Woman Who Could Not Forget (15 page)

The first article Iris wrote for the
DI
was on October 12, 1987. The title was “Pop Rocks, are they fun or fatal?” It was a well-researched Features article about a candy called Pop Rocks, which would sizzle and had a popping sound when put it in your mouth. Iris called me in excitement when I was in the lab. She informed me that her article had been published and asked me to read the article in that day’s
DI.
Our lab had a free copy of the
DI,
so I read it immediately. I shared in Iris’s excitement at seeing her first article published. The article was accompanied with a huge cartoon of a man with his mouth wide open and a blast of Pop Rocks!

Pretty soon, Iris was writing concert reviews. On Friday, November 6, she told me that she was going to the Assembly Hall to listen to Whitney Houston’s performance. Frankly, we never took our children to any American popular music concerts. We usually listened to either Chinese folksongs or Western classical music at home. Iris loved classical music as well as popular movie songs, but I never would have thought she could write concert reviews. On Monday when I read the article “Whitney Houston Rouses Audience to New Heights” in the
DI,
I was surprised that she had written it so well.

Iris had always loved opera, and she had been taking singing lessons in the UI Music Department. She had a very good voice. When I listened to her practice singing the aria “O mio babbino caro” from the Puccini opera
Gianni Schicchi,
it moved me to tears. She had asked the voice teacher to teach her this aria because she was inspired by the movie
A Room With A View.
We went to see the movie together, and both of us were quite moved by the music adapted from the Puccini opera in the film.

Because Iris wrote concert and theater reviews and because she was doing volunteer work as an usher, one day she called me and said that she had a ticket for that night. She wanted to invite me to see the production of Mozart’s opera
The Marriage of Figaro
by the UI Department of Music. She knew I liked to watch opera too. It was a memorable evening. At the end of the opera, I thought we were just going home, but instead Iris invited me to go to the Performance Center’s famous coffee shop to have a piece of her beloved chocolate cake. While she ate the chocolate cake, she talked about the opera. Not just the opera itself, but the disgusting feudal system described in the opera—the ancient European feudal privilege of a noble having a night with his servant-bride before giving her away to the groom. This was Iris: she always felt strongly about injustice whenever she saw it, even in a 200-year-old opera.

One day Iris told us she had found out that there was a summer internship program sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME). The internship was a ten-week summer training program for junior journalism majors for thirty or forty American domestic business magazines such as
Newsweek, Time,
and
Reader’s Digest
. Usually one intern was selected from each university’s Journalism Department, one who was recommended by the dean or the department head. Then, if accepted, the student would be assigned to a participating magazine. Iris said this internship would be the best training for her, and she wanted to apply. The deadline was in December, for the following summer.

In December, Iris had not yet been formally transferred to the Department of Journalism; that would not happen until the beginning of the next semester. Not only that, but the department head could only recommend one student from the department. Iris was worried that she would not be qualified; therefore, she called the ASME and asked if there was any alternative. Out of desperation, she went and talked to the head of the English Department. Iris had taken a number of courses in the English Department and knew several of the professors there. She had done very well in the English literature and rhetoric courses. Somehow, she was able to persuade the head of the English Department to write a recommendation letter on her behalf to the ASME. She sent off her application, together with her essay on why she wanted to apply for this internship and why it was so important for her.

During this period, Iris was uncertain about her future. She was very ambitious, but also very impatient. During the winter break of her junior year, in January 1988, she asked us to give her a ride to Chicago to visit the
Chicago Tribune.
When we walked in the chilly air of downtown, she was continuously complaining. She lamented why we had to stay in Urbana rather than in a big city such as Chicago where there were more opportunities. She asked why were we so satisfied with our placid lives, staying risk-averse, and so on. This was the first time Shau-Jin and I had ever been upset with her, as we were surprised that she would say these things. She had never criticized us before, and even now I still don’t know what made her so unhappy at that time. Later, she did apologize to us, and now I think she had just been bursting at the seams to take the next step in her life and her impatience was getting the better of her.

After her visit to the newspaper, Iris was able to persuade the
Chicago Tribune
editor to appoint her as their campus stringer for UI. In the second semester of her junior year, Iris not only wrote news and reviews for the
DI,
she also wrote campus news for the
Chicago Tribune.

On February 1, 1988, when I reached my lab, the students came up and told me that Iris had written a big fiction story titled “The Secret Admirer,” published in the
DI
Features section that day. The story was long and its title was in big type, with a drawing of a huge heart next to the article. It was a love story of college students living on campus. Now Iris was a frequent writer for the
DI.
She not only wrote news, theater reviews, and short stories; she reviewed books, too, which I know she enjoyed tremendously. At this time, all the students and colleagues in my lab knew that I had a beautiful daughter on campus who wrote for the
DI.
Some of the students told me that they enjoyed reading Iris’s articles and were eager to meet her in person.

From February to May 1988, Iris, as a campus news stringer, sent numerous campus news articles about UI to the
Chicago Tribune.
The news ranged from a story about the new collections in the UI Library to the supercomputer UI would purchase for the school. But the most sensational news was that a female first-year UI veterinary student, Maria Caleel, was murdered on March 6, 1988. That day, Iris called us early in the morning, which was unusual because she was usually a night owl and seldom got up early. She said in a shaking voice that she had just received a call from the
Chicago Tribune,
and they had asked her to gather information on the slain student. We were also shocked, since Champaign-Urbana was a relatively safe town. Iris told us that she was going immediately to work on the case and she wanted to borrow our car. Her devotion and passion as a journalist had already been demonstrated. The article on the murder was published on March 8 in the
Tribune
with her name as one of the contributors at the end of the article. Many years later, the killer of Maria Caleel still had not been found. Maria’s father was a prominent Chicago cosmetic surgeon, and her family had offered a huge reward for any leads to find the killer, but so far the case had not been solved. Years later, Iris still sometimes mentioned the case of Maria Caleel.

