Iris Chang
Iris Shun-Ru Chang (March 28, 1968 – November 9, 2004) was an American journalist, author of historical books and political activist. She is best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanjing Massacre, The Rape of Nanking, and in 2003, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. Chang is the subject of the 2007 biography Finding Iris Chang,[1] and the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking starring Olivia Cheng as Iris Chang.[2] The independent 2007 documentary film Nanking was based on her work and dedicated to her memory.
Iris Chang
Iris Shun-Ru Chang
March 28, 1968
Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.
November 9, 2004 (aged 36)
Santa Clara County, California, U.S.
Author, journalist, human rights activist
1995–2004
1
Zhāng Chúnrú
Zhāng Chúnrú
Life and education[edit]
Iris Chang was the daughter of two university professors, Ying-Ying Chang and Dr. Shau-Jin Chang, who moved from China to Taiwan and later to the United States. Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
Chang grew up hearing stories about the Nanjing massacre, from which her maternal grandparents escaped. When she tried finding books about the subject in the Champaign Public Library, she found there were none.[3]
She attended University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, and graduated in 1985. She was initially a computer science major, but switched to journalism, earning a bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.[4] During her time in college she also worked as a New York Times stringer from Urbana-Champaign, and wrote six front-page articles over the course of one year.
After brief stints at the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune, she pursued a master's degree in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.[5] She began her career as an author and lectured and wrote magazine articles.
In 1991, Chang married Bretton Lee Douglas, a design engineer for Cisco Systems, whom she had met in college, and had one son, Christopher, who was two years old at the time of her suicide. She lived in San Jose, California, in the final years of her life.[6][7]
Memorials[edit]
In tribute to Chang, the survivors held a service at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, around the same time as her funeral, held at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Los Altos, California on November 12, 2004. The Memorial Hall, which collects documents, photos, and human remains from the massacre, added both a wing and a bronze statue dedicated to Chang in 2005.
In 2017, the Iris Chang Memorial Hall was built in Huai'an, China.[22][23]
In 2019, Iris Chang Park was inaugurated in the Rincon district of San Jose.[24]