/104.jpg",
      "content"  : "The choreodrama Deep in Memory takes as its principal thread Iris Chang’s investigation into the 1937 Nanking Massacre and is built, as a theme, around the recollections of those who lived through it. Working from key terms — the killing, the witnessing, the contrition, the denial — the piece composes chapters that stand on their own and, at the same time, confirm one another. From these different angles, all of them point to a single truth, and re-enact the historical record. The choreography uses a direct and powerful dance language to seize the moments of intense emotion in each character and the points of acute psychological tension, expressing in many layers the changes of feeling and inner state, and reaching, with shocking force, into the part of memory that cannot be forgotten.Set against the international register of the stage design, the work reads almost like a stage documentary. The well-known dramatist and Vice-Chairman of the China Theatre Association, Luo Huai, has noted: “Deep in Memory is a work of large frame, capable of going out into the world.” The piece is written and directed by Tong Ruirui and performed by the Dance Drama Theatre of the Jiangsu Performing Arts Group; Tang Shiyi and Li Yiran each take the role of Iris Chang. With Iris, John Rabe, Minnie Vautrin, Li Xiuying, and Higashi Shirō as the principal historical figures, the piece moves through Iris’s view to draw forth the recollections of those who lived through the Nanking Massacre — to mourn, by way of this work, the suffering and the wound of a people, to awaken the memory of history, and to convey the meaning of peace.              Li Yiran / Iris Chang"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "The Film *City of Life and Death*",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/city-of-life-and-death/",
      "date"   : "15 August 2022",
      "image"  : "/images/107.jpg",
      "content"  : "City of Life and Death (Chinese: 《南京！南京！》, Nanjing! Nanjing!) is a film, set on the subject of the Nanking Massacre, by the mainland Chinese director Lu Chuan. Filming began on October 27, 2007; the film was released in mainland China on April 22, 2009. That same year, City of Life and Death won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, in Spain.City of Life and Death"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "The Film *John Rabe*",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/john-rabe/",
      "date"   : "14 August 2022",
      "image"  : "/images/108.jpg",
      "content"  : "The film John Rabe is a historical drama drawn from real events. It tells the story of the German businessman John Rabe who, during the Nanking Massacre of 1937, used his standing and his influence to establish a safety zone, and so saved tens of thousands of Chinese civilians. With a careful narrative and a fine craft, the film shows the courage and the human conscience of Rabe in conditions of the most extreme distress, and casts into sharp relief the light of human nature within war. The film has been widely praised across the world and has received a number of international film awards; it stands as a much-honored work of historical cinema."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "On Sharing and Reposting from the Iris Chang Studio",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/content-reposting-guidelines/",
      "date"   : "12 August 2022",
      "image"  : "/images/29.jpg",
      "content"  : "In recent months, we have observed that some users have set up personal pages on Weibo, the WeChat Public Platform, Douyin and other social platforms, posting material related to Iris Chang. We thank everyone for their support of Iris and trust that the gesture is, in itself, well meant. These pages, however, have begun to cause confusion online: it is at times difficult for readers to know which pages are authorized and which are not.The Iris Chang Studio welcomes the sharing of material related to Iris. We earnestly ask, however, that those who have set up pages of their own under the name of “the Iris Chang Studio” do not allow that name to be confused with ours. Please mark clearly, on the page itself, that the page is not run by the Studio.We have also noticed that some personal pages are being used to sell books. We state here, on the record, that the Iris Chang Studio is, in perpetuity, non-profit, and runs a book-giving programme each year. Any sales activity has no connection with the Iris Chang Studio.International:  Twitter: Iris Chang Studio  Facebook: Iris Chang StudioMainland China:  WeChat Public Account: 張純如紀念工作室  WeChat Channel: 張純如工作室  Xiaohongshu: 張純如工作室  Douyin: 至純至勇的鳶尾花  Sina Weibo: 至純至勇的鳶尾花Beyond the platforms listed above, any page or outlet claiming to be “the Iris Chang Studio” has nothing to do with the Studio, and the text or audiovisual material carried on such pages does not have the Studio’s authorization. To avoid any uncertainty as to its accuracy, please be careful in distinguishing where information comes from, so as not to be confused or misled by content of unclear origin.We ask everyone, before quoting or reposting, to verify a source briefly, and — whether reposting in full or in part — to mark clearly the original publication and date. We also recommend, when you encounter a piece of writing or a video of unclear origin that bears the name “Iris Chang Studio,” that you decline to share or repost it."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "Cover Exclusive: Teacher Dismissed for False Statements in Class — Iris Chang Studio: Do Not Forget History, for Forgetting Is a Second Massacre",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/thecover/",
