 When Iris Chang was a child, she was told by her parents, who had escaped with their families from China to Taiwan and then to the United States after World War II, that during the Nanking Massacre, the Japanese "sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths." In the introduction of The Rape of Nanking, she wrote that throughout her childhood, the Nanking 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.
