Today, August 17, 2021 is the fourth anniversary of Irene Cho’s passing. Irene is the woman behind the peacock 🦚 emoji that we all have on our smartphones. And this story is my way of remembering her and sharing a small piece of her huge legacy.
Emoji is what brought Irene into my life on November 2, 2016, just before the inaugural Emojicon, a conference celebrating emojis. Emojicon was held at the Bespoke event space in the San Francisco Westfield Mall on November 4–6, 2016. Jennifer 8. Lee, the conference co-founder, connected me with Irene, who was then working as a marketing executive with Burma Superstar, a popular San Francisco restaurant chain and one of the sponsors of the Emojicon. I collaborated with Jennifer over a year ago, designing several food emojis and she felt that Irene and I had a strong connection.
Irene invited me to meet at Burma Love (Burma Superstar’s sister restaurant) on Valencia Street in the Mission district. As I sat down, I noticed peacock decorations everywhere.
I was immediately intrigued and asked Irene why there were so many peacock symbols in the restaurant. “I actually didn’t know much about it.” She replied, and looked at the waiter who was serving us the delicious Burmese tea leaf salad, “Let’s ask the waiter. He is from Burma, perhaps he can tell us”. The waiter told us the cultural and historical significance of peacocks to the Burmese people. We learned that the peacock, more accurately, the green peafowl, called the ‘daung’, is the national bird of Burma.
As we finished our meal and exchanged phone numbers, we naturally tried to text each other the peacock emoji. To our amazement, we realized that it didn’t exist on our phone keyboards.
“Well, the Emojicon conference is the day after tomorrow. Perhaps we should submit a peacock emoji!” I jokingly said, while thinking it would be impossible. The dumpling emoji proposal took Jennifer, a few friends, and me several months to complete. We also had to trek to Palo Alto to present the proposal in person to the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit Silicon Valley group responsible for approving all emojis. Both of us were very busy with our full-time jobs, but it was something that we both happened to be passionate about. I started to hesitate but Irene exclaimed “Let’s do it! We will make it.”
We met again in the late afternoon of Emojicon’s 2nd day and we were both exhausted after working our day jobs. Yet, Irene still beamed with so much enthusiasm: “Have you started creating the artwork? I have already started the writing part of the proposal! We might still be able to make it.” It turned out we did have a shot: There was an Emoji Hackathon session at the conference where any attendee could submit an emoji proposal to attending Unicode Consortium representatives. Still, it’s a lot of work, and we only had one day to make the deadline.
But something kept telling us to do it. As we both walked out of the event venue, we even felt “chased” by peacocks. The window displays of many different shops had some kind of peacock theme — definitely a sign from the universe to complete the peacock emoji proposal!
We headed into an all-nighter and by the next day, Irene finished writing the proposal, while I completed the design of the peacock emoji. We crafted a presentation 15 minutes before the event ended and presented our proposal to Unicode and the Emojicon attendees during the emoji hackathon. Here is a tweet of us presenting the peacock emoji at the end of the Emojicon:
A few weeks later, the Unicode Consortium accepted our proposal and short-listed the peacock as an emoji candidate for 2017. To me, this felt truly magical, but Irene always had confidence we could succeed together. Her favorite emoji happens to be the unicorn because she believes in magic.
So while I am so lucky to have met a creative colleague in Irene Cho I cherish our friendship which deepened through meals and conversations… We ate burgers and fries late in the evening while working on the emoji proposal. Irene’s son, Ethan, a hilarious 11-year-old, cracked me up with dad jokes that were printed on the back of the menu. I know he gets his sense of humor from his mother, who I got to know better in this short time.
I learned that Irene loved going to Burma and she was very connected to the restaurant owners. It was almost like she was an honorary Burmese citizen despite being a Korean-American. She was born and grew up in North Carolina, spent her high school years in Korea, and returned to the US for college and her adult life. Before Irene joined Burma Superstar, she worked for the Sundance Film Festival and DreamWorks. She possessed many professional talents with her experience as a publicist and a producer for many indie films. She was also a radio show and podcast producer and host, advocating for Asian-American voices and stories.
Over the next few months, we tried to get together for a post-Emojicon reunion, but we were both busy working and traveling. Sadly, the last time we spoke was via email in July 2017 before one of my trips.
