Melville House Books

The late Iris Chang was “eulogized in simultaneous ceremonies in northern California, Washington and Nanjing, China” on Friday. The acclaimed author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, who committed suicide on November 9, “felt other people’s suffering so intensely, to the point that it made her suffer,” said her friend Barbara Masin in a eulogy delivered at a memorial prior to Chang’s burial in Los Altos, California. As an Agence France Press wire story reports, Masin wasn’t the only one who thought Chang’s writings “may have contributed to the internal anguish that led to her death.” The AFP reports hundreds of people attended, including China’s Vice Consul General Ciu Xuejun. In a San Francisco Chronicle report Heidi Benson writes that 600 mourners were there, including Chang’s husband Brett Douglas and the couple’s 2-year-old son, Christopher. Douglas described the first time he saw her, when they were in college: “She was a strikingly beautiful girl who carried herself like a queen. I was struck by the intensity of her eyes. I’ll remember the way she looked at me forever.” Chang’s brother, Michael Chang, “expressed his appreciation of the great public outpouring of grief that emerged after news of her death. ‘I didn’t realize what a beloved figure she was until she passed away,’ he said.” Meanwhile, another Chronicle story, by Kathleen E. McLaughlin, says “Chang’s suicide stunned those she tried so hard to help — the survivors of Japan’s ‘Rape of Nanking.’” Some, reports McLaughlin, “can’t help but compare Chang’s fate with that of another American, Minnie Vautrin, who lived in Nanjing during the Japanese occupation and led a safe house effort that saved thousands of lives and thousands of Chinese women and girls from systematic rape by Japanese soldiers. In her book, Chang wrote how Vautrin returned to the United States and killed herself a year later, exhausted and haunted by the images of those she could not save.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.