她向世界揭露南京大屠杀暴行，生命却永远定格在36岁

孤独，是一只蟋蟀隔湖而鸣的轻响，

Loneliness is a silent chirp of a cricket across a lake.

是夕阳下树林里叶片的沙沙声。

Where the leaves on the trees rustle at sunset.

孤独闻起来像一片紫罗兰的芬芳，

It smells like a violet patch.

听起来像风穿过高草的低语……

It sounds like wind blowing through the tall prairie grass...

1978年，10岁的张纯如（Iris Chang）写下了这些诗行。此时距离她因《南京大屠杀》而震撼世人还有19年。

1995年，27岁的她从美国加州出发辗转抵达江苏南京。在一轮深红色的夕阳下，她穿过城东郊区的荒草，来到一块不起眼的纪念石前。58年前，日本侵略者在此杀戮无辜。盛夏黄昏里，唯一打破寂静的，是持续不息的蟋蟀鸣叫。

这一幕，以及张纯如在南京改变其一生的三周旅程，都被她的母亲张盈盈（Ying-Ying Chang）写入了《张纯如：无法忘却历史的女子》一书中。该书于2011年出版，在此七年前的2004年11月，张纯如结束了自己年仅36岁的生命。

At the age of 27 in 1995, the author, whose name was borrowed from a Grecian goddess, flew from California to Nanjing in Jiangsu province, East China. There, under a crimson setting sun, she waded through the tall grass in an eastern suburb of the city to get to a nondescript memorial stone dedicated to those whom Japanese invaders murdered 58 years before. It was the height of summer, and all that broke the silence at dusk was the relentless chirping of crickets. The scene, and Iris' life-changing three-week sojourn in Nanjing, is described in moving detail in the book The Woman Who Could Not Forget, written by Iris' mother, Ying-Ying Chang, and published in 2011, seven years after Iris ended her life in November 2004.

2014年12月，75岁的张盈盈和丈夫张绍进来到南京，在杨夏鸣等研究南京大屠杀这段历史的学者们的陪同下，追寻女儿的足迹。20年前，当张纯如凝视着纪念石与周遭的破败时，站在她身旁的正是杨夏鸣。

“在那里，这个几天前才认识的性格活泼的女孩子忽然陷入一种近于悲怆的沉思。” 杨夏鸣说。张纯如在南京采访大屠杀幸存者期间，杨夏鸣担任了这位年轻的华裔美籍女士的翻译。

In December last year, Ying-Ying Chang visited Nanjing and toured for the first time those places where her daughter had searched for a history long since buried. The 75-year-old was accompanied by Yang Xiaming, a researcher of the six-week rampage of death now known as the Nanjing Massacre. When Iris Chang had gazed at the memorial stone and the surrounding dereliction 20 years earlier, Yang had stood at her side.

"To see this young, vivacious lady, someone I had met just days before, go into a ruminating state of sadness was almost heartbreaking," says Yang, who would later act as Iris' interpreter as the Chinese-American talked to massacre survivors.

“这些死者的悲剧是1937年12月13日拉开序幕的这场大惨案中的一部分。侵华日军在连续六周的时间内杀害约30万平民和放下武器的士兵，强奸无数妇女。倾听那些从尸山血海中爬出来的人的故事，足以让任何人的灵魂震颤。”

"Their tragedy was only a tiny part of the one that started on December 13, 1937, when invading Japanese troops killed an estimated 300,000 civilians and unarmed soldiers and raped countless others. But to listen to the stories of people who had crawled from under the heaps of bodies was enough to shake anyone to the core."

其中一次采访，对象是生于1929年的幸存者夏淑琴老人进行的。这位老人今天仍然健在，而她的双臂上也依旧留有日军刺刀留下的深深伤痕。

“1995年的时候，老人66岁，我们陪着她去到她当年的老屋旧址。在那里，年仅八岁的她透过木窗格，目睹了家人被害的惨状。”杨夏鸣回忆道。

“如果你了解张纯如的家族史，你就会明白这些采访在她心里激起了怎样的惊涛骇浪。”

One such occasion involved an interview with Xia Shuqin, a massacre survivor who bore the scars of deep bayonet cuts that Japanese soldiers had inflicted on her.

