Finding Iris Chang

An Interview with Paula Kamen

New America Media, Q&A, Andrew Lam, Posted: Dec 31, 2007

Three days before Iris Chang, best-selling author of "The Rape of Nanking," committed suicide, she contacted Paula Kamen, one of her closest friends. Chang was 36 and had much to live for - fame, fortune, beauty, a loving husband, caring parents, and a beautiful new baby. Seeking to reconcile Chang's seemingly perfect life with her mysterious suicide, Kamen scoured correspondences, diaries, archival material as well as her own memories. The result is Finding Iris Chang, a suspenseful investigation into a writer's journey and mental illness. Kamen spoke with NAM editor Andrew Lam, author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.


Tell me about your friendship with Iris Chang.

I met Iris when we were both in college at the University of Illinois, and it started off more as a rivalry, where actually she was my rival, not the other way around. She always seemed to beat me out of every kind of internship, or any kind of journalism opportunity that came along; she always seemed to be there before me. But then after college we met up and slowly became close friends, and both of us were writing books and I really grew to completely appreciate her talent and all of her hard work.


But it’s not easy to like her immediately; you described how exhausting it could be to be in her presence.

Yes, she was extremely intense - that just a minimum phone conversation would be a few hours on the phone. And she wouldn’t even take hints to get off the phone. If someone would say, “Oh, I have to go to the bathroom; I have to get off,” she would say, “Oh, how long will it take you?” and then the person would say “10 minutes,” and then she’d say, “Oh, I’ll call you back in 10 minutes,” and then call back in 10 minutes and talk for another hour. Her husband said that she has something he affectionately called ‘Attention Surplus Disorder’- where she was so focused and just couldn’t be distracted at all.

But was it always that way or did she develop this over time?

She was always very intense, did nothing halfway, was extremely focused, but in retrospect I see that as some kind of mania, she was diagnosed in the last few weeks of her life with bipolar disorder. So that intensity is somewhat of a sign of that, but full-blown bipolar disorder has usually some kind of psychosis attached to it - it isn’t just the moods being up or down - and she didn’t seem to be out of touch with reality until the last several years of her life, and mostly in the last several months of her life.

She called you the night before she killed herself?

It was three days before she committed suicide and I picked up the phone, and her voice - I had never heard it that way. It was just totally drained, exhausted, every word was a huge struggle to get out. She sounded obviously extremely depressed. She talked about a lot of fears that she had… She also told me to let people know how she was before her “sickness.” She never mentioned depression or bipolar disorder; she just acknowledged that she’d been sick the last several months.

And how did you feel about that conversation? Basically, you didn’t have a clue at that point.

It was very odd. I knew there was something wrong with her, definitely, but I didn’t realize what it was, that it was a goodbye call, basically, that at that point it was carefully planned: the suicide. She had bought three guns, she had decided exactly when and where she was going to do it, and part of putting her affairs in order was calling her friends. I had no idea just how dire - I knew it was very odd, and I had a feeling she was in some kind of trouble just because she did sound paranoid and so disturbed. But, yeah, it was a total shock three days later when I found out about the suicide.

How exactly did she die and where was she?

It’s a terrible story. She lived in San Jose and she took her car and drove in the middle of the night to the side of the highway in Los Gatos. There’s a book called “Final Exit” that she had bought, that actually tells you how to kill yourself. This is actually not an obscure book. I went on Amazon to get it and it was in the top few thousand books on Amazon and it tells you exactly what to do and she followed it to the letter: to go in a car, to have a police officer, not your family, find you. And she had bought three guns.

It was very shocking news when it came out because from a reader's point of view she was at the top of her game. When she killed herself, I think it came as a shock to practically everyone who knew something of her.

Yes, it was one of the biggest shocks of my life, too, that we all, all of her friends, saw her as the most envied and enviable person that we knew. She was perfect, almost to an extreme extent, where she was beautiful, rich, and famous. She had all this glamour. Hillary Clinton invited her for a private meeting at the White House. She had a wonderful husband, a two-year old son, very close parents, and so it didn’t seem to make any sense. And this is the reason why I wrote the book - that this most envied person would do this - and to understand more of the mental illness that was basically at the root of it, that is so misunderstood in our society. That so many people did not pick up, there were clear signs that Iris was showing that people didn’t pick up on, so I’m hoping in showing those signs, this could be avoided in others.

You mentioned that when you started looking into the story, you were kind of scared yourself, feeling haunted because you say, basically if this can happen to Iris, this can happen to anybody, including yourself.

Yes. That is what so many of her fellow journalists thought, that she was so much more together than we are, so why are we any different from her? I have sort of an intense personality too, and I’ve covered a lot of dark topics as a journalist, so it did worry me. But it seemed like the more facts I got about mental illness, the less worried that I was.

I saw that it wasn’t entirely her dark topics. Her best-selling book “The Rape of Nanking” was about these horrible atrocities the Japanese committed. In the last few years of her life she was interviewing non-stop U.S. GIs who had been tortured by the Japanese in the Philippines. So, I found that these dark topics did exacerbate her depression, but it wasn’t at the root of it. At the root of it was the mental illness, and the more I found out about the mental illness, the less I feared the dark topics.

In writing “Finding Iris Chang,” did you find anything in your digging that was surprising about her?

Yes. It was almost everyday; there were twists and turns. There’s a lot of things I couldn’t make up. I found out that a lot her fears were based in some reality.

She felt guilty that she had “given” her son autism when actually she was picking up on some real signs of autism from her son at that time. He was later diagnosed with a milder form of it. So it wasn’t rational to say, “I caused it,” but it was based in some reality. Then I found out too, that she had a lot of troubles with infertility and I remember her telling me about doing a lot of fertility treatments which involve a lot of heavy drugs. I investigated that and saw that the onset of the bipolar disorder happened at the beginning of that process of trying to have a kid in ’99. I didn’t realize all the struggle she had gone through to have a kid and when someone is prone to bipolar disorder, just how sensitive they are to hormonal fluctuation, which she was having in her effort to have a kid.
How much of her being Chinese American or Asian American contributed to the misdiagnosis of her illness? You mention in the book that she didn’t act out in the way that you would expect someone to act out.

Right. I didn’t realize this either, until working at it, that just culturally, Asian people, generally, can manifest mania much differently than a white person. There is a much narrower range of acceptable behaviors.

Like what?

For example, this is really boiling it down, but the classic symptoms for a white person at the manic level is promiscuity and shopping: having sex with tons of people randomly, going shopping, racking up debts. You wouldn’t see that as much in an Asian person even in their most unhinged state.

Why is that?

There is just a much narrower range of acceptable behavior. For an Asian person, what would seem very excited, to a white person, could just seem a little excited. Iris’s husband was white, so I could see him watching her. Of course she was excited, had insomnia, but it wasn’t the total recklessness he might see in a white person.

This woman moved her career forward and met with all these luminaries, yet the word naïve is constantly being used to describe her.

Yes, it’s interesting. She had an innocence about her. In hearing about the rape of Nanking and these atrocities, she just couldn’t hear about it and not act, where maybe someone else would’ve been more hardened and be like, “Well, it was sad, but atrocities happen.” But it was like she was so innocent, hearing about evil for the first time. Every time she heard about an atrocity that was committed, it would be like the first time she ever heard it. She never became ironic about it. A lot of us journalists use black humor to get through the day. She would never do that.

Has the family read the book and what are their feelings?

Her husband, who helped me a lot, asked to see a pre-published version of the book last spring, and so did her parents. Her parents didn't help me. They both agreed that I had portrayed her accurately. I was worried because, just like I portrayed myself as very human, I portrayed her as very human.

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