04/04/2026
While humans are capable of this degree of monstrosity, the opposite is also true, and we absolutely have a choice which side to champion and embody. And while it's never just a single choice, it does start with one. That one choice you must commit to following up with as much as possible from that day forth.
The little girl who spent hours in the library never imagined she'd become the voice for 300,000 dead.
Iris Chang grew up hearing whispers. Her grandparents had fled China in 1937, just before Japanese troops invaded Nanking. They spoke in hushed tones about the horror that followed. Mass murder. Torture. Unthinkable cruelty.
But when young Iris searched her local library, she found nothing. No books. No records. No mention of what happened to those people.
It was as if they had died twice. Once in 1937. Again in silence.
Iris was the quiet kid who devoured books. Born to professor parents in Princeton, she moved to Illinois as a child. While other kids played outside, she stacked library books to her chin and carried them home.
She was brilliant. At university, she wrote for the New York Times while still a student. By 23, she had her first book deal.
But those whispered stories from her grandparents never left her.
In 1995, she decided to write about what the world had forgotten. She had no idea it would consume her life.
For two years, she traveled across three countries. She sat with elderly survivors who wept as they remembered. She read diaries that described unspeakable acts. She stared at photographs that showed humanity at its absolute worst.
What she discovered broke her heart.
On December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers entered Nanking. For six weeks, they unleashed hell. They murdered 300,000 civilians and unarmed soldiers. They r***d 80,000 women. They bayoneted babies for sport. They held killing contests to see who could murder more people.
They turned a city into a slaughterhouse.
One discovery stunned even Iris. She found the diary of John Rabe, a German businessman who witnessed everything. The twist? Rabe was a N**i who wore a sw****ka armband. Yet this N**i became known as "the living Buddha of Nanking" because he saved thousands of Chinese lives.
Even a N**i was horrified by what the Japanese did.
The research destroyed Iris emotionally. She called her old professor one day and cried for an hour. "I don't know how I can go on," she sobbed, "knowing that human nature is capable of such cruelty."
But she kept going. Because someone had to tell their story.
"The R**e of Nanking" hit bookstores in 1997. The world finally learned the truth. The book shot to the bestseller list. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It was translated into dozens of languages.
For the first time, the victims had a voice.
But truth comes with a price.
Japanese ultranationalist groups attacked Iris viciously. They called her a liar. They sent her anonymous letters with bullets inside. They tried to destroy her reputation.
The threats terrified her. But she kept speaking. She appeared on TV confronting Japanese officials. She demanded apologies for the victims. She gave speech after speech.
She was exhausted. But she felt she owed it to the dead.
Meanwhile, Iris and her husband Brett desperately wanted children. But Iris had a chromosomal condition that caused multiple miscarriages. The fertility treatments pumped her full of hormones that can trigger mood swings.
Finally, they used a surrogate. Their son Christopher was born in 2002. Iris worried constantly about him. When he was diagnosed with mild autism, she blamed herself.
In 2003, she published another book about Chinese-American history. Another brutal publicity tour. Another dive into stories of suffering and discrimination.
Then she started researching her next project. The Bataan Death March of 1942, when Japanese forces tortured 90,000 American and Filipino prisoners.
Once again, she was swimming in accounts of torture and death.
In early 2004, Iris did 20 cities in 31 days promoting her book. When she came home, her friends noticed something different. Simple tasks like depositing a check suddenly became impossible.
That August, while interviewing Bataan survivors in Kentucky, Iris snapped. She hadn't slept in four days. She wasn't eating. A veteran helping with her research realized she was having a breakdown.
They hospitalized her for three days. Doctors diagnosed reactive psychosis and loaded her with medications. Then they sent her home.
Back in California, she got worse. The medications made her paranoid. She was convinced the government was watching her. In September, she checked into a hotel with sleeping pills and vodka, planning to end it all. But she came home instead.
In October, a psychiatrist diagnosed bipolar disorder. More medications. Her parents moved in to help care for her and little Christopher.
But Iris was drowning. The images from her research haunted her. The testimonies of torture victims echoed in her mind. The weight of 300,000 dead civilians crushed her soul.
She had given voice to the forgotten. But now she couldn't forget either.
On November 8, 2004, Iris wrote three su***de notes. She dated them all the same day, as if she'd been planning this for a while.
In one note, she wrote: "I promise to get up and get out of the house every morning." Even as she planned her death, she was trying to fight the depression.
The next morning, her husband woke to find her gone. He immediately called police.
At 9:15 AM, a water district employee was driving on a quiet road south of Los Gatos. He saw a car parked on the shoulder. The driver looked asleep.
He banged on the hood to wake them.
When he peered inside, he saw Iris in the driver's seat. A revolver lay on her leg. Blood covered her clothes. She had been dead for two hours.
In the backseat, a teddy bear sat in Christopher's car seat.
Iris Chang was 36 years old. Her little boy was just 2.
Over 600 people attended her funeral. At the same time, survivors in China held a memorial service at the Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall. Today, there's a bronze statue of Iris there. China built an entire memorial hall in her honor. San Jose named a park after her.
Her mother later wrote a book defending Iris, questioning whether the psychiatric medications pushed her over the edge. Others believe she suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder that was worsened by everything she endured.
What's certain is this: Iris Chang sacrificed her peace of mind to give voice to the voiceless. She forced the world to remember what powerful people wanted forgotten. She documented history's darkest chapters so they could never be erased.
She succeeded beyond measure. Millions now know about Nanking because of her.
But empathy has a cost. Bearing witness takes a toll. Iris absorbed the pain of every survivor she interviewed. She carried the weight of every victim she wrote about.
As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once said: "To forget a holocaust is to kill twice."
Iris made sure the Nanking victims would not be forgotten. But in saving them from dying twice, she couldn't save herself from the memories that consumed her.
On that quiet California roadside, her suffering ended. But her legacy lives on. Because of her courage, 300,000 forgotten souls finally have their story told.
Her son Christopher was too young to remember his mother. But because of her sacrifice, the world will remember Nanking forever.
~Forgotten Stories
