The Chicago Tribune ran a long piece on the death of Iris Chang.
chicagotribune.com
Flameout
BEST-SELLING AUTHOR IRIS CHANG HAD IT ALL. THEN SOMETHING WENT TERRIBLY WRONG.
By Monica Eng
February 6, 2005
On a cold Sunday night last April, I said goodbye to Iris Chang.
I'd driven her back to her hotel after dinner in Chinatown where we talked about her latest book, "The Chinese in America: A Narrative History." After she delivered all the tidy quotes a reporter could ask for, our dinner conversation eased into other things.
Iris was on a 22-city tour for the paperback edition of the book, but her mind was already on her next topic: a group of World War II POWs she had been interviewing over the last year. She was clearly excited about the project but didn't reveal much more. So we talked about kids-she was so proud of her baby son, Christopher. And we talked politics-she was incensed about the war in Iraq, the post-9/11 erosion of civil liberties and the then-current case of Chinese-American Muslim chaplain James Yee, who was falsely accused of espionage at Guantanamo Bay. If she ran the world, she said, things would be very, very different.
Smart, warm, intense and bursting with plans, Chang hardly stopped talking all night to take a bite.
It was only our second meeting, but it cemented my impression of the raven-haired author of the controversial 1997 best-seller, "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II." Chang was a woman in constant motion; a writer whose focus and work ethic allowed her to do it all and have it all. One of those rare people who had seemingly found the secret to balancing work, family and saving the world all at once.
So my "goodbye" that night didn't mean goodbye so much as "see you when you next swoop through Chicago."
But the next time I saw Iris she wasn't in Chicago. She was in a casket in Los Altos, Calif., at her funeral.
On Nov. 9, almost seven months to the day after our dinner, she left her home in the middle of the night, drove to a nearby town, raised an antique pistol and ended her life.
Reflecting the huge impact of "Rape of Nanking," which raised one of history's bloodiest massacres out of obscurity, Chang's death sent ripples around the world, making headlines in papers from London, Moscow and Beijing to Tokyo, Sydney and Paris.
In a tribute to Chang on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives shortly after her death, Japanese-American Congressman Michael M. Honda (D-Calif.) said:
"As an historian and activist, Chang fought passionately for historical justice and reconciliation. Her book, 'The Rape of Nanking,' chronicled the horrific capture of Nanking during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, and was instrumental in educating the international community about Japanese military atrocities during World War II-human rights violations that had gone unwritten and unacknowledged for decades. Her efforts to seek redress for the crimes at Nanking brought her in conflict with the Japanese government and communities worldwide, but Chang was unwavering in her commitment to justice and truth."
As hundreds of Chang's friends, family and fans gathered in the Silicon Valley for funeral and memorial services-memorials were also held that day in Washington, D.C., New York, Beijing and Nanjing (as Nanking is now spelled)-the mood was of profound sadness and shock. Phrases like "She was the last person I would have thought . . ." and "I couldn't believe it when I heard . . ." fell into every conversation.
How could someone so successful, so together, so invested in the future have taken her own life?
Few could make sense of it, but they tried. Some theorized that Chang had fallen victim to a swift and deadly depression or that she had reacted adversely to anti-depressants. Others speculated that she was a victim of overwork. And many thought she'd simply drowned in the sea of tragic stories she'd taken in over her career.
Still others saw things in a more sinister light, voicing conspiracy theories that soon made the rounds on the Internet. Chang had been murdered, they said. Maybe by the Japanese government. Or even by our own.
As I left a post-funeral luncheon, Bay Area activist Josephine Chu clutched my elbow and whispered in my ear: "I don't think this was suicide," she said. "Something happened to her. She was threatened, I'm sure of it. You have to check it out."
Far from providing answers, my trip to California only led to more questions: What happened to that bright, hopeful and engaged woman from last April?
Where had Iris gone?
It wasn't until I returned to the Midwest-where Chang grew up and was doing her latest research-that I could begin to make sense of the mystery, sorting through clues she had been leaving as the months and years ticked by.
