Woman Who Could Not Forget (17 page)

Then Iris told us that the Department of Journalism had informed her that she had enough course credits to graduate in four years. This was a surprise to her; she had thought she would need to take more required courses in order to graduate. But the Department of Journalism acknowledged the courses she took in math, computer science, and English as the equivalent credits. This threw her into distress, since it meant that she needed to look for a job immediately. On February 7, her letter was depressing. She wrote: “. . . Every day I get rejection letters from newspapers. I’m very upset.” She added: “I’m doing my best to juggle my courses with writing, dating and job searching. I miss both of you very much right this minute, but to tell you the truth I’ve been too busy to miss you most of the time. This semester will be even busier than the last.”

On February 12, 1989, Iris called and talked to us on the phone for two hours. She was unhappy because of the fact that so far she had not gotten any job offers. And she was going to graduate in May!

Iris also told us that she and Brett were thinking of visiting us in March, during their spring break. Brett and Iris had been in a steady friendship since they’d met in October the year before. We told her we would welcome their visit during the spring vacation. On March 16, 1989, they arrived, and very soon Michael came to visit too. We toured the famous San Diego Zoo, and we even went together to the Mexican border town Tijuana, where we bought many Mexican native handmade art products. We also went to Los Angeles to see Ye-Ye and Nai-Nai, who met Brett for the first time. The good weather of California refreshed all of them, and they returned to Urbana happily.

Near Mother’s Day, 1989, I received a card, dated May 12, from Iris to show her thanks. She chose a funny card. On the front, it read: “Mom, the
brighte
r the child, the more
difficult
they are to raise.” The drawing showed a scared mom next to a naughty, smiley boy holding a snake from a pile of books. Inside, the card was signed “Love, Einstein (alias
Iris
).” In the card, she also wrote:

Dear Mom:

Have a wonderful Mother’s Day. . . . This is probably the first Mother’s Day I’ve had with you so far away.

Today I handed in a 30-page paper and now I’m studying for four finals. Some of the classes I have are really boring. . . .

I hope you feel better soon. . . . I was upset and worried when you told me you are now restricted to a bland diet of rice, vegetables, etc.

Take care of yourself, please. Sometimes I think we worry too much about things we forget about a couple of years later! Maybe we should take up some mindless hobby to soothe the stress away. . . .

Love, Iris

At the time, Iris knew that my stomach was flaring up and, as a matter of fact, that I had been quite ill at the end of our stay in La Jolla. I was diagnosed later as having a gastroesophageal acid reflux (GEAR) problem.

Iris continued writing for the
DI.
From November 1988 to April 1989, she wrote articles on leading and top-notch scientific research on the UI campus. She combined her writing skill with her science background. She wrote a number of excellent articles such as “Talking Minds. Computer: A new hope for those who can’t move or speak.” She interviewed graduate students and professors from the Psychology Department and described the technology available for people who were unable to communicate physically to speak through a computer. She also wrote an article on “The Fifth Force” by interviewing Shau-Jin’s physics colleague, Professor Steven Errede. She was able to transform difficult physics laws into common, everyday language.

Iris also wrote a three-part series on AIDS. She went to libraries to do research to understand the disease, and she interviewed researchers and doctors in the field. She also went to a local hospital to interview an AIDS patient about his struggles and suffering and the current discrimination against AIDS patients. She told me she interviewed the AIDS patient without a mask or gloves. I was somewhat uneasy about that, but she told me that as long as she did not come into close contact with the patient, she would not contract the disease. She said the AIDS virus was transmitted through blood only. “You will not get AIDS even through shaking hands,” she assured me.

When I read the three-part series on AIDS, I was really moved by her dedication in understanding the disease and promoting awareness.

But to me, among the articles she wrote for
DI,
the most impressive one was an article on the “Third Kingdom,” the archaebacteria. She interviewed Professor Carl Woese of the Department of Microbiology, who classified archaebacteria as the third kingdom of life; she also interviewed other professors in the field. She thoroughly understood the research they were working on and the method they were employing to decipher the mysterious life forms. No wonder, after the article was published, she received a letter from Chancellor Morton W. Weir, who wrote:

Dear Ms. Chang:

I have just finished reading your Features article in
The Daily Illini
of March 1, 1989.

Congratulations on an excellent job. You have made the work of Carl Woese and his colleagues intelligible to a layman. I have read many articles about Professor Woese’s work, and have talked with him often about it. Yours is the most succinct and understandable account of his research that I have run across.

Iris was very happy to give me a copy of Weir’s letter. Anything she was proud of, she would not forget to let us know.

Even with all the above-mentioned well-written articles published in the
DI, Chicago Tribune,
and
New York Times
, Iris had difficulty landing a job at this time. Fortunately, her professors in the Department of Journalism, particularly Professor Robert Reid, who recognized her talent in writing as early as 1987, wrote very strong recommendations on her behalf.

The best gift that Professor Reid gave to Iris—and to his other students too—was his willingness to listen. Besides us, I guess at this time Professor Reid was the person who listened to Iris the most. Whenever she needed journalism advice, she would go to Professor Reid. The recommendation letter he wrote for Iris, dated April 15, 1989, stated: “Iris Chang is one of the very brightest, most energetic and most talented students I have seen in my 10 years of teaching at the University of Illinois. She has a keen analytical mind, writes extraordinarily well, does exceptional independent work and is a tenacious worker. . . .”

With such strong recommendations and her numerous newspaper clippings, Iris finally got a job as an intern for the Chicago bureau of the Associated Press. The job started on June 1, 1989.