"We went with the 66-year-old lady to the site of her original house, where killings took place when she was eight," Yang says. "Pointing to the dilapidated wooden lattice windows, she told us that it was through these windows that she witnessed the horrible deaths of her entire family. If you had known Iris' family history you would understand how those interviews must have resonated with her."

上图：1995年夏，张纯如（右二）采访南京大屠杀幸存者夏淑琴（左二）。夏淑琴的手臂上至今仍留有1937年被日军刺刀砍下的深深伤痕。 下图：1995年张纯如采访南京大屠杀幸存者时，杨夏鸣（右）为她担任翻译。

家族记忆与战争阴影

1968年3月，张纯如出生于美国新泽西州的一个中国移民家庭。

“她是个好奇心极强的孩子，”母亲张盈盈说，“八九岁的时候，她就不停地问我们：‘你们像我这么大时在做什么？’她的故事就是从这些问题开始的。”

In March 1968, Iris Chang was born in the United States to her Chinese immigrant parents. "Iris was a curious child," Ying-Ying Chang said. "When she was around 8 or 9 she kept asking us what we were doing at her age. That's really the beginning of her story."

1937年7月7日，中日战争全面爆发。同年11月，南京国民政府宣布迁都重庆，南京百姓大规模逃亡，张盈盈的父母也在日军进城前一个月奔赴后方。

其后的八年，他们先后在贵阳、重庆生活。1940年张盈盈在重庆出生，而在同一座城市的郊区，住着她未来的丈夫张绍进 （Shau-Jin Chang）——张纯如的父亲。

On July 7, 1937, the war between China and the invading Japanese officially started. In November that year China's Nationalist Government announced that it was moving its capital from Nanjing to the southwestern city of Chongqing. A mass flight ensued. Ying-Ying's father and her 7-month pregnant mother left one month before the Japanese soldiers marched into Nanjing.

For next eight years Ying-Ying's family stayed first in the city of Guiyang, then in Chongqing, where Ying-Ying Chang was born in 1940. At that time, living not far from her family, on the outskirts of the city, was Shau-Jin Chang, her future husband and Iris' father.

1937年出生的张绍进抵达重庆时只有六个月大。至今，他仍记得当年轰炸时的情景。

“我那时大约六岁。日军飞机几乎昼夜不停，我们偶尔从防空洞出来透气时，看到外面的人脸上溅着鲜血。父亲告诉我，重庆的苦难远不如南京惨烈。” 张绍进此前接受《中国日报》采访时说。他于今年1月25日辞世，享年88岁。

Born in 1937, he was 6 months old when his family arrived in Chongqing that year. Today he still remembers what happened when bombs fell.

"The Japanese bombing was virtually around the clock. Coming temporarily from the underground bomb shelter, I saw people outside with blood-splattered faces. I was around 6 at the time. However, my father told me that what happened in Chongqing was not nearly comparable to the suffering and carnage in Nanjing."

正如六岁的张绍进无法想象南京的惨状，尽管张纯如自小听着日本侵略暴行的故事长大，但在1994年12月，当她在美国加州库比蒂诺市举办的世界反法西斯历史保护联盟会议上看到南京大屠杀的巨幅照片时，她依然被震撼得无以言表。

“没有任何东西能让我做好心理准备——那些黑白照片里，是被砍下的头颅、被剖开的腹部、被强奸后被摆成色情姿势的赤裸女性，她们的脸上写满难以忘怀的痛苦与羞辱。” 她后来写道。

In the same way a 6-year-old Shau-Jin Chang could not conceive of the dimensions of violence in Nanjing, Iris, despite growing up listening to stories of Japanese wartime atrocities, found herself overwhelmed standing in front of poster-sized images of Nanjing war crimes, at a December 1994 conference in Cupertino, California, sponsored by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia.

