In 1997, when Fei Fei and I were planning the Nanking Conference at Princeton, we invited a young Chinese-American writer named Iris Chang to speak at it. She had been spending the past few years researching a book about the Nanking Massacre and, in the process, had uncovered John Rabé’s diary in the attic of his granddaughter’s house in Germany. Rabé had been one of the heroes of the Nanking Massacre. A German national, and member of the Nazi party, Rabé had organized a group of foreign missionaries and doctors to create a safe zone in the city of Nanking in which they protected thousands of Chinese citizens. Rabé had run around tirelessly twenty-four hours a day driving out Japanese soldiers for the long months of the massacre. The discovery of his diary was a major find, and Iris' story of how she discovered it was a popular presentation at the conference.

Shortly after the Nanking Conference, Iris’ book The Rape of Nanking was published and promptly became an international bestseller. She herself became a celebrity, spending most of the next year speaking around the world on the massacre, bringing more attention to “the forgotten holocaust of World War II” than we possibly could with our little conference.

The last time Fei Fei and I saw Iris was a few years later when she returned to Princeton to speak to the New Jersey Social Studies Educators. We had a bit of a falling out with Iris at that time, since she submitted an article for our book Nanking 1937: Healing and Memory which we were forced to reject. Since Iris was primarily a popularizer rather than an analyst, her article did not fit into a book which was intended to be a college text for students studying Chinese history in the 20th century. Still, we parted friends, if not as close as we had been during the exhilarating days of the Nanking Conference.

Now Iris is dead, having killed herself this past week. That was stunning news, and very sad news as well. She had followed the success of The Rape of Nanking with another bestseller, The Chinese in America, and should have been enjoying even more success and fame than she had originally. But the mind is a crazy thing, and it is impossible for us to imagine what demons haunted Iris. Whether they were related to her grandparents’ memories of the Nanking Massacre, or even somehow related to her success as a writer. nobody knows. Poor Iris...