IRIS SHUN-RU CHANG was born on March 28, 1968, in Princeton, N.J. Her parents, freshly minted Harvard PhDs from Taiwan, were doing post-doctoral work at Princeton when the little girl with her mother's intense eyes and father's long limbs arrived on the scene.
Before she turned 2, the family moved to Urbana-Champaign where her father, Shau-Jin, landed a job in the physics department of the University of Illinois and her mother, Ying-Ying, began post-doctoral work in biochemistry.
Chang's first language was Mandarin, but she soon picked up English in preschool. Recognizing her promise, Ying-Ying studied books on "raising a bright child" and Shau-Jin used letter stamps and an inkpad to label all the objects in the house.
During her early years, Chang typically spent Saturday mornings with her mother at the Urbana library, checking out piles of books. Sunday mornings found her tagging along with her father to the computer lab in the physics building. On very special Sundays, her mother would cloud up the house with a large batch of steamed buns that young Chang would Americanize with a slathering of peanut butter.
While showing an early aptitude for computer science, Chang also displayed a childhood passion for writing, penning her first story when she was 4-"a to-catch-a-thief tale," her father says.
At the University of Illinois' elite University High School, she hung out with what her classmate and friend Kathy Szoke calls "the literary geeks."
"We were in chorus together and we just loved to read and write for the school literary magazine, "Unique," says Szoke, who now lives in Arlington Heights. Friends remember Chang as being drawn to poetry and fantasy stories and say she could sometimes come across as distracted and aloof-almost as if she were in another world.
Like a lot of other University High kids, Chang skipped a grade and was ready for college at 17. Although she wanted to attend the University of Chicago, her parents "thought she was too young and that Hyde Park was too dangerous for her," Szoke says. So she stayed in town and attended the University of Illinois, where she was allowed to live on campus.
Because Chang was so bookish in high school, Szoke was shocked to hear she'd joined a sorority at the University of Illinois, and even more surprised to find her on the homecoming court in the fall of 1988.
"That was just not her," Szoke said. "She didn't like to drink and wasn't a big socializer, but I think she looked at it as a challenge. She looked at the court as this certain clique of girls and thought, why shouldn't a shy little Chinese bookworm be able to break into it too?"
This was part of a pattern that Chang would repeat for the rest of her life: zeroing in on a formidable goal, setting her mind to achieving it, and then through hard work, talent, a pinch of naivete and a mountain of sheer will, simply making it happen.
In eulogizing Chang, her friend Paula Kamen, a Chicago writer, talked about this modus operandi and how at first she found it frustrating while competing with Chang for internships in college. Later, she stopped envying her and started applying the formula to her own life and work. Today when she addresses young writers, Kamen exhorts them to "think big, be bold and to simply 'Iris Chang' it."
Chang began her undergraduate career as a mathematics and computer science major but had switched to journalism by her junior year. She agonized over how to break it to her parents.
"When we told her that it was OK, she was so surprised," her father recalls. "She thought we would be so disappointed. We told her that whatever you do in life you have to love it. She was afraid that we only wanted her to be a scientist."
And so, with her parents' blessing, Chang turned her path to journalism and never looked back. She immediately started writing for the student paper, the Daily Illini, and became campus correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. By her junior summer, she had secured an internship at Newsweek.
It was during this same junior year that Chang attended a fraternity party that changed the course of her life. At the party she met a tall, red-haired engineering major from downstate Illinois named Brett Douglas. "Lots of guys were around who wanted to talk to her, but when I finally got a chance, we talked for hours," recalls Douglas. "She told me about all her plans, and it was then I knew she was the woman I wanted to grow old with.
"It took me a few years to convince her of the same thing."
AFTER GRADUATING IN 1989, Douglas and Chang relocated to separate towns, Douglas following his academic adviser to the University of California at Santa Barbara and Chang moving to Chicago to write for the Associated Press and later the Tribune. Says Douglas, "A new invention called e-mail" enabled them to keep up a long-distance romance.
