Historian Iris Chang won many battles

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The war she lost raged within
by Heidi Benson

On a cloudy Monday morning in early November, author Iris Chang, 36, drove her white 1999 Oldsmobile Alero down Alum Rock Avenue toward the green foothills of East San Jose.

She passed the iron gates of Calvary Catholic Cemetery, where marble statues of winged angels, their heads bowed in prayer, mark the graves of early settlers. She passed the football field and the blocky, concrete auditorium of James Lick High School. Turning right, she pulled into the strip mall across the street from the school. She parked in front of Reed’s Sport Shop, a redwood-shingled emporium that sells fishing, cycling and hunting gear.

Tall and slender, with glossy black hair falling well past her shoulders, Iris emerged from her car wearing blue jeans and sneakers. She walked through the whooshing automatic doors and turned right. On the far wall, a gallery of mounted deer heads marked her destination: the hunting department.

This was not her first visit. She knew where to find the glass case of Civil War era pistol replicas, classified as “relics.” She knew that in California, she could purchase a relic immediately and avoid the 10-day waiting period necessary with other guns.

At 11:56 a.m., Iris presented her driver’s license and counted out $517 in cash — she was carrying nearly $4,000 — and left the store with an ivory-handled Ruger “Old Army” .45 replica revolver. Back in her car, she slipped the gun and owner’s manual into a cardboard box labeled “Real Estate Documents” that lay on the passenger seat. That night, she had dinner with her husband of 13 years, Brett Douglas. They went to bed at midnight.

Before dawn, Iris awoke and got into her car. Driving west toward Santa Cruz on Highway 17, she took a turnoff 25 miles from her home and parked on a steep gravel utility road within sight of the highway. Nearby, Bear Creek Road curled up the lonesome hills, thick with black oak.

At 9:15 a.m. Tuesday, a county water district employee drove past the Oldsmobile. He stopped and honked but there was no response. Thinking the driver must be asleep, he got out of his car and banged on the hood. He noticed condensation on the windows, peered inside and saw Iris in the driver’s seat with her hands crossed in her lap. The revolver lay on her left leg. Her head rested against the window. Blood covered her clothes. In the backseat, a teddy bear was tucked into the car seat of her 2-year-old son, Christopher. The water district employee called his supervisor, who called 911.

Homicide detectives would eventually determine that Iris had loaded all six chambers of the gun, placed the barrel between her lips, and fired. The half-inch lead ball perforated her hard palate, passed through her left dural sinus, her left cerebral and occipital lobes, broke partially through her skull and came to rest without exiting her scalp.

When her body was discovered, Iris Chang had been dead for two hours.

At Reed’s Sport Shop one month after her death, the spot on the top shelf of the glass-topped case where Iris’ gun had lain was still vacant. “She was in on more than one occasion,” said Reed’s manager, Pat Kalcic, a tall outdoorsman. “She appeared to have done research.” The clerk who sold her the gun told investigators Iris had said she collected antique firearms. “She got what she wanted and got out,” he said.

That such a beautiful woman would be remembered is not unusual. But Kalcic and his employees did not know how unusual Iris Chang was: a world- renowned author whose work had stirred international controversy. Neither did they know she had been bent on suicide.

On the day of Iris Chang’s death, word spread quickly over news wires and the Internet. Her obituary was published in newspapers worldwide. She had gained an international reputation in 1997 when she was only 29 for writing “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.” It was the first history of Japan’s brutal 1937 occupation of China’s capital city and documented the weekslong rampage.

“Rape of Nanking” became an immediate best-seller and established her as an outspoken advocate for victims of Japanese war crimes. The debate it provoked — between those Japanese who deny the atrocities and the Chinese who seek an official apology and reparations — continues.

“Iris scraped away the scar tissue of something that had been half forgotten and half healed over, and to this date, it’s still a very raw wound, ” said Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Schell reviewed her book favorably in the New York Times. “She ventured into a minefield of unexploded ordnance.”

News of her suicide brought forth a chorus of disbelief. Questions hung in the air:

— How could someone with such success, surrounded by loving family and friends, take her own life?

— Was she “the last victim of the Rape of Nanking,” plagued and destroyed by the dark histories she illuminated?

— Did her single-minded determination, her habit of working beyond exhaustion, contribute to her death?

— Did she suffer a fatal reaction to powerful drugs that she refused to take as prescribed?

Speculation that she may have been killed by Japanese ultranationalists continued to turn up on Web logs and Internet chat rooms. At the same time, her foes said her suicide proved that “Rape of Nanking” was nothing but lies.

Irrefutably, Iris Chang won many battles in her fight for justice. But as she began to manifest symptoms of bipolar illness, she perceived them as a failure of will. Such harsh logic, symptomatic of the disease, rendered her unable to extend her own magnificent compassion to herself.

In the end, the war she could not win raged internally.

Together, Mr. and Mrs. Chang answered the door of their quiet, two-story townhouse in San Jose. It had been one week since their daughter’s death. The foyer was filled with enormous bouquets sent by well-wishers. From the terrace, the view was peaceful — broad green fields and golden poplars.

Married 41 years, the Changs are a handsome, gracious couple. Both were born in mainland China. Their families fled the 1949 Communist revolution and settled in Taiwan, where the two met in high school. They met again at Taiwan University — and yet again when each won a science scholarship to Harvard in 1962. Ying-Ying is a biochemist. Her husband, Shau-Jin, is a theoretical physicist. They married in 1964, and each earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1967.

As that November afternoon darkened into evening, the Changs sat at their Danish-modern dining room table and told stories about Iris, speaking sometimes in past tense and sometimes in present tense.

They told of the time in grade school when Iris decided “if Dear Abby can do it — I can do it,” and she started her own advice column, writing questions and answers. Then, in high school, Iris became determined to revive the school’s literary magazine, and quickly enlisted a staff and a sponsor. Her mother said, “She was always publishing something.”