      "date"   : "16 December 2021",
      "image"  : "/images/159.jpg",
      "content"  : "Cover News reporters Xun Chao and Wu DeyuRecently, a teacher named Song, of the Eastern Film Academy at Shanghai Zhendan Vocational College, made false statements in class about the Nanjing Massacre, misleading her students. The matter drew nationwide attention. On the evening of December 16, Shanghai Zhendan Vocational College released a “statement of the situation,” dismissing the teacher.The notice reads: “After investigation by the school, it has been confirmed that, on the afternoon of December 14, 2021, in her course on News Interviewing, the teacher Song made false statements that constituted a major teaching incident and caused serious adverse social impact. In accordance with the Shanghai Zhendan Vocational College Procedures for the Determination and Handling of Teaching Incidents and the Provisional Regulations on Disciplinary Action for Faculty and Staff, the teacher Song is hereby dismissed.”The notice continues: “The college places the highest value on the moral and ethical conduct of its faculty. We will use this case as a lesson and tighten the management of all teaching, the political discipline of the classroom, and the standards of conduct. Toward any breach of discipline, we will hold without exception to a ‘zero tolerance’ attitude; once a violation is verified, there will be no leniency.”On the evening of the 16th, Cover News reached the Iris Chang Studio. Responding to Song’s false statements, the studio expressed both surprise and regret. “On the National Memorial Day, when the whole country was in mourning for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre, the teacher Song stood up in front of her class and openly cast doubt on the death toll, going so far as to say that ‘people without names, without identities, who died, do not count.’ That is, in plain terms, to plead the case of Japanese militarism’s wartime crimes.”In January 1995, Iris Chang traveled to the Library of Congress and to the library of the Yale Divinity School to gather material for The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust. In July of the same year she went alone to Nanjing to interview survivors. “What pained her most in the writing,” the studio recalled, “was reading, case after case, the records of what the Japanese army had done to Chinese civilians.”Between 1937 and 1938, the Japanese army killed, tortured, and violated countless innocents in Nanjing — by means that still escape what language can carry. Iris Chang read no fewer than several hundred such cases. “She often read deep into the night. The scenes of the killing seemed to rise up out of the page; the suffocating weight of them was hard to lift off her. Sometimes she had to step away from the desk to take deep breaths — and still the cruel scenes would not leave her. Once her mother asked her, ‘Will you go on?’ She said, ‘What I am going through now cannot compare with what they suffered. I want to save those who have been forgotten in the dark; I want to speak for those who can no longer speak.’”Iris ChangIris Chang’s mother, Ying-Ying Chang, said: “The Rape of Nanking is a message to the whole world: we must do all we can to dig out the truth of history, to uphold justice, to defend what is true.” The studio also told the reporter, “Recently we have seen, on social media, a Taiwanese blogger conducting a survey on the National Memorial Day — asking young people in Taiwan whether they knew what happened on December 13, 1937, and whether they thought Japan needs to apologize. The results were deeply disappointing.”The Iris Chang Studio added: “Looking at both of these incidents, the proper teaching of history to the next generation is, in our view, of the utmost importance. How to help young Chinese form a correct view of history; how to bring the Japanese government to a sincere apology — these are tasks for our entire society, now and for a long time to come. We must remember: do not forget history, for to forget is to commit a second massacre. With regard to the teacher Song, the school must not only act decisively, it must also undertake to educate her about history. The Iris Chang Studio gives away copies of Iris Chang’s books to members of the public every month — and we are willing to send Ms. Song her own copy of The Rape of Nanking.”  Editor: Xie Tingting"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "The Power of One Can Change the World — The Iris Chang Studio Visits the *Hawaii Chinese Daily*",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/the-power-of-one/",
