Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  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, st
ar 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.

  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.

  Fresh Out of College

  In 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.<
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  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!