Bestselling author and activist Iris Chang was remembered Friday as a fiery-eyed dreamer who even as a child sought to root out injustices with her writing.

More than 400 readers, relatives, friends and dignitaries filled the seats and stood on the lawn outside the Los Altos cemetery chapel where her memorial service was held, listening to a dozen eulogies in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin.

Separate memorials were held simultaneously in Washington, D.C., and Nanjing, China, for the woman who over the past decade was a leading voice in the demands for reparations from Japan for World War II atrocities.

Chang, a 36-year-old wife and mother, was found dead in her car Nov. 9 in Los Gatos, the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Family members said she had suffered for some time from depression and had been hospitalized.

The San Jose author's haunting bestseller "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II" catapulted her to glorious heights, but perhaps also contributed to the internal anguish that led to her death, friends said at her service.

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

Mourners fought sniffles as Masin shared her lasting impression of her gentle yet gutsy friend, the way Chang was before slipping into depression five months ago.

For Iris, no problem was unsolvable," Masin said. "There was always a way."

Iris Shun-Ru Chang was born on March 28, 1968, in Princeton, N.J. Her parents, both college professors, noticed her immediate love for all things literary.

At age 4, Chang wrote a story about catching a thief. Her mother, Ying-Ying Chang, helped her spell the big words. The young author illustrated the six or so pages, stapled them together, and read the story to her classmates at nursery school.

"This was her first book reading," her father, Shau-Jin Chang, said.

Tim Yip, a 38-year-old café cashier from San Francisco, met Chang last year at a book signing for her third epic account, "The Chinese in America: A Narrative History." He waited 45 minutes until the crowd dispersed so he could hand her a thank-you note.

"She helped me fill in the gaps about why my parents and their parents came to America," Yip said as he waited for the memorial service to start. "she helped me understand.."

U.S. Rep. Michael Honda, D-Campbell, sent a representative to read aloud the tribute that Honda read into the Congressional Record on Wednesday: "Her fierce pride of her Chinese-American heritage empowered others with the certainty that they were truly Americans despite their ancestry."

The burial at Gate of Heaven Cemetery drew everyone from China's Vice Consul General Ciu Xuejun to a Denver scientist who happened to be in the Bay Area on business.

"I didn't even have the courage to read the whole book," the scientist, 40-year old Jianlong Yao said, of "The Rape of Nanking." But he read enough of the tortuous tales to know it was written by a "beautiful and brave soul."

Chang, who had been unsuccessful in getting a movie produced about The Rape of Nanking was buried in the foothills where she liked to hike. Mourners sobbed as they circled her coffin and shouted "Goodbye, Iris."

The hundreds joined hands and sang a stanza of "American the Beautiful." Then in a last gesture of celebrating the life that ended too soon, they sang "Happy Birthday to You" as the casket was lowered into the ground.