While at the Tribune as a metro reporter, Chang churned out a mix of news stories and features. Remembering Chang's time at the paper, Tribune Springfield reporter Christi Parsons says that, as interns, they served as each other's "life raft."
At the end of one difficult day, in which Parsons says a particular editor had humiliated her, Chang took her out to Gino's Pizza near their Gold Coast apartments.
"She said to me, 'Can't you see him for what he is?' " Parsons recalls. " 'He is just a condescending man who looks at you like a little girl.' I don't know what I would have done without her friendship and support."
In the fall of 1990, Chang left the newspaper for the master's program in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. Within months of starting the program, Chang, always a step ahead of her peers, landed a book contract with Basic Books-becoming, at 23, the youngest author the publishing house had ever signed. Her task was to tell the story of American-educated Cal-Tech scientist Tsien Hsue-shen, who was deported from the U.S. during the McCarthy era and went on to found China's missile program.
Instead of relaxing on spring break in warmer climes, Chang spent the week researching Tsien's story, her head buried in documents at the National Archives. Douglas flew to Baltimore to spend the break with her, even if it meant taking the train with her into Washington each day and doing "touristy things" while she worked at the Archives.
When the Johns Hopkins program ended in June, 1991, Chang flew to Santa Barbara and moved in with Douglas; they were married that August. She continued to work on her book while he completed his dissertation.
Friends who visited their apartment in Santa Barbara recall seeing hardly a stick of furniture, but books, bookshelves and banker's boxes stuffed with documents were everywhere. It was a Spartan, frugal, grad-student existence and reflected her lifelong attraction to a life of the mind.
Her mother says that an aversion to shopping for ordinary consumer goods was true of Chang through most of her life, noting: "She didn't like to buy anything but books."
"I loved that she was such a hard worker," says Douglas, who was awarded his PhD in 1993. "She was a role model for me in my own work."
Chang's book about Tsien, titled "Thread of a Silkworm," came out in 1995. It got favorable notices, though it never sold very well.
Its lucid treatment of the creation of China's missile program owed much to Chang's scientific background. But she would never use that knowledge again; instead, her career would take a sharp political turn.
The trigger was a 1994 conference in Cupertino, Calif., that dealt with Japanese war atrocities, particularly the horrors inflicted at Nanking following the invasion of China by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1937. At the conference, Chang saw poster-sized photographs of the Nanking carnage that she described as "almost beyond belief" in a 1998 interview with the Tribune. These included "photographs of women who [had] been disemboweled or men who were used for decapitation contests, heaps of bodies that had been burned or were waiting to be thrown in lakes."
Chang already was familiar with the ghastly history. Her maternal grandparents had fled Nanking shortly before the invasion and she'd heard family stories about the Yangtze River running red with blood for days. That there were no books about these events at her local library left her puzzled as a child; but it hadn't occurred to her that she should write such a book until she attended the conference.
"The idea that 60 years later the whole world wouldn't know about it, wouldn't care, that was very frightening for me," she told the Tribune.
And so it was that two months after turning in her final draft of "Silkworm" in 1994, Chang began working on an English-language account for Basic Books of what took place at Nanking.
This shift of focus from science to politics puzzled friends like Szoke, who in retrospect says she wishes Chang "had followed her first instinct and written about things that wouldn't have affected her so personally."
But the die was cast. Chang began the more than two years of intensive research and writing that went into the 290-page book documenting the slaughter of an estimated 300,000 Chinese civilians and military at the hands of the Japanese army during eight weeks in 1937-38.
She sifted through Chinese, Japanese, American and German newspaper accounts, examined American and German military communications, corresponded with Japanese soldiers who had engaged in the massacre and traveled to torrid Nanjing in the summer of 1995 for a grueling month of interviews with survivors and visits to the various sites of the atrocities.
Chang had serious stomach problems for much of the trip, she told her friend Kamen in a postcard from Nanjing. But even in the midst of her physical distress, she wrote triumphantly in the postcard: "I have already interviewed eight massacre survivors."
One of her biggest coups was obtaining the little-known diary of Nazi party member John Rabe, "The Schindler of China," who as head of the Siemens Co. plant in Nanking sheltered thousands during the massacre.
