Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  It was frustrating that when the media learned of Iris’s nervous breakdown and reported the doctor’s diagnosis as bipolar disorder onset (a diagnosis that was never verified or confirmed), people started to speculate about Iris’s mental health without having the information they would have needed to understand her in her final six months. One published book even speculated that she was mentally ill as early as 1999. All these speculations are self-serving due to ignorance. Some people have even suggested that Iris’s enormous passion and drive might have been a manifestation of the mania phase of bipolar disorder. Friends who knew her and are trained in clinical psychology resoundingly disagree [3]. This kind of generalization implies that any person who is energetic and ambitious or a perfectionist would have or would develop bipolar disorder. I don’t think this oversimplified postulation is acceptable at all.

  Iris was an extremely private person. She did not want her plight to be known by the public. Another reason that she wanted the whole thing kept private was the stigma against mental patients in our society. Indeed, mental illness in the Asian culture is especially a taboo subject, as it elicits cruel judgments. Out of our respect for her privacy, we complied with Iris’s request that her depression be kept secret; but after she died, we decided to accept the invitation of the Asian American Mental Health Network to speak out in public on behalf of the mentally ill. Open discussion of mental issues and support from relatives, friends, and communities are essential steps for recovery from mental illness—this is the lesson we learned.

  Life cannot return when it vanishes. My earnest hope is to use this book to help families with mentally ill members. As many mental-health experts [6] now believe, psychotherapy, faith, and the love and support of family are essential for helping a mental patient fully recover. At the present time, antidepressants tend to offer only modest benefits compared to placebo. This shows that it is often hope that helps reduce depression, not the specific medication. We are far from fully understanding the function of the human brain.

  Although Iris has been dead for over six years as this book is about to go to press, her image and spirit were always in front of me as I wrote this book. Those images—her innocent smile, her loud laughter, her curious eyes, her endless thought-provoking questions—are constantly with me. But the most significant thing about Iris was her spirit: to strive to be the best and never give up the pursuit of historical truth and social justice. It’s precisely this spirit which has inspired people worldwide. The Rape of Nanking galvanized the global Chinese communities and vitalized the international redress movement in forcing Japan to reflect on its actions during the Second World War. However, up to this day, Japan still has neither issued a formal apology to the victims nor paid any reparations to the people whose lives were destroyed in the rampage. And worst of all, Japan has failed to educate its own citizens and future generations about the truth of the wartime atrocities Japan perpetrated in Asia during the Second World War.

  As a mother facing the tragic death of her daughter, I’m in a unique position: I could mourn the loss of my beloved daughter for the rest of my life, or I could convert my loss into something positive. In The Rape of Nanking, Iris quoted George Santayana’s immortal warning, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” to express the reason why she wanted to write the book. It is my mission to continue the unfinished work that Iris initiated—to educate the next generation about the cruel lesson of history in the hope that that history will not be repeated.

  A year and a half after her death, on Iris’s birthday, March 28, 2006, my husband and I, together with many of her supporters, established the Iris Chang Memorial Fund (www.irischangmemorialfund.net) to continue the work she cherished and to pay tribute to her fighting spirit and enduring legacy. In the past several years, alongside the time I spent writing this book, I devoted my time to activities in education—for the next generation—about the Asian Holocaust. This work gave me a reason to live on and the courage to look forward—and the hope for a peaceful and harmonious world in the future.

  Iris wanted the world to remember her writing, her words. She always said that life would vanish one day, but books and words would be left behind. In January 1997, in an e-mail to me, she wrote: “Words are the only way to preserve the essence of a soul. What excites me about speeches is that even after the speakers are dead and buried, their spirit lives on. This, to me, is true religion—the best form of life after death. (And, for now, probably the ONLY form of life after death.)” If, as she said, “Words are eternal,” and “Books are the ultimate for writers to reach immortality,” then she had already reached her life goal—except that she would have achieved even more if she lived longer.

  At the end of the writing of this book, I came to this ultimate question, one whose answer I have always been—and continue—searching for: what is the meaning of life? The answer will surely vary with different people. When I thought about Iris’s life, her speech and all those letters she wrote to me and her dad, she clearly expressed that she was a person listening to her heart, her own inner passion, while striving to create something of enduring value. That she meant “standing alone and forging one’s own path.” And she wanted her son Christopher “better to belong to the critical minority than the unquestioning majority.”

  To know her inner passion, in an interview in June 2003, she told Robert Birnbaum: “. . . it is important for me to write about issues that have universal significance. One of them that has resonated with me all my life has been the theme of injustice . . . for some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on other people’s civil liberties.”

  In concluding this book, while I was trying to find a quote from someone who had the same philosophy about life as Iris, I accidentally heard a line over the radio that struck me at once as representing Iris’s essence: “There are some that live their lives for others.”

  POSTSCRIPT

  Christopher is a handsome eight-year-old boy at this writing, and he lives with his paternal grandparents Ken and Luann in central Illinois near his father Brett’s home. Brett remarried in January 2006, and he and his wife have two children.