      "date"   : "18 December 2020",
      "image"  : "/images/128.jpg",
      "content"  : "Iris Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in journalism. Her 1997 book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II was the first thorough English-language study of the Nanjing Massacre — a book that ended the long English-speaking silence on the historical record of that event. Released in the United States, it became a leading work of nonfiction and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for three months. To honor her contribution, the Hawaii Chinese Daily has, for the first time in its history, named a person who is already in heaven — Iris Chang — to its list of Greater Chinese Personalities. The Washington Post columnist George Will has written: “Because of Iris Chang’s book, the second ‘rape of Nanjing’ is over.”1. To begin, please tell us about Iris Chang’s life.Iris was born on March 28, 1968, in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1967 her parents had completed their doctorates and gone to Princeton for postdoctoral work. Her father, Shau-Jin Chang, was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, working on physics; her mother, Ying-Ying Chang, was doing postdoctoral research in the Department of Biology at Princeton University. When Iris was a little over one year old, her father took up a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the family moved to the university town of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.Iris grew up there. In 1985 she graduated from the University Laboratory High School in Illinois. In 1989 she received her bachelor’s from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her first two years she studied mathematics and computer science; in the second half of her junior year, drawn by literature, she transferred and graduated with a degree in journalism.After college, she interned at the Chicago bureau of the Associated Press and at the Chicago Tribune, then returned to the University of Illinois for a half-year of history. Soon afterward, the writing program at Johns Hopkins University offered her a teaching fellowship for a one-year master’s in writing. Iris took it and earned her master’s in writing from Johns Hopkins in May 1991.(Iris Changs masters diploma in writing from Johns Hopkins.)Iris’s adviser, Barbara Culliton, was greatly taken by her style. Culliton’s friend Susan Rabiner, a book editor at HarperCollins, was looking for someone who knew Chinese to write a biography of Tsien Hsue-shen. Iris was very young at the time, and that book became the turning point of her writing life. In 1995, the first book of her career — Thread of the Silkworm: The Life of Tsien Hsue-shen — was published.Iris wrote three books in her lifetime: Thread of the Silkworm in 1995; The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II in 1997; and The Chinese in America in 2003.*Thread of the Silkworm: The Life of Tsien Hsue-shen**The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II**The Chinese in America*This is only a brief sketch of Iris’s life. Readers who wish to go deeper can read Ying-Ying Chang’s The Woman Who Could Not Forget. It is at once a mother’s memoir of her daughter and a full biography of Iris Chang, and it sets out her life in detail.2. What kind of family did Iris Chang grow up in, and what cultural inheritance did she carry?(A family photograph at age six. Back row: Iriss parents. Front row: her grandfather, Chang Tieh-chün (lower left), and her grandmother, Sun Yi-pai.)Ying-Ying Chang’s father — Iris’s maternal grandfather, Chang Tieh-chün — was a well-known journalist who served for many years as the chief editorial writer of Chung-Hua Daily. He prized Chinese culture and stressed: “Wherever we go in this world, we must not forget our Chinese roots.” That conviction lived on in Mrs. Chang and was, in turn, quietly handed on to her children.From her earliest years Iris studied not only English but Chinese as well. Her father and mother did everything they could to introduce Chinese culture to her. So Iris never felt herself, in America, to be part of a “minority”; partly because she had been in close contact with Chinese culture from her earliest years, she knew where her roots ran, and she was proud of being Chinese-American — proud, too, of carrying Chinese blood.Iris loved books from a young age. Each visit to the library, she carried home stacks of them. The library was her favorite place.A small but striking detail: when reporters interviewed her in later years, she said that at fifteen she had begun writing down the goals she wanted to reach in her life — and that this had been a turning point. To her own