It was nine years ago that Iris Chang, the 36-year-old Chinese-American crusader for human rights, was found dead in her car off Highway 17 in an isolated spot near Los Gatos. She had shot herself in the head. She left behind many distraught admirers worldwide.
Chang's meteoric rise to international fame came in 1997 with the publication of her history, "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of the Second World War." She charged that a mass murder of between 260,000 and 350,000 Chinese men, women and children had occurred over six weeks in one city in wartime China by invading Japanese troops in the winter of 1937 and 1938 -- a crime so heinous she dared to use a word Jewish historians had reserved exclusively for the memory of their own dead in wartime Europe: holocaust.
Chang also claimed that between 20,000 and 80,000 women had been raped and then many of them killed in "one of the greatest mass rapes in world history." "The Rape of Nanking" accused the Japanese government of a cover-up and demanded official acknowledgment and redress.
In an instant, Chang became a lightning rod for the intense feelings dividing nations about their respective histories. Chang's supporters maintained that Japan needed to confront one of the most grisly episodes of its wartime past. Her critics maintained that Chang either grossly distorted what happened or made up the story altogether.
In what is perhaps the most widely quoted excerpt from her introduction, Chang writes, "The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000-80,000 women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them alive to walls.
"Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practices, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks and burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds.
"So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of 'bestial machinery.' "
To counter charges that she was "Japan bashing," Chang acknowledged that long-standing imperialistic ambitions of other world powers -- including China and Europe -- led up to the conflict. She was interested in how "the power of cultural forces" either "make[s] devils of us" or keeps our humanity intact.
We are compelled by Chang's death to direct our focus toward the almost incomprehensible numbers of individuals who died by mass murder globally -- 170 million, by some estimates -- in the 20th century alone.
When Chang took her life on an isolated road nine years ago, the voiceless lost a singular voice.
Priscilla Hart is an Annapolis, Md., journalist and author. She wrote this for this newspaper.