HELEN YIN

HELEN YIN Artist, Mother, Economist

Helen Yin (née Wan Hung Chang) passed away peacefully on Thursday, Febuary 25, 2016, in Kensington, MD, after surviving 10 years with multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer of the blood. She was 88.


She was a descendant of Confucius and the daughter of Han Min Chang, a banker from Suzhou, China, who at one point in his career played mahjong with warring warlords with whom he did business, and Ling Vang Koo.


Helen studied economics as a college student at St. John's University in Shanghai, a progressive Western liberal arts school founded by US missionaries. Most classes were taught in English. At the college, critical thinking and service to the country were part of the ethos. During college, she worked as a simultaneous translator for a movie theater in Shanghai.


In 1949, she came to the US. She went on to earn an MBA at the University of Denver and a PhD in economics at Columbia University. Along the way, she did baby sitting, house sitting, and taught Chinese for a brief stint at the University of Southern California.


Long before a younger generation of women despaired of having it all, she managed to be a supermom of four and a full-time senior research economist for the US Department of Commerce. By day, her job involved generating balance of payments numbers that feed into national income estimates.


Helen loved the arts, especially painting and music. She was an accomplished painter who studied with modern painter Don Kingman. In her 70s, she studied Chinese painting with collector, authenticator, and Chinese painter C.C. Wang, despite initially being told that he was not accepting new students.


One of the artists she enjoyed emulating was Bada Shanren, a 17th century Chinese painter. Her paintings ranged from panoramic landscapes to close ups of birds, pine trees, or a few vegetables. Her most recent exhibition was in 2010.


Helen's artistic bent was reflected in a clear sense of style. Helen's favorite work outfits were Chanel knockoffs she had custom made in Hong Kong. She gravitated toward muted colors like plum, grey, and burgundy and knits of beige check or sea foam green for warmer seasons.


Helen loved music. Some of her favorites were Chopin études one son played. Especially slow ones like Tristesse (op. 10 no. 3: http://bit.ly/1WjCzxc). During the holidays, when the kids were in college or beyond, she would ask them to play quartets. She seemed to enjoy them, despite the glares, skirmishes, and sniping that would inevitably break out among the kids when someone played a wrong note or lost count. At the end of a movement she would say, "Ai ya, it''s so good to have us all together again."


She planned special trips to New York City just to go with one son to see musicals both new and old, including "In the Heights" and "South Pacific." The Metropolitan Museum of Art was another important destination.


Helen knew how to make things happen. When her first child wanted to learn the violin, she learned that the one music teacher in town was someone whose hardware store contained a woodwind/brass instrument section. At her urging, the man ordered two violins, including one for himself, so he could learn and stay one step ahead of his new student. Eventually, Helen's four children became two violinists, one pianist/cellist, and one pianist/violinist/violist.


Helen did things her own way. In the early 1970s before running had become de rigueur and long before athleisure clothing had entered the mainstream, she went jogging through town in a grey sweatshirt and sweatpants.


A tendency to do things her own way extended to cooking. She made a Chinese-style Thanksgiving turkey stuffing that was Chinese with Western characteristics. The sticky rice, bacon, scallions, soy sauce, giblets, and liver mix always disappeared quickly.


Even her wontons seemed to have American characteristics. In the 1970s, her pork filling contained canned French green beans and a high ratio of meat to beans. Upon seeing her heavily meat-based wontons, her oldest sister who first visited the US in 1980 said that they weren't wontons. They were meatballs.


One spring break, the family went to Rehoboth Beach. Although it was perhaps 40 F, she got in her swimsuit and headed straight into the water without any warmup. Nearly everyone else was huddled in a winter coat or jacket. But Helen wasn't going to miss out on a chance to swim in the ocean.


Helen loved traveling, often on her own. London, Paris, Marseille, Hong Kong, the Silk Road, Göttingen (Germany), and Florence were among her many destinations.


Helen had a strong sense of what was right. She taught her kids that one must respect all things. When one son popped the head off his sister's doll and threw it into the bushes, Helen was shocked. She demanded that he make the doll another head. To this day, the doll sports a papier maché head with yarn for hair and a painted face.


Helen insisted on order. When it came to wontons, that meant each bonnet-shaped wonton had to be neatly lined up behind another. Although they would ultimately all be dumped into a pot of boiling water, that did not matter. If they were set on the plate in a haphazard manner, it would suggest you were a disorderly person and reflect badly on your character, family, and upbringing. She also insisted that clothing on hangers all face the same way. If they did not, she said, they would fight with each other.


Some relatives who came to the US for the first time said that Helen hewed more closely to traditional Chinese values than they did. It's possible that cultural values were lost during the tumultuous years in Red China under Mao Zedong.


She cared for many people. After China normalized relations with the US, she helped two nephews, who had missed out on college during the Cultural Revolution, come to the US to study. She insisted they first get a good foundation in English. They eventually went to Ivy League grad schools for their PhDs.


Helen would go to great lengths to care for others. She wasn't a big cat lover, but when her daughter's cat disappeared, she filled up many Post-It notes, writing that a grey cat (Lucy) was missing. She went door to door, asking if anyone had seen the cat. Eventually, she found the family that had taken the cat in. But they had already sent it away. Luckily, her husband found the cat at the animal shelter.


Helen had an endless appetite for watermelon on a hot summer day, butterscotch ideally from a candy jar at the doctor's office, and ice cream in the middle of the night.


She is survived by her husband, Yichang; four children, Robert, Samuel, John, and Sandra; two nephews she helped bring to the US, George Yin and Allan Hong; her brother in Md. and five sisters in China; and four grandchildren, Richard, Rodger, Brian, and Wesley.


Helen's legacy lives on in the lives of those she left behind.


The world will never be the same.


Donations may be made to JSSA Hospice in memory of Helen Yin: JSSA Hospice, 6123 Montrose Road, Rockville, MD 20852, or donate online at www.jssa.org/donatenow (select Hospice Services from the gift designation drop-down menu).

No funeral service is planned.