In Kamen's opinion, Chang was "an incredibly focused young woman, who seemed to many to have a one-track mind." Once she began a project, she approached it with great tenacity — "like a laser beam, but it was not easy being extraordinary."

Kamen labels Chang as "an extremely sensitive person," given to writing about dark topics, who, in fact, suffered by being exposed to the suffering she wrote about. Because she was actually bipolar, writing about genocide literally depressed her.

She was either high or low.

"Isn't it thrilling," Chang wrote in a letter, "that I might be among the first to learn of some of the secrets the Soviet Union, China and the U.S. kept smothered during the Cold War? It's this kind of research I find so fascinating — like detective work, really — and so unlike the boring, white and gray textbooks they shoved at us in high school!"

And yet she also wrote, "Sometimes I would be shopping or walking through the park, and without any warning, some image from 'The Rape of Nanking' would just float in front of me ... I didn't want the events to spill over and poison the rest of my life."

Even after all her research, Kamen said, "I'll never understand the suicide. I will never be able to see into what she was thinking. I've cobbled together a part of what was happening, but I can't understand the depth of her suffering and pain."

On the other hand, Kamen discovered that she could do her own research without being smothered by personal depression. "It's important to cover atrocities. I demystified that process by writing about some of our greatest fears, our darkest places, which I could do while also paying attention to my mental health. It's less terrifying to me now — and I understand mental illness better."

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E-mail: dennis@desnews.com