wh. 写了： 2024年 1月 15日 09:59
另外naperville这个地名无比熟悉。疫情期间有一对非常优秀的姐妹在高速上撞车去世，也是这个地方的人吧，好像是哈佛MIT等名校毕业或就读的。去年有个UIUC刚毕业的CS女生在德国天鹅堡被人推下悬崖，也是住在那里的吧。那里是不是华人很多……
找了一下这对naperville姐妹的新闻，也是在ohio车祸去世……2020年圣诞前从纽约开到芝加哥，因为怕坐飞机感染病毒，所以开长途车。老大本科MIT，硕士Berkeley。老二本科Caltech，博士Princeton，还差半年读完。
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/ ... story.html
Naperville sisters die after car crash on drive home to visit their parents for the holidays. ‘They devoted their whole life to raising those girls.’
The terrible news of the Yang sisters’ deaths traveled fast and far.
Angel, 29, and Cassidy, 26, were killed in a car accident while driving from New York to Naperville. It was Dec. 5, and they were driving home to visit their parents for the holidays. The crash happened in Ohio.
They were their parents’ only children.
“They devoted their whole life to raising those girls,” said Christine Zhang, who has known the Yang family for two decades. “They have nothing now.”
Zhongjin Yang and Jie Yao, both natives of mainland China, moved with their daughters to the United States in 1994. Angel was born in Oslo, Norway, where Zhongjin Yang was earning his Ph.D. from the University of Oslo. Cassidy was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, and was 2 months old when the family moved to Naperville.
The sisters both graduated from Naperville Central High School. During their pre-high school years, they attended Ray Chinese School on the weekends, where Zhang was their teacher.
“They were the top of their class in everything,” Zhang said. “Anything they tried.”
Angel Yang was fluent in Chinese, Japanese, French and English. She attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and double majored in physics and management science before earning a master’s degree at University of California, Berkeley. She worked as a consultant in New York. She loved to paint.
Cassidy Yang double majored in physics and business economics and management at California Institute of Technology before enrolling at Princeton in 2016 to earn her Ph.D. in quantitative and computational biology. She was scheduled to complete her Ph.D. in May 2021. She spent the past few months working with volunteer scientists at Princeton to answer questions from the public about COVID-19. She was a friend and mentor to many. She donated her organs upon her death.
“The way their parents raised them was a big example for a lot of people in the Chinese American community,” said Yubo Su, a friend of Cassidy Yang’s from Cal Tech. “Their story touched a lot of our parents.”
Su said his friend in Boston heard about the Yangs’ deaths from another friend’s parents in San Francisco.
“It spread like wildfire,” Su said.
“It’s the saddest thing,” said Zhang, their former teacher. “They were going to bloom, big time.”
Zhang, with the help of longtime Yang family friend Jiyong Zhao, helped set up a GoFundMe page in Cassidy and Angel’s honor. They set a goal of $100,000, figuring that would cover the costs of two eventual funerals. The fund exceeded that goal in fewer than 24 hours.
Zhongjin Yang, Angel and Cassidy’s father, is well known in Naperville, both as an accomplished physicist who worked at Argonne National Laboratory and as a frequent volunteer. Jie Yao, their mother, is a telecommunications engineer.
“Even in the coldest Chicago winter, Mr. Yang would go out and patrol traffic,” said Zhao, who is the principal of Ray Chinese School. “Even after his daughters left the school and went to college, Mr. Yang just keeps coming to help the school. Everybody loves to see him.”
Zhongjin Yang told his friends he was grateful for the money they were raising, but he didn’t want to keep it for himself. Instead he plans to use it to establish the Angel and Cassidy Foundation, which will fund education opportunities for girls and young women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. (To donate, visit gofundme.com/f/angel-yang-cassidy-yang.)
Cassidy Yang was especially passionate about encouraging women to pursue STEM careers and supporting them once they made the commitment. At Princeton, she was the outreach coordinator for the Graduate Women in Science and Engineering group.
“Cassidy was really the finest of friends,” said Su. “Always supporting you, always helping you. Laughing at you if that was the right thing to do.”
She was generous with her time and space. She hosted an annual Friendsgiving feast at her Princeton apartment. She was brilliant, but humble.
“She would pretend she was struggling with something to get you to talk about it,” Su said. “She would say, ‘I’m having a lot of trouble with this one part of my essay. How are you doing?’ It was her way of checking in on us.”
When they needed a break from studying, Su said they would watch Korean dramas together.
“She asked if we could watch them with the Chinese subtitles because she thought they were better than the English subtitles,” Su said. “Her Chinese was quite a bit better than mine.”
Angel Yang was quiet, said her childhood friend Sophie Chung, until she felt comfortable around you.
“Then she would speak her mind,” Chung said.
Chung and Angel Yang attended school together from the time they were 8 years old, through their years at MIT.
“She was always very, very sweet-natured and super hardworking,” Chung said. “But she was one of those people who never points to herself. She just did the work.”
Both Yang sisters took piano lessons from Chung’s mom. Chung and Angel Yang played together in a piano trio at MIT. Chung last saw her longtime friend at a mutual friend’s wedding.
Zhang said Angel and Cassidy’s parents haven’t been ready to talk publicly yet. They wrote tributes to their daughters on a private memorial page, which contains dozens and dozens of photos and stories shared by friends.
“Her life was brilliantly radiant even if cut short,” they wrote at the end of their tribute to Angel. “We, as her parents, couldn’t be more proud of her.”
“Her life was short but brilliant,” they wrote at the end of Cassidy’s. “We, her parents, are so very proud of her.”
Donations and kind words continue to pour into the GoFundMe from around the world. Several posts are from people who never met the Yang family, but feel a kinship with the family and mourn what humanity lost when Angel and Cassidy died.
“The main goal is to carry on their names,” Zhao said. “We will live without them, but we are all hurting.”
Angel Yang, left, with her parents, Jie Yao and Zhongjin Yang, and her sister, Cassidy Yang, shown here on Christmas Day 2018. Angel and Cassidy were killed in a car accident on Dec. 5, 2020, while returning home to Naperville for the holidays. (Christine Zhang)