Iris Chang - Works

Works

Chang wrote three books documenting the experiences of Asians and Chinese Americans in history. Her first, Thread of the Silkworm (1995), tells the life story of the Chinese professor, Tsien Hsue-shen during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Although Tsien was one of the founders of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and for many years helped the military of the United States debrief scientists from Nazi Germany, he was suddenly accused of being a spy and a member of the Communist Party USA, and was placed under house arrest from 1950 to 1955. Tsien left for the People's Republic of China in September 1955. Upon his return to China, Tsien developed the Dongfeng missile program, and later the Silkworm missile, which would be used by the Iraqi military during its war on Iran and ironically against the United States-led coalitions during Gulf Wars One and Two.

Her second book, The Rape of Nanking:The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), was published on the 60th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre, and was motivated in part by her own grandparents' stories about their escape from the massacre. It documents atrocities committed against Chinese by forces of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and includes interviews with victims. It was mistakenly claimed to be the first English-language nonfiction account of the atrocity, but in fact, Year of the Tiger (1964) was among the first English language books to treat the atrocity. Her second book remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for 10 weeks. Based on the book, an American documentary film, Nanking, was released in 2007.

The book attracted both praise for exposing the details of the atrocity, and criticism because of alleged bias and inaccuracies. Alvin D Coox, a professor at San Diego State University, said of Chang's book, "As a work of history, Chang's book is flawed, as we have sought to demonstrate. If it is a politically motivated work of partisan propaganda, it is successful to a certain degree. But shouldn't Chang's compassion extend to the healing of old wounds rather than their revival?" After publication of the book, Chang campaigned to persuade the Japanese government to apologize for its troops' wartime conduct and to pay compensation.

Her third book, The Chinese in America (2003), is a history of Chinese-Americans that argued that Chinese Americans were treated as perpetual outsiders. Consistent with the style of her earlier works, the book relied heavily on personal accounts, drawing its strong emotional content from their stories. She wrote, "The America of today would not be the same America without the achievements of its ethnic Chinese," and that "scratch the surface of every American celebrity of Chinese heritage and you will find that, no matter how stellar their achievements, no matter how great their contribution to U.S. society, virtually all of them have had their identities questioned at one point or another."