As I've mentioned before, I've been looking forward to reading Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking for quite some time and finally got to it this past week. It was bleak and disturbing and really quite tragic but written in the most elegant and readable manner. It was wonderful history, really fascinating and interesting history, and it's so sad that Chang is no longer with us and unable to produce more truly well done books like this. I loved how she not only relayed the history of the event but also quoted just the right amount from first person sources and also delved into the historiography of the event - the way in which it has been purposely altered and ignored over the years. I love when a historian does this - makes the modern take on a historical event just as fascinating as the event itself. Very very cool.
There's an amazing poem for Iris in the current issue of VA Quarterly Review by Victoria Chang: "Ode to Iris Chang". It's written in sections, partly about the rape of Nanking, partly about Chang while she was researching and partly about her death. Sadly, it's not online but consider this:
5
How
to stay faithful to humans
How to stay faithful to
earth when all that is there is a
derivative of mud.
6
It was easier work than she had imagined-
Reed's Sport Shop and its glass case of
Civil War pistol replicas
under deer heads frozen in their shame
I'm awkwardly showing you part of it that really doesn't give you a hint as to its power. I was so surprised to be reading her book and then turn the page and see this here - see all of this hard and brutal use of simple language to remind me again how she died. It's as if the world was just too sad for her, too sad and hopeless. It makes what she managed to accomplish while she was with us all that much more impressive.
I strongly recommend Alan Shapiro's essay in the VQR, which is online. I don't know if I could be that honest about my family, or even myself in print. It's something to think about.
October 13
2006
08:41 AM
The Rape of Nanking has been sitting on my bookshelf, unread, for several years now. Occasionally, when I'm thinking about my next read, I'll run my fingers over its spine...and then I move on. And then she died, and now it's even more difficult for me to think of reading the book. (Not that I like only "happy" books--my still-unpublished YA novel is centered around a lynching.) But I will read it, soon, I think.
I didn't know Iris, but she went to the same high school my daughters attended and her father was in the same department as my husband at the university. She was a journalism major here at the U.I., and after her death I remember reading a quote from one of her professors saying that she broke down and sobbed in a reporting seminar while discussing her experiences writing in-depth about a man dying of AIDS.
Empathy was her gift and her curse.
Peace, Iris.