From: Jay Zhang
Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004
His passing away is a great shock to me
even I have been aware of his illness for a long time. There has always
been this hope that all is going to be OK.
Tianpei lost his mother at a very young age. His father worked in
railroad construction. He was raised by his grandmother back home in
the countryside of YanTing County, Sichuan.
We shared the same bunker bed for a while. I slept "upstairs", him
"downstairs".
For the first part of his study in college, he considered health and
excercse his first priority and did not put much thoughts in scores.
For the second part, he put more effort in academical works and, smart
as he was, his scores went to the top of the class.
He seemed shy, but can be talkative once he felt comfortable with you.
He talked about the dietary habit of YanTing that had put it at the top
of liver cancer rate in the country, without knowing that his own liver
was probably injured too.
After graduation, he remained in the department for graduate study.
One year later during the summer recess, I went to the dorm to visit
him. I was at the time determined to learn swimming and he offered to
teach. So we rode our bikes towards the school pool. Half way there, a
group of girls happened to be heading our way on their bikes. Tianpei
was totally hypnotized by one of the ladies and fixated his eyes on her
as she was passing us. Since his head now was twisted completely
backwards, his bike rode into the waterbeds on the roadside. The metal
fence made a large cut on his leg. I ended up carrying him on the back
of my bike to the hospital. That delayed my swimming by a year or so.
When I went back to University of Rochester to finish my Ph.D. thesis
in 1993, I first lived a few doors from his house on campus. That young
lady who caused that accident became his wife now and he was a happy
father of a lovely boy. My cousin happeded to be his housemate. For a
month or so, we saw each other almost every day and had dinner together
occasionally as fellow Chinese students often do.
I moved back to New York City area after receiving the degree. His wife
began to do an internship for Sony in New Jersey. She bought us a
camcorder with the internal Sony employee discount. We used that
camcorder for eight years until some friend broke it for us.
The last time I saw him was when we went to Rochester for the funeral
of a friend. Does this remind us life is short, for all of us?
May God bless Tianpei and he deserves to be in a better place.
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2004
On my bookshelf, there are three textbooks on statistics. One is Basic
Statistics, another one is Intermediate Business Statistics, and the
third one is a thin Chinese college text book on statistics. They have
been very useful to me over the years.
When I started this job on credit risk management, I consulted them a
lot to refresh my Statistics just like 11 years back when I started to
do market risk for Chemical Mortgage Bank. Nine years ago, my wife took
a exam to exempt her from statistics class when starting business
school. Professor Zhang Jinzhong happened to be staying with us that
week and used those books to teach her statistics. It took her three
days to learn the subject and pass the exam. It could be the teaching
skill of Professor Zhang, currently the chairman of Chinese Popular
Science Writer's Association, could be that my wife is particularly
smart, or those books are pretty good.
Huang Tianpei gave me those books almost 14 years ago when he just
arrived in University of Rochester. All of you know that I totally
neglected any subject of application nature during college time while
Huang Tianpei majored in Probability and Statistics. When fate played a
joke on us and I became the aspiring engineer and he was the Ph.D.
student on number theory, I had to go to him for help. My first job was
about digital imaging technology and everyone there assumed that I must
be good on any math subject.
I would go to his apartment, sitting on a couch underneath the window
and he began to explain to me from normal distribution, to Markov
process, knightingale, blah, blah. That was also when I took those
books from him. Those two books in English are leftovers by the former
occupant of his desk in the University and the Chinese textbook is the
one he used back in college.
I am really not sure he actually meant to give me those books as gift.
I just never bothered to return them since I assumed that they are more
useful to me than to him. I knew he was not good at asking them back
even if he wanted to. Once I borrowed some money from him when we were
still "bedmates" in Sichuan University, it took him great courage to
remind me while giggling appologetically like it was the most
embarrassing thing.
I always thought that cancer only happened to people who have certain
personality or out of profound sadness. It just does not fit his image.
When I resumed part-time study in 1992 to finish my Ph.D. thesis, I
paid him a visit late at night.
He said to me: "Do you want to see my son? He just arrived a few days
ago."
"No. Please do not wake him up."
"He would not wake up once he falls into sleep no matter what you do."
He carried out his sleeping son from the bedroom and showed it to us in
his
arms.
"He looks like his mother," He said proudly.
He looked like a little girl showing off her favorate stuffed animal.
He was a happy person and spent a happy life, a worthwhile life!