talk 599

It was a shock to hear on ABCNews, George Stan... " This Sunday" at 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM the passing of Iris Chang. I meant to write to my daughter to get more information, and S.S.'s e-mail brought the sad news already. Yes, Iris Chang was the rising star of American-Chinese writers. I read Maxim Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Iris Chang long before any of them become well-known. I read "Silk worm" when it first came out. It is a very detailed biography of Tsien Hsu Sung.
I was interested cause the subject person is a well-known aeronautical engineer/scientist, and the best liked student of Theodore von Karman. They wrote papers in 1939 to 1941 for the correction to the lift curve slope at sub-sonic speed. His wife (nee Chiang) was a daughter of Chiang Bai Lee (100 miles), and music student in voice. He got interested in her because of their common love of opera. He got into trouble because of going to some people's house to listen to classical music, that was distorted to Chinese Opera by local FBI. Iris got all these details in her book. The second and third book, I checked out from from the public library, and did not read very carefully. I do remember James Koo wrote about the third book, and asked writers to look it up. Among the three writers I mentioned above, Maxim wrote about monkey king etc. Amy wrote about her mother's real life biography as fictions in "Joy Luck Club" and "Kitchen God's Wife"

I started talking to my co-workers about her, and got the following:
(1) Sze Jai Zai Pao (World Daily) has written twice about her death. First time was front page news.
(2) One of my co-worker's classmate's wife is her mother (Chang Yin-Yin)'s younger sister. Iris was her niece. She had bi-polar maniac depression for quite awhile. The day before the incident, she called her mother asking about the two year old daughter the mother is taking care of. In Illinois Her husband works for Cisco. Her maternal grandfather
was a famous WWII general. Chang Tee Gwen ( Iron Soldier).

I hope Lighters will not think this write-up is just another gossip from me. Iris Chang did write more serious books for all of us, and deserves to be remembered