She also focused on Minnie Vautrin, an Illinois-born missionary and fellow University of Illinois graduate who gave sanctuary to thousands of Chinese during the mass bloodletting. Deeply affected by what she had witnessed, Vautrin suffered a nervous breakdown and returned to the U.S., where she committed suicide in 1941.
While finishing the writing on "Nanking," Chang and Douglas moved to Sunnyvale, Calif., where he took a job at Cisco Systems and Chang continued to research and write. She kept "college student hours," Douglas says, "waking at noon and then staying up and working late into the night. She liked that because then she could work for long stretches without interruptions."
It was during these late-night writing sessions, as she pored over diaries, interviews and photos depicting unspeakable acts of rape, murder and torture, that her work began to take its toll. She told people that clumps of her hair fell out, she lost weight, suffered nightmares, often became sick and frequently broke down weeping at her computer.
"She could really identify with the victims," her mother says. "I definitely think it affected her mentally."
Chang was frank about her problems in a 1997 interview with Johns Hopkins Magazine. "I was weak during the whole time I was writing the book," she said. "I was very unhappy."
Was it a bout of depression? "I don't think so," her mother insists. "I think she just identified too much with the victims."
"Nanking" came out in 1997 and remained on The New York Times bestseller list for 10 weeks. It was excerpted in Newsweek. It was favorably reviewed in the mainstream press, landing Chang on the cover of Reader's Digest and on such TV shows as "Nightline" and "Good Morning America." On "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer," she boldly demanded that Japanese Ambassador Kunihiko Saito apologize to the victims of Nanking. He declined.
Chang was suddenly a celebrity. Some felt it soon became a burden to her.
In 1998, after a year of non-stop book promotions, Chang told her hometown paper, the News Gazette: "I guess I've gone from hell to heaven, haven't I? But that's not an entirely correct analogy. It's more like being strapped to a roller coaster and not being able to get off."
In the same interview, she told of having Asian Americans, Native Americans, African Americans and Holocaust survivors share personal stories with her during her book-store appearances. "This is why I often find it so physically and psychologically draining," she said.
Yet some who saw her at the time thought she was enjoying herself. "She stayed at my house in Washington during the height of it and The New York Times came over to take her picture," says Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families. "I think initially she was enjoying the fame."
Along with fame came honors and invitations, including one to attend President Bill Clinton's Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head, S.C. There were meetings with high-level Washington figures. Columnist George Will called the Nanking massacre "perhaps the most appalling single episode of barbarism in a century replete with horrors-yet it had been largely forgotten until Iris Chang made it her subject."
BUT FAME ALSO brought backlash. The Japanese right wing denounced the book as propaganda by an "agent of China." Ambassador Saito went so far as to hold a Washington press conference in April 1998 to denounce the book as "contain[ing] many extremely inaccurate descriptions and one-sided views on the case. It's not a good thing that such a book has been published and has attracted great attention."
Chang challenged the ambassador to a debate on CNN or to cite specific inaccuracies. He declined.
Chang acknowledged errors in her book and said she corrected at least 10 of them in later editions, including misspellings and incorrect dates. Though she publically minimized their importance, telling the Los Angeles Times that it was "ludicrous" to suggest they gave ammunition to revisionists who would deny the massacre, in private e-mails she agonized over the mistakes, as she always did with inaccuracies.
Still, the main points and accounts of Chang's book are widely accepted as accurate, even if debate continues over certain details and captions.
"Nanking," which sold some 400,000 copies, was translated into 13 languages but never Japanese, even though a Japanese publishing house was keenly interested. In a San Francisco Chronicle article at the time, the head of the publishing house, Hiruko Haga, was quoted as saying he believed he was putting himself in "a life-threatening situation" by publishing the book, but was determined to proceed if Chang would correct what he saw as errors. In the end, their negotiations ended in stalemate and the book was not published.
In the summer of 1998 academics from some of Japan's top universities participated in a Tokyo conference convened to denounce Chang and her book as a fraud. One scholar, whom Chang quoted in a piece published in Harper's Magazine, called the book "the most outrageous world-class lie."
