"She was talkative, idealistic, bold, passionate, tall, beautiful, with long dark hair, and she attracted much male attention." Such are the words Paula Kamen uses to describe Iris Chang in her book "Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind."
"I didn't want to touch it (the book) with a 10-foot pole," said Kamen during a phone interview from her home in Chicago, "but there were so many rumors flying around about her." She wanted to dispel rumors and write the real story of the colorful Chang — "not a dry, clinical study, but one that would make both her and her bipolar disorder come alive."
Chang, the author of the international best seller "The Rape of Nanking," the compelling history of "the Chinese holocaust" — the 1937 brutal torture and murder of upward of 35 million Chinese citizens at the hands of the Japanese, was instantly labeled a human rights pioneer. Today there is a bronze statue of Chang standing in Nanking.
She also wrote "The Thread of the Silkworm" and "The Chinese in America," but then she shocked the world in 2004 when, at the age of 36 — a mother with a young son — she took her own life.
Because Kamen was a close, personal friend of Chang's and didn't see the suicide coming, she became intensely interested in knowing why.
The result is this thoroughly-researched and affectionate psychobiography of her friend — a friend she candidly admits sometimes drove her crazy with questions and long phone conversations. Sometimes, Kamen "couldn't bear another minute with her."
Yet Chang was also a "rival" of Kamen's — and Kamen considered her rival's talents to be beyond her own. She considered Chang to be "the smartest person" she'd ever known — "a superhuman invincible heroine."
Chang's son, Christopher (born with the help of a surrogate mother), has been diagnosed as autistic — specifically Asperger's disorder, a mild form. Chang also experienced several miscarriages — all said to influence the onset of bipolar disorder.
Kamen loved Chang, but she was determined not to "write a Hallmark card," either. She also loved the fact that Chang wanted to "write about the unsexy parts of history — like genocide." Kamen found her research to be "very complicated" and pays special tribute to Chang's husband, Brett Douglas, who was "very generous and very open and it also helped him to move on."
Douglas told Kamen that Chang had "attention surplus disorder."
Douglas has since remarried to another Asian woman also named Iris Chang, who looks eerily like his first wife — and they have a new son. (Iris is a commonly-used Americanized name for Asian women.)
In Kamen's opinion, Chang was "an incredibly focused young woman, who seemed to many to have a one-track mind." Once she began a project, she approached it with great tenacity — "like a laser beam, but it was not easy being extraordinary."
Kamen labels Chang as "an extremely sensitive person," given to writing about dark topics, who, in fact, suffered by being exposed to the suffering she wrote about. Because she was actually bipolar, writing about genocide literally depressed her.
She was either high or low.
"Isn't it thrilling," Chang wrote in a letter, "that I might be among the first to learn of some of the secrets the Soviet Union, China and the U.S. kept smothered during the Cold War? It's this kind of research I find so fascinating — like detective work, really — and so unlike the boring, white and gray textbooks they shoved at us in high school!"
And yet she also wrote, "Sometimes I would be shopping or walking through the park, and without any warning, some image from 'The Rape of Nanking' would just float in front of me ... I didn't want the events to spill over and poison the rest of my life."
Even after all her research, Kamen said, "I'll never understand the suicide. I will never be able to see into what she was thinking. I've cobbled together a part of what was happening, but I can't understand the depth of her suffering and pain."
On the other hand, Kamen discovered that she could do her own research without being smothered by personal depression. "It's important to cover atrocities. I demystified that process by writing about some of our greatest fears, our darkest places, which I could do while also paying attention to my mental health. It's less terrifying to me now — and I understand mental illness better."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com