Iris Chang brought global attention to the truth of the Nanjing Massacre with her book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, but faced defamation from Japanese right-wing groups.

In our interview, Iris Chang's mother, Ying-Ying Chang, recounted one effort to counter this campaign. In 2016, she learned from a letter that Randy Hopkins, a retired American lawyer, had written a detailed article over 40 pages long, systematically refuting the smears against Iris Chang's work. Despite its meticulous footnotes and well-sourced claims, the article could not find a publisher in the US. "They wouldn't publish it, because you were going against their will," Ying-Ying Chang explained. She then submitted the article to a Chinese journal, where it was successfully published.