How "Iris Chang" became a verb

The author of "The Rape of Nanking" inspired her friends by fearlessly confronting some of history's darkest moments. A eulogy.

By Paula Kamen

Nov 30, 2004 | In college, I would have liked Iris Chang more if she hadn't always been one step ahead of me, frustrating all my major life ambitions.

During our junior year, I applied for the one available hopefully-path-paving summer-magazine internship in New York City. The program took only one student from each journalism school. She got the job.

The next summer, I applied to a major Chicago daily newspaper for an internship. Despite my terror, the interview seemed to go well. I called in a week later, as instructed, and they told me, "You were close, but someone else got it. Also from the University of Illinois, by coincidence. You probably know her."

I was not alone in eating Iris' dust. Other editors on our college paper eyed her with the same mixture of amazement and frustration. One day, Iris had the idea to become the college stringer for the New York Times from Urbana-Champaign. Not wasting a minute, she called the New York Times' main desk, said she wanted to be a stringer, and soon after published a story in the front section. (And then five more over the year, until they told her to stop, so the paper would not raise eyebrows by disproportionately covering Champaign.) A few days later, I heard another editor on our staff grumble about it; she had wanted that position, but Iris beat her to it. I later met an editor of the college literary magazine. He was still bristling about a past encounter with her, for supposedly "taking over" the publication on the first day she went to a meeting.

Then, some time in the early 1990s, a little after graduation, Iris called me to get together in Chicago. She apparently had no idea how she had trampled my hopes and dreams. She considered us to be friends. I almost declined, but then decided to think this out rationally.

At that point, I made a conscious decision not to hate Iris Chang. With some distance from school, things were clearer. Any moron could see that she wasn't just getting by on her good looks. She was obviously very talented and could teach me something. As the features editor of our college paper, I had edited her articles -- or actually never edited them -- because they always came in perfect. The facts, grammar, punctuation, gerunds, everything. In retrospect, I was still marveling at a lucid story she had written about recent breakthroughs in a very complicated area of artificial intelligence.

During that meeting, or perhaps another one, I was immediately sorry to see that the grueling hours at her new job at the Associated Press were wearing her down. In college, she was a steamroller of energy. But now she was frail and told me her hair was coming out. I saw then for the first time just how hard she worked, how she put a piece of herself into every story she covered.

We soon moved to lighter topics. She was happy about planning her upcoming wedding. Her explanation for the marriage was simple. One day in college, she decided she wanted a boyfriend. Someone suggested that frat parties were a good place to meet guys. So she went to one, and there she met her red-haired husband-to-be, a star engineering candidate from a small farming town. He was delighted with -- instead of taken aback by -- her drive and candor.

She asked me how I was getting along. At that time, in the middle of a Bush-era recession, I was fruitlessly applying for work at local suburban newspapers. So I was starting to freelance. I told her of an Op-Ed I had written, that I would try to get published. She immediately suggested that I send it to the New York Times. I thought she was joking. I didn't have such pretensions. I thought maybe some local alternative paper might want it.

But lo and behold, the piece was accepted -- and a year later, on perhaps the slowest news day in history, the Times published it. My luck was changing -- not long before, I had signed a book contract to write on the same topic.

At that point, I had a revelation. So, that was the Iris Code. I had finally cracked it. And it was so simple: Think big. Almost to the point of being naive.

Next Page: "Think big! That's half the battle"

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