Rising from his chair, her father pulled a small red leather volume from the bookshelf. “Poetry by Iris Chang” was written in neat cursive on the title page. “She’s very systematic — you see, every poem has a date on it. She just knows how to do things,” he said, tenderly smoothing out a page. “This was lying in our basement. Now, it becomes our treasure.”

Iris was a serious child, her mother recalled. “Every day she seemed to have something new. She liked to talk, so it’s very fun to watch her talking,” she said. “She also liked to beat the system.”

Her father patted the tabletop. “Yes!” he said, grinning. “Every time we set a rule, she always tried to find some way to get around it. We always had to argue all the exceptions she could think of. It’s never boring with her — it’s interesting.” Slowing down, he repeated, “It’s interesting.”

His voice slipped to a whisper. “It’s been too short.”

Iris Shun-Ru Chang was born March 28, 1968, in Princeton Hospital, on the university campus in New Jersey where her parents were doing postdoctoral work. They lived on a leafy country road named Einstein Drive. After two years at Princeton, the family moved to a Midwestern college town, Champaign-Urbana, in Illinois. “He got the job, we went,” Mrs. Chang explained. Soon they were both teaching and conducting research at the University of Illinois. Their second child, Michael, was born in 1970.

“Michael is very outgoing, very extroverted — Iris is different,” said Mrs. Chang. “Iris can be a loner; it doesn’t bother her.” She touched her fingertips to her forehead, then waved her hand to the heavens: “It’s because Iris is a dreamer.” Iris learned to read at age 4. At 10, she entered a young- author competition and won first place. Winning that prize led to dreams of becoming a writer, her father said.

“Iris always came to us to discuss her problems,” her mother said. “We are a very close family. We are lucky — she could tell me everything she felt. She was easily hurt, though sometimes she didn’t show it. I would tell her, ‘You can care too much about what people say about you.’ ” Iris was sometimes teased for her earnestness. She wanted to be independent, to think for herself.

Iris and her brother went to University High — known as Uni High — on the campus where their parents taught. The small, academically elite school has produced many Nobel laureates.

At 14, Iris was studying advanced math and decided to join an all-boys computer club called Submit. She easily passed the 20 exams necessary to qualify, only to be told that she must take five more.

“The boys came together to say, ‘Crisis! There’s a girl who wants to get into Submit,’ ” Mr. Chang recalled. “So they tried to make it harder and harder.” Iris insisted she had already passed.

“They had a big fight,” he said. “Iris thought it was an injustice. She was mad. So you see, she was really a fighter. If they had let her get into Submit, she may not have become a journalist,” he added.

“We should be grateful.”

Iris met the man she would marry in 1989, when she was a sophomore in journalism at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Brett Douglas was a tall, low-key redhead, nearly two years her senior and an engineering graduate student when they were introduced at a Sigma Phi Delta fraternity party on campus.

Sixteen years later, and five days after her death, Brett sat in the living room of the San Jose town home they shared, surrounded by family photos. The air was still, heavy with grief. A red tricycle and a jogging stroller flanked the front door. The sound of children singing wafted in from the swimming pool nearby. The pool, a turquoise rectangle surrounded by pines, sat at the center of the village-like complex.

Brett’s father, Ken Douglas, had flown out to keep his son company. A reassuring presence, he stood at the kitchen counter, fixing a sandwich for lunch. He had only recently retired from the family farm in central Illinois that had been in the family for five generations.

Speaking of the night they met, Brett said, “Iris was beautiful, vivacious — and sober. She just seemed to be more driven and to have more zest for life than anyone I’d ever met. I knew immediately I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.”

It didn’t take him long to propose, but their 1989 engagement stretched out while Brett finished grad school in Urbana. Meanwhile, Iris was one of a dozen journalism undergraduates chosen for an accelerated Associated Press training program. She was assigned to the AP office in Chicago.

Brett soon grew concerned that Iris was overextended. “Iris could write two or three stories a day, and they loved her because she wrote so fast,” he said. “But she worked herself way too hard when she was there. She wore herself out.” Her mother concurred: “At AP, she worked so hard she couldn’t sleep. I was worried. She never did sleep very well or eat very well.”

When her internship was up, Iris was offered a permanent job at AP. She went to the Chicago Tribune instead, but didn’t enjoy “politicking for assignments,” Brett said. Opting for a master’s degree, she was accepted by the Graduate Writing Seminar at Johns Hopkins University and moved to Baltimore in 1990. Her long-distance engagement to Brett entered its second year. By now, Brett was living in Santa Barbara, working toward a doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of California. They kept in touch every day by e-mail.

At Johns Hopkins, Iris studied playwriting, fiction, poetry and science writing. As a teacher’s assistant, she taught a class in creative writing. She wrote her thesis on “The Poetry of Science.” Soon she exceeded the dreams of every student in the program by getting a book contract from a major publisher while still in school. She was 22.

“Iris was a phenomenon,” said one of her former teachers at Johns Hopkins, Ann Finkbeiner. In the fall of 1990, Iris took Finkbeiner’s “Science Stories” course. “She talked almost obsessively. She got very, very wound up in things,” Finkbeiner said. “You didn’t always feel she was talking to you —

it was as if she had to talk. To me, it was part of that whole intensity that made Iris able to do what she went on to do.”

Barbara Culliton, now editor in chief of Genome News Network, was then director of the Johns Hopkins science writing program. Her friendship with Iris, Culliton said, “lasted from the day she walked in as a student — in effect, to the day she died.”

