Woman Who Could Not Forget (18 page)

She was genuinely in love with the U of I. In the Summary Overview of the U of I, Iris concluded:

Few schools can rival the University of Illinois in academics, size and price. Its world-class status and excellent faculty attract the brightest students everywhere, many who cross oceans to get an education at Illinois. The school boasts of such things as having the third largest academic library in the country, the biggest alumni network, the biggest Greek system, the best centers for science and technology and all for low, low, state university tuition.

Iris received a check for $200 from the book’s editor as a reward for writing about the U of I. Iris was quite happy about it. A couple years later, Iris told us that a paragraph of her article on the U of I in
Barron’s Top 50
had been used in one year’s reading test on the SAT exam. She felt honored.

I
n the spring of 1989, Chinese students in mainland China launched a pro-democracy movement that grabbed the attention of the world. For Shau-Jin and myself, both born in China, the events really hit home. We were riveted to the television for weeks.

When the student protests began, I was still at UC San Diego, working in Professor Milton Saier’s lab with a couple of students from mainland China. The students and I talked constantly about the news from China and couldn’t contain our excitement. We all thought that our homeland was inexorably heading down a democratic path.

In addition to students, we saw older workers and intellectuals demonstrating in the streets of Beijing and in Tiananmen Square. Hundreds of students went on hunger strikes to demand that the Chinese government reform, guarantee freedom of speech, and crack down on corruption. The students also erected a Goddess of Democracy statue, which looked remarkably similar to our own Lady Liberty in New York Harbor. Tears of joy welled up in my eyes.

In late May, Iris called to tell us she had reached Chicago and was living in a dorm room of Mundelein College. She shared our excitement about the events in China.

After we finished our sabbaticals at UC-San Diego on June 4, Shau-Jin and I started driving back to Illinois. On the way, we heard on the radio that Chinese tanks had rolled into Tiananmen Square in a violent, bloody crackdown. We couldn’t believe it. As soon as we reached St. George, Utah, where we’d planned on spending the night, we called Iris. She said that the AP had told her to head to Chicago’s Chinatown to gather reactions to the massacre.

The next time we called her from the road, Iris told us that she had interviewed Chinatown shop owners and people on the street. Her story, the first one she wrote for the AP, was used by hundreds of newspapers around the country. Her new colleagues enviously told her how lucky she was to be allowed to work on such a hot news story her first week on the job. And Iris was excited to have an AP photographer assigned to her story.

After we returned home, she mailed us a copy of a letter written by her boss, James Reindi, the AP’s news editor in Chicago. The June 7 letter read:

Dear Iris:

Congratulations on your first A-wire (story) for the AP. I trust it is the first of many.

Your story on Chicago’s Chinatown reaction to the situation in Beijing is in the newsroom of every afternoon newspaper in the country today. It deserved to be. The story is loaded with excellent detail and good quotes. A first-rate job!

Sincerely, Jim

We also got a copy of her story as it appeared in the
Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette.
It was headlined: “Chicago’s Chinese hunt for news on homeland.” The byline was “by Iris Chang, Associated Press Writer.” The story began:

The old man raised his cleaver and slammed it into the neck of a duck at a Chinatown grocery store. “Killers,” he spat out as he repeatedly chopped the duck and spoke with two other men listening to a Chinese-language radio broadcast Tuesday morning.

The day after we arrived home, Chinese faculty members and the Chinese Student Association organized a huge protest on the University of Illinois campus. The demonstrators condemned the military crackdown, as did the American people as a whole. To show their anger and disgust, the U.S. scientific community boycotted conferences held in China. Shau-Jin and I signed numerous petitions. We couldn’t comprehend how the Chinese government would slaughter defenseless students who we thought were genuine patriots.

Iris often came home from Chicago on weekends to see us and to see Brett, who was still at the University of Illinois working on his doctorate in electrical engineering. Iris told us her job at the AP was demanding; she had to pump out story after story. Because she was a fast writer, she was always able to make her deadlines, but the flow of news was unrelenting. She could barely find the time to eat. So she mostly grabbed fast food on the run. That alarmed me, and I told her to make the time to eat more healthful food. I don’t know how much she listened to me. She also told us she didn’t know whether she should marry Brett or wait for a few years. I was reluctant to steer her in either direction, knowing that that was a decision she could only make for herself.

Once Iris became an adult, I never made a major life decision for her. But at the same time, I did emphasize that women, just like men, needed to become financially independent by developing skills to support themselves, whether or not they were going to marry. Iris agreed, telling me: “To gain equality with men, women need to educate themselves first.”

About two months after Iris went to work for the AP, she called to tell us that the
Chicago Tribune
had offered her a four-month internship. About the same time, she said, the AP offered her a full-time reporting job. She told us she had decided to work at the
Tribune
so she could write in-depth feature articles. At the AP, she said, the job was mostly writing hard news.

August 29 was the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary for Shau-Jin and myself. That Saturday, Iris came home from Chicago to help us celebrate the occasion. Brett and Michael joined us for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. After dinner, we took a family portrait. Iris was twenty-one years old. She looked so happy and carefree in the picture. She had lost some weight because of her frenetic pace at the AP, but she looked beautiful and happy.

Iris began her internship at the
Tribune
on September 1. As an intern, she worked for all the departments in the newspaper: the national desk, metropolitan desk, features, and sports. She particularly loved writing feature articles and generally disliked writing local news. She said she hated to go to City Hall for press conferences because she found most municipal issues boring.

