Early life
The daughter of two mainland China-born university professors who emigrated from Taiwan, Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey and was raised in , 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, a master's degree in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and later worked as a ''New York Times'' stringer from Urbana-Champaign, in which capacity she wrote six front-page articles over the course of one year. After brief stints at the Associated Press and the ''Chicago Tribune'', she began her career as a writer, 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.
Works
Chang wrote three books documenting the experiences of s and Chinese Americans in history. Her first book, titled ''Thread of the Silkworm'' , tells the life story of the professor, Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen during the in the 1950s. Although Tsien was one of the founders of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory , 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 aboard the merchant ship ''President Cleveland''. Upon his return to China, Tsien developed the Dongfeng missile program, and later the Silkworm missile, which ironically would later be used against the United States by the Iraqi army during the and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.
Her second book, '''' , 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 details of the atrocity, and criticism from others because of alleged inaccuracies. After publication of the book, she campaigned to persuade the Japanese government to apologise for its troops' wartime conduct and to pay compensation. The work was the first English-language full-length nonfiction account of the atrocity itself, and remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for 10 weeks. is a history of Chinese-Americans which argued that Chinese Americans were treated as perpetual outsiders. Consistent with the style of her earlier works, the book relied heavily on personal accounts, drawing its strong emotional content from each of their stories. She wrote, "The America of today would not be the same America without the achievements of its ethnic Chinese," and that "scratch the surface of every American celebrity of Chinese heritage and you will find that, no matter how stellar their achievements, no matter how great their contribution to U.S. society, virtually all of them have had their identities questioned at one point or another."
Public notability
Success as an author propelled Iris Chang into becoming a public figure. ''The Rape of Nanking'' placed her in great demand as a speaker and as an interview subject, and, more broadly, as a spokesperson for an entire viewpoint that the Japanese government had not done enough to compensate victims of their invasion of China. This became a political issue in the United States shortly after the book was published; Chang was one of the major advocates of a Congressional resolution proposed in 1997 to have the Japanese government apologize for war crimes, and met with First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1999 to discuss the issue. In one often mentioned incident :
...she confronted the Japanese Ambassador to the United States on television, demanded an apology and expressed her dissatisfaction with his mere acknowledgement "that really unfortunate things happened, acts of violence were committed by members of the Japanese military". "It is because of these types of wording and the vagueness of such expressions that Chinese people, I think, are infuriated," was her reaction.
Chang's visibility as a public figure increased with her final work, ''The Chinese in America'', where she argued that Chinese Americans were treated as perpetual outsiders. After her death she became the subject of tributes from fellow writers. Mo Hayder dedicated a novel to her. Reporter Richard Rongstad eulogized her as "Iris Chang lit a flame and passed it to others and we should not allow that flame to be extinguished."
In 2007, the documentary was dedicated to Chang, as well as the Chinese victims of Nanking.
Depression and death
Chang suffered a nervous breakdown in August 2004, which her family, friends and doctors attributed in part to constant sleep deprivation. At the time, she was several months into research for her fourth book, about the Bataan Death March, while simultaneously promoting ''The Chinese in America''. While on route to Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where she planned to gain access to a "time capsule" of audio recordings from servicemen, she suffered an extreme bout of that left her unable to leave her hotel room in . A local veteran who was assisting her research helped her check into Norton Psychiatric Hospital in Louisville, where she was diagnosed with , placed on medication for three days and then released to her parents. After the release from the hospital, she continued to suffer from depression and was considered at risk for developing bipolar disorder. Chang was also reportedly deeply disturbed by much of the subject matter of her research. Her work in Nanjing left her physically weak, according to one of her co-researchers.
On November 9, 2004 at about 9 a.m., Chang was found dead in her car by a county water district employee on a rural road south of and west of , in . Investigators concluded that Chang had shot herself through the mouth with a revolver. At the time of her death she had been taking the medications Depakote and Risperdal to stabilize her mood.
The third note included:
There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand. Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do. I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me.
Days before I left for Louisville I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the 's attempt to discredit me.
I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead.
Reports said that news of her suicide hit the massacre survivor community in Nanjing hard. In tribute to Chang, the survivors held a service at the same time as her funeral, held at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Cupertino, California on Friday, November 12 2004, at the victims' memorial hall in Nanjing. In 2005, the victims memorial hall in Nanjing, which collects documents, photos, and human remains from the massacre, added a wing dedicated to Chang.
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