Culliton was sufficiently impressed by Iris’ talent to recommend her to Susan Rabiner, editorial director of Basic Books, the “serious nonfiction” division of HarperCollins Publishers. It was unusual for Basic Books to consider such an untested writer. But Rabiner had been looking for someone conversant in the sciences and in Mandarin to write a biography of Hsue-Shen Tsien. Tsien was a top physicist at Cal-Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was deported during the Red scare of the 1950s. He returned to China and went on to develop its missile system.

Rabiner recalled telling Iris, ” ‘You’re young, but take a flyer.’ I didn’t know if I’d hear from her again.” Less than two months later, she did. Iris called to say she had found Tsien’s son and had interviewed him in Mandarin. “Clearly, Iris was a strong, smart and directed young woman,” Rabiner said. She helped Iris write a proposal and the project was quickly put under contract.

“Iris was so excited when she got the contract for the book,” Brett said, recalling how obsessively she ferreted out material. “She contacted people who’d been lost for years, dug up records that nobody ever knew existed. She wrote her 100-page book proposal in a couple of weeks.”

By now, Brett had taken a job with a Santa Barbara engineering firm. He and Iris were married in August 1991 in Champaign-Urbana. Their mothers helped to plan the wedding. The newlyweds settled in Santa Barbara, and Iris began writing the book about Tsien. In 1992, at 24, she received a $15,000 award from the MacArthur Foundation, which helped fund the project.

The book, “Thread of the Silkworm,” was published in 1995. It was well- reviewed, though it never sold in great numbers. But soon Iris would write one of the most controversial books of the decade. That book would sell half a million copies.

Iris Chang found the inspiration for her new book in 1994 when she came face-to-face with poster-size photographs of Nanking war crimes at a conference in Cupertino. She was 26.

“I walked around in shock,” she later wrote. “Though I had heard so much about the Nanking massacre as a child, nothing prepared me for these pictures — stark black-and-white images of decapitated heads, bellies ripped open and nude women forced by their rapists into various pornographic poses, their faces contorted into unforgettable expressions of agony and shame. In a single blinding moment I recognized the fragility of not just life but the human experience itself.”

The conference had been sponsored by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia. Iris discovered this group of Chinese American activists after she and Brett moved to Northern California when he got a job with Cisco Systems.

After seeing the Nanking pictures, Iris wrote: “I was suddenly in a panic that this … reversion in human social evolution would be reduced to a footnote of history … unless someone forced the world to remember it.”

Iris called Rabiner. “There’s a book I must do,” she said. She offered to pay Basic Books to publish it. “No, no! We don’t work that way,” Rabiner insisted. “Tell me why you want to tell the story.”

Iris had been haunted since childhood by the graphic stories she was told about Nanking. Her maternal grandparents had escaped just weeks before the Japanese arrived. As a youngster, Iris had sought books on the subject in her school library. But there was none. As she later told an interviewer, “I wrote ‘Rape of Nanking’ out of a sense of rage. I didn’t really care if I made a cent from it. It was important to me that the world knew what happened in Nanking back in 1937.” Rabiner sensed the book would be important and signed Iris to write it.

Later, Iris told interviewers that, as a child, “it was hard for me to even visualize how bad it was, because the stories seemed almost mythical — people being chopped into pieces, the Yangtze River running red with blood. It was very painful for me to think about, even then.”

While writing the book, Iris found it “almost impossible to separate myself from the tragedy,” she said. “The stress of writing this book and living with this horror on a daily basis caused my weight to plummet,” she said. “I had to write it, if it was the last thing I ever did in my life.”

On her trip to China, she met with survivors from Nanking. “Every single survivor I met was desperately anxious to tell his or her story,” she later said. “I spent several hours with each one, getting the details of their experiences on videotape. Some became overwrought with emotion during the interviews and broke down into tears. But all of them wanted the opportunity to talk about the massacre before their deaths.”

Seeing how the survivors lived was as harrowing as hearing their stories. Iris was “shocked and depressed” to see their living conditions in Nanking. “Most lived in dark, squalid apartments cluttered with the debris of poverty and heavy with mildew and humidity,” she wrote. “During the massacre some had received physical injuries so severe they had been prevented from making a decent living for decades. Most lived in poverty so crushing that even a minimal amount of financial compensation from Japan could have greatly improved the conditions of their lives.”

During two years of research, Iris made significant historical discoveries. She found the diaries of a pair of Westerners who were among the heroes of Nanking. The first was John Rabe, a German member of the Nazi party who was living in the Chinese capital in 1937. He established an International Safety Zone in Nanking before the Japanese soldiers arrived from Shanghai. Iris dubbed him the “Oskar Schindler of Nanking.”

The other diarist — the “Anne Frank of Nanking” — was an Illinois woman named Minnie Vautrin. (In the book, Iris noted that Vautrin had graduated with honors from her own alma mater, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.) In 1937, Vautrin was a missionary and teacher at the Nanking Women’s College when its campus became part of the Safety Zone. She harbored hundreds of Chinese women and children there during the occupation. But there were untold numbers of women she could not save from capture, torture or death at the hands of Japanese soldiers. Haunted by the belief that she had failed, Vautrin suffered a breakdown in 1940. While on the ship home, she tried repeatedly to leap overboard. Back in Illinois one year later, she committed suicide.

“Civilization is tissue thin,” Iris wrote. She called this the most important lesson to be learned from the tragedy of Nanking. And she believed her research produced irrevocable proof of Japanese atrocities. She wrote:

“After reading several file cabinets’ worth of documents on Japanese war crimes as well as accounts of ancient atrocities from the pantheon of world history, I would have to conclude that Japan’s behavior during World War II was less a product of dangerous people than of a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times, able to sell dangerous rationalizations to those whose human instincts told them otherwise.”

