The Woman Who Could Not Forget

What really happened to Iris Chang? The Western Confucian reports on the death of the author of The Rape of Nanking, saying:

Concluded Ying-Ying Chang, Iris's research-scientist mother, "I believe Iris's suicide was caused by her [prescribed] medications." In his two-and-a-half-year-old review of an earlier book, Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind, Eamonn Fingleton notes that "some Bataan survivors have speculated that Chang's death was not a suicide" — Whatever Happened to Iris Chang? His conclusion:

All the evidence, however, seems to suggest that this goes too far. The real question is whether new forms of coercion were instigated against Chang in her final months. What is clear is that the pressures in the field are enormous and few Westerners stay long without being relieved of their truth ethic. Either that or they voluntarily sideline themselves in bland peripheral aspects of the subject. Chang retained her Western truth ethic to the end -- and kept her gaze unflinchingly on the center of the target.

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