US Election 2004

Last month, historian Iris Chang committed suicide.

Publicly, she is remembered for her books:  The Thread of the Silkworm, The Rape of Nanking, and The Chinese in America.  Personally, I found both of her first books valuable, but not enjoyable.  She had the courage to face hard truths about history, including backlash from those seeking to evade the truth.  From her website:

Iris Chang is one of the nation's leading young historians. Her latest, widely acclaimed book focuses on Chinese immigrants and their descendents in the United States -- their sacrifices, their achievements and their contributions to the fabric of American culture, an epic journey spanning more than 150 years. But even before the publication of "The Chinese in America: A Narrative History," Chang had established herself as an invaluable source of information about Asia, human rights, and Asian American history.

In her international bestseller, "The Rape of Nanking," Chang examines one of the most tragic chapters of World War II: the slaughter, rape and torture of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers in the former capital of China. Stories about Chang's grandparents' harrowing escape were part of her family legacy and prompted her to embark on this ambitious project, for which she interviewed elderly survivors of the massacre and discovered thousands of rare documents in four different languages. Published by Basic Books on December 1997 (the 60th anniversary of the massacre) and in paperback by Penguin in 1998, "The Rape of Nanking" - the first, full-length English-language narrative of the atrocity to reach a wide audience - remained on the New York Times bestseller list for several months, became a New York Times Notable Book, and was cited by Bookman Review Syndicate as one of the best books of 1997.

Chang's first book, "Thread of the Silkworm," a critically acclaimed and engrossing study of how Cold-war hysteria influenced American foreign policy, tells the ironic story of Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen. Born in China, educated at M.I.T. and Cal Tech, Tsien became a professor at both universities and a brilliant space age pioneer. Then, after 15 years of stellar achievement and major contributions to American military defense, he was branded a Communist and deported to China -- where he revolutionized the Chinese missile program and developed the Silkworm missile that later threatened American armed forces. The imprisonment of Tsien Hsue-shen during the height of the McCarthy era has been compared to U.S. mistreatment of Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos scientist accused of passing secret nuclear data to mainland China.

At the time of her death, she was researching for a book about American survivors of the Bataan Death March.  Frankly, her intensive research into such horrors caused her to breakdown.  It is an important reminder that recharging your soul while confronting such brutal facts is essential to life.

Taking this lesson to heart, the weekend after her death I went to the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C. to view Daniel Chester French’s sculpture “The Sons of God Saw The Daughters of Man That They Were Fair”  (1923).  While there, in addition to refueling my soul with the sight of casts from the friezes of the Parthenon, I stopped at the “First Division Memorial” (1922) and gazed upon its golden Nike.  Since my soul have feasted upon the first two novels in Ed Cline’s Sparrowhawk series: Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick, which demonstrate the revolution of ideas that preceded the American Revolution.

My condolences to those that loved Iris Chang.  To others heed the lesson and invest the effort to refuel your soul.

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