"Nothing prepared me for these pictures - stark black-and-white images of decapitated heads, bellies ripped open and nude women forced by their rapist into various pornographic poses, their faces contorted into unforgettable expressions of agony and shame," Iris Chang later wrote.

走进“黑暗的中心”

那时，她是伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校新闻专业的毕业生。此后的三年，她一头扎进这段世界反法西斯史上最黑暗的篇章，最终写出一本正如澳大利亚学者罗斯·特里尔所说的，“几乎令人无法阅读，却又不可不读”的书。

By then she had graduated as a journalism student from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where both of her parents were science professors. For the next three years the budding writer was to plunge into a history that constitutes one of the darkest chapters of World War II, before emerging with a book that is "almost unbearable to read" but "should be read", to quote Ross Terrill, an Australian academic and author, and a China specialist.

她的研究始于美国：在耶鲁大学神学院图书馆里，她读到了明妮·魏特琳（Wilhelmina Minnie Vautrin）的日记。这位1886年出生的美国传教士在淞沪会战爆发时担任南京金陵女子文理学院教务主任。她将校园变成难民营，拯救了数以万计的中国平民，其中绝大多数人是妇女和儿童。目睹了太多暴行的她患上严重创伤疾病，于1940年初回到美国治疗。1941年5月14日，她在公寓内打开煤气，结束了自己的生命。

在1937年12月19日的日记中，魏特琳写到：“如果日本妇女知道这些（她们的丈夫和兄弟们犯下的）恐怖行径，她们会羞愧难当。”

The research started in the US, where, in the Yale Divinity School Library, Iris Chang read the diaries of Wilhelmina (Minnie) Vautrin, also a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Born in 1886, the US missionary was in charge of Jinling College in Nanjing when war broke out. Turning the campus into a refugee camp, she helped save tens of thousands of Chinese, mostly women, during the massacre and afterwards. Yet having witnessed so much violence, Vautrin returned to the US in early 1940 with severe stress. On May 14, 1941, she turned on a gas stove in her apartment and killed herself.

"How ashamed the women of Japan would be if they knew these tales of horror," Vautrin wrote in her diary on Dec 19, 1937.

魏特琳去世54年后，张纯如读到了她的日记。六个月后，她来到南京，追寻这位拥有非凡勇气的女性的足迹，同时深入挖掘那些令她不断落泪的故事背后的真相。（值得一提的是，魏特琳和张纯如同为美国伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校的毕业生。)

她的受访人之一，是大屠杀开始时年仅19岁且已经怀孕七个月的李秀英。性格倔强的她与三个日本兵殊死搏斗，身中数十刀，倒在血泊中数小时。后来人们发现她胸口微弱起伏，才把她送往医院。昏迷中，李秀英在19日夜——也就是魏特琳写下那条日记的那一天——流产了。

Six months after Iris Chang read Vautrin's diary, she was in Nanjing to trace the footsteps of the courageous woman, and to find out more about the blood-chilling, heart-wrenching stories she had so frequently encountered in Vautrin's lines.

One of the interviewees was Li Xiuying, 18 years old and seven months pregnant in November 1937. After putting up a memorable fight with her assailants, Li was stabbed repeatedly and was left for dead for several hours, until a fellow Chinese noticed bubbles of blood foaming from her mouth. Friends took her to Nanjing University Hospital, where doctors stitched 37 bayonet wounds.

Unconscious, she miscarried that evening of Dec 19, the day Vautrin made her diary entry.

“五十八年了，伤痕都被皱纹挡住了。” 李秀英在采访中指着自己的脸对张纯如说到。曾经，这张脸上刀痕纵横，让李秀英的每一次对镜自照都成为精神的折磨。

然而有些伤痛是皱纹永远无法遮盖的。在南京期间，张纯如不仅被战争的残酷震撼，更对正义的缺失深感痛心。

"Now, after 58 years, the wrinkles have covered the scars," Li told Iris Chang, pointing to her own face once crosshatched with scars so terrible that it made looking into a mirror an emotional ordeal.