Congressman Honda, an acquaintance and frequent ally of Chang on several issues, says he was not surprised at the opposition to her work from the Japanese Right. "There was a particular Japanese writer who did research similar to hers [on the Rape of Nanking] and had to walk around in disguises in public because people considered him a traitor," Honda says.
When it became known that a Japanese translation would not go forward, postings on conservative Japanese chat sites gloated over the victory. Such triumphant remarks were echoed on the Internet when the news of Chang's death broke around the world last fall.
One writer, using the screen name "mad god," said on the Web site "Japan Today": "Good riddance to a writer whose individual agenda and mental instability did not allow her to write a coherent or factual history."
Another identified as "Ryuhei" wrote: "She probably killed herself . . . because she was writing books full of lies and deceiving people."
Although she didn't appear to dwell on it, Chang was disturbed by what she said were ongoing threats from critics. In 1998 she told the History News Network that "not a single week goes by when I don't suffer harassment from some vicious right-wing Japanese group."
Even if, according to Douglas, she never received a direct death threat, she firmly believed that Japanese writers and politicians had been killed for similar research and it kept her on her guard.
Her friend Gregory Rodriquez, a behavioral scientist and expert on World War II prisoners of war and with whom she served on panels about Japanese war crimes, says Chang would "become tearful and tell me about her fear of being assassinated and them getting away with it because she was Chinese, just a 'chink.' " Rodriquez said.
IN 1999, CHANG embarked on a new project, "The Chinese in America." It took four years to write and blended broad historical trends with personal tales to depict the fate of an American minority over 150 years. Persecution of Chinese-Americans over that period emerges as a recurring theme in the book, but Chang defended herself against those who labeled it unpatriotic.
"I see this as my love letter to America," Chang said over dinner last April. "Many people believe that to criticize the government is not patriotic, but I think it is the most patriotic thing you can do."
I'd met Chang for the first time the previous May, during her tour for the hardcover version of "The Chinese in America." With the war on terrorism under way and the campaign in Iraq just two months old, Chang, in a speech at the Harold Washington Library, compared the persecution of Muslims in the U.S. to the persecution of Asians during times of war and economic difficulty. She decried the erosion of civil liberties implicit in the Patriot Act and literally shook her fist while delivering her speech to the crowded room.
After the talk, Paula Kamen, who had been my editor as well as Chang's at the Daily Illini, introduced us and we went out for pizza. I didn't see her again until the following spring, when she returned to Chicago and we had our Chinatown dinner. She seemed perfectly well-if a little tired-but I would find out later from her e-mails that she had been coming down with a bad case of flu. She also was suffering from insomnia and seemed vulnerable to infections.
Some who knew her better than I said they were surprised to learn she'd passed through town on the tour without calling. And a friend she did call during a Texas stop said she seemed a bit odd.
"When she came to Dallas she asked me to come to a reading because she just needed a friendly face there," recalled Dallas Morning News columnist Esther Wu, who covers Asian-American issues. "That night she asked me if people like us would ever be able to break out of the responsibility of writing about our community. She said that she didn't think we could."
Chang's family says that after the grueling paperback tour of 2004, she never seemed the same again. According to Douglas, she returned exhausted and drained. But she fought it off, he says, believing she was in a race against time.
THE TIME PRESSURE had begun in the spring of 2003 when Sgt. Tony Meldahl, of the Ohio National Guard, contacted Chang with an idea for her next book. He wanted the author, who had long been active on behalf of America's World War II ex-POWs, to examine their experiences through the stories of a single unit of mostly Midwestern men, the 192nd (Provisional) Tank Battalion.
It was one of two U.S. tank units captured in the Philippines and forced by the Japanese to endure the Bataan Death March, subsequent weeks on Hell Ships and eventual slave labor for Japanese industrial firms.
The book Meldahl proposed would go beyond these overseas experiences, however, and include the treatment the men received once they came home.