astonishment, by the end of the year she had achieved every one of them: in studies, in extracurricular activities, in awards. The goals seemed to her, she said, almost as if they had been touched by magic. From that time, she understood that her own destiny was something she could, in part, take in hand.3. What pushed her to write The Rape of Nanking?Around 1979 to 1980, when Iris was in fifth grade, she became curious about her own roots — about where her family had come from. She began asking her parents many questions: where did each side of our family come from? Why did we have to come to America? When you were my age, what was China like?The Chang household was unusually open; nothing was unspeakable, and at dinner Iris’s parents would tell her the story of the family. They explained, for example, what Iris’s grandfather had often said — Wealth and rank shall not corrupt you, poverty and lowliness shall not move you, force and threat shall not bend you — and how, despite poverty, the family had risen by hard work and refused to give in to fate.Her parents told her about what each side of the family had suffered during the war against Japan, and afterward, in the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Above all, the events of 1937 — the Japanese invasion of Nanjing and the inhuman massacre that followed — was a passage of history that no Chinese could ever forget. Every Chinese, they told her, ought to keep in memory the cruel acts that Japanese imperialism committed during the war.In fact, on December 13, 1937, when the Japanese army took Nanjing and the killing began, the New York Times correspondent Frank Tillman Durdin wrote a front-page report on the massacre. A number of newspapers carried articles in those weeks. Yet sixty years later, the Western world had quite forgotten this terrible passage of history.The wartime stories her parents told at home were largely unknown to American society. Iris discovered, in her schoolbooks and at the public library, almost nothing about the Nanjing Massacre, while the history of the Nazis’ killing of the Jews was taught in detail. She wanted to understand why this enormous gap existed.But what brought her to the page was a 1994 photographic exhibit on the Nanjing Massacre held in Cupertino, in the San Francisco Bay Area. “The horror of those photographs,” she said, “was what made me want to write this book. Whether it earned money or not, I did not care. What I wanted was for everyone in the world to know what had happened in Nanjing in 1937.” So Iris set out to find the truth. In January 1995 she went to the Library of Congress and to the Yale Divinity School library to gather materials, and in July of the same year she went, alone, to Nanjing to interview survivors.(Iris in the archives.)(Iris interviewing Xia Shuqin, a survivor of the Nanjing Massacre.)Iris wrote The Rape of Nanking with no thought for sleep or food, putting body and mind through pain to finish the book. Mrs. Chang once asked her, “Will you go on?” Iris said: “What I am going through now cannot compare with what they suffered. I want to save those who have been forgotten in the dark, and to speak for those who can no longer speak.”In the course of her research, John Rabe’s name turned up again and again in the documents — but no one, after the war, had any idea what had become of him in Germany. Iris kept on the trail; in time she found his granddaughter, and through her, the Diary of John Rabe. The recovery of the Rabe Diary was one of Iris’s great contributions to the history of the Nanjing Massacre.(Pages from the *Rabe Diary*, donated by Iris Chang to the Memorial in Nanjing.)(Iris Changs portrait at the Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders.)When the Japanese ambassador to the United States publicly criticized her book as “inaccurate,” she challenged him directly. On December 1, 1998, on the program NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, Iris debated the Japanese ambassador, Kunihiko Saito, before the entire country.Iris’s parents had never imagined that the stories they spoke at the dinner table would, one day, drive their daughter to write a book that would sell across the world and change how the world saw the Second World War.4. Iris Chang believed in “the power of one.” Through what conditions did she come to that conviction?It was while she was writing The Rape of Nanking that she came to feel “the power of one.” She believed that one person, working alone, can succeed — can reach the goal that he or she has set.Mrs. Chang’s reading: it was through the writing of The Rape of Nanking that Iris formed the idea that “the power of one can change the world.” To complete the book, in Mrs. Chang’s view, Iris needed five things: curiosity, passion, sustained effort, refusal to give up, and courage.5. What does “the power of one” mean for the work of the Iris Chang Studio?First, a brief introduction. The studio was founded three years ago.I myself first learned of Iris Chang in 2008, through