Finding Iris Chang (1 of 4 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Finding Iris Chang by Paula Kamen. Copyright 2007 by Paula Kamen.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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FINDING IRIS CHANG
Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind

Paula Kamen


INTRODUCTION

THE QUESTIONS


From September 23, 1994 e-mail:

Dear Paula,

I can relate to your comment about being a perfectionist when doing research. This tendency seems to be universal. Consider the following paragraph from Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison in his book Sailor Historian: "First and foremost, GET WRITING! Young scholars generally wish to secure the last fact before writing anything, like General McClellan refusing to advance (as people said) until the last mule was shod. It is a terrible strain, isn't it, to sit down at a desk, with your notes all neatly docketed, and begin to write? . . . Nothing is more pathetic than the 'gonna' historian, who from graduate school on is always 'gonna' write a magnum opus but never completes his research on the subject, and dies without anything to show for a lifetime's work. . . ."

I think you've done enough research for your sex [and gender] book. You may have enough information in your tapes and notes to sustain two or three more books. What you ought to do now is compile an outline of questions.

Ask yourself, what is the single most important question that this book will answer? That will be the thesis of your work. Then ask yourself, what are five to ten questions that must be asked in order to answer my main question? Each of those questions will be the topic of a new chapter. Then break down each chapter by asking five or ten or twenty more questions.

Use complete sentences to pose the questions, such as "What did Jane Doe believe was the most serious threat to sexually active women today?" If you [use] sentence fragments, such as "Jane Doe" or "interracial marriage" or "rape" when writing the outline then you might get confused later on. When the entire outline is typed up and printed out, then you can go back at your leisure and answer all the questions. . . .

Anyway, feel free to ask questions or bounce ideas off me as your writing progresses. Send me a copy of your outline its [sic] finished!

Love, Iris


My questions about Iris:
- What possessed her to kill herself?
- Were there earlier signs?
- Could depression come on that suddenly?
- Or was it something more than depression?
- Was it postpartum depression?
- Did the dark topics that she covered in her work drive her to insanity?
- Or, was she murdered?
- Were her fears based in reality?
- Was her suicide preventable?
- Could I have stopped it?
- Who was she, really?
- How am I any different than her?

While it was a mystery to me why Iris Chang had wanted to die, I knew why she should have wanted to live.

This thirty-six-year-old woman was the most envied, and enviable, person I knew. She achieved success, by all possible external measures, to the extreme and to an almost farcical extent: She had fame and fortune, a result of her 1997 international blockbuster book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, which sold at least a half million copies and was translated into fifteen languages. She was doing meaningful social justice work and giving formerly anonymous victims of some of the worst war atrocities of the twentieth century a strong voice. She was a powerful and charismatic speaker, able to mobilize audiences with seeming effortlessness. She was beautiful. She was thin. She regularly socialized with filmmakers, the kinds of authors whose books you are assigned to read in college literature classes, and even elite policy makers. Her family was unusually close and supportive; her parents and brother would do almost anything for her.
She adored her husband, and he adored her. And she openly expressed delight with her two-year-old son, who already was showing signs of his own genius.

Also, her suicide didn't add up for other reasons. Her family had explained that she had become seriously depressed only in the last several months of her life. I had never known her to be clinically depressed. If anything, she had been one of the most steadfastly positive and exuberant people I had ever known; no one I knew wanted to do more with their life and was more driven. And whenever we had talked about weakness through the years, it was nearly always about me.

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