Chang was well-acquainted with the effort among remaining Bataan survivors to seek compensation from the Japanese firms for whom they performed slave labor-even though the U.S. had seemingly waived such compensation as part of its 1951 peace treaty with Japan.
Citing specific articles in the treaty and the compensation that Holocaust survivors had received from Germany, the veterans felt they had a case, but they met stiff opposition from the U.S. government.
A leader of the POW movement, Chicago native Lester Tenney, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2000: "I once again feel that I have been taken prisoner, but this time by my own country. The Japanese beat me with guns and swords. My country is humiliating me, and the memories of those who did not survive, with words."
After many legal filings by the POWs had been struck down, Reps. Honda and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) introduced the "Justice for American WWII POWs Act of 2001" as part of a spending bill in Congress. The provision sought to block the U.S. State Department and the Department of Justice from stepping in, as they had throughout the process, on behalf of the Japanese companies.
The bill overwhelmingly passed both houses, but in conference committee, the White House-citing the need to maintain a united coalition in the war on terrorism-successfully pressured the conferees to strip the provision from the spending bill.
"It was outrageous," said Linda Goetz Holmes, Chang's friend and the author of "Unjust Enrichment," about Japanese companies that benefited from POW slave labor.
The action prompted Chang to write a passionate op-ed piece in the New York Times that concluded: "Our leaders must not be permitted to sell out the men who gave so much for our freedom . . . If we are to have another 'greatest generation' we must duly honor the rights of the first one."
Chang continued to follow the POWs' case closely, showing up at hearings in California and Washington. By 2003, responding to Meldahl, she began visiting sick and elderly veterans to collect their stories. Her objective: a book with the working title "The Bataan Tankers."
Chang traveled widely to meet the men from the battalion, all of whom had been National Guardsmen from Janesville, Wis., Maywood, Ill., Port Clinton, Ohio, and Harrodsburg, Ky.
By last summer, she had collected about a dozen videotaped interviews that told stories of boyhood friendships in the 1930s, subsequent enlistment and camaraderie, and wartime horrors followed by alleged betrayal by the U. S. government of its own servicemen.
Accompanying her on these journeys were Meldahl and two teachers from Maywood's Proviso East High School, Ian Smith and Jim Opolony. The teachers knew many of the vets through a Web site they had produced on the 192d, which now features some of Chang's interviews.
"I could see that this story clicked with her," says Sgt. Meldahl. "With 'The Rape of Nanking,' she could relate to the people because they were her distant roots, but here she could relate because they were all from small towns in the Midwest, like her. When they first saw her, she looked Chinese, but when she opened her mouth, they knew she was one of us. And, boy, did they love her."
These stories of brothers watching brothers endure torture, friends forced to bury friends alive and young Americans used for human medical experiments began to affect her deeply. But, says one friend, it was what happened to the men upon their return that infuriated Chang.
"Her outrage had shifted from the Japanese government to our own government and how they treated the POWs," says Goetz Holmes.
he final blow came in the summer of 2003, when Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) sponsored a provision that would have granted one-time, $10,000 payments to each surviving POW. Overwhelmingly passed in the House and Senate, the provision was gutted from the appropriations bill it was attached to in conference committee at the request of the White House.
Last August, despite pleas from her family not to leave because she was clearly spent, Chang boarded a plane for Kentucky to talk to POWs there.
"She didn't sleep for three nights before she went," says her father.
"We should have stopped her but we didn't know how serious it was at the time," adds her mother.
Theories have circulated that Chang was threatened by someone in Kentucky or was spooked during an interview. But those close to her say she never made it to the interviews. The only time she left her hotel there, they say, was to be hospitalized for a mental breakdown. A few days later, she returned to San Jose and started seeing a therapist.
At Chang's request, her family has revealed little about her illness. Douglas will only say that, despite "up and down periods," her condition became progressively worse.
She was hospitalized again in September and by October, Christopher, the couple's 2-year-old son, was sent away to live with his paternal grandparents in downstate Illinois.
Chang's own parents, who had moved to San Jose in 2002 and often looked after Christopher, said the boy was sent away because, "At that point, we couldn't take care of Christopher; we had to take care of Iris."
