The change from Uni High to a Taiwanese middle school was a shock to Iris. The new environment helped her come out of her shell. She was welcomed by her fellow classmates and was bombarded with interesting questions. She had a good time practicing her Chinese and teaching her classmates English. They were very curious about her life in the U.S. But gradually she learned of the weakness of the Taiwanese education system. She would tell me that a class of fifty or sixty students sitting in fixed seats and listening to the teacher quietly, without expressing opinions of their own, was too passive for her. She also did not like the school rules, such as forcing students to cut their hair so short and making them wear uniforms every day. She told me that she was grateful that she was able to attend school in the U.S. and that she valued the freedom she enjoyed at Uni High even more after her brief stay in a Taiwanese school.
I also brought Iris and Michael to see the house where I had lived in the suburbs of Taipei when I was a little girl their age in 1951. I told them the story of how my parents moved to the place (after they escaped from the Communists and arrived in Taiwan in 1949) with almost no neighbors around, and now it had become a populated town. Also, I told them how my mother raised fifty chickens at one time so we could have eggs. She also planted vegetables and flowers in our yard, which was very beautiful in the spring when the flowers were in blossom. But now when they looked at the yard, it was a polluted home factory. Both Iris and Michael accompanied me to the elementary and middle school I used to attend nearby, but they never could feel the same nostalgia I felt when I walked on that path in 1982.
When Iris was in her third year at Uni High, as a sophomore, the report cards for the first quarter of the year came, and she had done poorly in French. It was not surprising, because I had never heard her listen to the language tapes. Right at this time, Uni added a new language course, Chinese, in addition to the French, German, and Latin that were on the original curriculum. Iris immediately dropped French and took Chinese. We knew this was an easy way out because she had been studying Chinese for six years, but we had no reason to prevent her switch. We knew one day she would realize that she had to face the problem and overcome it.
The first semester of her sophomore year, all I can remember about Iris is her obsession over her IQ score. She had learned there was a Mensa organization and subscribed to its monthly publications. Iris read these carefully and wanted to take an IQ test to see what her score would be. Finally, one Saturday morning in December 1982, she asked me to drive her to the place to take a supervised IQ test. Actually, I had never worried about her IQ, so I didn’t care what her score was. At the time, I was irritated by her obsession with this. I told Iris that I did not think that the fact one had a high IQ score could prove anything. My feeling was that working hard was the most important condition for someone to achieve his or her goal in life. As my mother used to say to me, the success in one’s life was dependent on seventy percent hard work and only thirty percent talent or genetic makeup. That’s what I stressed to Iris at the time.
When Iris first entered Uni High, she had found out there was a school newspaper called Gargoyle, and she immediately wanted to join the editorial board. She did not know, though, that there was a hierarchy among the editors. Seniors or juniors would be the editors and Iris, a subbie, would have to wait for her turn. Iris was disappointed, but she said, after all, the school newspaper was not a literary magazine, more or less just a newsletter for the school. About this time in 1982, she found a magazine called Unique, which was a school literary magazine, started in 1961, which had been discontinued recently because no one at Uni was interested in continuing its publication. Iris was overjoyed and immediately told us that she wanted to revive the magazine.
The discovery of Unique and her determination to revive it occupied Iris for much of her free time after school. She had finally found an outlet. I remember she talked about the magazine all the time, from finding a teacher to sponsor it to finding a team of literary lovers as contributors. She put out a working plan and tried to recruit schoolmates to join her in this endeavor.
She found Ms. Adele Suslick, her English teacher, to serve as the magazine’s adviser. Iris talked to Ms. Suslick many times after school about the revival of the magazine. Because of the work relating to Unique, Ms. Suslick became a good friend and remained so even after Iris graduated from Uni. The magazine Unique was revived and was finally published in 1983, her junior year.
At that time, there was a girl in Iris’s class who was labeled by her classmates as “weird,” cruelly singled out as a target for fun or name-calling in the class. Iris told me she felt very sorry for the girl. Iris felt injustice. She also told me that she did not like one other aspect of Uni High—the size of the school was too small. Everyone knew everybody else, and they were all under scrutiny from others, and it was hard to meet new people when you already knew everyone. She told me that she would never be the kind of person who would follow the crowd. She had her own opinions, she said, as opposed to most people who followed the trends or the fashion or “political correctness.” For example, she never thought that she had to buy a name-brand sweater or signature jeans to wear to promote her status. Very early on, she gave me the impression that she was unique. I had the feeling that most of her fellow classmates did not know her potential.
Besides working on Unique, Iris spent a lot of her after-school and weekend hours on computers. Iris had loved computers since she was in grade school. Every Sunday morning Shau-Jin brought both Iris and Michael to the physics building. He dropped them in the computer room near his office. While he was preparing his lecture notes for the week, they were happily playing PLATO, a computer-based educational system developed at the U of I, which was a pioneer in computer-based teaching tools.
