Say What?
Sometimes the most courageous people do the most gutless things, and all I can be is baffled. Such is my state upon hearing the news, today, that Iris Chang committed suicide at age 36. In her short life, Chang wrote a book that the world, and especially the Asian world, owes her an endless debt for writing. Her gripping narrative of the Japanese military's atrocities against the Chinese civilians in 1937 and 1938 in the city of Nanjing, told in
The Rape of Nanking, set history straight and shone a bright spotlight on one of history's darkest, and most carefully concealed, corners. The Japanese government has systematically denied the existence of these crimes, wiping them from textbooks and threatening death to anyone who dare mention them. The Chinese government, eager to ride the Japanese economic wave of the past half-century, has done little to acknowledge the crimes, either. And the American government has mostly looked the other way, as well.
Into this culture of silence and denial stepped Chang, who performed the two years of research the book required while she was in her late 20s. She worked largely alone and faced predictable resistance, and even death threats, from Japanese historians, government officials and the perpetrators themselves. What Chang did instead was seek out the Chinese victims of the atrocities, many of whom were on the brink of death and had never told another soul of the horror that befell them a half-century before. A vast culture of shame exists in China, and to admit to having been raped by a Japanese soldier, which roughly 80,000 women were during the siege, was to risk even greater horrors as life went on. And so most victims suffered silently. And, if not for Chang's timely intervention in the twilight years of those women's lives, history would have no record of their stories.
Instead, history has a meticulously detailed, exhaustively researched and utterly gripping account, told almost minute by minute and in a voice so close and personal it feels as if you're watching the horror unfold before you. The strange paradox in her book is that I couldn't possibly put it down. The human drama is macabre beyond words, hopeless beyond strength but ultimately as riveting as a mystery novel. Chang clearly did not intend for it to be such a page-turner; she simply recounted events that were so horrorific, and human nature in such a perverse, twisted state that they lent themselves to suspense.
The book changed my entire view of Asia. Throughout my year in China, I became enraged when, seemingly every day, a Chinese student or teacher would tell me, "You know every Chinese hates the Japanese." Every time I heard that, I'd scream internally: WHY?!?!?!?!
Chang's book explained exactly why. The Japanese soldiers, with encouragement and rewards from their military and political superiors, tortured innocent civilians in ways that can only be described as inventive. Mere traditional torture wouldn't cut it; they had to psychologically destroy, physically brutalize, and spirtually crush every last citizen of Nanjing, with special brutality reserved for women and children. It was systematic and state-sponsored and genocidal. The crimes themselves were enough to help me understand my students' and colleagues' deep anger toward the Japanese.
But the crimes told only half the story. As Chang recounts, the Japanese government since then has done nothing to apologize for the crimes and precious little simply to acknowledge that they occurred. Worse, not only have they not paid a yen of reparations or issued a word of apology to the victims, but they've consistently and shamelessly blamed them for being tortured. Still, every year, the Japanese prime minister makes a special visit to pray at a shrine to war heroes. Among them are many of the worst offenders at Nanking.
As disturbing as they are, the crimes needed to be exposed and, without Chang, they probably wouldn't have been. Because of her courageous research and careful writing, half a million copies of the book have been sold worldwide. Dozens of translations have been done, with the notable exception of, any guesses? You won't ever read her book in Japanese, which is perhaps the greatest tribute paid to it. I just read a short obit of her in which she states, "I didn't care if I made a cent from the book. I was driven by a sense of rage."
I'm in the process of reading her second marvelous book
, The Chinese in America, the definitive chronicle of that important story. I looked forward to reading more and more of Chang's rage-driven narratives that surely were to come. Now, I must mourn her passing and contemplate the void her death creates. Tyrants and thugs and repressive regimes all over Asia must be breathing a deep sigh of relief at her passing. I hope her example of gutsy, humane journalism lives on through us all.
