Urbana’s University Laboratory High School music students opened a remembrance celebration with sweet notes for an auditorium filled with friends, community members and former colleagues and teachers of the late Iris Chang.

The Thursday event commemorated the life of the Illinois alumni who was a distinguished journalist, best-selling author and human-rights activist.

On Nov. 9 Chang was found dead in her car from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Los Gatos, Calif. The 36-year-old wife and mother, born in Princeton, N.J., received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University and then later earned her master’s in writing from John Hopkins University in Baltimore.

“All of the speakers talked of their own personal experiences with Iris,” said Fang Gao, audience member and employee at the University’s Graduate Library. “So it made it really nice. I liked the (remembrance) booklet as well.”

Gao attended the event with her daughter Michelle, a freshman at the University Laboratory High School. Chang graduated from the same high school after growing up in Champaign.

“Disbelief and then shock were my immediate reactions (after hearing about Iris’s death),” said Adele Suslick, an English teacher at Chang’s high school.

“She was one of the most passionate individuals I’ve ever met,” Suslick said. “She was very committed and very focused to important issues at hand.”

Suslik has frequently shared Chang’s books and other works with her students.

“Iris lives on at Uni(versity High School),” she said. “(My students) know that she has changed the world in a meaningful way.”

Other speakers at the event gushed of Chang’s contribution to the world.

“Iris was a journalist brimming with fire and enthusiasm,” said Ronald Yates, dean of the College of Communication. “She mastered what I think are the two most empirical skills of journalism: observation and interviewing.”

Yates first knew Chang as a colleague at the Chicago Tribune, where he said Chang had quite an impressive reputation. Journalism professor Robert Reid agreed, saying that her great passion for writing made her stand out amongst her peers when he had her as a student.

“She was always challenging and inspiring,” he said. “She truly was a Curious George. In her 36 years, she has managed to get more done than most people do in 70, 75 years.”

Of her generation, Reid said he wouldn’t be surprised if Chang was found on the top 10 list of the most promising people in the world. Besides having touched so many worldwide with her work, she touched her teacher and mentor in her own way.

“She made an aging man, who could have been discouraged (with teaching) stay with it,” Reid said.

Chang, who was been called one of the most famous young Chinese people today, along with NBA star Yao Ming, has significantly contributed to well-known publications. Besides writing for the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Chang has also been on the best-selling list for her book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Her talents even extended to television and radio. She was featured on Nightline, Jim Lehrer’s News Hour, Charlie Rose and Good Morning America.

Last week, Chang was honored on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Mike Honda’s (D-Calif.) tribute to Chang has been added to the congressional record.

“Iris will be remembered for her work and service to the community,” he wrote in his tribute. “Certainly, the millions of people whom she touched through her writings and her activism will not forget … the public impact of her work promoting peace between peoples of different races and backgrounds. Our community has lost a role model and a close friend; the world has lost one of its finest and most passionate advocates of social and historical justice.”

Even though the formal memorial ceremony for Chang was held in Los Altos, Calif., separate memorials took place in both Washington, D.C., and Nanking, China. Both countries commended the journalist and historian for her voice in writing about the atrocities Japan committed during World War II.

“We are all very saddened by Iris’s passing,” said George Yu, director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies. “We are deprived of the future work of a budding author.”