The Tragedy of Iris Chang

This review recently appeared in the San Jose Mercury News

FINDING IRIS CHANG: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind
By Paula Kamen
Da Capo, 304 pp., $24
Three years ago, on the morning of November 9, Iris Chang’s body was found in her car. Sometime during the night or early morning she had left her husband asleep in their home in San Jose. She drove up Highway 17 and pulled off near the Bear Creek Road exit in Los Gatos. There, she took a gun (one of three she had recently purchased), placed the barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

Since then, the city of Nanjing has erected a life-size statue of her at the burial site of some of those who were tortured and murdered during the Japanese occupation of the city. Chang had written graphically about these horrors in her 1997 international bestseller, “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.” She had followed up that book with the well-received “The Chinese in America,” and had begun work on a book about the Bataan death march. Her career inspired a writer in the quarterly Chinese American Forum to compare her to Alexander the Great and Mozart – people who had achieved greatness and died in their 30s.

Not quite so hyperbolically, Paula Kamen writes, “This thirty-six-year-old woman was the most envied, and enviable, person I knew. … She had fame and fortune. … She was doing meaningful social justice work and giving formerly anonymous victims of some of the worst war atrocities of the twentieth century a strong voice. … She was beautiful. She was thin. … She adored her husband, and he adored her. And she openly expressed delight with her two-year-old son.”

Kamen had met Chang in 1987 when they were undergraduates in journalism at the University of Illinois. Their friendship overcame some tensions caused by Chang’s hard-driving ambition – she twice won coveted journalism internships that Kamen had also applied for. They corresponded often as their careers progressed. Kamen wrote two books about young women and feminism and the sexual revolution, and another book, “All in My Head,” about her battle with chronic headaches. But it was Chang who became a star. When Kamen lectured to writing classes, she urged students “to ‘Iris Chang’ it. She had become a verb to me. An action verb.”

The news of her death hit Kamen hard, especially because of the disturbing telephone conversation she had with Chang only a few days before her suicide. Chang told her that she had “been very, very sick for the past six months.” “People in high places,” she said, were not going to like what she had uncovered in researching the Bataan death march. “Frankly, Paula, I fear for my life.” She was also worried because, she said, “I’ve made serious mistakes with my son. I gave him autism with vaccines.”

Chang had always been tightly wound. A phone call from her, Kamen says, could last two or three hours. Once, while visiting her, Kamen had to escape to a motel “to truly rest and have a vacation.” And signs of her mental instability had been evident as early as 1999. A friend recalled that Chang was so anxious about the Y2K bug – the computer glitch that was supposed to wreak havoc on January 1, 2000 – that he spent “an hour and a half calming her down. … I found my conversations with Iris were exhausting me.”

During this last phone call, Kamen did her best to try to reassure her, but without success. “Before we finally hung up,” Kamen writes, “she said one last time: If anything happened to her, I had to let people know what she was like before this happened.” In trying to fulfill that task, Kamen has given us a book that’s part biography, part memoir, part literary detective story, and part treatise on mental illness. That “Finding Iris Chang” doesn’t fully achieve all of these aims isn’t surprising.

One problem with the book is structural: Kamen has followed a suggestion once given her by Chang, to outline a book as a series of questions to be answered. Thus each chapter in “Finding Iris Chang” is headed with a question, including: “What did they say happened to Iris?” “Who inspired her?” “What happened in California?” And: “Just because you’re paranoid, does that mean they still aren’t out to get you?” But this approach to telling Chang’s story leads to a lot of overlapping, backtracking and repetition. The sequence and development of Chang’s career – and of her mental disintegration – get blurred.

Which is not to say that “Finding Iris Chang” isn’t full of powerful insights into the problems of identifying and treating mental illnesses such as Chang’s bipolar disorder. Kamen discusses the problems peculiar to ambitious women like Chang – the animosities of the workplace and the stress caused by the conflict of career and family. A professor who studies Asian suicides suggests that cultural differences between Asian-Americans and European-Americans might have caused many to miss warning signs in Chang’s behavior. Another student of suicidal behavior examines the relationship between creativity and bipolar disorder. The book also establishes the great significance of Chang’s work, especially for her Chinese readers, and its exposure of the often overlooked tensions between China and Japan.

The word “tragic” has been trivialized by applying it to automobile accidents and natural disasters. In its classical sense, it refers to a man or woman of immense promise, undone by his or her own disjunction with the world. Iris Chang’s friends, family and physicians could not forestall her self-destruction. In Kamen’s account, she emerges as a genuinely tragic figure.