At this time, Iris found out that there was a computer club called “Summit,” which consisted of computer wizards on the UI campus. Iris found the group challenging and wanted to pass the tests and become a member. She studied hard and passed all the tests, then found out that the club had changed the rules and she had to pass more tests in order to get in. Later, she found out that the Summit group was all-male. After hearing of a girl wanting to join in, they had held an emergency meeting. They did not want to have a female in their group, so they changed the rules. Iris felt that this was totally unacceptable. She said that they could not change the rules after she had taken and passed all the tests. In a second, she told us that she did not care about it anymore and told them to “forget it.”
In spite of this incident, she continued attend CERL (Computer Engineering Research Laboratory) on the UI campus for her junior and senior years as a Junior Programmer and did research for PLATO. She met and made friends with a number of computer engineering students there. Her love for the computer only increased, and she felt the computer was part of her future.
In the summer of 1983, the end of her sophomore year, I saw another change in Iris. She opened up gradually and tried out everything that was offered to her. For example, she found a week-long computer workshop taking place at Bradley University, a small college in Peoria, Illinois. This was a typical trait of Iris’s. She always initiated things by herself. She told us she wanted to go so she could learn a new computer language, Pascal, which the camp would teach.
One day in June 1983, Iris told me she had found out about a teenage volunteer service called the Candy Stripers. She told me that the Candy Stripers was a national volunteer organization, and the local chapter was doing volunteer work in Carle Hospital in Urbana. I had never heard about Candy Stripers, and so I called several department stores in town, asking whether they carried the uniform that Iris needed. Later, I realized that the name Candy Striper came from the fact that the uniform was a striped red and white pinafore. Iris applied to the program and was accepted. She went through several weeks of training in order to become a volunteer and was then allowed to work in the hospital. She was well liked there, and some of the patients told her she
was a very pretty young lady, which no doubt was refreshing to hear during these years of high school insecurity. I no longer worried as much about her vanity as I had when she was a child.
Looking back, as parents, we feel very lucky to have had a daughter such as Iris who initiated so many activities that we did not know about. Without her introduction, we would never have known about Mensa, Unique, Summit, Bradley’s summer computer camp, or the Candy Stripers. Our lives were enriched tremendously by her presence.
In later years, Iris often told me that she had begun writing down her goals when she was fifteen years old, and it had proved to be a turning point in her life. To her astonishment, she said, by the end of the year, she had achieved everything she had set out to accomplish on her list—the grades, the extracurricular activities, the awards. She said it was as if the words themselves were possessed by magic. It was then that she realized that she had control over her own destiny.
In the fall of 1983, Iris became a junior at Uni High. One day she proudly showed us the issue of Unique she had been working on for so long. The revival issue had finally been published. Although the issue was thin, it was the product of more than a year of planning and working, along with her and her team’s busy school life. In the issue, there were two of Iris’s poems:
A Soap Bubble
by Iris Chang
A sheen of iridescence
Lustres on a sphere
Glossing a slippery surface
So translucent and crystal clear. . . .
Nature’s paragon of fragility
Hovers in delicate ascent
Glistening in the sunlight
With a shine so scintillant. . . .
Enchanted, I gaze with wonder
At the miracle so near
But perfection is ephemeral
And too soon will disappear. . . .
Sunrise
by Iris Chang
Rosy luminance appears
Over the edge of the earth
Banishing all the darkness
To reveal a new day’s birth. . . .
Streaks of flaming gold
Etch the glowing pink heavens
When a crimson disk emerges
Casting embers as it ascends. . . .
The sun, growing more vivid,
And taking a golden hue
Transforms a magenta sky
Into a deep azure blue. . . .
When I re-read her poems today, it seems like her life was described in her poems: her life was as magnificent as the sunrise, and yet the miracle of her life was ephemeral like a soap bubble, soon gone.
In that issue of Unique was a story written by Iris (but labeled as anonymous), about a little dandelion that had a conversation with a big tree next to it. The dandelion was asking the big tree what the big tree could see over the horizon. The dandelion was impatient and wanted to know more about the universe. The dandelion was searching for a purpose to its existence. The article portrayed exactly, I think, what was in Iris’s mind and her thinking at that period of her life.
Iris grew to love science fiction in those years and read many books in this genre. Shau-Jin and I have fond memories of her talking about the books she read, such as H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. She also loved the book 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by Arthur C. Clarke (with whom she later had corresponded in the 2000’s). Iris also loved to watch the Twilight Zone TV series. Shau-Jin had introduced her to One, Two, Three . . . Infinity by George Gamow and What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger. These two books, I believed, had great influence on her.
She was also very interested in nature and science. I remember she talked a great deal about the book The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley and The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas. Shau-Jin and Iris also loved the book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by the famous physicist Richard P. Feynman. When they discussed the stories of Feynman, both had a particularly good time. Even now, Iris’s crisp laughter was still floating in my ears.
The second semester of Iris’s junior year was college SAT and ACT test time. I knew the ACT and SAT scores were important for admittance to a good college, but I was not very involved in that process. She seemed to know what she should do. She handled everything by herself. Iris wished to get into Harvard or Stanford, but she also knew her grades at Uni and her SAT scores were not good enough. Students at Uni were pre-selected, and they were all exceedingly good academically. Therefore, to make it to the top of the class was not easy.