But there are things that wrinkles can never cover. And during her stay in Nanjing, Iris Chang was deeply disturbed not only by the inhumanity of war, but also by what she saw as a failure to mete out appropriate justice, Yang says.

还有一次，她和杨夏鸣探访一位名为刘永兴的幸存老人。老人住在不足六平方米的“鞋盒”里，他们拜访的时候他正在用一个脸盆擦身，盆中的水十分浑浊。

“我看见张纯如移动摄影机的方式——从低矮的天花板、到熏黑的墙壁、再到堆满垃圾的走廊——你能感到她心中的沉重。” 杨夏鸣说。

One of the survivors they visited lived in a shoebox of a space of no more than six square meters. The old man was bathing, and the water in the small basin had almost gone muddy. "The way Iris moved her video camera - from the low ceiling to the soot-covered walls and the rubbish-clotted corridors - clearly indicated her mood," Yang says.

三年写作，

每周七十小时工作

据张纯如的丈夫布雷特·道格拉斯（Brett Douglas）说，回到美国后，张纯如花费大量时间将所有在南京收集的资料仔细“提炼与过滤”。这个过程中，她每周工作七十个小时左右。

但仍然有很多的资料搜寻和研究工作要做。在发出一百多封信件之后，张纯如终于收到了一封回复，来自约翰·拉贝的外孙女乌苏拉·莱因哈特。出生于1881年的约翰·拉贝是一位德国商人，1937年12月拉贝与几位西方人士共同设立了南京安全区，挽救了数十万生命。正是通过张纯如，拉贝在战争期间所写的、为南京大屠杀提供了重要证据的日记才最终得以公开。

All the information Iris Chang gathered during her stay in Nanjing, she was to "distill and filter" in the writing process, during which she was "working 70-hour weeks", says Brett Douglas, whom Iris Chang married in 1991.

And there was still research to do. After sending out more than 100 emails, Iris Chang received one reply from Ursula Reinhardt, granddaughter of John Rabe, a German businessman who, together with a handful of fellow Westerners, set up the Nanking Safety Zone in December 1937 and saved hundreds of thousands lives. For the first time, the existence of the diaries Rabe kept during the war became known to the world.

写作期间，她常常打电话给父母。“她告诉我她做噩梦、掉头发。” 张盈盈说，“我劝她停下来。但她拒绝了。她说：‘我要为那些不能再说话的人发声。’”

《南京大屠杀》（The Rape of Nanking）于1997年12月出版。

“我们原以为能卖一两万册。” 张纯如的丈夫道格拉斯说，“结果仅美国就卖出近50万册。” 该书在《纽约时报》畅销书榜连续停留10周，次年被译为中文。

From time to time, Iris Chang would call her parents. "She talked about her nightmares and her hair loss," Ying-Ying Chang says. "I told her to stop. But she said no. She said she wanted to speak for those who could no longer do so."

The Rape of Nanking was published in December 1997. "We expected it to sell 10,000 to 20,000 copies," Douglas said. "It sold close to 500,000 in the United States alone. The book remained on top of the New York Times' bestseller list for 10 weeks and was translated into Chinese the following year.

上图：张纯如1997年的著作《南京大屠杀》（The Rape of Nanking)

下图：南京大屠杀发生时的惨状

荣耀背后是争议与孤独

名声随之而来，但攻击也接踵而至，张纯如不得不为书中内容的真实性辩护。

“她勇猛无畏，” 张盈盈回忆说。在1998年与日本驻美大使斋藤邦彦的电视辩论中，大使发表对南京的言论后，张纯如转向主持人说：“我没有听到‘道歉’这个词。”

With the accolades for her work came attacks, and Iris Chang was forced to defend the veracity of her account.

