Customer Reviews

Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

***First of all, please note that I strongly disagree with the Publishers Weekly review posted above. I think it's simply wrong.***

Iris Chang (1968-2004) is somewhat forgotten now, and that's a shame. A journalist, she wrote an international bestseller back in 1997 called "The Rape of Nanking," a historical study that became not only a must-read among intellectuals and armchair historians, but also among college students, their professors, and hundreds of thousands of people of Chinese or Japanese descent.

Although born in the 1960's, Iris Chang became a sort of international ambassador/interpreter of the war crimes committed in Nanking, China, just before World War II, whose magnitude depends one whom you choose to believe. That she was a physically beautiful, mentally brilliant, hard-charging 20-something wunderkind is--from a historical point of view--totally irrelevant to her subject matter. On the other hand, it made her a meteor-like instant celebrity around the globe, sort of like Woodward and Berstein shortly after their Watergate reporting.

Tragically, Chang's unbelievable, too-good-to-be-true story was, ultimately, too good to be true. At the age of 36, she took her own life.

Now, author Paula Kamen has written a book that tells the story of Chang's life. What puts a fascinating twist on this biography is that Kamen and Chang were very good friends going back almost 20 years, and Kamen herself is a successful non-fiction author.

Kamen looks at Chang through two strikingly different lenses: one, from an objective, strictly professional/journalistic point of view, and two, from the point of view of a caring, long-term, mourning friend.

What gives the book its considerable heft is that the reader gets a super-close-up view of who Iris Chang was throughout her life. Kamen tracks down Chang's high school classmates, her sorority sisters, her former colleagues, her husband, and dozens of others. We get an amazing portrait of a first-generation Chinese-American growing up in the cornfield-ringed college town of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. We follow her early struggles and partake in her jump to international celebrity. But then, we accompany her downward as well. Kamen includes quotes from dozens of e-mails, notes, Christmas cards, interview transcriptions and the like that she exchanged with Chang over the years. Some readers will find that this intimacy makes them uncomfortable. I, however, think that it let me get to know the soul of a beautiful person.

One of the possibly hundreds of details about Chang that Kamen relates goes back to the time when she was an intern at a famous Midwestern newspaper. Her editors told her to keep calling back a grieving family until she could get a quote for the newspaper. Risking her job, Chang refused. I like her guts.

This book is carefully layered. It is about many things: history, genocide, journalism, friendship, ambition, mental illness, suicide, loyalty, success, and failure. Kamen has done two things brilliantly here. She has taken us first-hand on a very sad journey of what it means to have unimaginable success, and she has created a loving and permanent portrait of her friend.

Kamen takes on a delicate, intriguing, painful topic--the (self) destruction of a young, brilliant, dedicated writer--with the same admixture of gentle humor, wide scholarly research, sympathy, earnest and sometimes self-deprecating personal narrative, and more research that she brought, in her previous book, ALL IN MY HEAD, to the topic of devastating chronic pain--her own and that of millions of Americans and other around the world.

She takes the reader on the path she followed in investigating a question and a mystery that touched her deeply because of her complicated, long-standing personal relationship with Iris Chang, the brilliant, internationally successful writer who took her own life at age 35. (Please don't let the Publisher's Weekly review keep you from taking a look at this book yourself--they seem to have expected a conspiracy-theoried murder mystery and been disappointed when a skim through the pages for the "juicy" parts revealed a more human story, sad, funny and still perplexing.)

I am harping on this a bit because they have a monopoly as the top-listed editorial review on all Amazon listings and therefore have an ethical obligation, in my opinion, to be thorough in reading the works they review). Instead, I believe this reviewer never actually bothered to read (versus skim quickly) the book, or else is somehow very confused as to what Kamen is both attempting and accomplishing via her (deliberate) interweaving of genres to tackle non-fiction subjects from a scholarly, and yet very human and humor-infused (as appropriate) perspective.

Thus, I would like to offer the following to the Publisher's Weekly reviewer (courtesy of Willa Cather, from THE PROFESSOR'S HOUSE):

"... For all the interest [his books] awoke in the world, he might as well have dropped them into Lake Michigan.... Nobody saw that he was trying to do something quite different--they merely thought he was trying to do the usual thing, and had not succeeded very well."