The book hit the stores at Christmas, a tough selling season for serious nonfiction. It became a surprise best-seller. A groundswell of interest in the Chinese American community had quickly spread to booksellers and the broader reading public. Newsweek ran an excerpt, and soon Iris was a familiar face on TV news shows. Reader’s Digest devoted a cover story to her.

“We weren’t really prepared for the success of the book,” Brett said. “Iris wasn’t prepared and her publisher wasn’t prepared. I don’t know how many printings it went through. They just kept saying, ‘We’ll print another 10,000, we’ll print another 10,000.’ ”

Rabiner said Iris “found her voice” in promoting “Rape of Nanking.” “She had so many bookings, she could easily be on the road for 2 1/2 weeks before coming back home. She came alive before crowds — she loved to share, and she was interested in other people’s lives. That’s why she was such a powerful role model for so many Chinese Americans. She was committed to her cause, and she radiated life.”

At the same time, torrents of hate mail came in, Brett said. “Iris is sensitive, but she got charged up,” he recalled. “When anybody questioned the validity of what she wrote, she would respond with overwhelming evidence to back it up. She’s very much a perfectionist. It was hard for her not to react every single time.”

Most of the attacks came from Japanese ultranationalists. “We saw cartoons where she was portrayed as this woman with a great big mouth,” Brett said. “She got used to the fact that there is a Web site called ‘Iris Chang and Her Lies.’ She would just laugh.”

But friends say Iris began to voice concerns for her safety. She believed her phone was tapped. She described finding threatening notes on her car. She said she was confronted by a man who said, “You will NOT continue writing this. ” She used a post office box, never her home address, for mail.

“There are a fair number of people who don’t take kindly to what she wrote in ‘The Rape of Nanking,’ ” Brett said, “so she’s always been very, very private about our family life.”

The book’s popularity meant a lengthy book tour. “Over a year and a half, she visited 65 cities,” Brett said. “Most authors are worn out after five or six cities.” He could see the travel was taking a toll on her. In 1998, Brett recalled, “for her 30th birthday, we went out to a little resort near Santa Cruz and she literally didn’t want to leave the room.”

Somehow, she always bounced back, energized by her role as spokesperson for a movement. Among her many television appearances was a memorable evening on “Nightline,” where she was the only Asian and the only woman among a panel of China experts.

“To see her on TV, defending ‘Rape of Nanking’ so fiercely and so fearlessly — I just sat down, stopped, in awe,” said Helen Zia, author of “Asian-American Dreams: Emergence of an American People” and co-author, with Wen-Ho Lee, of “My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused.”

“Iris truly had no fear. You could see it in the steadiness of her voice and in her persistence,” Zia recalled. “She would just say, matter-of-factly, ‘Japan is lying and here’s why.’ ”

Later, Iris challenged the Japanese ambassador to a debate on the “MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS. After the ambassador spoke of events in Nanking, Iris turned to the moderator and said: “I didn’t hear an apology.”

“Chinese Americans grew up hearing about this forgotten holocaust,” said Zia, whose grandmother was killed in Nanking. “It was family lore.”

When Zia and Iris met for the first time, they planned a quick lunch. But lunch lasted through dinner. “We sat down and started talking, and we had a lot to say. For Asian Americans to write nonfiction about Asia or Asian America was relatively new. Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan really blew the doors open for fiction writers. But for us to be able to write nonfiction, the stories of our lives — on a lot of levels, it was revolutionary.”

Despite support from esteemed historians and journalists, including Stephen Ambrose and George Will, some judged Iris’ version of history too subjective. “This was something of a roots venture for her — to reconnect with the country that her family had drifted off from,” said UC Berkeley’s Schell. “And she brought an incredible reserve of emotion to it. Iris was first and foremost an advocate. She was an able journalist, but she allowed herself to become deeply involved emotionally in her subjects, which gave her accessibility. But some scholars felt that she was a little too involved with her subject matter.”

Rabiner, who later became an agent and represented Iris, said, “The book was beyond well reviewed — it was a mega-best-seller that continues to sell. It showed that at times history has to be written by a member of the community, out of a passion the author shares with the community. It caused an international scandal because the Japanese to this day have not conceded the extent of the wartime atrocities perpetrated against the Chinese and others. It also showed publishing houses that there is a market for books about the Chinese experience.”

The book rocketed Iris into the pantheon of American intellectuals. In 1998, she and Brett were invited to attend Renaissance Weekend — the meeting-of-the-minds seminar held each New Year’s weekend in South Carolina. “Iris was much in demand and gave many talks,” Brett recalled, adding with a laugh, “she was schmoozing the whole time.” There, Iris had lengthy conversations with then-President Bill Clinton and gave him a signed copy of “The Rape of Nanking.”

But when Brett and Iris were invited back the next year, the young couple took a different tack. They attended lectures but Iris gave fewer talks; she was still recovering from the book tour. Meanwhile, they decided they had put their plans for a family on hold long enough.

“When we first got married, we said we were going to start trying to have a child after four years,” Brett said. “And then we stretched it to six, and then ‘The Rape of Nanking’ hit the best-seller list and she was out promoting it for almost two years. By the time that was done, it was already eight years. So we finally started trying, and then we had our son in 2002.”

Christopher was born Aug. 31 that year. He was a happy baby, with his mother’s jet-black hair. “We wondered what we did with all of our time before we had a son,” Brett said, “because of the amount of time that a little one involves. What made it much easier is that we did have a wonderful nanny to help.”

They had moved from a small apartment in Sunnyvale to the San Jose townhome. “We bought this house when we knew he was on the way. There are so many kids his age here.”

Iris’ parents retired in early 2001, and after Christopher was born, they moved from Illinois and into a home in the same complex. Her mother hoped Iris would take on a lighter topic for her next book, especially with a baby in the house. The Nanking book had “made Iris sad.”