  Shau-Jin and I still live in the same townhouse in San Jose. Christopher visits us twice a year during his spring break and summer vacation, and he loves to come to California to visit us. Besides managing the Iris Chang Memorial Fund, Shau-Jin and I are active in Bay area organizations such as the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia. Because of Christopher’s autism, we have also joined the Bay area organization Friends for Children with Special Needs. When I have time, I hope I can help the national organizations in preventing suicide.

  NOTES AND REFERENCES

  1) Teicher, M. H., Glod, C. A., Cole, J. O. (1990). “Emergence of intensive suicidal preoccupation during fluoxetine treatment.” Am J Psychiatry 147:207-210.

  Techer, M. H., Clod, C. A., Cole, J. O. (1993). “Antidepressant drugs and the emergence of suicidal tendencies.” Drug Safety 8(3):186-212.

  2) Healy, D., Harris, M., et al. (2006). “Lifetime suicide rates in treated schizophrenia: 1875-1924 and 1994-1998 cohorts compared.” British Journal of Psychiatry 188: 223-228.

  3) “It is scientifically established that certain variations in genes, called polymorphisms”: Personal communication with Dr. Diana Zucherman, Clinical Psychologist and the President of the National Research Center for Women & Families, http://www.center4research.org. Other information in this book has been also kindly provided by Dr. Diana Zucherman via personal communication.

  4) Okuma, T. (1981). “Differential sensitivity to the effects of psychotropic drugs: psychotics vs normals; Asian vs Western populations.” Folia Psychiatr Neurol Jpn 35(1): 79-87.

  Bond, W. S. (1991). “Ethnicity and psychotropic drugs.” Clin Pharm 10(6): 467-70.

  Lin, K. M., R. E. Poland, et al. (1991). “Pharmacokinetic and other related factors affecting psychotropic responses in
Asians.” Psychopharmacol Bull 27(4): 427-39.

  Matthews, H. W. (1995). “Racial, ethnic and gender differences in response to medicines.” Drug Metabol Drug Interact 12(2): 77-91.

  Bakare, M. O. (2008). “Effective therapeutic dosage of antipsychotic medications in patients with psychotic symptoms: Is there a racial difference?” BMC Res Notes 1: 25.

  5) Bass, Alison (2008). Side Effects: a prosecutor, a whistleblower, and a bestselling antidepressant on trial. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a division of Workman Publishing, N. Y., N. Y.

  6) Breggin, Peter R., M.D. (1991). Toxic Psychiatry. St. Martin’s Press, N. Y.

  —— (2001). The Anti-Depressant Fact Book: What Your Doctor Won’t Tell You About Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and Luvox. Da Capo Press.

  —— (2008). Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide, and Crime. St. Martin’s Press, N. Y.

  7 “The FDA and the National Institutes of Mental Health now carry warnings on their Web sites that antidepressant medication can double the risk of suicide, compared to placebo”: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/eating-disorders/fda-warnings-on-antidepressants.shtml.

  The Abilify Web site states that antidepressants may increase suicidal thoughts or behaviors: http://www.abilify.com/Default.aspx?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CCkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.abilify.com%2F&rct=j&q=abilify%20side% 20effects&ei=vDxDTJSBIML98AakspUQ&usg=AFQjCNEmuZnhqoRv2cM0IGq_-bFnCG8QJw

  The Celexa web site and label warn that “patients of all ages taking antidepressant therapy should be closely monitored”: http://www.celexa.com/

  8) A very recent study: Schneeweiss S, et al. “Variation in the risk of suicide attempts and completed suicides by antidepressant agent in adults. A propensity-score adjusted analysis of 9 years’ data.” Arch Gen Psychiatry 2010; 67: 497-506. http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Depression/19904

  9) Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. Revised paperback, 2010, Basic Books, Perseus Books Group, N. Y.

  —— (2010). Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Crown Publishing Group, N. Y.

  APPENDIX

  Eulogy delivered by James Bradley

  at Los Altos, California, on November 19, 2004

  I stand here with a message for two-year-old Christopher.

  My name is James Bradley.

  My father was John Bradley.

  My father was one of the guys who raised the flag on Iwo Jima.

  Growing up, I didn’t learn much about the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photo from him, because he couldn’t talk about it.

  My father died in 1994.

  After his death, I went on a quest to learn about that of which he could not speak.

  Christopher, your mother was Iris Chang.

  She wrote haunting words about difficult historical truths.

  Your mother died in 2004.

  Later, I imagine you will also go on a quest to learn about that of which your mother could not speak.

  In 1997—five years before you were born—I was struggling in my efforts to write a book about the six flag-raisers in the photo.

  For two years I had tried to find a publisher.

  Twenty-seven publishers wrote me rejection letters.

  My spirits were low.

  Then one Sunday I felt a beacon of hope.

  A book about World War II was on the New York Times “Best Sellers” list.

  It was The Rape of Nanking.

  And it was on that day that I first saw those two beautiful words . . . Iris Chang.

  Somehow I got up the courage to write a letter to your mother.