I, in contrast, who did actually read Kamen's entire book, found it a page turner, and think Kamen not only presented a personal and human story with respect and poignancy, but also brought several important topics to light -- including the under-recognition and under-treatment of mental illness in the U.S. and the real potential for danger (whether realized or not) that journalists and other fighters for the truth and freedom of speech hazard every day of their working lives.

Somewhere in the Sherlock Holmes stories there is an episode where Holmes slyly sets a little test for Watson. Holmes has already checked out the mystery du jour but, without letting on, deputes Watson to take a second look. Watson reports back in plodding and largely irrelevant detail, as Holmes impassively listens. Finally Holmes thunders: "Watson, you have noted everything but what is significantc.You see but do not observe."

Anyone familiar with the geopolitical ground covered in this book can be forgiven a similar harrumph. While Kamen's account consistently holds the reader's interest, she comes up short on many of the crucial questions that knowledgeable readers want answered.

One of the most obvious questions is how someone as young as Iris Chang could have soared so seemingly effortlessly to fame. True, Chang's defining book The Rape of Nanking was not only well written but Chang had added considerably to what was already known from the 1930s. But, in an era in which hype alone can catapult sheer balderdash to the top of the best seller list, good writing is hardly a sufficient condition for publishing success. What propelled the Nanking book was its unique shock value in breaking a half-century-old omerta in the Japan studies field. Quite simply in pre-Chang days, Nanking was virtually never mentioned by American Japan watchers.

This self-censorship was all such a sharp contrast with the dedication with which American scholars had pored over the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka (and indeed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Why had Nanking been forgotten? The answer -- one whose significance has evidently been lost on Kamen -- is that the highest government officials in Tokyo wanted it forgotten. And in Japan studies, what Tokyo wants it usually gets. The field has long been under Tokyo's thumb thanks to American universities' shamefully subservient dependence on Japanese money (much of which comes directly from Japanese sources and most of the rest from various "globalist-minded" American corporations intent on currying favor with Tokyo).

If the subject of Nanking had long been taboo, another element of Chang's story was the ultimate third rail: Japan's war reparations policy. This was defined in 1951 when, in negotiating the Treaty of San Francisco, Japanese officials played up Japan's then sub-Saharan levels of poverty to slough off most war claims. Even the orphans of Nanking (or Nanjing as it has now become known) never received a penny. Nor did millions of Imperial Japan's other victims, not just in China but in countless other victim nations.

What made the compensation issue particularly explosive was that governments of the victim nations were quietly but deeply complicit in Japan's not-a-penny policy. This included even the Chinese government. Although Beijing was not a party to the 1951 treaty, Mao Zedong renounced all Chinese war claims on Japan when Sino-Japanese relations began to warm up in the early 1970s. Thereafter Beijing did Tokyo's dirty work in blocking attempts by Chinese victims to sue Japan in Western courts. Perhaps even more controversially Washington has played a similar role in, for instance, marginalizing claims by former American prisoners of war against Japan.

Before Chang, the not-a-penny policy had received even less attention in the West than the Nanking massacre.

One of the biggest omissions in Kamen's account is a clear, extended account of how The Rape of Nanking was reviewed. Initially, many East Asia-watching scholars and journalists adopted a haughty establishmentarian policy of trying to ignore the book (this tactic, standard in Japan in dealing with any boat-rocking initiative, is known as mokusatsu -- "killing with silence"). But as sales soared in the spring of 1998, mokusatsu was no longer tenable, so the establishmentarians switched instead to a policy of loudly alleging gross inaccuracies.

But was the book inaccurate? For any conscientious biographer, this question is surely paramount. In effect the question is was Chang a serious historian or not? What is called for is a dispassionate itemization of alleged inaccuracies accompanied by a careful and fair evaluation of all the available evidence. This sort of digging seems beyond Kamen and indeed it does not even occur to her that it is necessary.

It is a pity. Chang was actually a more than averagely scrupulous fact-checker and in virtually all cases she had solid sources for what she wrote. The only issue was whether her sources were more reliable than those the Japanese establishment has wanted us to believe.