"She was fierce and fearless," Ying-Ying Chang says, referring to her daughter's appearance in a television debate with the then Japanese ambassador to the US Kunihiko Saito, in 1998. After the ambassador talked about events in Nanjing, Iris Chang turned to the presenter and said, "I didn't hear an apology."

道格拉斯认为，从个人层面来说，这本书对张纯如的生活产生了深远的影响，这种影响在张纯如转向其他写作项目后依然存在。

“在她生命的最后七年里，人们不断联系她，向她倾诉自己遭遇日本军队暴行的恐怖经历；也有不少人主动找到她，希望她继续写更多相关的书。”

2003年末，张纯如开始为一本可能的新书展开调查研究，主题是“巴丹死亡行军”——这是二战期间被日军俘虏的美军和菲律宾士兵，被迫在菲律宾巴丹半岛酷热难耐的丛林中进行的惨烈强制行军。

On a personal level, the book continued to exert influence on Iris Chang's life, long after she started working on other projects, Douglas says.

"For the last seven years of her life, people were contacting her with their own horror stories to tell about the Japanese military, and people were approaching her trying to persuade her to write more books on the subject."

南京大屠杀发生时的惨状

疾病、坠落与永别

2004年8月，张纯如飞往肯塔基州路易斯维尔，会见一位巴丹死亡行军的幸存老兵。抵达不久，她便在酒店房间里倒下，但之后入院治疗。医生的诊断是：“短暂反应性精神病”。

“我在1988年10月第一次见到的那个她，再也没有回来。”道格拉斯说。

In August 2004, Iris Chang flew to Louisville, Kentucky, to meet a Bataan veteran. Soon after arriving, she collapsed in a hotel room but later managed to have herself admitted into a psychiatric hospital. The doctor diagnosed "brief reactive psychosis".

"The Iris Chang I first met in October 1988 never came back," Douglas said.

在与病情抗争了数月之后，2004年11月9日，36岁的张纯如用一把左轮手枪结束了自己的生命。哀悼的信息纷至沓来，但她的去世也给了批评者可乘之机——有人声称她写作《南京大屠杀》时陷入了某种妄想。

对此，作为夫妻相伴十三年的丈夫道格拉斯给予了坚决否认。“她在1997年初就完成了《南京大屠杀》，而直到2004年才首次出现精神疾病的迹象。”他说。他同时也不认为张纯如的死与她在写作此书时所承受的心理压力有直接关联。

“那些照片和资料非但没有让她崩溃，反而激励了她，驱使她竭尽全力把这些故事讲出来。”道格拉斯说到。

After struggling with her condition for months, Iris killed herself with a revolver on Nov 9, 2004. Messages of condolence flooded in, but her death also provided an opening for her detractors, who alleged that she had written The Rape of Nanking under delusion.

This is an assertion that Iris Chang's husband of 13 years flatly rejects. "Iris completed The Rape of Nanking in early 1997 but never showed any real signs of mental illness until 2004," says Douglas, who also sees no direct connection between Chang's death and the horror she endured writing the book.

作为一名微生物学教授，张盈盈强烈怀疑，张纯如去世前所服用的抗抑郁药物加重了她原本就存在的自杀倾向。

2005年9月，也就是张纯如去世后的第一年，张盈盈与张绍进夫妇受邀前往南京，参加南京大屠杀遇难者纪念馆为张纯如所立铜像的揭幕仪式。

2014年12月13日，张纯如的母亲张盈盈（中）和张绍进（左）出席首个南京大屠杀死难者国家公祭日。

“我是在1949年随父母离开中国的，那时我九岁。从那以后我从未回过南京，直到2005年。”张盈盈说道。“我们把历史讲给她听，而她则用她的书，把我们带回原点。”

Ying-Ying Chang, a microbiology professor, strongly suspected that antidepressants Iris Chang was taking at the time of her death had increased suicidal tendencies she already harbored.