Olivia Cheng’s documentary Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking. I was in my last year of high school. After watching the film I bought The Rape of Nanking at once and read it. I have kept the book ever since, and I take it down to read whenever I have time.I had always assumed that, with someone of her reach, there would be a dedicated team gathering and editing her work, her speeches, her recordings — going further, telling the story in greater depth — because she had awakened the entire world to look once again at the wartime crimes of imperial Japan. But I found that there was no such person. I wrote to Mrs. Chang by email and told her I had an idea: to set up a studio in Iris’s memory.Among the studio’s tasks now: translating Iris Chang’s speeches on video and bringing them to the public as soon as we can. We also work with the Iris Chang Memorial in Huai’an on commemorative events.The studio has recently joined with the Outlook Research Institute to produce a “Super Iris” NFT series, which is expected to launch on a major cross-chain NFT trading platform.In the past, public lectures were often given by Mrs. Chang herself; but Mrs. Chang must not exhaust herself, and she must care for her family. So the studio will, more and more, appear in public on her behalf — with the goal of raising up a new generation that will carry forward and spread Iris’s spirit. The studio’s important task is to train the next generation to take on what Mrs. Chang has been doing.I live in Hangzhou. The places I love most are the Baochu Pagoda and the Yue Wang Temple — places where I feel I can almost see Iris in the photographs taken when she came to Hangzhou. I believe that, no matter how the years go on, Iris and I, in the deepest places of our spirit, will remain in a connection that crosses time and space.(Iris Chang at the Yue Wang Temple, Hangzhou.)  Editor’s note from the Hawaii Chinese Daily: Around 1965, while serving in Taipei, the editor’s regular work included calling each week on the political commentators of the day to collect their manuscripts and to deliver their honoraria. Each visit to Mr. Chang Tieh-chün’s home in Xindian was met with a cup of tea and a brief, warm conversation. In speaking recently with Ms. Ying-Ying Chang, the editor learned that Mr. Chang Tieh-chün is Ms. Ying-Ying Chang’s father, and Iris Chang’s maternal grandfather. That one of those whom the editor most respected should be linked to Iris Chang in this way is not what one would have expected. With the Changs, the editor regrets a meeting that came too late. He sets it down here in record."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "Dr. Ying-Ying Chang: 'The Power of One Can Change the World' — Marking the Sixteenth Anniversary of Iris Chang's Passing and the First Year of Iris Chang Park",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/AfKL7OPbDmc/",
      "date"   : "12 November 2020",
      "image"  : "/images/17.jpg",
      "content"  : "Talk: The Power of One Can Change the World— Marking the sixteenth anniversary of Iris Chang’s passing and the first year of Iris Chang ParkTime: Wednesday, November 11, 2020US West Coast: 8 p.m., November 11Beijing: 12 noon, November 12Speaker: Dr. Ying-Ying ChangAbout the speaker:Dr. Ying-Ying Chang was born during the war in the wartime capital, Chongqing, and later moved with her family to Taiwan. She graduated from National Taiwan University and, in 1967, received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard University, where she also met and married the physicist Shau-Jin Chang. Dr. Chang then joined the Department of Microbiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, beginning a career of teaching and research that ran for thirty years. Her papers have appeared in the leading journals of science, including Science, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the Journal of Bacteriology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. After her retirement, she and her husband settled in San Jose, California.The late writer Iris Chang — author of The Forgotten Holocaust — was Dr. Chang’s elder daughter. After Iris’s death, Dr. Chang and her husband devoted themselves to the preservation and transmission of the history of Asia in the Second World War, and together founded the Iris Chang Memorial Foundation, in honor of their daughter’s spirit of uncovering the historical record and guarding the truth. In 2011, Dr. Chang completed her memoir The Woman Who Could Not Forget: Iris Chang Before and Beyond the Rape of Nanking.Programme:Marking the first year of Iris Chang Park — Address by Assembly Member Kansen ChuThe Power of One Can Change the World — Keynote by Dr. Ying-Ying ChangDeep in Memory — Discussion and Reflection"
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "History Is Not to Be Forgotten — Iris Chang's Mother, in Tears, Writes a Book to Carry Out Her Daughter's Last Wish | *The World, Listen to Me*, CCTV International, 17 October 2020",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/X8rHbrm51GA/",