Kamen has done her friend a signal injustice in not more spiritedly debunking the inaccuracy charge. Kamen moreover missed some of the most telling critical sub-controversies. After the San Francisco Chronicle, for instance, published a lengthy critique by Charles Burress, a noted Japanophile, the paper's editors refused to publish a powerful point-by-point rebuttal by Chang. Kamen also omits all mention of the curious role played by Ian Buruma, a crucial figure because of his reviewing activities for the New York Review of Books. His first mention of the book in the New York Review did not come until nearly 18 months after publication.@Earlier, in an interview with the rightist Japanese-language magazine Sapio in the summer of 1998, he sounded notably condescending, suggesting the book was not "serious history." The magazine used the interview, in which Buruma poured scorn on Chang's alleged overstatement of the number of deaths in Nanking, as the first item in a battery of anti-Chang propaganda. In the words of the Tokyo-based commentator Michael Hoffman she was portrayed as "the central character -- central villain -- in an extended Sapio feature entitled 'The Nanking Massacre Campaign Plot.'" The magazine portrayed the book as having been spawned by a Sino-American conspiracy against Japan.

What really happened to Chang? Kamen does little to illuminate the mystery. Towards the end Chang was evidently suffering serious psychological problems (in one of her suicide notes she described herself as "a wild-eyed wreck"). A clue to the mystery may lie in the fact that for years Chang had been the victim of harassment from Japanese "rightists." Certainly for anyone looking seriously for a motive for Chang's suicide, inquiries might usefully start with a consideration of whether new forms of coercion had been instigated against her in her final months. Finding Iris Chang instead treats us to a confused account in which Kamen tries to equate her _own_ experience of psychological illness with Chang's. The unstated assumption is that the problems arose from similarly autonomous causes. Yet from what little factual information Kamen provides, Chang's problems seem to have been a world away from Kamen's. For a start Chang seems to have had no pre-history of illness: her problems emerged suddenly only in her final months.

As I argue in more detail elsewhere on the web, the conclusion on Iris Chang is that, brave woman that she was, she may have ventured out of her depth. Certainly her biographer did.

Author Paula Kamen received an unexpected phone call on November 6th 2004 from her friend of many years Iris Chang. Beginning with that call, Kamen was about to undergo a journey for the next few years that would become this book. Chang, the beautiful, young, best-selling author of one of the most important historical accounts of the last decade, and a woman that seemed to have a "perfect" life, was just a few days away from suicide. The call, Kamen would later realize was a heartbreaking "good-bye" to a long-time friend, and a plea to be remembered as the person she was before her illness.

If you aren't familiar with the story of Iris Chang and her landmark book The Rape of Nanking, you will likely be left breathless when you learn what Iris Chang wrote about while still in her twenties and the tragedy of her stunningly fast decent into mental illness and suicide at age 36. As a primer for the story, there are many audio and video clips of Iris Chang on the Internet that will allow you to see and hear her poise with a most difficult story and message for the world.

Someone needed to fill in the gaps of this painful and perplexing mystery, and Kamen has done the job. She retraced Chang's footsteps through library archives, recollections of Chang's friends and family, and Kamen's own memories and correspondence. The shear volume of what Chang left behind for such a short life is remarkable.

Iris Chang's life is both inspirational and disturbing. Her death was a BIG story, and the lessons of her life, her work, and her death, are well worth your attention. Although we'll never completely understand Chang's demise, Kamen comes about as close as we can and lends new insight into what actually happened to end the life of this extraordinary woman. The book also has a few revelations not published elsewhere that make a few things more clear.

The book reads like a true detective story because that's exactly what it is. Each chapter vigorously explores another irksome question in the case. Whether you know the Iris Chang story or not, I recommend you read this book.

Kamen has done a wonderful job detailing both her friendship and the details of Iris Chang's life and success. She clearly has a lot of respect and affection for Iris. She also shares an understanding for psychological disturbance, but where I feel the book falls down is in a serious examination of the implications of Iris's treatment in the last months of her life. Iris suffered a psychotic episode on a book tour as a result of all the stress she was under after the birth of her child to a surrogate mother, a diagnosis of autism, the demands of her writing career on serious dark topics, and the demands of her agent to promote her books. What happened then is accepted practice in the field of psychiatry -- treatment with an atypical antipsychotic. The rush to medicate psychosis, let alone depression, that exists in our society needs to be urgently re-examined in light of the repeated failures of treatment and Kamen gives no nod to this problem.