Iris took her advice, though the book she began was enormously ambitious. “The Chinese in America: A Narrative History” was published by Viking in 2003. Iris told her mother that working on it was a vacation after “Rape of Nanking. ”

But soon she found herself drawn to a subject just as dark.

Iris Chang rang the doorbell on Ed Martel’s front porch in Kenosha, Wis., on Dec. 4, 2003. It’s a date he won’t forget.

“She sat down and cross-examined me like a district attorney for five solid hours,” said Martel, 86, one of the last remaining survivors of the Bataan Death March of World War II. His daughter, Maddy, remembered the day well, too. “We set out a very big lunch — meat trays and sandwiches and desserts,” she said. “My dad was so excited that she was doing this, and so honored.”

Months earlier, Iris had seized on a letter in her “book ideas” file about a Midwestern pocket of Bataan survivors, all members of two tank battalions. “They drop so fast,” the letter had read. The correspondent was Sgt. Anthony Meldahl, a supply sergeant with the Ohio National Guard who had admired Iris’ work. Meldahl was now urging Iris to join his oral-history project. She did, and, starting in November 2003, would make four trips to meet with Bataan vets — in Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky. Each time, Iris swept into town and conducted four or five intensive interviews in as many days. “She was like a battalion commander,” Meldahl said.

“It’s amazing when you watch Iris do research,” Brett said. “She would go into a town — and with Tony Meldahl’s help, it was even better. She would have a team of three vets and their children and their wives. Iris would be interviewing them, somebody else would be filming them, somebody else would be photocopying records, and somebody would be sending documents down to UPS. And Iris would buy lunch and dinner for everybody, and they all thought it was great.

“These people wanted their story told for a long, long time, and they knew that because Iris had success as an author, she’d be able to do a very good job,” Brett said.

Ed Martel’s story began on Dec. 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor was still smoldering when Japanese planes bombed the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula, where Martel was stationed with a National Guard tank battalion. With few rations, little ammunition and no reinforcements, 70,000 American and Filipino troops held off the Japanese for months.

When the American general surrendered on April 9, the Japanese forced the troops to walk 65 miles through sweltering jungle. Some 8,000 died on the notorious “death march.” Those who survived spent the rest of the war in a bleak prison camp; some were shipped to Japan as slave laborers. Once the Allies won the war, the story was forgotten. It had been the largest U.S. Army surrender in history.

“It’s baffling to me that the U.S. today has so little knowledge of the four months we held out,” Martel told The Chronicle by telephone from his home in Wisconsin. “We marvel at how America turned their backs on us.”

Martel was slightly hard of hearing, but his memory was crisp. He recalled telling Iris about the worst of his Bataan experiences. “Iris asked me to tell about atrocities,” he said. “Twice I broke down and had to leave the room.”

After he and his fellow soldiers had been starved and beaten for months, a Japanese guard knocked him to the ground, piercing his chest with his bayonet. Martel cried, “You son of a bitch! Just do it!” His daughter recalled that in telling Iris this story, he got terribly worked up. “Why did he have to toy with me like that?” he cried. It was as if he were back in Bataan. But just in time, Iris changed the subject, prompting him to tell a lighter story.

“Did you really look like Charlie Chaplin?” asked Iris, knowing Martel had been saved from near starvation by the brushy mustache he wore. The mustache reminded his Japanese captors of “The Little Tramp.” So, in return for performing a short, Chaplinesque shuffle, he would be rewarded with a handful of scallions.

“Iris was very loving,” Martel’s daughter said. “Talking to her, you felt like she was one of the family.” After the interview, they kept up an active correspondence. Iris sent the Martels photographs from her trip, cards for Chinese New Year and updates on her Bataan project. One picture she sent showed Iris hugging Martel and his wife. He framed it and hung it on a wall in his home. Next to it, now, is a copy of Iris’ obituary. When Martel read in a newspaper about her death, he asked his daughter, “Is that our Iris?”

Iris connected so well with these veterans because each of their stories mattered to her. She didn’t just ask what had happened, she asked what they had felt. Theirs was not just a story of war, but of boys becoming men, she said in a transcription of one of her many taped interviews. “It boggles the imagination, what you went through,” she said. “You’ll have to forgive me, but I find myself often deeply affected by these stories.”

Between trips to the Midwest, Iris conducted yet another book tour. In early 2004, she traveled to promote the paperback version of “The Chinese in America.” Brett said, “It was, I think, 21 cities in 28 days. And that really took its toll on her, too.”

Her last Bataan trip was scheduled for July 2004. She planned to visit Harrodsburg, Ky., where several survivors lived and where an old Bataan-era tank stood sentry in the town square. She hoped to gain access to a time capsule of audiotapes that was sealed within that tank after the war.

Getting ready for the trip, Iris went into overdrive. “In the past, when Iris was working on something, she might work for 48 hours straight and then she would crash for 20 hours, and then she’d be back up, working again,” Brett said. “But this time, I had assumed she was sleeping all day after working all night. But it turned out she wasn’t sleeping during the day either. She was trying to be a top-notch mother and she was also trying to prepare for her trip.”

The nanny was the only person aware that Iris had been up for three days with no sleep. But the nanny spoke only Mandarin. Later, Brett learned that the nanny had urged Iris to cancel the trip.

“Iris was really good at putting her best face forward, even when she was totally exhausted, so I didn’t really perceive that there was a real problem,” Brett said. “We had our lives so structured. Either she was watching Christopher or I was watching Christopher, or she was working or I was working. We didn’t see each other as much as we did in the past.”

He added, sadly, “I think if we had, I would have noticed earlier that things were going wrong.”

Normally, Iris never did interviews alone. She preferred to meet someone in each town who could introduce her to the veterans and their families. For the Wisconsin trip, she had hooked up with people from the Bataan Commemorative Research Project, a historical archive and Web site created by faculty and students at Proviso East High School in Maywood, Ill.

