Haunted by History

In the last years of her life, her mother remembers, author Iris Chang wanted to make a movie. Chang's 1997 best seller, The Rape of Nanking , had shone a spotlight on an infamous 1937 atrocity. This was the massacre of an estimated 260,000 people, and the rape of as many as 20,000 women, by Japanese troops occupying Nanjing (formerly Nanking), then the Chinese capital. The book spent 10 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and made the 29-year-old a literary star. But Chang wanted to do more. "She firmly believed that a movie or a documentary film would get...

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