During her senior year, Iris’s English class had a senior debate. Iris prepared for the debate very carefully. The topic was social reform in the U.S. Iris went to the U of I main library to gather materials and prepared for the debate. I remember that she carried a gray metal index-card box to school with her every day. She wrote down her arguments on each notecard. She often mentioned to me that the debate at Uni was good training: it prepared her for public speaking and debating later in her career.
In February 1985, she was almost seventeen years old and got her driver’s license. She was like a bird, ready to have her solo. As a senior, she now had many literary friends and enjoyed her life and was very busy with her social activities. When it was time for the Prom, we went together to look for a prom dress and the necessary accessories. Indeed, she had grown up as a beautiful young lady, but she somehow did not realize it yet.
In June, Iris graduated from Uni High. It was an important time for all the seniors. Iris was no exception. All the seniors received the Uni High Yearbook with their senior class pictures. Each graduate had been asked to write a few words of their own or use a quotation from their most admired personalities. Iris chose Matthew Arnold and Albert Einstein, a literary figure and a scientist. The quote from Matthew Arnold read:
“Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, wildly effective mode of saying things, hence its importance.”
And from Einstein:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
On graduation day, all the students were busy writing in each other’s yearbooks. The seniors were especially excited since they were embarking on a brand-new stage in their lives. Iris’s friends from the editorial board of Unique wrote words of appreciation and admiration for her literary talent and hard work. But there were others who did not know Iris very well, and they expressed regret that they had not made the effort to know her better.
It was a paradox. On the one hand, Iris tried her best to be accepted by her peers; on the other hand, she was very independent. She held her own views and opinions, and resisted following the crowd. Some of her classmates considered her to be a loner lost in her own world. In reality, she was constantly reflecting and striving to become the best in whatever she was doing. She was extremely competitive and motivated.
On graduation day, as Iris watched some of her classmates being voted to be one of the most likely to succeed, she felt left out and depressed. She knew that it was just a popularity contest, but it was disturbing to her. She was restless. She talked to me for a long time that evening after graduation. I did sense her ambition, her strong determination to succeed, and her confidence in proving herself. I told her that I believed in her and that one day she would succeed. I told her that all she had to do was work hard and have patience. It went without saying that she had my full support. It was a mutual commitment we had.
Iris’s English teacher, Adele Suslick, knew Iris well, as she was the faculty sponsor for Unique and the two spent a lot of time together. Ms. Suslick spoke about Iris at the memorial service held on the University of Illinois campus on December 2, 2004, which gave us an accurate glimpse into her days at Uni High. She said on that occasion that “‘Colorful’ pales as a descriptor for her. She was one of the most passionate individuals I have ever known: very intense, very focused, totally committed to the cause at hand. . . .
“Iris’s first published work may have been this haiku (which appeared in the 1980-1981 issue of Unique):
“Time
Moving steadily
Destroys, mystifies, conquers
Absolutely impossible to stop
Eternity.”
Ms. Suslick continued: “Iris may not have considered knowledge paramount back then, but she knew a lot about a great many topics, as demonstrated by her outstanding performance in Senior English. What’s more, she had an innate talent for public speaking and could nail an argument with compelling evidence. She made meticulous notecards, I recall. Grades did not seem to motivate her as much as her desire to understand something thoroughly, and she always looked you directly in the eye when she spoke. There was no doubt that she believed in what she had to say and that she wanted you to believe it too.” These words were a good characterization of Iris as we knew her.
In August 1985, after her high-school graduation, we headed east for a family vacation to see Po-Po and Gong-Gong in New York. We drove to New York via Ann Arbor, then from Toronto to Boston. When we reached Cambridge, we showed Iris the Harvard campus along the Charles River. We showed her the Memorial Church on the campus quad, where Shau-Jin and I had married, and the Holden Green, the married student housing, where we had lived. We also took her to see Harvard Medical School, where I had spent five years as a medical science student. We also showed her the famous century-old Filene’s bargain basement store where I’d found the few fancy clothes that I could afford to buy. It was a trip to recount Shau-Jin’s and my graduate student days. Now, twenty years later, Iris was going to move to a dormitory and get her own taste of college life.
Standing Out in Crowds
Iris was admitted into the University of Illinois in 1985, double-majoring in mathematics and computer science. Before she started her freshman year that fall, she had already registered with the U of I for a summer math course in calculus. She studied hard every day, since the summer course was short and intense. She got an A for her hard work. At the end of the summer, after we returned from our vacation to the East Coast, Iris moved to Hendricks House, a privately owned high-rise building in Urbana very close to the campus. It was on the same block as the Physics building and one block from my laboratory in Morrill Hall.
