Paula Kamen Interview
Conducted by Andrew Lam

Editor’s note: The night before Iris Chang, best selling author of “The Rape of Nanking,” committed suicide using an antique gun, she contacted Paula Kamen, one of her closest friends. Chang was 36 and had much to live for – fame, fortune, beauty, a loving husband and caring parents, a beautiful new baby. Seeking to reconcile Chang’s “perfect” life and her mysterious suicide, Kamen scoured correspondents, 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 talked with NAM editor, Andrew Lam, author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora

AL: Tell me about your friendship with Iris Chang?

PK: 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.

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

PK: 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 “ten 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 it ‘Attention Surplus Disorder’- where she was so focused and just couldn’t be distracted at all.

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

PK: She was always very intense, does nothing done half way, 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 Bi-Polar 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.

AL: She called you the night before she killed herself. Tell us about that conversation.

PK: 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 talked about fear of the U.S. Government coming after her for things that she had discovered. She talked about guilt for quote “giving her son Autism”, that she had given him vaccines and there is some debate if that could lead to autism, just all these horrible, consuming fears. She also told me to let people know how she was before her “sickness”, so she never mentioned depression or bipolar disorder; she just acknowledged that she’d been sick the last several months.

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

PK: 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 this was apart 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.

AL: How exactly did she die and where was she.

PK: It’s a terrible story. She lived in San Jose and she took her car and she 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 like 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…

AL: Why three guns?

PK: Well, each of them was bigger. This book tells you if you use a gun to use as big a gun as possible.

AL: So you wouldn’t necessarily wound yourself, but really kill yourself.

PK: Right. It was clear that she meant to really kill herself. This wasn’t a cry for help, she meant to be “successful”, and she was.

AL: It was very shocking news when it came out because from readers’ point of view she was at the top of her game. Everyone thought she was one of the most meticulous, perfect people there is on earth. When she killed herself I think it came as a shock to practically everyone who knew something of her.

PK: 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. Hilary 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, was, a lot it was just a gut need just to know what happened; that this most envied person would do this, and 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.

AL: 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.

PK: Yes. That is what so many of her fellow journalist thought, that she was so much more together than we are, so why are we different than 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 was “The Rape of Nanking” about these horrible atrocities the Japanese committed. In the last few years of her life she was interviewing non-stop U.S. GI’s 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.

AL: In writing “Finding Iris Chang” did you find something, in your digging up, anything surprising about her?

PK: 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 rationale to say, “I caused it”, or it was being too harsh on herself 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 and I investigated that and saw that the onset of the bi-polar 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 bi-polar disorder just how sensitive they are to hormonal fluctuations which she was having in her years long effort to have a kid.

AL: How much of her being Chinese American or Asian American contributed to the misdiagnosing of her illness, because you mention in the book that she didn’t act out in the way that you would expect someone to act out.

PK: 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.

AL: Like what?

PK: 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.

AL: Why is that?

PK: 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’ husband was white, so I could see him watching her; of course she was excited, had insomnia, but it wasn’t totally reckless he might see in a white person.

AL: But this could be attributed to the topics she deals with, Massacre in Nanking and Death March of Bataan. The issues she deals with are atrocious and horrible. Maybe people didn’t understand the level of horror that she experienced as she did the research.

PK: It certainly affected her, she talked to many of her friends about being affected by the dark material. I found tons of interviews with journalist where she talked about being affected. But a lot of people do write about dark topics, atrocities and they don’t kill themselves. I think the root was this mental illness that’s basically inherited and it could come out because of your environment, and the dark topics. She was doing book tours where she was going to a different city everyday for weeks just totally being driven into the ground, lowering her resistance. She was trying to have a kid for years and all the wear and tear on her brain chemistry with all the hormones going up and down. So, it was complicated.

AL: Your friendship with her is also complicated. In the beginning you were kind of jealous of her but then you also admire her and in some of your speeches you use her almost as a verb. You say “Iris Chang it”, meaning what exactly?

PK: That she really was inspiring to everyone, she was inspiring as an Asian American activist, to people who didn’t know her, and the people that knew her, she was inspiring to just go do it. An example, we were in college and she had the idea that she wanted to write for the New York Times, so she just called them up on the phone and said “Hi, do you need a correspondent from the University of Illinois?” and they said “Oh, Ok.” Pretty soon she had front section stories running all the time in the New York Times. Some people looked at that with jealous or ‘why didn’t I think of that’, but I sort of grew to see that as an example to follow, to “Iris Chang it”, to just act despite any fears, almost to the point of being naïve.

AL: In fact that word naive kept coming back. It’s a contradictory thing where this woman moved her career forward and met with all these luminaries, yet the word naïve is constantly being used to describe her.

PK: Yes, it’s interesting. She had 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 journalist use black humor to get through the day, she would never do that.

AL: You mentioned that doing the whole research, you turned it into a topic and an object. Is that still true or have you come to another understanding of your relationship to Iris Chang.

NK: I did have a lot of mixed feelings about doing this, that she was not open about her mental illness and I had mixed feelings about exposing it. But then I thought that it had social worth. She was such a major public figure people wanted to know. The shame and ignorance that she and her family and friends had around it contributed to her death. So, I thought that it was worthwhile. There was some emotional parts of writing this when I was reading her letters to me, and I’ve interviewed some of her friends and they would show me her letters and in quite a few of them she was talking nicely about me behind my back. Every victory I had, she was just reveling in and so happy for me. So it was mixed, there were times where she did almost become a subject like any other, just to get through, where you’re working on this intensely for years, so I’d find myself becoming more detached on some days.

AL: Has the family read the book and what are the feelings?

NK: Her husband, who helped me a lot, he asked to see a pre-published version of the book last spring, and so did her parents. (Her parents did not 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. I was afraid that they would only want the most idealized parts. But, that wasn’t true, so they agreed that I had a complete portrayal of her. So, with her mother, there were a few sensitive things that we negotiated. There were a few lines she asked me to take out, which I did, that weren’t really that central to the book, that made her feel a lot better. It was a challenge to write about someone who so recently passed away and has close family still living.

Iris Chang related articles

Other Andrew Lam’s articles

Documentary on returning to Vietnam

Andrew Lam’s book “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora