Shu / Joy
Shu in the Freshman Register.
Shu receiving an award from the Harvard Club of Chicago at the Club's Annual Meeting, June 2024.
Dave Demarteau, Joy, and Brock Walsh, St. Lucia, 1974.
Joy à Paris.
04-14-2025
Shu Yan Chan tells classmate Joy Horowitz the story of his family, who fled the Chinese Communist Revolution in the 1950s as political refugees. Though Shu’s father had earned a law degree from Beijing University and worked as secretary to the mayor of Chongqing, he immigrated with his young family to Chicago where he became a dishwasher before working his way up to chef and opening his own restaurant. “May you live in interesting times,” he often told his son, and Shu would come to understand that expression’s dark undertones.
For Shu Yan Chan, remembering his first Harvard Thanksgiving conjures the deep conversations he had with his charismatic roommate Jeffrey Wright, who would die by suicide in 1977. But it was the kindness of Jeffrey’s father, who took Shu and other Weld Hall “stragglers” to dinner at Durgin Park in downtown Boston in November 1971, that remains a lasting memory.
Other kindnesses followed. Outnumbered by women at the Radcliffe Quad, he fondly recalls how warmly he was accepted at South House. And how house masters Marty and Ann Peretz, darlings of the New Left, hosted salons with the likes of presidential candidate George McGovern and anti-war journalist Frances Fitzgerald.
After graduation, Shu moved to Los Angeles—following the woman he fell in love with at Harvard—and worked on the B-1 nuclear program for Northrop Corp. But after his girlfriend was killed by a drunken driver, he had a moral awakening. “I realized we’ll never get to see this work, because if we do it’ll be Armageddon.”
Returning to Chicago and a career in commercial real estate, he became a director of the Harvard Club of Chicago, the oldest Harvard alumni club in the United States. Despite his lifelong ties to his alma mater, his daughter would matriculate elsewhere. All the same, Shu tells Joy, she likes to say, her father is her “best friend.”