The day she moved in, we all were there, including Michael, to help her. The campus was full of students and helping parents. The town was awakened by the noises, which were a huge contrast to the summer silence. Finally, Iris was out of our house—an independent person. In reality, it only took ten minutes for her to drive home and five minutes to walk to her dad’s office or to my lab during the day. Nevertheless, she was living on her own.
The first weekend, Iris came home. She was very happy and excited. She brought all her dirty laundry with her. While she was doing her laundry, she described to us the things that had happened in Hendricks House and her coursework. The girls she shared her suite with were nice, but they did not study as hard as she, she said. Most of the students in the house came from the Chicago area or nearby towns, and they all got along just fine. Looking at her beautiful and happy smile, she was just like a flower in full blossom. I was as happy as she was when I saw her smile.
Iris told me that she loved the fact that UI was so big, so that she was able to meet many different kinds of people. She enjoyed the freedom on the campus too. She said that no one really knew anyone else in such a big university, so no one would be judged as closely by peers, as would be the case in a small school. She was happy like a fish that had found water.
During registration and course selection, Iris had consulted Shau-Jin as to what courses she should take for her first semester. After all, Shau-Jin had been the course advisor for students in the Physics Department for many years. Shau-Jin told Iris that if she wanted to major in math and computer science, even if she was only required to take Physics 101 and 102, he advised her to take the Physics 106 and 107 series instead. Math and computer science were part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Only engineering students needed to take the harder Physics 106 and 107 rather than the easier Physics 101 and 102. But Shau-Jin told her that physics was a basic science for students who really wanted to major in math and computer science. Iris listened to her dad and signed up for Physics 106.
Iris studied hard, and the only time she came to see me or her dad in our offices was when she needed money to pay tuition or rent, or to buy meals and books. In addition, we gave her an allowance for clothes. At this time, she was quite aware of her appearance, and she started to enjoy shopping for clothes. She foun
d an Indian shop on Green Street carrying many exotically colored clothes imported from India that were comparatively inexpensive. Because she was tall and slim, any clothes looked elegant on her. She showed me a multicolored skirt made of soft cotton fabric imported from India and a black long-sleeve top. Wearing those clothes, with her long curling black hair (she had her hair styled in a beauty salon in her senior year at Uni High), she looked like a gorgeous young lady from an ancient Middle Eastern country.
Iris did not usually spend too much time shopping, except for necessities. She wore T-shirts and jeans to go to class. The only times she really needed fancy clothes were when she went to a party. Whenever she was shopping, she looked at the price tag first. I think we had influenced her in this regard. Both Shau-Jin and I had come to this country on scholarships with limited resources. We were very careful in spending, quite frugal. It became a habit, even when our income later improved. We had always told her that we should not waste time and money on something we did not really need.
Iris told us that she was often noticed and admired by male students she met on campus. She seemed to enjoy the attention. I knew she was going to parties and watching movies in addition to studying. She was really enjoying college life. She not only met many students in her computer science courses, but also met students from other departments, such as engineering or English majors.
Every weekend Iris came home to do her laundry and see the cat, as she missed Cat very much. In the meantime, she would ask Shau-Jin about the math or physics that she did not understand in her courses. Her first semester ended happily, with a grade point average that qualified her for the Dean’s List.
The year of 1986 was an extremely exciting year for me professionally as well. In January 1986, I found that the protein sequence of a bacterial enzyme with which I had worked for several years had a strong homology (similarity, affinity) with the protein sequence of another enzyme. The discovery of the homology of these two proteins explained several things about their unique properties. I attended two national meetings to report my results. In March, I went to Washington, D.C. for the annual American Society of Microbiology meeting; and in June, I went again to D.C. for the annual Biochemistry meeting. I was busy wrapped up in my own research. I had been working full-time in the lab since 1984, when Michael was in his sophomore year at Uni High. I was sure the children did not need me when they came home from school. I now had a number of papers published in scientific journals, almost one paper a year.
The second semester of Iris’s freshman year, the spring of 1986, Iris had some difficulty with her Physics 107 course. She often came home to ask Shau-Jin for help, but I could see that her heart was not in the physics. At the time, she told me she was going to start a student literary organization called the Illini Literary Society. She found out that she could apply to the University for financial support if she submitted a budget for the organization. Eventually she did get some funds that way. She later used the funds to start a magazine called Open Wide. She was talking about recruiting literature-loving students to submit poems, fiction, or original musical compositions and artwork for publication in the magazine. Again, she was enthusiastic about the new magazine and talked about it with passion, just like her high-school days with the magazine Unique.
In the final few weeks of the second semester Iris was struggling with Physics 107 and eventually got a C for that course, which made her unhappy. Maybe she secretly blamed her dad, who had advised her to take the more difficult physics course for engineering students. When her freshman year ended, that summer she wanted to take a summer-credit math course: differential equations. We thought it was a good idea. In our family, taking classes was always encouraged, and this was no different.
