"I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills"
About this Quote
There is something quietly disarming about the word "certainly" here: a hedge and a flex in the same breath. Iris Chang isn’t claiming genius, insight, or authority-by-birth. She’s claiming competence earned the hard way: amassed, like weight or receipts, through repetition. The phrasing is almost stubbornly procedural. Not "I know history". Not "I tell the truth". Just the nuts-and-bolts accumulation of skills, the kind you only notice when you’re wading through archives, chasing reluctant sources, and trying to pin down events people would rather keep blurred.
The subtext is defensive in the way many serious researchers become defensive: against dismissal, against the suspicion that writing history is just opinion with footnotes. Chang’s career, especially her work on the Nanjing Massacre, sat in a cultural minefield where denialism and nationalist pressure weren’t abstract forces but organized pushback. In that light, "research gathering skills" reads like armor. She’s foregrounding method because method is what survives attacks on motive. If critics want to debate her conclusions, she signals, they’ll have to go through her process first.
It also hints at the emotional cost of doing this work. "Amassed" implies time, stamina, and exposure to difficult material. Chang’s sentence is plain, almost modest, but that plainness functions as credibility: a refusal to romanticize the historian’s role when the real drama is in the evidence and the stakes of bringing it to light.
The subtext is defensive in the way many serious researchers become defensive: against dismissal, against the suspicion that writing history is just opinion with footnotes. Chang’s career, especially her work on the Nanjing Massacre, sat in a cultural minefield where denialism and nationalist pressure weren’t abstract forces but organized pushback. In that light, "research gathering skills" reads like armor. She’s foregrounding method because method is what survives attacks on motive. If critics want to debate her conclusions, she signals, they’ll have to go through her process first.
It also hints at the emotional cost of doing this work. "Amassed" implies time, stamina, and exposure to difficult material. Chang’s sentence is plain, almost modest, but that plainness functions as credibility: a refusal to romanticize the historian’s role when the real drama is in the evidence and the stakes of bringing it to light.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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