She wrote articles headlined “Fire Forces Museum to Close” and “Young Muralists Put City in Perspective.” She wrote about the University of Illinois being urged to scrap its Indian mascot, and she whipped up an article for the food section before Christmas titled “Adding Memories to Sugar and Flour.” Her long articles in the Tempo section, such as the one headlined “Do Bugs Give You the Creeps? Get to Know Them,” showed her strong science-writing ability.

One of the best and most widely read articles she wrote for the
Tribune
had the headline: “To Scientists He’s an Einstein. To the Public He’s—John Who?” The story was about Professor John Bardeen, the two-time Nobel Prize winner who had been on the University of Illinois faculty in the engineering and physics departments since 1951 (emeritus since 1975). In the early eighties, the young Iris had met him at our house because he and Shau-Jin were in the same department, so she knew how famous he was in the scientific community. In that early-eighties meeting, Iris asked if Bardeen would do her the honor of autographing a copy of the
News-Gazette of Champaign-Urbana
in which an article had just described Bardeen’s world-famous discovery. Iris was very impressed by Bardeen’s achievement, and was proud that she had met him personally. Whenever someone asked her about the U of I, she would always say that Bardeen was on the faculty there and he was a two-time Nobel laureate, whereas the questioner might have only been interested in the Fighting Illini football team!

Iris was fascinated by Bardeen’s research on the transistor and the theory of superconductivity, so we suggested that she interview him for a story. We also reminded her that Bardeen was eighty-one years old, and if she wanted to interview him, she should do it soon.

She immediately contacted Bardeen and interviewed him over the phone many times and at length in his office. Her story was published in January 1990, a year before he died. The article was reprinted by several University of Illinois publications to memorialize his life.

Because of Iris’s science background and her tenacious research, she was able to write an accurate, passionate article about him. Bardeen was well known for being quiet and modest and not showing much emotion in public. But Iris told us she found him warm and kind. Perhaps Iris reminded him of his own granddaughter.

Iris had interviewed many of Bardeen’s former students and postdoctoral researchers in the physics and engineering departments on campus, including Nick Holonyak, a physics and electrical engineering professor. Iris told us that she had gained insight into physics—which still intrigued her even though she had not taken a physics class in many years—from Holonyak, who in turn appreciated Iris’s passion for learning and her talent in science writing.

Holonyak, Bardeen’s first graduate student, later invented the light-emitting diode used in digital watches and pocket calculators. After Iris’s article was published, we ran into Holonyak a couple of times on campus, and he told us how much he enjoyed talking to Iris. Later, he told us that he had followed Iris’s career and read her books. Iris always felt lucky that she had grown up in an academically rich community such as Champaign-Urbana.

In late September, my brother Bing called us from his Manhattan office to tell us about a two-hour special called “China in Revolution, 1911-1949” that would soon be shown by PBS. My father, a witness and survivor of that period of Chinese history, was interviewed for the special. When we got a tape of the program and gave Iris a copy, she showed a lot of interest and told us that some day she would like to interview her dad and me about our family history.

Three weeks after the PBS special ran, my mother called me from New York. She said she had coughed out two pea-sized blood clots from her throat that day. My brothers and sisters were all alarmed and urged her to see a doctor immediately. The doctor told her she had a tumor in her lung that could be cancerous.

The diagnosis shocked our whole family. I took time off from work and flew to New York to help out my mother. On November 27, my sister Ling-Ling and I accompanied her to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital for a biopsy. The doctor found that the tumor was indeed cancerous, but that the cells originated from her breast, not from her lungs. That was actually good news, because there were drugs to stop the growth of breast-cancer tumors, whereas lung cancer was much harder to treat. After the biopsy, the doctor decided against removing the tumor and prescribed cancer-fighting drugs instead. For a while, we were relieved there was a cure for the tumor, but we knew that my mother’s breast cancer had metastasized to other organs—a bad omen for her overall health. I came home from New York exhausted.

Then Iris called us from a public phone booth down the stairs from her office with more bad news. The
Tribune
, she said, was not going to hire her after her internship was over at the end of December. This was a big setback. She had been hoping to land a job at a major newspaper to establish her journalism career. Her dream was dashed. We asked her whether the
Tribune
had hired any of her fellow interns. “Yes, they did,” she replied weakly. I could hear the humiliation in her shaky voice.

Shau-Jin and I talked to her for a long time, and she began a self-examination of her work and her life. She told us that in the newspaper industry, she would be limited in what she could write. She also realized that she was not the kind of person who liked taking orders or being at the whim of whatever was deemed newsworthy at the time.

Shau-Jin told her that in any profession, you had to work your way up from the bottom. “You cannot be a general the first day you enter the army,” he told her. “You have to work first as a foot soldier.” But Iris was exceedingly ambitious and impatient. During this phone conversation, Iris told me: “You know, Mom, I’m not the kind of person who is willing to conform in a corporate setting.” She admitted that she was too independent, too individualistic, and didn’t really enjoy being part of a team.

She told me about some of her confrontations with her editors. One time, she said, her boss had asked her to call members of a family whose loved one had just died tragically. She told the editor she had tried several times, but the family refused to be interviewed. Not showing much sympathy, the editor asked her to try again. So Iris picked up the phone and dialed the phone number, in front of other colleagues. She handed her boss the phone and said “
You
talk to them.” He, of course, was not happy. But Iris told us that she felt the family had a right to grieve in private. That, she said, was more important than getting a quote for a story.