Iris Chang and depression

Deep, desperate depression can strike anyone, anywhere, at any time. I have suffered through raging bouts of it myself, first when my biography failed to find a publisher due to the machinations of my subject's family, second when members of my family began dying in droves. Perhaps that's one reason I continue to be troubled by the death of Iris Chang.

Author's depression so severe, son, 2, sent away

Only a few of those close to her knew she was severely depressed in the last few months.

But Chinese-American author Iris Chang, who was found dead in her car not far from her home in California last week, had become a changed person.

She had apparently shot herself.

The depression had got so bad that she and her husband decided to send their 2-year-old son, Christopher, to live with his paternal grandparents in Illinois.

To the outside world, the tall, striking Madam Chang, 36, seemed to be a woman in supreme control of her successful life.

She was a bestselling author and spokeswoman for a growing movement to seek compensations from Japan for World War II atrocities.

But Madam Chang was reportedly hospitalised recently after returning from Kentucky on a research trip for her latest book project.

'She was a wonderful person and she'll leave a huge void in everyone's life,' Mr Brett Douglas, her husband of 13 years, told the Mercury News.

Mr Douglas, a design engineer for Cisco Systems, declined to discuss specifics of her depression 'to respect the privacy of her family'.

He would only say that 'it's been really, really difficult.'

She had also asked her parents not to discuss her depression with others.

In April, she went on a 21-day, 28-city US tour to promote her latest book, The Chinese In America.

She would call every day to chat with Mr Douglas and their son.

But it was a gruelling schedule and took its toll on her, he said.

'She was never really the same after she got back.'

NO-ONE KNOWS

No-one knows 'what brought it on, but it developed suddenly and progressed rapidly,' said Susan Rabiner, her editor and literary agent.

'She had been in hospital, but she never really stabilised.'

She had gone to Ms Rabiner 'as a young kid' on the advice of a professor from Johns Hopkins University, where she had earned her masters degree in writing.

When Ms Rabiner learned that she spoke Mandarin, she asked her if she was interested in writing a book about Tsien Hsue-shen, an American space pioneer who was accused of being a communist and deported to China and went on to developed the Chinese missile programme.

The result was Thread Of The Silkworm, published in 1995.

Madam Chang's sudden death came as a blow to her colleagues in the Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition.

'We're pretty shaken up because we've lost someone who was for us the symbol of hope, the symbol of truth,' said Ms Julie Tang, co-chair of the group.

Ms Tang, a Superior Court judge in San Francisco, remembers her fierce resolve, her focus on fighting against injustice.

But at the same time, 'I've always felt that there was a kind of emotional fragility about Iris,' she said.

When she first read The Rape of Nanking, Madam Chang's bestselling book on Japanese atrocities in China in the 1930s, Ms Tang said she wondered: 'How can anybody endeavour to write about something so horrific and not be affected?'

But Ms Ami Chen Naim wrote in Metro, a Silicon Valley weekly newspaper that Madam Chang 'did not just see the Japanese army in China as evil, but recognised that evil is possible for all human beings'.

http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/top/story/0,4136,77784,00.html