“World War II hit the town of Maywood really hard,” said Ian Smith, chair of the school’s history department. “This high school alone lost 200 students — 28 were with the Bataan company.”

Smith had been Iris’ liaison in Wisconsin; another Proviso High teacher was to be her guide in Kentucky. But just before Iris left for Kentucky — the last week of July 2004 — a family emergency forced the teacher to cancel. Iris would be working solo. Her parents saw her off that morning. “She was very tired,” her mother said. “She should not have gone.”

By the time her plane landed in Louisville, she was overwhelmed by exhaustion and anxiety. She got from the airport to the hotel, but that was all she could do. Iris collapsed in bed. Soon she managed to call her mother.

“I knew Iris was not right,” her mother said. “She couldn’t eat or drink. She was very depressed.” She asked if Iris had any friends there she could call for help. One of the veterans — a colonel she had planned to meet in Louisville — came to the hotel. Smith said the colonel spent only a short time with her. “She was afraid of him when he showed up,” Smith said. “But he spoke to her mother on the phone and told Iris, ‘Your mom is on the phone, so it’s OK.’ ”

That afternoon, she checked herself in to Norton Psychiatric Hospital in Louisville, with help from the colonel. Through a third party, the colonel declined to be interviewed.

“First they gave her an antipsychotic, to stabilize her,” her mother said. “For three days they gave her medication, the first time in her life.” (The family would not name specific drugs.)

In three days, her parents came to take her home. Doctors at Norton Hospital had diagnosed “brief reactive psychosis,” her father said. This could be a one-time event or it could signal the onset of bipolar disorder, the doctors told them.

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, is a mood disorder that affects one in every 70 people. The cycle of mood shifts that distinguish the disease — from manic highs to depressive lows — differs with every sufferer. Without treatment, the condition worsens over time.

Though Iris had previously suffered what her parents called “down” periods after bouts of intense exertion, the lows were never as extreme as what befell her in Kentucky. “She had never seen anyone for depression or anything before,” her mother said.

They brought her home, and at first Iris responded well to rest and treatment. “But gradually, she became very depressed,” said her father, adding that her doctor in California prescribed an additional medication, an antidepressant. “But Iris herself did not believe she was sick.” And she was determined not to be hospitalized again.

“She didn’t like the idea that she was taking medicine,” her father said. “Iris was impatient. First she thought it would be a couple of weeks” before she improved, “but we tried to convince her that it would be several months, because that is what the doctors said.”

Her mother added, “She was in therapy all the time, but it didn’t help, and she took the medicine on and off. The medicine made her feel sluggish. So she took a little bit and then she stopped — and it shouldn’t be stopped like that.”

Iris had convinced her doctor to reduce her dosage. “She’s very strong- willed,” her mother said. “The doctors wanted her to continue in therapy, so sometimes they would go along with her.”

Between August and November, Iris saw two different therapists before finding one who seemed a good fit. But, her father said, “In spite of many sessions, Iris did not tell the therapist her deepest thoughts. He was misled by Iris. He thought Iris was improving.”

Brett said Iris was anxious to get back to work. “She was so driven,” Brett said, “she just wouldn’t take time off.” But that meant diving back into her Bataan Death March research.

Those close to Iris had always seen her ups and downs as part of the natural cycle of a brilliant person with intense drive, passionate commitment and a capacity for hard work. These were considered her finest traits. Now, the family rushed to learn everything they could about her illness. Brett devised a “20-Point Plan to Make Iris Well,” listing such remedies as going to the beach; calling friends; eating well (on her desk, she kept a book titled “How Food Affects Your Mood” next to her Franklin Planner); and getting exercise. Brett set up a home gym in the basement and coached her through hourlong workouts with hand weights. Still, the depression failed to lift.

She was seeing a therapist two to three times a week, Brett said, but fought against having family members participate. “Iris was a very strong person, even when she was depressed,” said Brett. “She didn’t like other people taking control, so she resisted” his attending any of her therapy sessions. “There were up and down periods,” he said. “There was a time earlier, in September, when we were worried, but she seemed to come out of that.”

Their son, who had turned 2 years old in August, became aware of a change. “Christopher sensed that something was going wrong with Iris,” Brett said. “He could tell that she was a lot different after she came back from Louisville. It was obvious she wasn’t the same person that she was before,” he said. “When Iris’ condition got really bad, we sent him to stay with my parents in Illinois. We called him every day, sometimes two or three times a day.”

Rabiner became worried, too. “Iris told me now was not the time to go on with the Bataan project. I told her, ‘Take a break.’ You’re not on a moving train. You have a young kid. Let go, We all said, ‘Take a break.’ ”

One of Iris’ best friends, Barbara Masin, came up from Santa Barbara for a long weekend visit. “I urged her to talk with someone — either Brett, or me, or someone. She finally agreed that she would talk to me. I was there for three days and we talked. For her, it was a relief,” said Masin.

“We went out and did really long hikes, and it seemed to help. At the end of the three days, I was making silly little jokes and she was laughing. We arranged for her to come down and stay with me soon,” she said. “But as I was leaving, she got apathetic again.”

Three days before Iris’ death, Brett dreamed up a special weekend, just for her. On Saturday night they went to dinner at Fresh Choice and out to the movies. “We went to see ‘Ray,’ ” Brett said. “I thought it would be inspirational. And she loved it. She hadn’t ever heard much of Ray Charles’ music before, and when we got home, she went upstairs and was browsing all kinds of information on Ray Charles on the Internet.”

Sunday morning, they drove to Santa Cruz for lunch on the pier, then went to her favorite spa, Chaminade — a 300-acre mission-style resort, surrounded by redwoods and eucalyptus, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Iris got a massage. “Then we came home, and that was our last weekend together,” he said, fighting back tears.