After the SAT test, it was application time. In May 1984, parents of Uni High students were invited to see the school counselor, who would advise and recommend universities to which each student should apply. We went with Iris to see the school counselor. The counselor looked at Iris’s grades and she immediately told us that there was no need for Iris to apply to any Ivy League universities. In her opinion, there was no chance for her to get in. We were somewhat surprised by her blunt attitude and the way she understated Iris’s potential. At least, she should give a little room for Iris to try, I thought. Needless to say, Iris felt somewhat insulted.
Iris knew her dad and I had gotten our PhD’s from Harvard, but we never tried to convince her that she should go to an Ivy League university. Both Shau-Jin and I always stressed to her that a person’s success in life eventually depended on himself, not on what kind of school he attended. There were plenty of examples, as we told her, of famous and successful people in history who never even had a college degree—and of people who went to prestigious schools and ended up floundering. Nevertheless, in spite of her counselor’s discouragement, she applied to a number of universities including Ivy League schools. She got admitted to Cornell University, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and UC Berkeley, in addition to the University of Illinois.
Iris wished to go to Cornell or the University of Chicago, but we told her the University of Illinois was just as good as Cornell or Chicago, reminding her that she was a year younger than average students entering colleges; to be near home might be better for her. In the end, she chose to attend the U of I. Indeed, she had a good education at the U of I and was a loyal Illini alumna ever after.
In the summer of 1984, we drove to Los Angeles via Yellowstone National Park in our new blue Dodge Aries. Although Iris was only sixteen years old and Michael was a little short of fourteen, both were taller than I was. Michael was as tall as his sister. I felt that I was sandwiched between two giants when I talked to them. When they sat in the back seat of our car, they looked just like a pair of adults.
When Shau-Jin was driving from Illinois to Yellowstone, we not only enjoyed the moving scenery we saw through the window, we also listened to Iris’s comments and opinions along the way. She talked about the books she’d read, the news she’d heard, or her stories in school. She was very talkative and a good storyteller. It seemed that talking never tired her. I really enjoyed listening to her. When she talked, her face was full of expression. She also liked to tell jokes. When she heard a joke, she laughed louder than anyone else. She was reserved in public or in school, but she had no reservations in private when she was talking to us. We asked her to stop talking only when we got lost on the highway or when I needed to take a nap.
After Yellowstone, we drove straight south to Salt Lake City. We took a tour at the big Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and listened to their version of history and the religion of Mormonism. When the church video said that American Indian art and culture could be attributed to the Jews who left Israel to discover the New World, I could see that Iris was frowning with disbelief. We were not Christians, but we were not against any religion or anybody’s belief. As a scientist, I’m always in pursuit of truth. Our views might have influenced Iris. When her friends asked her whether she was Christian or whether she believed in any religion, she would say she was “agnostic” but not an “atheist.”
That summer, the Olympic Games were taking place in Los Angeles. The P
eople’s Republic of China, for the first time, was going to participate in the Games. Before that, only The Republic of China on Taiwan was in the Games. Watching that year’s Olympics in L.A. on TV was very popular among Chinese-Americans, and Iris and Michael were excited about it too. Very naturally, we talked about the two Chinese political systems and the historical background involved. At this time, there was a game between the PRC and the U.S. In front of the TV set, Shau-Jin and I were in favor of the Chinese team, whereas Michael supported the American team. Iris seemed undecided and she said she did not know which side she would prefer. This reminded me an incident Iris told me about when she was in grade school. One of her classmates asked her, if America and China were at war, which side she would be on. Iris told her friend that she hoped there would be never a war between America and China. When she came home, she told me that she was confused and did not know how to answer. She said she loved both countries. In 1984, she still loved both countries. She was not too concerned about which country would win the medal count in the Olympics.
On our way back home from L.A., we passed through Utah again, but this time we accidentally visited Cedar Breaks National Monument near Cedar City. It was raining. When we reached the Monument, the sun suddenly broke through the clouds. The sunshine made the rain-washed sandstones brilliant red. The scene was stunningly beautiful and unforgettable. Could all those scenes Iris saw from the trips we took over the years to the West and to the East Coast have made her more appreciative of nature? The family trip we took together in 1984 spanned more than half of the country; we saw from the vast flat plains of the Midwest to the majestic Teton peaks of Wyoming, from the white sand desert of the Salt Lake to the bright red sandstone of Cedar Breaks, from the glittering neon signs of Reno to the blue seashore of Santa Monica. . . .
In the fall of 1984, Iris began her last year of Uni High. She became the senior editor of the magazine Unique. With the SAT and ACT examinations behind her, the last year of high school was really a free time for all the seniors. Iris collected many articles from her schoolmates for Unique to be published, and she herself also contributed many. When the 1984-1985 issue of Unique came out, it was thicker than before, and she had four poems in it.
Woman Who Could Not Forget Page 8