Time & Perspective Quote by Iris Chang

Chang’s “for some reason” is doing sly work: it pretends at modesty while signaling something closer to compulsion. As a historian who made her name excavating atrocities and state-sponsored forgetting, she frames outrage not as a political pose but as a reflex, almost physiological. The line reads like an author’s mission statement stripped of branding - less “calling” than inability to look away.

The intent is plain: she’s committing her future writing to the exposure of injustice and violations of civil liberties. The subtext is sharper. By collapsing “acts of injustice” with “assaults on people’s civil liberties,” she refuses the comforting hierarchy that treats some harms as exceptional and others as procedural. It’s a warning about how the machinery of power normalizes itself: violence isn’t only the headline event; it’s also the paperwork, the euphemisms, the narrowed rights.

Her final move - “Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction” - is a quiet rebuke to the notion that genre dictates truth. Chang suggests that moral clarity can travel through any form, and that factual rigor doesn’t exhaust what needs to be communicated. History, for her, isn’t a sealed archive; it’s an argument with the present.

Context matters: Chang wrote in an era when the “end of history” optimism still lingered, yet her work insisted that modernity doesn’t retire cruelty, it repackages it. The quote anticipates the costs of such witnessing too: to be “bothered” is to accept a lifetime of friction with polite narratives, institutions, and audiences who prefer closure to accountability.