Biography:What happened when the then Chinese capital Nanking fell to the Japanese in December 1937 is back in the news with a new film by Japanese film maker Satoru Mizushima disputing the horrors it is long said went on there.
It's been estimated that more than 260,000 (and perhaps as many as 300,000) civilians were killed by Japanese soldiers during a seven-week period in the city where it's said Japanese soldiers rounded up tens of thousands of young men and massacred them . It's also estimated that tens of thousands of Chinese women were raped ; that people were disembowelled, castrated, roasted alive and used as fodder in decapitation contests.
Despite the scale of all this , the events remained obscured for decades due to a combination of Cold War politics, nationalism and official denial. Several classic tomes on the second World War omitted mention of it entirely. Iris Chang heard about Nanking from her parents - scientists who had fled China after the war, first to Taiwan, then to the US. But the horror came home to her when she was at a conference in California at which large photos of the massacre were displayed.
Terrified that Nanking could be reduced to a footnote in history, Chang published, three years later, in 1997, The Rape of Nanking, the first full-length study in English of events.
Chang had written one previous work (about a persecuted Chinese-American scientist during the McCarthy era) but the publication of The Rape of Nankingchanged her life. She was only 29 at the time. The book was an international best-seller, though not warmly received by the Japanese, among whom varying levels of denial about Nanking persist. She was attacked by the Japanese government, right wing academics and journalists. Hideous cartoons of her appeared in the press; she received hostile e-mails and phone calls. The book's publication in Japan was cancelled when she refused to make certain textual changes. Her would-be publisher (who wanted to print a companion volume giving the "other side" of the story) received death threats.
But the book's success also meant that Chang had achieved her dream of becoming a highly influential and respected author (she was never shy about her ambitions). She had a husband, a small child, a new book in the works. She was a hero to Holocaust survivors and a role model for Asian-American women. She symbolised - particularly to the Asian community - the possibility of questioning authority, even the state's authority. ("I don't believe in small rebellions", Chang told an interviewer.)
She was, in short, "this beautiful, creative, empowered and intelligent woman who brought atrocious injustices to light". Friends used the word "perfect" when describing her and, ironically, shied away from discussing their own anxieties and depressions with her for fear she wouldn't understand. Chang's suicide, therefore, in 2004 at the age of 36 (she parked by the side of a road in California and shot herself) seemed inexplicable. There was even speculation that she might have been murdered.
Paula Kamen was at university with Chang in Illinois. The two had kept in touch over the years as they pursued parallel careers in journalism and non-fiction (Kamen has authored three previous works). Kamen trawls through Chang's letters and archives, and interviews mentors, friends and colleagues - as well as Chang's former husband - in searching for the causes of her friend's suicide.
Was it the stress of having immersed herself in what happened in Nanking? A friend describes Chang as highly porous, "viscerally as shocked for the last atrocity as for the first one". After publication, strangers would approach her and recount their own stories of torture. Was it the stress of success? The gruelling book tours, the expectations, the pressure of being an "action verb". Kamen herself used to lecture students to think big, to "Iris Chang" it.
Was it the grisly, controversial nature of her work-in-progress? She'd been researching a book on the Bataan Death March - profiling American POWs captured in the Philippines during the second World War - when she died. The book was likely going to challenge the US government for having prohibited former Bataan POWs from suing Japanese corporations, and Chang had become convinced that the US government was spying on her.
Or was the suicide rooted in something intrinsic to her that, in its more benign form, enabled spells of intense productivity but that eventually, untreated, overwhelmed her? Chang is described by many as speeding, anxious, obsessive. Her husband refers to her "attention-surplus disorder". A list of "things to do this summer" that she wrote in high school included studying maths every day, writing poetry, and learning karate, computers, Chinese and calculus.
Finding Iris Changpeels back the layers of a "perfect" life to trace what led to Chang's carefully plotted suicide. Even ethnicity was an indicator: Asian-American women between 15 and 34 are twice as likely to commit suicide as their white counterparts, while China accounts for over half the world's female suicides. While Kamen's style is sometimes a bit dull ("Iris's case shows that effectively using documents from the past is not always simple", or "That seemed to be what I needed to finally end the investigation"), she approaches her very interesting subject with clarity, respect and an absence of melodrama.
Molly McCloskey's last book was the novel Protection, published by Penguin Ireland
Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind By Paula Kamen Da Capo Press, 278pp. £13.99