On April 19, Iris called us in excitement because she had received a letter from ASME telling her she had been awarded the summer internship. More significantly, she was assigned to
Newsweek!
She was so happy that she almost screamed. She later told us that two students from UI were accepted by the ASME internship, one from the Department of Journalism and the other, Iris, from the English Department. Iris told us later that it might break a record, since it was very rare for two students from the same university to be accepted by the ASME in a single year. It was a very pleasant surprise to me that she had been assigned to
Newsweek
, one of the two hottest and most desirable magazines, a dream internship for anyone. When Shau-Jin told one of our Chinese friends that Iris had been awarded a summer internship at
Newsweek
, our friend repeated twice
“Newsweek?”
with the suspicion that he was hearing it wrong.

Iris was able to get the summer internship with the ASME not by chance, but through hard work. During the application process, Iris was demonstrating her ability in writing and her passion in journalism. By this time, she had published many articles in the campus newspaper, plus she was a campus stringer for the
Chicago Tribune
. The Department of English recommended her because of her excellent classwork, her dedication, and her eagerness to learn. She had a goal, and she worked hard to reach it. She was very persistent; this was her strong trait. And, most important, she was not afraid to try to beat the odds.

On June 5, Iris flew to New York City for her ten-week internship. All the interns lived in dorms at New York University. She shared a room with another intern and had the opportunity to talk to many other interns assigned to other magazines. She said that she and the intern who was assigned to
Time
magazine got the most attention from their peers. Iris was assigned to the Business section of
Newsweek
and got to know the writers and editors of the magazine and gained firsthand experience on how the magazine was published.

On June 14, she sent us a postcard of a picture of the famous New York waterfront skyline with the words “I Love New York.” In her message, she wrote:

Hi, Everyone!

I want to say Happy Father’s Day to Dad! I’m doing very well in New York and I have met other ASME interns as well as the ones at Newsweek and Time Inc. Everyone gets along amazingly well because everyone has very similar interests. I’m going to be reporting and fact-checking at Newsweek, and I might get a byline. The New York Times gave me a personal tour to see the paper yesterday, and they were very friendly and want me to write for them. I miss you all and I’ll write back. Love, Iris

Iris called us regularly and told us about her life at
Newsweek.
She told us that writing for a magazine as opposed to a newspaper was very different.
Newsweek
only published once a week. The staff did not write simply to fill space; they picked and chose stories out of a pool of ideas. Very few ideas were chosen and published. And a few of the reporters were also writers. It was difficult to get a byline at
Newsweek
unless you were one of the few writers. Iris told us that she did her best to suggest many ideas to the editors, but only one of her ideas was accepted. Unfortunately, the idea was killed even before it started when they found out that the story had been reported in a newspaper a year before.

In spite of all this, Iris told us that she learned a lot and that the experience was one she could not have gotten in journalism courses. She was delighted to be treated as nicely as one of the staff members working there. There were fringe benefits at
Newsweek
too, she said. Every Friday, the business department went to dinner on the expense account because they worked so late. She was treated to lunches and dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and many Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue restaurants.

In the last few weeks of her internship, Iris tried to speak with several
Newsweek
editors to seek their advice on her career. On July 4, Iris called to tell us how wonderful it was to see the splendid fireworks explode in the sky, illuminating the images of the New York skyscrapers. How exciting to live in a big city, she said. She told us she wished to live in a big city like New York after she graduated—and besides, she said, New York was the center of the publishing world!

In New York, Iris also visited Gong-Gong and Po-Po at Confucius Plaza. Not long after Iris got to New York, Michael and I flew there for my father’s ninetieth birthday. Iris came to join us for the big occasion.

While Iris was doing her internship in New York, she also visited the
New York Tim
es and talked to the editor about the possibility of becoming a campus stringer for them. They were convinced and gave her the opportunity. When she retuned home, during her senior year at UI, she had submitted campus news to both the
Chicago Tribune
and the
New York Times
. This was another common trait of Iris: she never missed any chance or opportunity she thought might help her reach her goal. Iris submitted UI campus news to the
Times
very frequently. The editor of the Campus Life section of the
Times
used her news pieces one after another; but finally he told Iris that he could not use her pieces anymore, otherwise the readers would think the Campus Life section of the
New York Times
was specifically for the University of Illinois!

In 1988, Iris continued working hard for the magazine
Open Wide
. She had a number of literary friends on campus who contributed poems and stories. Her second issue of
Open Wide
was published in her last year of college. In this issue, Iris wrote a story, “The Halloween Prince,” in which she described debating whether a captured toad should be set free or put in a glass tank. At the end, the girl and the boy decide that to set the toad free in the creek, which “might be a dangerous, short life threatened by a million things. . .” was still better than to life in a glass tank, where life would be “a secure and long one, year after year, the same rocks, same food, same water, able to see the world on the other side but never able to reach it. . . .” Very clearly, this was Iris’s philosophy of life. She preferred to lead a colorful risky life rather than a secure long one.

Iris read novels and nonfiction when she could find time in her busy coursework. Sometimes she would tell me what books she was reading and the names of the authors. I remember her mentioning a number of famous American writers, poets, and playwrights such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, O. Henry, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, and Tennessee Williams.