Iris Chang dies at 36

I am so sad. I just heard the news that she was found dead in a parked car beside a Californian highway, of an apparent suicide. Already, conspiracy theories are starting to come in. This is because Chang is no ordinary person. She is the author of the best-selling Rape of Nanking. The subtitle of the book is "The forgotten holocaust of World War II" and it chronicles the astrocities committed by the Japanese troops against Chinese civilians in the then Chinese capital of Nanking. A reported 300,000 people were killed in a matter of days. Her book was critically acclaimed, yet without controversy. It reads like a novel, but I could not finish reading the book as it was too gruesome for me to do so. Iris was heralded as a young, promising historian. The late historian Stephen Ambrose described Chang as ``maybe the best young historian we've got, because she understands that to communicate history, you've got to tell the story in an interesting way.'' And now the world has been robbed of one of its greats. It is just so sad.