After leaving Reed’s Sport Shop at noon on Monday, Nov. 8, Iris tried to load the revolver she had just purchased. But the gun jammed. Such “black powder” firearms, popular with Civil War re-enactors, require skill to load and fire. The lead balls must be individually prepared, packed with gunpowder and topped with a percussive cap.

According to the police report, Iris phoned a local gunsmith, an antique firearms specialist who did business from his home. She told him she had an old revolver that was unsafe to shoot. They made an appointment. At 12:40 p.m., she stopped for lunch at FujiSan Sushi in Milpitas Square. The manager knew her as a customer and an author — Iris and Brett ate there often. But this time, “she appeared unhappy,” the manager told investigators. Iris ate quickly, asked for green tea to go and charged $15.11 to her credit card.

Iris arrived at the gunsmith’s at about 2 p.m., carrying a Reed’s Sport Shop Bag. The gunsmith told police he had spotted a can of gunpowder in the bag. This kind of “black powder” is unstable and unsafe indoors, so he insisted she first take the can outside. She told him she had not asked for instructions when she bought the gun. He showed her how to load the gun and tried to give her basic safety and handling instructions. Later, he would tell police that she “seemed distracted or aloof.”

Hoping to practice shooting, she asked the gunsmith to go with her to a nearby indoor firing range. He explained that the gunpowder she had was unsafe to use indoors. She promised to buy less volatile powder. They made an appointment to meet Wednesday at the firing range. She paid the gunsmith $10. They had spent one hour together.

After dinner Monday night, Iris returned a call to her agent. “We spoke for two hours, from 8:30 to 10:30 p.m.,” Rabiner said. “I’d left a message — I actually had business to talk about. A book packager wanted to publish a children’s version of ‘The Chinese in America.’

“Much of the conversation was upbeat. Other parts were not. She asked me if I was religious — I said I wasn’t, not at all. In a funny kind of way, she was resolute, she was calm. She had been sad for several months, but she didn’t seem in an acute phase. ”

Rabiner invited Iris to spend a week or so at her home in Westchester County, N.Y. “I figured we’d take a week off and just relax, walk the woods up here. I thought it would break the spell, break the hold of these emotions. I told her that I wanted her to call me the next night and every night after that until she worked out the details. I got off the phone confused and concerned, but I was too unsophisticated about psychological problems to realize that she was saying goodbye to me.”

That night, Iris and Brett followed their routine and went to sleep around midnight. “But I woke up at 2 a.m. and she was pacing the hallway,” Brett said. “Iris wanted to talk, and I said, ‘You should go to bed, it’s 2 in the morning.’ She went back to bed. Then she got back up again. I said, ‘You need to go to bed.’ So she went back to bed and I watched her until she fell asleep.”

Waking at 5 a.m., Brett saw Iris was gone. So was her car. He went to her desk in her upstairs office and found a note next to the computer. He immediately called the police.

Ultimately, three notes were found, all dated Monday, Nov. 8, 2004. The first was short, titled “Statement of Iris Chang.” It read: “I promise to get up and get out of the house every morning. I will stop by to visit my parents then go for a long walk. I will follow the doctor’s orders for medications. I promise not to hurt myself. I promise not to visit Web sites that talk about suicide.”

Then she wrote a suicide note — addressed to her parents, Brett and her brother — followed by a lengthy revision. The first draft said: “When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute. It is far better that you remember me as I was — in my heyday as a best-selling author — than the wild-eyed wreck who returned from Louisville . . . . Each breath is becoming difficult for me to take — the anxiety can be compared to drowning in an open sea. I know that my actions will transfer some of this pain to others, indeed those who love me the most. Please forgive me. Forgive me because I cannot forgive myself.”

In the final version, she added: “There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand. Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do. I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me. . .

“Days before I left for Louisville I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the government’s attempt to discredit me.

“I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead.”

After Iris Chang’s Oldsmobile was found off Highway 17 on Tuesday morning, Nov. 9, the California Highway Patrol was called to the scene. The Highway Patrol then called the Santa Clara Sheriff’s homicide unit and detective Sgt. Dean Baker, a 33-year veteran, took over the investigation.

“There is an aspect of paranoia in the majority of suicides,” Baker said. “A lot of people — depending on how disturbed they are — feel that people are plotting against them.” And often, he added, “people think they’ve wronged everybody and can’t possibly do anything to make up for what they think they’ve done wrong. Generally, there’s an apology.”

After studying the final results of the Santa Clara Country medical examiner’s report, Baker closed his investigation March 1, 2005. The coroner’s report, dated Dec. 23, 2004, stated: “Based on the medical investigator’s report and the autopsy findings, Iris Chang, a 36-year-old Asian female, died from a self-inflicted intra-oral gunshot wound.”

Baker explained his conclusion: “There’s no evidence that any kind of conspiracy caused her death. We’ve seen a lot of suicides. We’ve seen staged suicides and we’ve seen homicides. I have no evidence of foul play. Everything points to suicide.”

The number of calls to Asian Community Mental Health Services spiked in the days after Iris Chang’s death. Most of the calls were from women, said Betty Hong, executive director of the Oakland clinic.

“Depression is a silent epidemic among Asian Americans because we tend not to seek help soon enough,” Hong said. “It’s a double-edged sword. There’s a stigma within the culture about accessing care, because then people will think there is something wrong with you and your family. And then there’s the issue of the model minority. Asians were the first immigrant community that ‘made it,’ and we should all be doctors and lawyers.” That is, successful and invulnerable.

Stress does not cause mental illness, but it can worsen the symptoms, doctors say. Iris pushed herself “to be the best possible mother and the best possible writer,” Brett said. This put her under enormous stress. On top of that, she wasn’t sleeping.

