Editing The Rape of Nanking (book) (section)

===Inspiration===
As a child, Chang was told by her parents that during the [[Nanjing Massacre]], the Japanese "sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths." Her parents had escaped with their families from [[China]] to [[Taiwan]] and then to the United States after [[World War II]]. In the introduction of ''The Rape of Nanking,'' she wrote that throughout her childhood, the Nanjing Massacre "remained buried in the back of [her] mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil." When she searched the local public libraries in her school and found nothing, she wondered why no one had written a book about it.<ref name="RapeOfNanking7-8">{{cite book|author=Iris Chang|title=The Rape of Nanking|publisher=Penguin Books|year=1998|isbn=0-465-06835-9|pages=[https://archive.org/details/rapeofnankingfor00chan/page/7 7]–8|url=https://archive.org/details/rapeofnankingfor00chan|url-access=registration}}</ref>

The subject of the Nanjing Massacre entered Chang's life again almost two decades later when she learned of producers who had completed documentary films about it. One of the producers was Shao Tzuping, who helped produce ''Magee's Testament'', a film that contains footage of the Nanjing Massacre itself, shot by the [[missionary]] [[John Magee (missionary)|John Magee]].<ref name="Princeton">{{cite web|url=http://www.princeton.edu/~nanking/html/proposal.pdf|title=Proposal for The Nanking Conference at Princeton University|publisher=Princeton University|access-date=2007-07-23|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070110100610/http://www.princeton.edu/~nanking/html/proposal.pdf|archive-date=2007-01-10}}</ref> The other producer was Nancy Tong, who, together with [[Christine Choy]], produced and co-directed ''In The Name of the Emperor'',{{cn|date=September 2024}} a film containing a series of interviews with Chinese, American, and Japanese citizens.<ref name="Princeton" /> Chang began talking to Shao and Tong, and soon she was connected to a network of activists who felt the need to document and publicize the Nanjing Massacre.<ref name="RapeOfNanking8-9">Chang, ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=8XnKuSxod8wC The Rape of Nanking]''</ref>{{Rp|8-9}}

In December 1994, she attended a conference on the Nanjing Massacre, held in [[Cupertino]], [[California]], and what she saw and heard at the conference motivated her to write her 1997 book''.''<ref name="Penguin">{{cite web|url=http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/rape_of_nanking.html|title=The Rape of Nanking|publisher=Penguin Group USA|access-date=2007-07-22|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070927210146/http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/rape_of_nanking.html|archive-date=2007-09-27}}</ref> As she wrote in the book's introduction, while she was at the conference:<blockquote>I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it.<ref name="RapeOfNanking8-9" />{{Rp|10}}</blockquote>