Iris Chang — Author, Inspiration and Warning from History
‘Denial is an integral part of atrocity, and it’s a natural part after a society has committed genocide. First you kill, then the memory of killing is killed.’
- Iris Chang
Far from the bustling metropolises of Shanghai and Nanjing, nestled in the middle of Jiangsu province in Eastern China lies a small city of 4.9m people called Huai’an (淮安市). Unremarkable, cities like this exist across China and are not usually the first port of call for foreigners exploring the country.
However, in a public square on the outskirts of the city center lies a memorial and museum to one of the most inspirational women and authors of the last 50 years.
Iris Chang, born in the US but of Chinese ancestry, devoted years of her life to document, record and uncover the truth behind one of the greatest and least covered atrocities of the 20th Century. Her novel, The Rape of Nanjing, uncovered new detail and shed light for a Western audience on an act of unspeakable violence, brutality and barbarism committed by the Japanese Imperial Army on the citizens of Nanjing in late 1937 and early 1938.
Western history focuses on early September 1939 as the beginning of World War Two, but in truth it was already in full swing in East Asia since at least 1937, when the Japanese military pressed deep into China from North-Eastern Manchuria and on to the gates of Peking (now Beijing).
The city of Nanjing has a museum dedicated to the atrocity, in which an estimated 300,000 Chinese residents of Nanjing lost their lives in an unimaginably bloody and terrifying month and a half. In addition to this gruesome toll, it is estimated by Chang in her novel and by other scholars that between 20,000–80,000 Chinese women were raped, often repeatedly, in this despicable period of time.
The Iris Chang Memorial Hall
Three hours on a bus from Nanjing lies Huai’an and the Iris Chang Memorial Hall. Built in 2017, it is dedicated to recording the life and work of Huai’an’s most famous daughter. The Hall was closed to visitors on the day I was travelling, but luckily was opened for me by the kind museum curator who, after much back and forth on WeChat, took pity on my 6-hour round journey to see the hall and drove in from the suburbs to open it up and show me around.
The Memorial Hall is a tasteful and poignant journey through Iris Chang’s life from growing up as the daughter of two Taiwanese emigrants in Princeton, New Jersey, onto her college years and her blooming interest in journalism and her growing consciousness her Chinese background. It is clear from the museum excerpts that Chang was an enormously gifted student and writer, even at such a young age. She was intensely curious about her ancestry and she grew up hearing snippets of stories from Nanjing at the time of the massacre from her grandparents, who had the good fortune to escape.
A quote from Chang at the Memorial illustrates the depth of feeling her parents felt about the Nanjing Massacre. Despite achieving extraordinary academic success at Harvard, according to Chang her parents ‘never forgot about the Sino-Japanese War, nor did they want me to forget. They particularly did not want me to forget the Rape of Nanjing […] their voices quivering with rage…’
She published her first book during a writing fellowship, documenting the life of an exiled Chinese scientist who helped develop China’s missile program. However, it was Nanjing that drove Chang, and she spent the next two years between the US and China, interviewing scores of survivors, uncovering thousands of original documents from the time and generally devoting her life to telling the tale of the forgotten victims of Nanjing.
The Mental Toll of Recounting Horror
Dear Mom…sometimes I forget how miserable research can be. I spent hours at the National Archives, opening dozens of boxes What I’m suffering right now is nothing compared
Chinese sons were sometimes being forced to rape their own mothers, or fathers their own daughters, or brothers their own sisters, often in front of their family members. Those who refused were usually killed on the spot.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-04/10/content_28866419.htm
