Saturday, February 03, 2007

A Woman We Couldn't Forget


Two years after Iris Chang's untimely death, a bust of her was unveiled in a reading room at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Her New York Time bestselling book "Rape of Nanking" was the first major work on the Nanking Massacre in English, which revived people's memory of the darkest days in human history. Even decades later, the two weeks of bloody, unstopped and indiscriminated slaughtering of civilian residents in Nanking has been concealed by both Chinese and Japanese governments for political reasons. A movie "Nanking" made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last month. More movies and TV programs are being made at the dawn of the 70 anniversary when 300,000 Chinese of then capital city Nanking were killed when the city fell to the Japanese invasion in 1937.

Iris Chang died while she was preparing for her fourth book. The topic of the book will be Bataan Death March, while ten thousands of allied POWs, mostly American, were tortured and died on a 100 kilometers prisoner transfer in 1994 after the fell of Philippine to Japanese invasion.

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