  She responded with a picture postcard encouraging me.

  The picture on the postcard was a photo of her.

  I hung the postcard photo of Iris on the wall of my study.

  Every day, as I wrote through my fears, I said to myself, “If she can do it, I can do it.”

  Flags of Our Fathers became a New York Times #1 best seller. Twenty-seven publishers had said “no.” Your mother had said “Do it.”

  Then I wanted to write a second book, but I couldn’t find a story.

  I turned once again to your mother.

  She e-mailed me a suggestion that I contact a guy named Bill in Iowa who had some “interesting information.”

  I phoned Bill, who then gave me the story that became my second book, Flyboys. This book, a gift from your mother, became a #2 best seller.

  The opening line of Flyboys begins with the words, “The e-mail was from Iris Chang. . . .”

  At the back of the book is the Acknowledgement—my opportunity to thank those who made Flyboys possible.

  The Acknowledgment in Flyboys begins with those beautiful two words . . .

  “Iris Chang.”

  Christopher, since writing these books, I have addressed hundreds of audiences around the world.

  And I have learned that I am just one of thousands who owes thanks to your mother.

  In my quest to find out about my father, I learned that in the brutal battle of Iwo Jima, my dad—a medical officer—held over two hundred screaming young boys in his arms as they died.

  And in your quest to find out about your mother, you will learn that she held hundreds . . . thousands . . . no, hundreds of thousands—of tortured dead and screaming victims in her mind’s eye.

  Iris Chang touched millions and will be remembered on all continents in countless ways.

  Here is just one of them.

  Four years ago, I established the James Bradley Peace Foundation.

  The foundation sends American high-school students to China and Japan for one year, to live and study.

  The goal of the foundation is to create understanding across cultures so that some day, arms like my father’s won’t hold the dying . . . and minds’ eyes like your mother’s won’t have to hold war’s dead.

  Two days ago, our board met and decided that from now on, the American students we send to China will do so as recipients of our foundation’s new Iris Chang Memorial Scholarship.

  Christopher, when you are older, I invite you to come and sit on our board. Come help us choose more students worthy of the Iris Chang Memorial Scholarship. By then, you’ll be able to meet the many students who will have studied in China in your mother’s name.

  They will tell you what I already know:

  About how when they entered China, they saw the beautiful words “Iris Chang” in the airport bookstores . . . city bookstores . . . and libraries across the land.

  How Chinese students study your mother’s words to learn their country’s history.

  And how her photo graces museum walls there, motivating others to search for the truth.

  Christopher, as you grow older, my hope is that you can experience three things that I have.

  Someday you will learn that of which your mother could not speak.

  I hope it will help you understand your mother’s legacy, as I have come to understand my father’s.

  I hope you will someday work sitting under a photo of your mother and feel the warm power of her special inspiration felt by so many others and me.

  And later—when you make that difficult but rewarding inner journey to discover your unique mission in the universe—when you find your personal truth—I hope you will acknowledge the example of your valiant mother, who once fearlessly told truth to the world.

  Perhaps you will write an acknowledgement to her, a thank-you like I once did.

  A thank-you that begins with two bright and hopeful words.

  Those two beautiful words . . .

  . . . Iris Chang.

  REQUIEM FOR IRIS CHANG

  by Steven Clemons

  http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2004/11/requiem_for_iri/index.php

  I HAVE JUST BEEN GUT-PUNCHED BY THE NEWS that a dear friend and intellectual soul m
ate over the last several years, Iris Chang, was found dead in her car near Santa Clara, California.

  Iris’s book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, had immeasurable impact on a collective historical amnesia problem not only in Japan, but also in the United States and around the world. This brilliant and beautiful writer and thinker was, to me, a modern Joan of Arc riding into the nastiest of battles calling for honest and fair reconciliation with the past.

  We met via e-mail years ago. She joined a quest I was on some years ago to try and get people to look seriously at the contemporary legal consequences of back room deal-making by John Foster Dulles on the eve of signing the San Francisco Peace Treaty, formally ending Allied Occupation of Japan on September 8, 1951. I wrote a New York Times piece on this subject, which appeared on 4 September 2001.

  Whereas I thought I had found an interesting historical tidbit that had been neglected by historians and lawyers, Iris Chang knew that I had just wandered unsuspecting into a raging battle between Chinese and Japanese warriors over memory and the historical record. She called me, and we had a two-hour phone conversation where she helped prepare me for the onslaught of criticism that would fly my way from those who wanted to preclude any discussion of Japan’s wartime responsibilities.

  She followed up with her own New York Times articles on the debate about Japan, war memory, and what I called—America’s complicity in Japan’s historical amnesia. Unfortunately, her articles are not available on the Internet.

  We met several times in person, once after a talk I gave at De Anza College in Cupertino, California, where she sat anonymously in the back of a room of 500-600 people interested in Japan’s war memory debate. This subject is one she owned—and was one that I had just stumbled into—but her brilliance and authority on this subject was tempered by intimidating modesty. She never let anyone know that she was there at De Anza.