In that summer of 1986, our house needed some repairs and maintenance work, such as painting the outside wooden trim and replacing the rotten wooden deck above the garage. I was too busy to use my one-month vacation in the summer to carry out the house repairs. We told Iris, a college student, and Michael, a rising senior in high school, that they should share some responsibilities while they lived under our roof.
Both Iris and Michael, just like average teenagers, were reluctant to do any household chores without enforcement and reward. Iris in particular was constantly reminding me while we were working outside, such as painting the siding of our house or mowing the lawn, that humans should invent more machines to substitute for manual labor. It was clear that Iris believed she would do better with her brain than she would laboring with her hands. That summer was the last one Iris spent at home. She looked for jobs that required her brain, not her hands, ever after.
In the fall of 1986, when the first semester of her sophomore year started, Iris moved to the university dormitory, Illinois Street Residence Hall (ISR), which was so close to the campus that Iris essentially needed only a few minutes to walk to her classes.
This second of Iris’s college years was the year she tried to figure out what her real passion was. In the fall semester, she took a required math course, Abstract Algebra, which she had been struggling with from day one. After a few classes, one day she came to see her dad and complained that she had spent a whole afternoon trying to understand the first page of the textbook, and she could not grasp the meaning of it. She was frustrated, to say the least. Shau-Jin took the textbook and read it and agreed with her. He said that he did not understand why the mathematician had made the statement so hard for students to understand. Shau-Jin started to explain the content of the mathematic theory to Iris in his way. Iris seemed to understand this time, for page one; but there were many new theories as the class went on. On the first exam, she did badly, so she dropped the course immediately. This discouraged her and made her reconsider whether she really wanted to be a theoretical mathematician. She told us that she had previously found math fun, but now she no longer felt that way.
One of the reasons that she failed her math course, in my opinion, was due to the fact that she was doing so many other things at the same time—she had many, many interests! She joined music chorus, recruited students to join her literary society, read books she was interested in—plus she liked to go to parties, as any college girl would. She told me that she wanted to taste all kinds of college life. On Halloween night, for example, she showed me a number of the pictures she had taken at a party. She had dressed as a Hawaiian girl and posed as she was dancing Hawaiian dances. She said that in the ISR, there was a party going on every night if one wanted to go.
When Iris dropped the Abstract Algebra course, it shook her. She started to ask herself whether she should continue to major in math and computer science. She came home to talk to us seriously one day. She said that she loved math and computer science, but she loved writing and psychology even more. She was thinking about transferring either to English literature or psychology. We had a long talk that night. We told her that we had no objection if she wanted to change majors. We told her that we understood that only when one loved a subject would one spend time on it and consequently succeed in that field. Iris was quite relieved—she had thought we would be against the change. Shau-Jin and I loved science and no doubt we encouraged our children to study it, but we stressed to her that we believed that she would succeed only in the subjects she was interested in and wanted to spend time studying. In later years, Iris had expressed her gratitude to us for allowing her to follow her own interest in choosing her career path. In contrast, some Chinese parents, Iris said, forced their children to study subjects, such as medicine or law, instead of their children’s true love.
Then she started pondering whether she should major in literature, journalism, or psychology. I encouraged her to find out by gathering information on each field and talking to the students and professors in each of the departments. Finally, she decided she would like to transfer to journalism after speaking with several friends in both the English and Journalism departments. In journalism, she said that she not only could write, but she could also g
et in contact with many interesting people who would enrich her experiences.
After she decided to transfer to the Journalism Department, she went to see the Dean of the College of Communications. Iris reported to us that when she saw the dean, he asked her to think twice before transferring. He told her that the students in the Journalism Department had difficulties getting jobs after graduation, but that, on the other hand, computer science students had no problems getting jobs. He asked Iris to think further and come back again if she still insisted on transferring. It took Iris another semester to decide whether she should transfer to journalism or not. Actually, Iris did very well her sophomore year; she was on the Dean’s list for both semesters. She was taking not only math and computer science courses, but also rhetoric, psychology, philosophy, and music courses. She took far more courses than were required for graduation.
In January 1987, Professor John Cronan’s recommendation to promote me to Visiting Assistant Professor was passed in the departmental meeting. The whole family thought it was great. Iris, in particular, felt very happy for me. She thought that I should have been promoted long before this date. Very early on, Iris and I had discussed the role of women in society. We agreed that although women in this country had gained equality with men in many aspects, there were still places unfair treatment existed—such as the pay in the workforce. Women’s salaries and promotions still lagged behind men’s, not to mention the fact that it was still quite difficult for women to have both a family and a career, whereas men usually did not have to make such sacrifices and were not expected to “choose” one or the other.
Woman Who Could Not Forget Page 9