      "date"   : "17 October 2020",
      "image"  : "/images/16.jpg",
      "content"  : "The Chinese-American writer Iris Chang authored The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. The news of her death in 2004 brought deep grief to the entire Chinese community in North America.On the stage of The World, Listen to Me speakers come from many countries, near and far. Among them are Chinese living abroad who have made distinguished contributions in their fields, and friends from outside China who love Chinese culture and have, in their own ways, found themselves bound to it. Through one fine, moving story of a life after another, the stage offers a range of points of view, and gives all of us, together, the beauty of mutual understanding."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "*Jiayu Jeng Has Something to Say* — In Memory of Iris Chang",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/jiayu-jeng/",
      "date"   : "14 November 2019",
      "image"  : "/images/126.jpg",
      "content"  : "On November 9, 2004, the Chinese-American writer Iris Chang took her own life at home, after struggling with depression; she was thirty-six years old. Her standing in the world had been won by The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, the bestselling book that appeared in 1997, which set out the cruel record of the Nanking Massacre and became a much-noted historical document. After many years of preparation and the unwearied work of many in the community, a park bearing her name was opened in northern San Jose on November 9, 2019, to mark her exceptional contribution and her spiritual inheritance.On the eve of the opening, Iris Chang’s parents and California Assembly Member Kansen Chu — the principal mover of the project — were invited to the well-known Bay Area Chinese television programme Jiayu Jeng Has Something to Say, to remember together this brave woman who took up her pen as a weapon and stood for the truth of history. On the programme, the guests recalled, with deep feeling, the events of Iris Chang’s life, and emphasized the great service she rendered in carrying forward the memory of history and in deepening understanding among nations.“Iris Chang Park” is more than a memorial park: it is a cultural landmark, a sign of the lasting search for truth, justice, and the spirit of human conscience. The opening of the park is a high act of homage to a spirit that gave history its voice and would not yield before any power, and it is the dignified safeguarding of the inheritance she has left."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "Iris Chang: Selected Sayings",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/analects/",
      "date"   : "28 March 2019",
      "image"  : "/images/127.jpg",
      "content"  : "First — please, please, please believe in the power of one. One person can change the world by a great measure. One person — in fact, one idea — can start a war, or end a war, or upset an entire structure of power. One discovery can cure a disease; one new technology can save mankind, or destroy it. You are one person, and you can change the lives of millions. Aim high. Do not narrow your sight, and never give up the dream or the conviction you carry.        The written word is the only way to keep the essence of a soul.        A human being, in fact, dies twice — once in the death of the body, and once in the moment when he disappears from the memory of others.        If we look back across a thousand years of history, what becomes plain is this: no race and no culture has held a monopoly on cruelty in war. The garment of civilization is, it seems, very thin — easily torn off.        Whether this book makes money or not, I do not care. What I want is for everyone in the world to know what happened in Nanjing in 1937.        Although I had heard from childhood many descriptions of the Nanjing Massacre, those photographs still came on me without warning. The bare black-and-white images were unbearable to look upon: victims with their heads cut off, or with their bellies slit open; women, naked, forced into one obscene posture after another at the demand of those who raped them, their faces twisted, their suffering plain, their disgrace and rage marked into the image so deeply that the eye could not, afterward, let it go."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "Iris Chang: The Film of the Nanking Massacre",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/iris-chang-movie/",
      "date"   : "06 July 2007",
      "image"  : "/images/122.png",