“A lack of sleep is one of the hallmark symptoms of mania,” Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, author of “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide,” told The Chronicle. “Typically, people start losing sleep, then stay up later and later each night. It has a terrible reverberating effect. The lack of sleep can exacerbate the illness and vice versa.”

Rabiner believes that neither the subject matter of her work nor the intensity of her work habits precipitated Iris’ manic-depressive symptoms. “Iris was suffering from clinical depression,” she said, “and it deepened rapidly over a period of about three months. People tend to think that clinical depression is like a bad-hair day. It’s a disease. If she had a brain tumor, people would better understand.”

Along with fear for her safety, Iris’ illness generated feelings of self- blame. In her goodbye note, Iris described her guilt about having allowed her son, Christopher, to be vaccinated before the age of 2. She feared these vaccinations may have caused him to become autistic. But today Christopher is healthy. Family members say he shows no signs of autism.

When Brett woke to find Iris gone early Monday morning, he called San Jose police, reporting that she was missing, on medication and a suicide risk. The Police Department drafted a missing person’s report. The report stated that Iris had been taking two medications: the mood stabilizer Depakote, an anticonvulsant similar to lithium; and a smaller dosage of Risperdal, an antipsychotic drug commonly used to control mania, which is also thought to reduce suicide risk. Sluggishness is a common side effect of Depakote, because it subdues the manic phase of bipolar disorder by depressing the central nervous system.

Iris’ reluctance to take medication may indicate the difficulty she had accepting her illness as an illness. “For anybody who experiences mental illness for the first time, it’s very hard to accept that it is your biology that is making it happen. It’s very hard to believe that there is something wrong with your mind,” said Dr. David Lo, director of Santa Cruz Mental Health Services and former director of Chinatown Mental Health Center in San Francisco.

Families, too, have trouble coping. “There is no way that a family member could sort out all the details, let alone their own feelings, because they’re connected to the person,” Dr. Lo explained.

“The onus is on us, as Western medical professionals, to be aware of cultural influences — and to be proactive in educating family members and the patient when there is a first encounter with mental illness,” he said. “It is a scary, dangerous and terrifyingly confusing time.”

As Iris’ good friend Barbara Masin said, “Those who are close to her did everything that they possibly could have done. There is always free will. I believe that Iris was very strong-willed and whatever she wanted to do, she would do.”

Brett voiced a similar conclusion. “When somebody like Iris makes up their mind that they’re going to commit suicide, they’re going to do it. She was too strong-willed not to.”

A poster-size photograph of Iris, lit by candlelight, stood vigil on the lawn of Spangler Mortuary in Los Altos in the early evening of Nov. 18. It was a Thursday, nine days after her death.

In the picture, Iris was standing, her head bowed in prayer like a saint or an angel. In the month after her death, the image would be the central icon at each of three Bay Area memorials.

At the first memorial — that evening’s “visitation” — friends signed the guest book and offered condolences to the family. They approached the open casket, where they stopped, gazed at her for a final time and bowed three times, in Chinese custom. Beautiful as always, she was dressed in an indigo blue suit, identical in color and hue to the dress in the photograph.

The next morning, Friday, Nov. 19, dawned cold, clear and sunny. At the Gate of Heaven Catholic Cemetery in Los Altos Hills, the photograph stood on an easel before the chapel. Hundreds gathered for the memorial service and burial. After eloquent eulogies by family and friends, a tribute written by U. S. Rep. Michael Honda was recited, which he had read into the Congressional Record earlier that week:

“Her fierce pride of her Chinese American heritage empowered others with the certainty that they were truly Americans … Our community has lost a role model and close friend; the world has lost one of its finest and most passionate advocates of social and historical justice.”

The Gate of Heaven was well named. Open sky surrounds broad, rolling lawns at the crest of a hill. Iris Chang’s grave faces west toward wooded hillsides painted with November’s glorious reds and yellows, colors of consolation before winter’s starkness. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, the black-clad tribe of mourners formed a line. One by one, each dropped a single purple iris or one red rose into the grave, saying, “Goodbye, Iris.”

One month later, on Saturday, Dec. 11, the same elegant photograph of Iris was displayed at a memorial honoring her on the 67th anniversary of the invasion of Nanking. As a duo played traditional Chinese music, a group of nearly 100 gathered at the Millbrae headquarters of the Chinese-language daily the World Journal. The event was organized by Global Alliance and the Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition.

One speaker called Iris “a hero for those muffled by injustice.” Another said: “Let us thank her parents. They are the ones who brought her up.” Between eulogies, a guitarist played “Let It Be.” Then, a larger-than-life video image of Iris appeared on a wide-screen monitor: She was speaking as an expert witness in a mock grand jury trial of Emperor Hirohito, filmed at the 2003 Youth Conference at San Francisco City College, which the Nanking Redress Coalition sponsored. Finally, the group stood to sing a halting but heartfelt rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

To soothe the pain of her loss, it would be tempting to seek a single, simple explanation for the suicide of Iris Chang. Though troubling to realize, those things that protect us most — faith, family, health, financial stability — are often powerless against mental illness.

“People who are in great treatment, who have all the love and support in the world, can still commit suicide,” Jamison, author of “Understanding Suicide,” has said. “Sometimes, people can be both mentally ill and highly disciplined, highly structured, highly productive members of society, whether you’re talking about science or business or the arts. It happens every day of the week, and people just don’t know it because people don’t talk about it.”

Every suicide is the tragic terminus of a tangle of roads, a route unique as a thumbprint.

The fundamental question about suicide, as Howard I. Kushner wrote in “Self-Destruction in the Promised Land,” is this: “Why, when faced with a similar set of circumstances — whether cultural, psychological or biological — does one person commit suicide while another does not?”

No one knows the answer.