Acclaimed Chinese-American author Iris Chang was eulogized in simultaneous ceremonies in northern California, Washington and Nanjing after her apparent suicide earlier this month.

The 36-year-old writer and journalist, who chronicled the rape and massacre of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops during World War II, was found shot dead in her car on November 9.

Family members said she suffered from depression and had been previously hospitalized for it.

Speakers at a ceremony prior to her burial in California said her bestseller, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, may have contributed to the internal anguish that led to her death.

"She felt other people's suffering so intensely, to the point that it made her suffer," friend Barbara Masin said during the 75-minute memorial.

US Representative Michael Honda sent an envoy to read a tribute that he presented in Congress earlier in the week.

China's Vice Consul General Ciu Xuejun attended the burial along with hundreds of mourners.

Chang was a leading non-fiction author and was widely known in both the US and Asia for her studies of Chinese immigrants and their descendents. The Chinese in America: A Narrative History was published last year and traces more than 150 years of Asian American history.

But her best-known book was the 1997 Rape of Nanking, which details the slaughter of Chinese civilians by the Imperial Japanese army that occupied China in the late 1930s.

It was the first major full-length English-language account of the atrocity and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 10 weeks and sold half a million copies.

During the past decade, Chang was a leading voice in calling for Japan to pay reparations and issue an official apology for wartime atrocities. She was also a co-founder of the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia.

Her parents said Chang's last wish was to shoot a film on the Nanjing massacre of a quality similar to Schindler's List.

Two memorial funds have been established in Chang's name. The Iris Chang Scholarship Fund is for students at the University of Illinois, Chang's alma mater, who wish to study in Nanjing on an exchange program. In Nanjing, the Iris Chang Memorial Scholarship Fund was set up to assist financially disadvantaged students at Nanjing Normal University.

(China Daily, China.org.cn November 22, 2004)