Remembering Iris Chang

I had meant to blog about Iris Chang, who took her life last week, since I heard the terrible news. I started writing, and then the baby started to cry, and I found myself too disspirited to finish the post by the time I could go back to the computer. Reading the news coverage made me sadder still. In addition to being a brilliant woman, blessed with moral clarity, she was young and had a young family. I read of her long battle with depression, and of the printing of parts of her suicide note–would she really have wanted that?–and of how she was a “Chinese-American author.”

Here, stapled together with a vicious little hyphen, is a digital epitaph that deposits Iris Chang’s ashes into a little drawer and slides it closed, neatly labelling her remains and locking her away from the rest of us to whom she rightfully belongs.

Of course, she did write about Chinese-American history, among other things. Of course she was proud of her roots.

Not. The. Point.

But for the accident of race (and a society that is far too conscious of it, best or worst intentions notwithstanding) the world would rightfully have remembered Iris Chang for a better reason–her understanding of the stubborn virtue and the pathological evil that swirl uneasily within the human soul, and how the character in a soul that obeys its conscience with quiet determination can transcend its environment. Here is a message that welds a thousand hyphens into a sword of steel.

Several years ago, I went into a Barnes & Noble, propped a copy of The Rape of Nanking against a shelf, and ended up overstaying my welcome for many hours, unable to pry myself away from it. I could barely grasp the unlikeliness of the book’s hero, John Rabe, who was a German businessman in Nanking when Japan attacked, as well as a swastika-pin-wearing member of the Nazi party. When other foreigners evacuated from the city, Rabe organized the stay-behinds in the foreign embassies to shelter 250,000 Chinese from Japanese bayonets at the risk of his own life. Upon his return to Germany, John Rabe had the brass to submit a detailed report and film of the atrocity to Adolf Hitler, which earned him a visit from the Gestapo. He was released, but arrested again after the war, this time for his Nazi affiliations. Rabe later wrote a diary, which also includes his account of surviving the house-to-house hell of the Soviet conquest of Berlin.

Not long afterward, reading a different story by a different author, I learned that history produces photonegatives of itself. In 1940, as Japanese troops were murdering and enslaving millions in the East, German troops were doing the same in Europe. There, a young civil servant in the Japanese Embassy in Vilnius worked day and night, stamping fake visas into the passports of Polish Jews to help them flee the Nazis. His name was Chiune Sugihara, and his actions saved thousands of lives. The government of Japan eventually fired him for it (after the war!) and never recognized his courage until after his death.

Here were two people serving mad nations, living in mad places, and still defying all of the politics of affiliation, identification, and accomodation to obey their stubborn consciences. Iris Chang, who taught us this lesson, was no more a predictably Chinese-American author than Rabe was a predictably German businessman, or Sugihara was a predictably Japanese official. All were exceptional human beings who deserved to be remembered for who they were, not the origin of their surnames.

A week later, having written this, I now understand why the death of Iris Chang hit me hard. She could have had so many more exceptional years with us, and selfishly, I sense that I have lost the chance that some of that exceptional soul might have rubbed off on me, too.

I will pray for her family, and I hope you will, also.