Cleveland.com: Iris Chang's mother dedicates self to daughter's vision of documenting Japanese Rape of Nanking
To the world, Iris Chang seemed to have everything. She was young, beautiful, the mother of a 2-year-old son, a best-selling author whose book on the Rape of Nanking and Japanese atrocities in China catapulted her to fame. She was widely hailed as a hero by fellow ethnic Chinese, both here and abroad. But one night in November 2004, the 36-year-old Chang, who had been quietly struggling with depression, left her husband asleep in their San Jose home and drove her car to a lonely private road south of Los Gatos. She put a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. It took more than a year before her mother, Ying-Ying Chang, could talk about her daughter without crying. When the emotional blackness and numbness began to fade about a year and a half after her daughter's death, Chang began asking herself what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She decided the best way to cope was to finish her daughter's work: trying to persuade the Japanese government to apologize for the wartime conduct of its troops and pay victims compensation -- and educating young people about the "Forgotten Holocaust"...more...