After each hospitalization, says Douglas, Chang would immediately resume her work on the POWs, telling friends that she was racing against the clock, against the mortality of the survivors and against injustice.
"She wouldn't take a break," Douglas says.
Records and exchanges with colleagues show that Chang was examining transcripts for the POW book as late as a week before her death. But she told others she was finished with the research. "I just can't go on with it. It is too dark," she told a friend.
Four days before Chang took her life, she reached Kamen on her cell phone. The conversation deeply disturbed her old friend, who wrote in her journal, "I think Iris is in danger."
The danger Chang spoke of to Kamen, though, was not from her own hand but from "people in high places who would not like what she was uncovering."
She told Kamen that she feared for her life and that "If something should happen to me, I want you to let everyone know it was all about the work I'm doing, about external circumstances. Not internal."
Kamen says Chang spoke in a tired monotone and referred to a "sickness" she suffered that they both understood to be depression. Kamen tried to assure Chang that this was not a permanent condition and they would talk more in a few days, when Kamen returned to Chicago.
It is only in retrospect that some of Chang's words haunt Kamen-comments such as, "I want to thank you for being such a good friend." Referring to Kamen's painful migraine headaches, Chang asked: "Have you ever just wanted to stop it permanently, to put the lights out?"
The call to Kamen was one of several she made to friends that week as part of a "to-do" list that her family thought might help lift her depression. It now appears they became a way to say goodbye.
ON THE MORNING of Nov. 8, Chang dropped into Reed's Sport Shop in San Jose and told the clerk she was an author researching antique weapons, according to Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department Sgt. Dean Baker.
She asked a lot of questions, took detailed notes and bought a Ruger Old Army .45-caliber pistol for about $460.
Because it is considered an antique gun, albeit a modern-made replica, the pistol was not subject to the usual background checks, waiting periods or registration. Ever the researcher, Chang had checked out this loophole and exploited it.
Within an hour, she had jammed the weapon, which was not hard to do because loading it involves inserting a lead ball and gunpowder into the chamber and then tamping them down.
She soon found a gunsmith in Santa Clara who worked out of his home and said he could help. He said Chang seemed unfamiliar with guns and "very distracted" as he cleared the gun and, without using real gunpowder, showed her how to load. Chang wanted to go to a shooting range right away, but the gunsmith did not have time. They made an appointment for the next day. She would never show up.
Sometime that day she returned home and made more long calls to close friends, including her agent, Susan Rabiner, and fellow author Barbara Masin.
Rabiner says she spoke to Chang for "about two hours" that night, and portrayed the author's mood as just "incredibly sad and black. She was certainly lucid but just very sad. I don't know how else to describe it."
Both Rabiner and Masin note that before Chang hung up the phone with them, she said, uncharacteristically, "I love you."
DESPITE HER DEEP sadness and the clues she was leaving with friends, Douglas told the San Francisco Chronicle "there were up and down periods but actually we thought the suicide risk was low."
The couple had plane tickets for a vacation in San Antonio the following week. Rabiner says they were working on a children's version of "The Chinese in America." And her parents say she still had plans to make "Nanking" into a movie.
Chang was at home when Douglas went to sleep that night. As usual, she stayed up writing, but on this night, her text was a suicide note. After writing and revising this final work, Chang left a printout on her desk next to the computer.
Somewhere around 2:30 a.m. she slipped out of the couple's townhouse and drove off in their white 1999 Oldsmobile Alero.
At around 2:50 a.m., she bought gas at a Texaco station in Los Gatos about six miles away.
At around 5 a.m., Douglas awoke, found the note and called the police to report his wife missing. He and her family tried frantically to reach her.
Medical evidence suggests that sometime between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m., Chang pulled off Highway 17 and onto a small private gravel road just outside Los Gatos. It was there, at the foot of the Santa Cruz Mountains, that she took out the shiny pearl-handled gun she had bought the previous morning, placed the barrel in her mouth and took her life.
At about 9 a.m., a passing commuter discovered Chang in her car and called 911.