      "content"  : "IntroductionIn the summer of 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident drew open the curtain on China’s War of Resistance against Japan. Seventy years later, Nanjing, Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking, The Rape of Nanking, and Nanjing! Nanjing! — among other films and documentaries — were released across the world, and brought that wretched history once again before our eyes.In a world where some in Japan still attempt to twist the historical record, the appearance of these works has its own historical significance. Yet the work of recovering history, and of reflecting on it, is not finished.Walking in Iris Chang’s FootstepsZhu Chengshan, the director of the Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders, said of Iris Chang: “She was a flower in full bloom, who withered too soon, to our sorrow; and she was a soldier fallen on the field, with countless others behind her, ready to take up her unfinished work.”In March 2007, Wang Weixing stood on top of the Zhongshan Gate of Nanjing’s old wall and pointed into the distance, telling Olivia Cheng: “On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army came in from over there and took the Zhongshan Gate.” He answered her questions in detail, and his voice grew strong: “Do you know what it meant to write that book? Do you know what it meant to bring the truth of the Nanjing Massacre before the world?” It was as if Wang Weixing had returned to the moment, twelve years earlier, when he had spoken the same words to Iris Chang. The likeness between Olivia Cheng and Iris Chang moved him beyond words.Bringing History Back: From Iris Chang to Olivia ChengTo bring back, on screen, the days when Iris Chang had gathered her materials in Nanjing, the experts and survivors who had once spoken with her took part in the making of the documentary Iris Chang. Olivia Cheng — the only actor in the film, a Chinese woman raised in Canada — seemed almost born to take the part of Iris Chang.Olivia Cheng’s admiration for Iris Chang began in 1998, when she first “met” Iris Chang through a cover article in Reader’s Digest. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II had had a deep effect in the Western world, and Olivia Cheng felt that, as a person of Chinese descent, she had a duty to learn this history.In 2006, when Olivia Cheng set out to know her own idol more deeply, she learned that Iris Chang had already been gone for two years.              Olivia Cheng / Iris ChangTouching History: From San Francisco to NanjingOlivia Cheng resolved to make people remember Iris Chang — through writing and through film. At her own expense, she traveled to San Francisco, called on Iris Chang’s family and friends, read through what had been left, and stood at her grave.In February 2007, when Olivia Cheng learned of the casting call for the documentary Iris Chang, she wrote at once and was selected. To play her own idol well, she went on, following Iris Chang’s footsteps, all the way to Nanjing.The Inheritance and Continuance of HistoryThe success of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking in the West rested on her thorough investigation, her command of English prose, and her skill in the literature of reportage. Zhang Lianhong, director of the Nanjing Massacre Research Center at Nanjing Normal University, has noted that during the 1990s Japan repeatedly engaged in revisionist activity over questions of history, drawing the attention of the international community.Iris Chang stresses, in her book: “The Nanjing Massacre is one of the worst, and one of the largest, atrocities in human history. The aim of this book is to set the facts in order, to draw the lessons, and to keep the warning bell ringing.” The making of the documentary Iris Chang will, in its turn, encourage many more to take up Iris Chang’s unfinished work.Liu Meiling, vice-chair of the Toronto chapter of the Canada ALPHA, the film’s producer, has said that the film is in the final stage of editing and is expected to be released worldwide this December, in several language versions. There is hope that the film will reach Japan as well — to carry an antiwar message, and to bear witness to the Nanjing of 1937.One of the directors, Anne Pick, has said the film bears witness, through the eyes of one brave young woman, to events that make the hair stand on end. The other director, Bill Spahic, hopes that, through Academy Award consideration, the world might come to know the truth of the Nanjing Massacre.Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking is not only a memorial to Iris Chang’s own life, but a deep reflection on the history itself — a film through which we may better know what was, hold the past in mind, and together press toward a peaceful future.  Note: This article is excerpted from International Herald Leader: “The Rape of Nanking”: Films of the Nanjing Massacre Spread Across the Globe (July 6, 2007)."
    } ,
  
    {
      "title"  : "Glenn Zuckerman in Conversation with Iris Chang — A Brief Record, April 24, 2004",
      "url"    : "/en/posts/273nAOdo_ek/",
      "date"   : "24 April 2004",
      "image"  : "/images/19.jpg",
      "content"  : "Glenn Zuckerman has made a wax-painting and a collage in memory of the late writer Iris Chang. The piece, painted on a piece of wood cut to a custom shape, now hangs in his living room."
    } 
  
]