Iris’s graduation ceremony was May 21, 1989. We were determined to return home for the ceremony, even though I did not feel well at the time. I had had a stomach problem since the summer of 1988, when I hurt my esophagus eating hot peppers. Since then, I’d had an acid-reflex problem that was getting worse in La Jolla. On May 14, I went to New Orleans for the American Society of Microbiology meeting. The food I ate there made me sick again, but I still flew to Urbana. Iris was delighted to see Shau-Jin and me come for her graduation, but the photo I took with her in front of the Assembly Hall showed that I was sick.

Shau-Jin and I flew back to San Diego after the graduation ceremony to conclude our half-year sabbatical, and we started to drive back home on June 4—when Iris had already reported to work in Chicago for the AP. In the summer of 1989, Iris happily told us that she’d been awarded a $1,000 national scholarship from the Asian American Journalists Association. Again, her unfailing hard-working spirit had paid off.

In 1990, Iris returned to the University of Illinois campus after a brief stint working at the Associate Press and the
Chicago Tribune
. She was approached by an editor of a college guidebook called
Barron’s Top 50, An Inside Look at America’s Best Colleges
(Barron’s Educational Series, Inc., 1991 edition). The editor was looking for a person who had graduated from a university to write about his or her personal experience about the particular university in question. Iris was delighted to accept the invitation and wrote a superb chapter in the book for the University of Illinois. Many people may not know that she wrote that article for the U of I. I felt that her description of the U of I was accurate, vivid, and inspiring. She described not only the student lives at the U of I in general, but she also injected her own personal life into those four years (1985 to 1989).

Iris’s own words are:

Choices, choices, choices! I was stunned by all of them at the University of Illinois. During my four years as an undergraduate, I took courses in news reporting, differential equations, Shakespeare, computer science, sociology, and voice. The professors had won the Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize, and I remember one semester I tried to decide whether to study under a former New York Times correspondent, a Broadway and Hollywood star, or a world-renowned expert in artificial intelligence. I started my own magazine, joined the Oriental Cultural Organization, and listened to speakers invited by the British history club. Never again will I have the supermarket of choices that were available to me at the U of I.

I started out as a math and computer science major; and later switched into journalism. This confused people in both fields. In the dorm cafeteria, my C. S. buddies urged me to come to my senses: “At least get a science degree as a backup.” In my creative writing classes, my teacher and classmates would tease me for being too rational. “Where’s your sense of romance?” There’s no way to get only one perspective at a school as large as the U of I. That’s what I like about it—hearing these different opinions all the time.

Iris described her journalism class at the UI:

I heard all the horror stories about journalism professor Robert Reid, before I took his in-depth reporting class. A man of inflexible deadlines, he was known to flunk people who stumbled in class a few minutes late when handing in their 40 page papers.

I was pleasantly surprised when I sat with 14 other people on the first day of class. Reid wanted us to be more than reporters. He wanted us to be writers. Creative nonfiction writers who, like novelists, would capture details and make a story so real a reader could see it and smell it and taste it. Reid hated reporters who insisted on punching facts into a cold news formula. “If I had any such robots in my newsroom, I’d fire them,” he liked to say, cracking a piece of chalk onto the ground for emphasis.

Later in the year, Reid became my mentor. I would spend hours with him after class to discuss writing techniques, journalistic ethics, and the works of literary journalists like Tom Wolfe, Lillian Ross and John McPhee. And since he was convinced that each student in his class would do something important one day, he told us to quit worrying about our grades and start trying to do our best.

Under the Social Life section, Iris wrote:

At least once a week, I would get together with some of my buddies and—over Chinese food and pizza boxes in our dorm room—we might talk until three in the morning. The subjects of conversation ranged from boys to comic books to thermodynamics, depending on the group I was with.

I especially liked being with journalism friends—we would read each other’s writings, suggest changes and toss around story ideas. We swapped books and discussed John Steinbeck and Guy de Maupassant and Franz Kafka; we slammed on bad articles in the local newspapers, sometimes highlighting key paragraphs. These nightly chats were some of the best times I had at the U of I and what I learned from them was as valuable as anything taught in the classroom.

Iris described the extracurricular activities:

“I remember the first article I wrote for the
Daily Illini,
I was assigned to do a feature about Pop Rocks, the candy that allegedly killed Mikey, star of the Life cereal commercials. After experimenting with ten packs of Pop Rocks—sprinkling them on my tongue, feeling them sizzle and explode in my mouth—I tried the candy out on my friends, carefully researched the history of the candy, and typed the story in the
DI
computer system.

A few days later, I snatched up the
DI
that was thrust under my door. There it was, a full-page article next to this cartoon of a man with his mouth shattered open from a volcano of Pop Rocks! I did it! I had broken into print! My stomach felt as if all ten packs were bursting out at once. An hour later, my phone was ringing off the hook from excited friends who had seen the article. Although I was later writing for bigger newspapers like the
New York Times,
nothing could match the thrill of seeing my first byline in the
Daily Illini.

Then Iris described another personal experience at the U of I:

I was a junior when I first wandered into Professor Stegeman’s office. He was the placement officer for the journalism department and I asked him for some advice about breaking into the newspaper business. Stegeman smiled, stroked his white beard, and told me about his first job as a reporter in a coal mining town in southern Illinois, his adventures in Africa and even his investigative reporting crew in East St. Louis.

Stegeman was the one who suggested that I apply to 50 newspaper and magazine internships; he gave me a big batch of application forms and even proofread my resume and cover letters to make sure they were free of typos. He gave names of U of I alumni to contact and frequently stopped me in the hall to tell me about new job opportunities. Unlike the machine-like career placement center I expected of a Big Ten university, the journalism placement office was very personal.

From all the descriptions Iris wrote about her experience at the U of I, we could get a better glimpse of part of her college life, which was full of excitement and fun. She was so eager to learn everything and full of hope for a bright future.