I knew Iris Chang’s voice; thoughts on a suicide.

As a lawyer, your client can sweep you up into events of awesome significance, like a leaf in a storm.

One such event for me was my brief acquaintance with a young Chinese American author who asked for my help negotiating a development and production agreement for a best-selling book she had written that was being made into a film.

The book, she explained over the phone, was the Rape of Nanking.

. . . long pause

I don’t know how we met

I don’t recall who referred her, I have not kept my notes. Our correspondence sits in a dark basement two thousand four hundred miles away.

I do remember her voice. It was so…

When she didn’t contact me for a month, two months, half a year, I made a mental note that I should get in touch, if only to ask how the film project was coming. How was she doing? Anything she needed?

Unknown to me she was working on a new, even more troubling book project, this time about the Bataan Death March.

The common telling is that she fell into insanity driving alone across the American South to interview the veterans, suffering from an unhealthy combination of sleep deprivation, herbal supplements, prescription medications, and memories of war.

The work was too much for her, a modern victim of distant conflicts. She cared too much. She broke.

Why didn’t I call?

In a different world, a better one, I did call. She invited me into her world, and my lightness helped her escape the inevitable. The call that never happened, and would not have done any good if it did, is real to me, as present as memories of her voice.

“People die twice — once as mortals, and once in memory,” Iris once told her mother. Please remember her, Iris Chang.

(image: her memorial, in Nanjing)

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