People like Iris Chang

Iris Shun-Ru Chang (March 28, 1968 – November 9, 2004) was a Chinese American journalist, author of historical books and political activist. She is best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking 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, and the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking starring Olivia Cheng as Iris Chang. The independent 2007 documentary film Nanking was based on her work and dedicated to her memory.

Iris Chang was the daughter of two university professors, Ying-Ying Chang and Dr. Shau-Jin Chang, who moved from mainland China to Taiwan and eventually emigrated to the United States. Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey and raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Chang grew up hearing stories about the Nanking massacre, from which her maternal grandparents managed to escape. When she tried finding books about the subject in Champaign Public Library, she found there were none. She attended University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, and graduated in 1985. She was initially a computer science major, but would later switch to journalism, earning a bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. 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. She then embarked on her career as an author and lectured and wrote magazine articles. She 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.