On November 12, 2017, I found myself jet lagged after returning to San Francisco after a long flight from Berlin. Not long after my arrival, a notification from my phone calendar caught my attention: Annual International Tea Festival at the SF Ferry Building. “That’s weird, I didn’t recall ever signing up for this event,” I thought, “May be someone on Facebook invited me. I love tea, and perhaps those varieties of tea will be helpful for my jet lag. I should go!” I clicked on the Eventbrite link: the tickets were sold out. “It’s not far away, I should just walk there and perhaps I can get an onsite ticket,” I thought to myself again. Thus I went.
Indeed, there were people outside selling last-minute tickets. I got my ticket and experienced many different tea products from various vendors, filling the entire floor.
At the end of the hallway, I saw a Burma Superstar booth. “How does Burma Superstar have anything to do with the Tea festival?” I thought to myself, “Oh, the famous tea-leaf salad! Oh my gosh, Irene must be here! It would be so great to see her!”
I quickly made my way to the booth. There were many people, but I couldn’t find Irene. I turned to a person at the booth: “Excuse me, I am looking for Irene Cho.”
“You know Irene?” He said with a bit of surprise and sadness, “I’m Irene’s husband. I am really sorry, but Irene passed away a few months ago in August.”
I stood there with utter disbelief and shock.
Irene, my beautiful, vibrant, and full-of-life Korean-American sister, was no longer here. She was only 46. She was still so young.
I learned from Irene’s husband that Irene had died suddenly from a stroke caused by moyamoya disease, a condition she’d had for some time. Her death came as a shock to her family and friends as she was getting ready to travel to Burma. I expressed my condolences to her husband and asked how their son was doing. We shed tears and I left the Ferry Building. In the years after, I had not been able to get over the fact that Irene left the world. We spent such a short amount of time together — altogether less than 3 days, and yet, her optimism, generosity, kindness, tenacity and creativity, left a huge impact on me.
I always hoped that one day I could share Irene’s story to the world. But I didn’t know where to start.
Fast-forward to early March this year when two BBC reporters, Vivienne Nunis and Sarah Treanor, came to San Francisco from London. They were working diligently on … an emoji documentary series! I was excited to talk about 🦚emoji in the heart of San Francisco Chinatown. And finally, I was able to share my experience with Irene. They asked me if I could contact Irene’s family and friends for the interview. I was not connected to her family but through social media, I found one of Irene’s close friends, Claire Chen-Carter, a Creative Director who lives in the Bay Area, who then connected Vivienne and Sarah to American actor and former Miss Universe Brook Lee, Irene’s former roommate and friend.
Irene’s story on BBC starts 17:35, by Vivienne Nunis and Sarah Treanor
Brook’s words in the interview brought me to tears:
“Irene was ahead of her time. When I met her, Asia hadn’t really been something that was on Hollywood’s radar yet. She was one of the first pioneers to sit down with the people at DreamWorks and explain to them what an untapped market, and potential in Korea, especially in Asia.”
Brook had no idea that Irene was behind the peacock emoji, living in her own phone.
“You know, there’s always a little bit of sadness because the world had to catch up with Irene: Parasite just won the Oscar last year, and now all these years later she (Irene) is not here to see this. She could have been able to sit here with everybody and say: ‘I told you so, I told you so.’ It’s another sort of wave, I guess from heaven of hers, it’s like: ‘Hey, I am still here. It is finally coming to fruition. And not even death can stop me!’ It’s not surprising. It’s something that’s important. Representation is something that she was always hugely proponent of. Things that matter, everyday things that will help you see that you’re being seen matter.”
I finally got the chance to hear this episode on July 31, 2021. A few days later, Irene’s friend Claire was kind enough to drive us to visit Irene’s gravesite in the East Bay. Just like it says on her epitaph: “Irene Cho, she touched the lives of everyone she met.”
For more than three years, I thought that the loss of Irene left a hole in my heart. Every time I saw our peacock emoji, I felt the pain in my heart as I refused to accept the fact that she was gone. But today, as I was reading her story from Vivienne and Sarah on BBC, I was hearing every sentence her friend Brook described her, and as I was on the phone with Claire and Jennifer, we discussed and edited this tribute to her. I finally realized Irene was never gone. She lives on in our hearts.
The peacock has been recognized as the “Phoenix on earth” — She rises from the ashes to recreate.
Thank you, Irene, for giving us the 🦚 peacock emoji.
And thank you, for allowing me to share my human experience with you.
