I recently came across the story of Iris Chang, and her book, “The Rape of Nanking.” Nothing that I write could do her memory justice, so I leave you with some links and quotes.

*Trigger Warning*: very detailed article on the death of Iris Chang, but has a lot of information!

Historian Iris Chang won many battles / The war she lost raged within

Iris Chang committed suicide. Now her mother aims to resurrect her reputation

“In the immediate aftermath of their daughter’s death, rumours circulated that she had been murdered. She had received death threats because of her research on the atrocity.”

Whatever Happened to Iris Chang?

“Iris Chang was a Chinese-American author and historian who died early one morning of a single gunshot wound to the head on a quiet road in Santa Clara County in November 2004. Various suicide notes were found. Aged just 36 and the mother of a two-year-old boy, she had seven years earlier published The Rape of Nanking, a book that had accomplished an impressive double as a runaway best seller and a major contribution to our understanding of World War II. She went on to become an international celebrity and at the time of her death had been researching the so-called Bataan Death March, another little publicized Japanese atrocity in which in the summer of 1942 more than 70,000 American and Filipino prisoners captured on the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula were force-marched across jungle tracks for more than sixty miles in conditions often of gratuitous brutality.”

Who killed ‘Rape of Nanking’ author Iris Chang?

“Iris Chang, author of “The Rape of Nanking”, ended her life with a pistol on November 9, 2004. She was 36. She had suffered from years of depression and constant sleep deprivation since her bestseller – full title “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War Two” – was published in 1997. It may be true that Iris Chang committed suicide. But I still have to ask: Who killed Iris Chang?”