Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking and the Price of Truth

Iris Chang, who was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and grew up in Champaign, Illinois, became one of the most important investigative historians of her generation. Born in nineteen sixty-eight to Chinese immigrant parents who survived the Second World War, she felt the weight of a history that had been largely ignored in English. Her nineteen ninety-seven book, The Rape of Nanking, brought the nineteen thirty-seven Japanese massacre of Chinese civilians in Nanjing to the attention of Western readers for the first time at scale.

The book became an international bestseller and forced a reckoning with atrocities that Japan had not officially acknowledged. Chang spent years interviewing survivors and digging through archives, and the psychological toll of that research was immense. She died in two thousand four, leaving behind not just the Nanking book but also a history of the Chinese in America, and a book on the Bataan Death March that she did not live to finish.

Her work restored voices to hundreds of thousands of people history had tried to erase.