Iris Chang
Author profile
born
March 28, 1968
in Princeton, New Jersey, The United States
died
November 09, 2004
gender
female
website
genre
About this author
Iris Shun-Ru Chang (traditional Chinese: 張純如; simplified Chinese: 张纯如; pinyin: Zhāng Chúnrú) was an Chinese American historian and journalist. She was best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking Massacre, The Rape of Nanking. She committed suicide on November 9, 2004.
The daughter of two university professors who emigrated from China, Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey and was raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where she attended University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois and graduated in 1985. She earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, during which time she also worked as a New York Times stringer from Urbana-Champaign, and wrote six front-page a...more
Iris Shun-Ru Chang (traditional Chinese: 張純如; simplified Chinese: 张纯如; pinyin: Zhāng Chúnrú) was an Chinese American historian and journalist. She was best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking Massacre, The Rape of Nanking. She committed suicide on November 9, 2004.
The daughter of two university professors who emigrated from China, Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey and was raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where she attended University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois and graduated in 1985. She earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, during which time she also worked as a New York Times stringer from Urbana-Champaign, and wrote six front-page articles over the course of one year. After brief stints at the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune she pursued a master's degree in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.[3] She then embarked on her career as an author, and also lectured and wrote articles for various magazines. She married Bretton Lee Douglas, whom she had met in college, and had one son, Christopher, who was 2 years old at the time of her death. She lived in San Jose, California in the final years of her life.
Chang wrote three books documenting the experiences of Asians and Chinese Americans in history. Her first book, titled Thread of the Silkworm (1995),[4] tells the life story of the Chinese professor, Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Although Tsien was one of the founders of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and helped the military of the United States debrief scientists from Nazi Germany for many years, he was suddenly falsely accused of being a spy, a member of the Communist Party USA, and placed under house arrest from 1950 to 1955. Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen left for the People's Republic of China in September 1955. Upon his return to China, Tsien developed the Dongfeng missile program, and later the Silkworm missile, which would be used by the Iraqi military during its war on Iran and ironically against the United States-led coalitions during Gulf Wars One and Two.
Her second book, The Rape of Nanking:The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997),[5] was published on the 60th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre, and was motivated in part by her own grandparents' stories about their escape from the massacre. It documents atrocities committed against Chinese by forces of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and includes interviews with victims. The book attracted both praise from some quarters for exposing the alleged details of the atrocity, and criticism from others because of alleged inaccuracies.For instance, Daqing Yang, a professor at George Washington University, wrote that "the publication of Iris Chang's book in 1997, with its numerous factual errors, handed the conservatives a much needed opportunity to blame the Nanking Massacre on the conspiracy of a second-generation Chinese American journalist." Professor Alvin D Coox at San Diego State University described Chang's book "As a work of history, Chang's book is flawed, as we have sought to demonstrate. If it is a politically motivated work of partisan propaganda, it is successful to a certain degree. But shouldn't Chang's compassion extend to the healing of old wounds rather than their revival?"[6] After publication of the book, she campaigned to persuade the Japanese government to apologize for its troops' wartime conduct and to pay compensation. The work was the first English-language full-length nonfiction account of the atrocity itself,[7] and remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for 10 weeks.[7] Based on the book, an American documentary film, Nanking, was released in 2007.
Her third book, The Chinese in America (2003),[8] is a history of Chinese-Americans which argued that Chinese Americans were treated as perpetual outsiders. Consistent with the style (less)
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4.03 avg rating — 4,546 ratings
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published
1997
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28 editions
3.86 avg rating — 22 ratings
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published
1995
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4 editions