Iris was given no other alternative to recovering from her psychotic episode but a drug. Little effort was apparently made to understand exactly how her stressors could be modified, how she could reduce her stimulation, improve her sleep hygiene, etc. etc. When she fell into a depression because of the way the antipsychotic made her feel she was put on an antidepressant, precisely the wrong medication for someone with any tendency to racing thoughts, anxiety, sleeplessness. Clearly she was a prime candidate for mania and further psychosis and an antidepressant is a lethal addition to someone with this vulnerability as SSRIs are known to induce mania and psychosis. It's a clearly listed adverse side effect. Her husband has admitted that it was probably a "mistake" for her to be on an antidepressant. So it was removed but do we know how carefully she was taken off it, how slowly she was tapered, and what rebound effects (NOT relapse) it probably had that can crop up weeks after the drug is out of the system? She was kept on Risperdal, the antipsychotic, and Depakote was added. Side effects of Depakote include sleep disturbances, hallucinations, and other frightening problems. Risperdal has been associated with increased suicidality in clinical trials. And if you want to read something nearly as shocking as The Rape of Nanking, read the story behind the approval of Risperdal in Mad in America. The corruption that plagued the clinical trials for Risperdal resulted in arrests. Yet this is the evidence that was used to gain FDA approval. The state of Arkansas is now in the process of suing the manufacturer of Risperdal for a "defective" and misrepresented drug. This is what was given to a truly brilliant and creative young woman. How was she or her family to know that she was really being given something neurotoxic? Kamen calls Risperdal and Depakote "mind calming". This is absurd to anyone who has experienced the life altering and harm producing effects of these drugs. Iris Chang's suicide fits precisely the profile of a drug induced suicide. It was preceded by apparently obsessive rumination (described 14 years ago by Martin Teicher in an article on antidepressants); it was violent; it took place in the early morning hours, and it was out of character. It was so shocking that many people thought it must be murder. This is typical of these drug induced deaths; this reaction of total disbelief in loved ones happens all the time. How many more of these needless deaths of creative, wonderful people who are rushed into ill understood treatment with dangerous and yes, toxic drugs do we have to endure before the truth behind them is really examined?

I hope this is not the last word on Iris Chang.

In a precursive phone call Iris told her "friend", Paula Kamen (who found her exhausting), to tell everyone what she was like "before this happened." I didn't count, but there were probably more pages about "this" and its aftermath, than what she was like before it. Kamen's book does not fulfill her friend's request.

Kamen had, and probably still has, a wonderful opportunity to provide insight. Unfortunately she gives us more about how she reacted to Iris, than about how Iris might have reacted to her. Why did Iris reach out to her? Did her interest in being a sorority member or homecoming queen inform her later career or was it a reaction? How did she become interested in Nanking? The questions surrounding her work on Nanking are huge and very little text is devoted to them.

Whether or not Iris's son was acutally autistic is resolved near the end of the book, which makes it more of a literary device than an factor. Paula is honest but, for me, too causal about her own flaws in her relationship with Iris.

I doubt that this is the telling that Iris had in mind.

Kamen is not the journalist her friend was. Being a lay person, I'm glad to see someone in this profession take "no" for an answer, as Kamen did with Iris's mother, (and Iris at the Tribune where stakes were higher) but the flip side of this is her relaxed approach to the reponses of those who bow (and bowed) to pressure. While I am not a lawyer or reparations expert, I expect that the Holocaust survivors also met resistance of officials citing treaties and precedents. Kamen gives the nay sayers a pass.

I think the world's hunger to know and understand this heroine has led to the warm reception this book has received by readers. I view it as a starting point for a more substantive treatment that I someone is working on right now.

