Mystery No. 2: Finding Iris Chang

"Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind" by Paula Kamen is an entirely different kind of mystery than yesterday's "Echoes." For starters, it's non-fiction; but it's an equally compelling page-turner with some surprising revelations at the end of the story — a literary, rather than a criminal, investigation.

Kamen became friends with Chang after convincing her to switch majors from computer science to journalism; she then found herself eating Chang's dust as her fellow student won internships, jobs and awards that outpaced Kamen and most of their friends. The two remained close, however; supporting each other with phone calls, letters and e-mails about everything from dealing with chronic pain to pregnancy to publishing; but especially the progress of each other's books.   

Chang won instant fame and fortune with the 1997 publication of her book, "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII." She was beautiful, she was thin; she had a successful marriage, a new baby, three books to her credit and another in the works when she committed suicide in 2004 at age 36. Her friends, including Kamen, were stunned and disbelieving at both the news of her death and that Chang had just been diagnosed with a mental illness.

 

University of Illinois Archives: Iris Chang Papers

Iris Chang and Paula Kamen at their 1989 graduation

from the journalism school at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.

When Kamen couldn't reconcile the perfect Iris Chang she knew with the woman who killed herself, she went looking for the answers that resulted in this book. She used Chang's own methodology: "Ask yourself, what is the single most important question that this book will answer ... then ask yourself, what are five to ten questions that must be asked in order to answer my main question?"

Kamen asks — and answers — all those questions and many more — especially about mental health issues — as she reconstructs Chang's life and death. While the story of Chang is fascinating, what caught my interest even more was all the research and information that Kamen amasses. It starts out as background and eventually becomes the story.

Some of Kamen's side roads:

* A discussion of the range of acceptable behaviors among Asians and Caucasians. When Chang began acting outside the narrowly acceptable Asian range, her white friends missed all the cues. The book points out that even for trained mental health professionals, there is "an extreme lack of clinical research into non-white subjects and how they experience mental illness."

* Chang was apparently bi-polar. She was also undergoing hormonally-based infertility treatments in an attempt to get pregnant. Those prone to bi-polar are extraordinarily sensitive to "all major hormonal shifts," according to Kamen's findings; meaning the treatments would most likely have had a profoundly negative effect on Chang.

* "Research has shown that Asian Americans end up seeking mental illness services only when the disease has become completely unmanageable," according to Dr. Jha, a co-founder of the Asian American Suicide Prevention Initiative. "The individual will try to tolerate it and compensate for it, and the family has a very high level of tolerance for it." The only time in her life that Chang saw a therapist or went on medication was in the few months before she died.

* "American college students of Asian descent are twice as likely to seriously consider suicide as their white peers. Furthermore, Asian-American women between fifteen and thirty-four are twice as likely to actually commit suicide as their white counterparts. China alone accounts for a staggering 40 percent of the world's suicide deaths and more than half the world's female suicides."

KEMPTON/WORDPRESS/IRIS CHANG THE MOVIE

Chang covered dark topics and met a painful end, and Kamen doesn't shy away from any of it. She looks at the book, "Final Exit;" how its author intended it to be used vs. how people actually use it, and how Chang used it. And she discusses journalists and the personal price they pay for covering the world's traumas and pain.

Ultimately, Chang's mental illness was "the main culprit" behind her death, says Kamen, and Chang's death has been the door that has opened the discussion on this issue in the Asian-American community. But reading this book suggests that there are many more tragedies out there, as real and painful as Chang's, if less publicized. Kamen's book is one step toward public awareness about the lack of research about how gender and ethnicity can shape mood disorder. It is also a great tribute to her friend, Iris Chang.

(Iris' Web site is still up should you be curious ...).

Comments

[troutbirder]

Very interesting and well done review. I would have trouble reading it though as my 27 year old son met a similar fate.

[LINDA from EACH LITTLE WORLD]

Thanks for your comment. It is a difficult book, especially given that her best friend wrote it. I think it may be something that is easier to read if one is more distant from the subject.

[Becky]

I have been debating reading this. Your post makes me think I might go ahead and do so.

[Nicola]

I'm not familiar with the work of Iris Chang, but I remember hearing about her death. Interesting points about mental illness and Asian Americans. I'm sure Amy Tan has written about depression in The Opposite of Fate. I'll check it out.

[LINDA from EACH LITTLE WORLD]

Becky and Nicola — A very worthwhile read. As I said, I think some of the mental health and cultural info that Kamen discovers is very interesting. And I particularly liked the thread of the book about research and writing and the questions to ask.

[K. Fulton]

I disagree that this book was a tribute to Iris. I really hated this book. Iris seemed to confide in Paula and the only thing Paula can do is write about explaining that Iris had a mental illness? It should be noted that Iris' parents and many many in the Chinese community were not happy with the book. Aside from that, this book is really about Paula's self indulgence and how she feels about death. Iris was one of a kind. This book is covering something up. Paula should be ashamed.

[K. Fulton]

For more on this story: see here:

http://counterpunch.org/fingleton12122008.html