In September 2005, one year after Iris Chang died, Ying-Ying and Shau-Jin Chang were invited to Nanjing for the unveiling of a bronze statue of their daughter at the city's Memorial Hall for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre.

"I left China in 1949 with my parents when I was 9 and had never been back to Nanjing until 2005," Ying-Ying Chang says.

"We told our history to Iris, who then, through her work and her book, brought us back to where we had come from."

2006年，张盈盈与丈夫在美国设立了张纯如纪念基金会，致力于维护抗日战争历史记忆，并推动南京大屠杀史实的国际传播。“我们资助美国的中学教师到中国学习南京大屠杀的历史，”张盈盈说，“这是二战中一个极其重要的章节，却在美国的历史教科书里几乎完全缺席，也因此缺席于美国公众的认知之中。”

In 2006, Ying-Ying Chang and her husband set up the Iris Chang Memorial Fund in the US. "We sponsored US high-school teachers to travel here and learn about the Nanjing Massacre," Ying-Ying Chang says. "It's a crucial chapter of World War II that is almost completely missing from history textbooks in the US and in people's consciousness. There are lessons to learn."

作为《南京大屠杀》一书的作者，张纯如于1999年受邀前往白宫会见希拉里·克林顿。

位于美国加利福尼亚州城市圣何塞的张纯如纪念公园于2019年建成。张纯如曾居住在这座公园附近。

无法忘记，也不能忘记

在书的末尾，张纯如写道：“二战期间日本的行为，与其说是危险之人的产物，不如说是危险政府、脆弱文化与危险时代共同作用的结果——他们能够向那些本能上抗拒的人兜售各种危险的辩解。”

Toward the end of her book, Iris Chang wrote: "Japan's behavior during World War II was less a product of dangerous people than of a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times, able to sell dangerous rationalizations to those whose human instincts told them otherwise."

每一次张纯如的父母来到南京，杨夏鸣都全程陪同。

“在中国，很长一段时间里，人们并不鼓励谈论南京大屠杀，部分原因是因为那种羞痛。” 现年67岁的杨夏鸣说，“而如今，是另一种羞愧——一种由张纯如在我心中播下的羞愧——推动着我继续进行大屠杀研究。”

Each time Iris Chang's parents were in Nanjing, Yang accompanied them.

"For a very long time in China, discussion of the Nanjing Massacre was not particularly encouraged, partly because of the shame involved," the 57-year-old Yang said. "Today, another type of shame, one that Iris had instilled in me, propels me forward in my research of the massacre."

2024年11月9日，江苏省南京市，在侵华日军南京大屠杀遇难同胞纪念馆，人们在张纯如女士塑像前参观瞻仰。 刘建华/FOR CHINA DAILY

2007年，杨夏鸣将张纯如的《南京大屠杀》英文原著重新翻译成中文。他说，他至今无法忘记当年张纯如站在南京郊外纪念碑前的情景——落日的余晖为石碑镀上金边，也照亮了她年轻的面庞。

Yang, who in 2007 did his own translation of Iris Chang's book from English to Chinese, said he could not wipe from his mind the sight of Chang, standing before the memorial stone in suburban Nanjing. The setting sun gilt-rimmed the stele and illuminated her young face.

2024年12月12日，江苏淮安，江苏电子信息职业学院商学院大学生在张纯如纪念馆献花。 赵启瑞/FOR CHINA DAILY

对于那些见证过她青春才华的人，这一幕或许会让人想起张纯如在高中担任校文学杂志主编时写下的一首诗——《日出》：

For those who were in touch with her young genius, that scene may call to mind another poem Iris Chang wrote, when she was the editor of her high-school literary magazine. The poem is titled Sunrise.

玫瑰色的光芒升起

Rosy luminance appears.

越过大地的边缘

Over the edge of the earth.

驱散所有黑暗

Banishing all the darkness.

迎来新一天的诞生……

To reveal a new day's birth...

记者：赵旭

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