阅读张纯如 Iris Chang在历史大观的作品!!! | |||||
张纯如
张纯如张纯如出身书香门第，祖父是抗日国军将领张铁军，后曾为台湾中华日报总主笔。其父当年是台大物理系“状元”，其专著《量子场论》在美国理论物理学术界颇有影响。张纯如的母亲一直从事生物化学的研究工作。
张纯如曾荣膺麦克阿瑟基金会“和平与国际合作计划”奖、美国华人团体“年度女性”称号，并且获得美国“国家科学基金会”、“太平洋文化基金会”及“哈利·杜尔门图书馆”赞助。张纯如曾成为世界最著名的文摘杂志《读者文摘》的封面人物，受到许多电视节目邀请，包括著名新闻访谈节目《夜线》(Nightline)和《吉姆莱赫新闻时间》(NewsHour With Jim Lehrer)，也为多家出版物(包括《纽约时报》和《新闻周刊》)写稿。她与NBA体育明星“东方小巨人”姚明、著名钢琴家郎朗被誉为当下美国最引人瞩目的三位华人青年。
1997年，张纯如的《南京大屠杀：被二战遗忘的浩劫》在美国出版。与南京大屠杀有关的研讨会也因此在美国哈佛及斯坦福等大学举行，美国新闻媒介都大幅报道了南京大屠杀。《南京大屠杀》是首部全面记录当年日军血洗南京城暴行的英文著作，曾连续5个月被列为《纽约时报》书评的最佳畅销书，引起英语世界对二次大战时日本在中国实施暴行的关注。张纯如的其它作品还有《蚕丝》、《中国导弹之父--钱学森之谜》。去年，其新书《美国的华人：一部叙述史》的出版再次引起了广泛的注意。
2004年11月9日，张纯如突然在美国加州自己的轿车内用手枪自杀身亡。有消息推测，年仅36岁的她可能因患抑郁症自杀
中国导弹之父--钱学森之谜》又名《蚕丝》
1996年出版
《蚕丝》讲述了华人科学家钱学森为美国火箭科技作出贡献，以及如何成为麦卡锡主义的牺牲品而离开美国，后在中国发展起中国原子弹的历史。
1997年，张纯如的《南京大屠杀：被二战遗忘的浩劫》在美国出版。与南京大屠杀有关的研讨会也因此在美国哈佛及斯坦福等大学举行，美国新闻媒介都大幅报道了南京大屠杀。张纯如自己也曾到纽约等地作关于这段历史的演讲。
《南京大屠杀》是首部全面记录当年日军血洗南京城暴行的英文著作，曾连续5个月被列为《纽约时报》书评的最佳畅销书，引起英语世界对二次大战时日本在中国实施暴行的关注。
1998年4月，东方出版社翻译的20万字《南京大屠杀：被二战遗忘的浩劫》中译本在北京出版。
1997年，张纯如在接受一个主流杂志访问时说：“这是我真正不得不写的一本书。我写，是出自义愤。即使拿不到一分钱，我也不在乎。让世界知道1937年在南京发生了什么事，对我来讲，这才是重要的。”
《华裔美国人》
2003年4月，张纯如的《在美国的华人：一部叙述史》在美国洛杉矶出版。她还曾以此书主题巡游全美发表宣传讲演。
《在美国的华人》讲述了美国华人150年的移民史，让早期华人所受的歧视公之于众。
Personal life
The daughter of two university professors who emigrated from China, Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey but raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where she graduated from University Laboratory High School in 1985.
Chang earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, during which time she also worked as a New York Times stringer from Urbana-Champaign, and wrote six front-page articles over the course of one year. After brief stints at the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune she pursued a master's degree in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.. She then embarked on her career as an author, and also lectured and wrote articles for various magazines.
Chang married Bretton Lee Douglas, whom she had met in college. The couple had one son, Christopher, who was 2 years old at the time of her death. She lived in San Jose, California in the final years of her life. Chang was an atheist.
[edit]Works
Chang wrote three books documenting the experiences of Asians and Chinese Americans in history. Her first book, titled Thread of the Silkworm (1995), tells the life story of the Chinese professor, Dr. 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 helped the military of the United States debrief scientists from Nazi Germany for many years, he was suddenly accused of being a spy, a member of the Communist Party USA, and placed under house arrest from 1950 to 1955. Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen 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.