Iris Chang had a gift for reaching scholars and public with groundbreaking writing. Paula Kamen has a worthy goal in trying to understand Chang, but her book could be much better. She approaches the subject in a breathless, watch-me-unravel-the-mystery style. Thus it fits in the confessional/personal memoir genre, but focusing on her own longterm relations with Chang is unfortunate. This leaves her unable to plumb the depths of Chang's work or her death. Kamen seems mostly uninterested in Chang's concerns, including the Rape of Nanjing but also Chinese immigrants in America. Fierce commitment to redressing wrongs against Chinese, eventually shading into obsession, marked Chang's work, so any study cries out for real scholarship on the issues she pursued. Without this "FIC" can only offer raw material for more substantive work. Despite Kamen's speculations the "mystery" is plain enough: sustained study of war crimes and human rights violations is inherently depressing, and Chang presumably succumbed to the weight of history she shouldered. Her unfinished project on the Bataan Death March (also very grim) tends to support this view. Iris Chang's research inspired readers, but it was sometimes flawed, notably in overstating Japanese refusal to confront their 1931-45 history. Engaging these issues is crucial to comprehending East Asia then and now. K. Honda ed, "Nanjing Massacre" critiques Chang fairly along with other writers; S. Ienaga, "Pacific War" grapples heroically with the horror of Japanese aggression. NB, it was rated 3 stars until reading comments on the "I agree with PW" review. The info there, from within the Chinese American community, seems unimpeachable. We will truly honor Iris Chang by holding biographers to a higher standard.

History happens every day. For those who have stepped up to the plate to research and write about history, at times it may be a daunting but exhilarating experience that may help readers understand a particular event that might not have been uncovered if they had not attempted the task, and one writer and historian who took the reigns was Iris Chang. She often tackled controversial and misunderstood topics that related to Chinese and Chinese American history in her books, THREAD OF THE SILKWORM, RAPE OF NANKING and THE CHINESE IN AMERICA, and attempted to clarify and explain events that previously had been misconceived within historic narratives. Paula Kamen writes about Iris' life in FINDING IRIS CHANG: FRIENDSHIP, AMBITION, AND THE LOSS OF AN EXTRAORDINARY MIND.

As a journalist and friend, Kamen writes a loving and memorable biography that covers Iris' life from childhood to the last days of her life. One may suggest that this may have been a way to mourn and heal after the loss of her college friend as well as answer the number one question that many avid readers of Iris' works have been wondering for the past three years after her passing, why? Why would someone so successful take her own life on the brink of writing another monumental piece of work related to World War II that may have further brought a better understanding of that period in American history? Kamen answers all these questions like an investigative reporter with the help from those who knew her, and the email correspondences and voicemail that she received and kept that recollect past memories and hints to Iris' life. But one of the most intriguing aspect of the book is how Kamen confronts psychological issues that Iris possessed that no one, including her family and friends would have suspected, depression and bipolar disorder; unfortunately, Iris attempted to fight her own psychological warfare that she simply could not combat.

FINDING IRIS CHANG is a powerful biographical account of Iris Chang. Not only does the book discuss the unfortunate circumstances surrounding her life and death, it opens the doors for serious discussion pertaining to depression. Indeed, she was the Chinese American woman warrior that writer Helen Zia describes on the back cover of the book. And for those who have grown accustomed to reading Iris' work, it has been a great loss, especially those who have been inspired to research and write about histories that need further clarification. However, the books she left behind may encourage and inspire those who would like to continue or follow in the same path of ground breaking work that she helped lead.

I kept reading nightly because of the book's unique perspectives.
While looking at Chang, Kamen regards her own life and reactions to
Chang's success, even countering with Chang's comments to and about her.
In the process of finding Iris Chang, she helps the reader understand aspects of the creative processes in writing. Real and imagined input of governments (Chinese,Japanese and American) add yet another viewpoint.
Moreover, Kamen's work helped me understand better the experience of Asian-Americans in this country.
In this book, as in others by Kamen, we learn how the author learns about living. We are lucky that she is able to communicate her insights to us.

I haven't read any of Iris Chang's books, but I really enjoyed this biography by Paula Kamen. I got the book on a Saturday and was still reading into the morning on Monday. Ms. Kamen is honest to a fault, as she admits that she was jealous of her friend Iris from their college days on. It is obvious that Ms. Kamen researched heavily to write this book. She found old letters, talked to very old men, tracked down old friends. The book gives insight of what made Iris Chang the way she was. Ms. Kamen does her subject justice. By writing this biography, Kamen preserved the memory of Iris Chang as well as legitimize Iris' body of work, including "The Rape of Nanking". After reading this book, I plan on buying Iris Chang's books.

I do wonder about something -- Iris died in November 2004, and her husband remarried rather quickly, in early 2006. I wonder how he was able to fall in love with someone else so quickly after his first wife's death.

Ignore the review from Publisher's Daily on Amazon's site. It's clear that whoever wrote the review didn't read the book.