Iris Chang

Iris Shun-Ru Chang (March 28, 1968 – November 9, 2004) was an American journalist. She is best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking Massacre, The Rape of Nanking. She committed suicide on November 9, 2004 as a result of serious depression. Chang is the subject of the 2007 biography, Finding Iris Chang, and the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking.

Early life

The daughter of two university professors who emigrated from Taiwan, Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey and raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where she attended University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois and graduated in 1985. She earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, during which time she also worked as a New York Times stringer from Urbana-Champaign, and wrote six front-page articles over the course of one year. After brief stints at the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune she pursued a master's degree in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She then embarked on her career as an author, and lectured and wrote magazine articles. She married Bretton Lee Douglas, whom she had met in college, and had one son, Christopher, who was 2 years old at the time of her suicide. She lived in San Jose, California in the final years of her life.