Acclaimed Chinese-American author Iris Chang was eulogized in
simultaneous ceremonies in northern California, Washington and
Nanjing after her apparent suicide earlier this month.
The 36-year-old writer and journalist, who chronicled the rape
and massacre of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops
during World War II, was found shot dead in her car on November
9.
Family members said she suffered from depression and had been
previously hospitalized for it.
Speakers at a ceremony prior to her burial in California said
her bestseller, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of
World War II, may have contributed to the internal anguish
that led to her death.
"She felt other people's suffering so intensely, to the point
that it made her suffer," friend Barbara Masin said during the
75-minute memorial.
US Representative Michael Honda sent an envoy to read a tribute
that he presented in Congress earlier in the week.
China's Vice Consul General Ciu Xuejun attended the burial along
with hundreds of mourners.
Chang was a leading non-fiction author and was widely known in
both the US and Asia for her studies of Chinese immigrants and
their descendents. The Chinese in America: A Narrative
History was published last year and traces more than 150 years
of Asian American history.
But her best-known book was the 1997 Rape of Nanking,
which details the slaughter of Chinese civilians by the Imperial
Japanese army that occupied China in the late 1930s.
It was the first major full-length English-language account of
the atrocity and remained on the New York Times bestseller
list for 10 weeks and sold half a million copies.
During the past decade, Chang was a leading voice in calling for
Japan to pay reparations and issue an official apology for wartime
atrocities. She was also a co-founder of the Global Alliance for
Preserving the History of World War II in Asia.
Her parents said Chang's last wish was to shoot a film on the
Nanjing massacre of a quality similar to Schindler's List.
Two memorial funds have been established in Chang's name. The
Iris Chang Scholarship Fund is for students at the University of
Illinois, Chang's alma mater, who wish to study in Nanjing on an
exchange program. In Nanjing, the Iris Chang Memorial Scholarship
Fund was set up to assist financially disadvantaged students at Nanjing Normal
University.
(China Daily, China.org.cn November 22, 2004)