The Rape of Nanking, Chang's most famous work
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 allegedly documents atrocities committed against Chinese by forces of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and includes interviews with victims. The book attracted both praise from some quarters for exposing the alleged details of the atrocity, and criticism from others because of alleged inaccuracies. For instance, Daqing Yang, a professor at George Washington University, wrote that "the publication of Iris Chang's book in 1997, with its numerous factual errors, handed the conservatives [in Japan] a much needed opportunity to blame the Nanking Massacre on the conspiracy of a second-generation Chinese American journalist." Professor Alvin D Coox at San Diego State University described 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, she campaigned to persuade the Japanese government to apologize for its troops' wartime conduct and to pay compensation. The work was the first English-language full-length nonfiction account of the atrocity itself, and remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for 10 weeks. Based on the book, an American documentary film, Nanking, was released in 2007.
Her third book, The Chinese in America (2003), is a history of Chinese-Americans which 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 each of 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."
[edit]Public notability
Success as an author propelled Iris Chang into becoming a public figure. The Rape of Nanking placed her in great demand as a speaker and as an interview subject, and, more broadly, as a spokesperson for an entire viewpoint that the Japanese government had not done enough to compensate victims of their invasion of China. This became a political issue in the United States shortly after the book was published; Chang was one of the major advocates of a Congressional resolution proposed in 1997 to have the Japanese government apologize for war crimes, and met with First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1999 to discuss the issue. In one often mentioned incident (as reported by The Times of London):
...she confronted the Japanese Ambassador to the United States on television, demanded an apology and expressed her dissatisfaction with his mere acknowledgement "that really unfortunate things happened, acts of violence were committed by members of the Japanese military". "It is because of these types of wording and the vagueness of such expressions that Chinese people, I think, are infuriated," was her reaction.
Chang's visibility as a public figure increased with her final work, The Chinese in America, where she argued that Chinese Americans were treated as perpetual outsiders. After her death, she became the subject of tributes from fellow writers. Mo Hayder dedicated a novel to her. Reporter Richard Rongstad eulogized her: "Iris Chang lit a flame and passed it to others and we should not allow that flame to be extinguished."
In 2007, the documentary Nanking was dedicated to Chang, as well as the Chinese victims of Nanking.
[edit]Depression and death
A bronze statue of Iris Chang at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in Nanjing
Chang suffered a nervous breakdown in August 2004, which her family, friends and doctors attributed in part to constant sleep deprivation. At the time, she was several months into research for her fourth book, about the Bataan Death March, while simultaneously promoting The Chinese in America. While on route to Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where she planned to gain access to a "time capsule" of audio recordings from servicemen, she suffered an extreme bout of depression that left her unable to leave her hotel room in Louisville. A local veteran who was assisting her research helped her check into Norton Psychiatric Hospital in Louisville, where she was diagnosed with reactive psychosis, placed on medication for three days and then released to her parents. After the release from the hospital, she continued to suffer from depression and was considered at risk for developing bipolar disorder. Chang was also reportedly deeply disturbed by much of the subject matter of her research. Her work in Nanjing left her physically weak, according to one of her co-researchers.
On November 9, 2004 at about 9 a.m., Chang was found dead in her car by a county water district employee on a rural road south of Los Gatos (California) and west of State Route 17, in Santa Clara County. Investigators concluded that Chang had shot herself through the mouth with a revolver. At the time of her death she had been taking the medications Depakote and Risperdal to stabilize her mood.
It was later discovered that she had left behind three suicide notes each dated November 8, 2004. "Statement of Iris Chang" stated:
I promise to get up and get out of the house every morning. I will stop by to visit my parents then go for a long walk. I will follow the doctor's orders for medications. I promise not to hurt myself. I promise not to visit Web sites that talk about suicide.
The next note was a draft of the third:
When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute. It is far better that you remember me as I was — in my heyday as a best-selling author — than the wild-eyed wreck who returned from Louisville... Each breath is becoming difficult for me to take — the anxiety can be compared to drowning in an open sea. I know that my actions will transfer some of this pain to others, indeed those who love me the most. Please forgive me. Forgive me because I cannot forgive myself.
The third note included:
There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand. Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do. I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me.
Days before I left for Louisville I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the government's attempt to discredit me.
I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead.
Reports said that news of her suicide hit the massacre survivor community in Nanjing hard. In tribute to Chang, the survivors held a service at the same time as her funeral, held at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Cupertino, California on Friday, November 12, 2004, at the victims' memorial hall in Nanjing. In 2005, the victims memorial hall in Nanjing, which collects documents, photos, and human remains from the massacre, added a wing dedicated to Chang.