By examining computer records, Chang's family found at least three versions of her note. The only excerpt they will release says she wished to be remembered as the woman she was before the illness, "engaged with life, committed to her causes, her writing and her family."
Despite the sheriff's reports concluding Chang's death was a suicide (the Santa Clara County Coroner's office was still awaiting toxicology results at this writing), many still have their doubts. Common refrains on Web sites say: "She had everything to live for. It just doesn't make any sense."
But if you look at the statistics on suicide among female Asian Americans, Chang's death makes a little more sense.
For many reasons, "Asian-American women between 15 and 34 have a suicide rate that is twice as high as their white counterparts," says Betty Hong, executive director of Asian Community Mental Health Services in Oakland, the country's largest provider of mental health services for Asians. "And Asian-American adolescents have the highest suicide rate among all women between 15 and 24 years of age. We are at the highest risk of any group."
Contributing factors, Hong says, are the high demands "model minorities" put on themselves and the expectation that Asian working mothers be superwomen both at home and on the job. Perhaps most dangerous, says Wong, is the deep stigma of mental illness in the Asian-American community, where such problems might sometimes be blamed on ancestors' misdeeds or demonic possession.
Many who learned that Chang had a toddler at the time of her death theorized that she had suffered from post-partum depression. But Douglas says, "She didn't get bad until our son was about 2 years old"-far past the time that most experts agree post-partum can occur.
Douglas says that, like most working mothers, Chang felt the strain of balancing work and family after her son was born. "That was hard for her," he says. "She wanted to be the best possible mother and the best possible writer, and so she pushed herself even harder."
One sign often associated with post-partum depression that Chang did display was inordinate self-blame about "bad parenting." She had expressed concern--- to Kamen- that a routine vaccination she allowed Christopher to receive had made him autistic. But this only seemed to show her slipping grip on reality. Christopher is reportedly healthy, with no signs of autism.
Class-action suits against the makers of certain anti-depressants have claimed that the drugs have led users to commit suicide. Some speculate that Chang's was such a case. But her family is not commenting on the medication she had been prescribed. Douglas says only that because the time between her breakdown and her death was relatively short, and anti-depressants can take up to a month to have an effect, "We didn't have a lot of chances."
Hong says that the one bit of good news to come out of Chang's case is that, since early November, her Oakland office has seen a twofold increase in the number of suicidally depressed Asian women seeking help. "Her death has created quite an awareness," she says.
While she was alive, though, Chang's family says she asked that only seven people know about her mental illness. Relatives who discovered her condition only after she was gone felt angry and betrayed, Douglas says. But he felt obliged to abide by her wishes even as he watched the Iris he knew vanish before his eyes.
"If you had told me last March that she would do this in November, I would not have believed it was possible," he says. "There was just nobody who wanted to do more with her life than Iris."
Andrew Solomon, who is a depression sufferer and the author of "Noonday Demon," an exhaustive text on the subject, writes: "When you are depressed, the past and the future are absorbed entirely by the present, as in the world of a 3-year-old. You can neither remember feeling better nor imagine that you will feel better."
Says Kamen of their talk on the phone: "I told her that [depressed] was not how I saw her, that the Iris I knew was energetic, a hero, an inspiration, and that this illness would pass. But she didn't say anything. I don't think she believed it."
Driving through the mountains and valleys of Iris Chang's world in Northern California, I could see how a Midwestern girl could easily fall in love with the place.
Cold, gloomy mornings miraculously gave way to warm, sunny afternoons nearly every day I was there. Who couldn't be charmed by this magical transformation, this daily argument for optimism?
But as I learned more about Chang's profound depression, it became clear that nothing would have been enough-not miraculous weather, love of friends and family, the satisfaction of exposing injustice, nor even the prospect of Christopher's tiny arms around her neck once more. Nothing could penetrate the darkness that had consumed her and made her lose her way.
Even if-as some have suggested-she had been fending off depression for many years, this recurrence was different. When that bitter chill rolled in this time, it settled somewhere deep inside her and promised it would never leave. |
