December 2, 2004, 4 PM
Spurlock Auditorium, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
On the morning of November 10, 2004, at seven o’clock, as I was driving to school, the host on WILL AM 580 announced the news of Iris Chang’s death. Disbelieving, stunned, I pulled the car over and called my husband — I needed to talk to someone about what I had just heard, to try to make sense of the tragedy.
I had always loved Iris very much.
The word “multifaceted” is not enough to describe her. She was the most passionate person I have ever met — fully attentive, fully present, throwing the whole of herself into whatever she had taken on.
I first met Iris in 1983, when she and Bob Winter were editing the Lab High School literary magazine, UNIQUE. Iris had set out to revive the magazine, which had not been published since 1980, and she asked me to be the faculty adviser.
She was also my student in twelfth-grade English in 1984-85, the year Russell Ames was on the school board and Warren Loyer was principal. I remember the punk look was everywhere among the seniors that year, and “McJobs” were what the students were chasing.
Iris’s first published piece was, I believe, a short poem that appeared in UNIQUE in 1980-81:
Time
Going steadily on
Destroying, mysterious, conquering
Never stopping
Becoming eternity.
She kept writing throughout her years at Lab High. In 1983-84 she published two more poems, and in 1984-85 several others. Most of these early pieces turned on the theme of change and impermanence.
Beside her senior portrait in the 1984-85 yearbook, she set down a sentence by the Victorian writer Matthew Arnold: “Poetry is the most beautiful, deepest, and most effective expression of things, and that is wherein its importance lies.” And another, from Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Iris perhaps did not believe knowledge was the highest thing — but in advanced English class, she displayed a breadth of reading on a wide range of subjects. More importantly, she had a natural gift for public speaking, and a knack for arguing with persuasive evidence. I remember the meticulous detail of her note cards. She was not chasing a grade; she was after a complete understanding. And when she spoke, she always looked you straight in the eye. There was no doubt that she believed in what she was saying — and she wanted you to believe it too.
In 1998 I spent a remarkable weekend with Iris. She had just come back from her home in San Jose to receive the 1998 Lab High Excellent Alumni Award. At the opening she gave a wonderful speech. In it she said:
“When I wrote The Rape of Nanking, I was struck by how badly the historical record itself had been disfigured by acts of genocide and bloodshed. My education — at Lab High, at Illinois, at Johns Hopkins — had given me no real preparation for confronting the story of Nanjing and other atrocities. I was shocked, not only by the stories themselves, but by how readily people allow such things to slip from memory, and by the threat that this kind of forgetting poses to human civilization. The thought that some people would be moved by my book has been, more than once, the single thing that kept me going.”
We were indeed moved — and so were many other readers across the country, enough to keep the book on The New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks.
The next day, Iris and I decided to meet at an antique shop to talk. She told me a great deal about her plans for children. At the time she expected that pregnancy and the demands of her career would be her next priorities. As it turned out, what she did instead was write another remarkable book — The Chinese in America. I shared that book with my senior class last year, and this year I will use it alongside The Joy Luck Club with my new freshmen. Time has gone by. Iris’s son is two years old now.
Because of her education at University Lab High, Iris Chang has, over the past decade, become the most powerful voice of Chinese Americans. In her first published book, Thread of the Silkworm, she inscribed for me:
“Thank you for teaching me the research skills I needed to write this book! Your advanced debate class had a profound influence on my life.”
And in return, she gave Lab High a tremendous influence. She has shaped the way Lab High students understand the history of twentieth-century Asia; she has taught them not to remain silent in the face of injustice. Her writing turns up regularly in classroom discussion.
In a real sense, Iris Chang is still alive at Lab High. Our students know her, and they cheer for what she accomplished. They see her as a woman who changed the world in a meaningful way. More than anything, she has given Lab High students a deeper sense of social justice. They want to inspire others, as she did. They want to tell a story worth telling. They want their lives to count for something.
When they go and do these things, I know they will be affirming the life and the dream of Iris Chang. To close, I have chosen a few lines from a poem about the dawn that Iris wrote in eleventh grade:
At the ends of the earth,
Drive away all the darkness,
To open a new day…
Sunlight, alive and growing,
With gold
Paints the purple-red firmament
Into blue.
- (Translated by Yang Hui, reviewed by Sheng Jie, August 6, 2018.)
