Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  Iris seemed very happy when I decided to stay home with her, and it was a happy time for me too. I even bought a sewing machine and made simple dresses for Iris and myself. When we wore the dresses, made of the same fabric and from the same pattern, it caught people’s eyes in the street. They commented that we were a lovely pair, mother and daughter. By now, Iris had become a beautiful, energetic little girl. She was very active and loved to talk to me in Chinese.

  Urbana-Champaign is a mid-sized college town, 140 miles south of Chicago. The University is the center of the town. It seemed that everyone in town was in some way associated with the university. I had a good time socializing with Shau-Jin’s colleagues and their wives. We also found a big group of Chinese-American faculty in town. Everyone was nice to us newcomers. We met a number of good-hearted people who showed us around the town. This kind of sincerity, honesty, and down-to-earth quality exhibited by the people of this Midwest college town had been missing in the big cities where we’d lived before. This is probably one of the reasons we lived there for many happy years.

  On September 24, 1970, Michael was born. It took several months for Iris to adjust to the idea that she now had a baby brother. Iris was fascinated with him, but I think her feelings were mixed. She had been the center of the attention in the family, and now my attention was split between her and Michael.

  By the time Michael was six months old and Iris was three years old, I felt that Iris needed to play with other children in her own age group. We decided to send her to a nearby preschool for two or three days a week.

  When the summer of 1971 arrived, Shau-Jin took the whole family with him to visit the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago for a month, and then we drove to Aspen, Colorado, where a physics conference and workshop was taking place. We spent a month in the high country of the Rocky Mountains. In Chinese, there is a saying: “Hearing it a hundred times is not worth as much as seeing it once.” That was our philosophy. We took our children to as many places as we could.

  In the spring of 1971, we found a small old house with a big fenced back yard at 1101 Broadmoor Drive, in south-central Champaign. This was the first house we’d ever owned. Shau-Jin started a vegetable garden and planted tomatoes, beans, Chinese leeks, and other varieties. We also erected a gym set for Iris and Michael. In the middle of the back yard stood a big maple tree. Iris usually spent her time playing under the tree and on the swings. She loved the swings and spent long hours on the gym set. She and Michael also played with water toys in a big round plastic bathtub on the back porch. Summer was hot in Champaign, and the big fenced-in yard with trees and grass was ideal for the children.

  Despite the pastoral setting, 1971 was a difficult time in our lives. Shau-Jin worked extremely hard, and the Physics Department liked him very much. He had many papers published in prestigious physics journals and was considered one of the leading physicists in his field. He was also rated by his students as an excellent teacher. This was quite an honor for an immigrant such as Shau-Jin, whose native language was not English. The department promoted him to associate professor with tenure after only two years. But unfortunately, at that time the University of Illinois froze the whole university budget, according to the Illinois state government policy, due to a state budget deficiency. That year there were no salary increases for the entire university. Shau-Jin got promoted in rank, but without the commensurate increase in salary. We had a new mortgage to pay, and the house needed remodeling. We now had a family of four, with two young children. We were feeling the pinch financially, and it became necessary for me to go back to work.

  In the fall of 1971, I returned to Dr. Hager’s lab in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Illinois. I had been away from the lab since the spring of 1970; but in the interval that I wasn’t working, I attended the department seminars once in a while, when there were interesting speakers coming to campus. I reminded myself constantly that I should keep up in my field so I would not be out of date.

  We sent Iris to a Montessori preschool, which was located just across the street from our house. It was very convenient for me to walk her there in the morning before I went to work. This was one of the reasons we bought that particular house.

  Iris seemed unhappy in the Montessori preschool. She started to suck her fingers excessively. She frequently woke up in the middle of the night. I learned that, for Iris, a new house and a new school, plus our own hectic lives, made her emotionally insecure. She had nightmares at night, and she needed to be reminded of our love for her. I learned at this very early time that Iris was a sensitive child. What happened around her seemed to affect her more than ordinary kids. I also learned that I would have to deal with her feelings in a more special and tender way.

  In 1972, my parents immigrated to the U.S. and lived in New York City. Iris and Michael could finally meet their grandparents in person. Although my mother had visited us in 1968 when Iris was just a few months old, Iris had no memory of her. Iris and Michael knew of their grandparents in Taiwan, but meeting them in person would be a very different experience.

  An opportunity came for Shau-Jin to visit the Brookhaven National Lab in Long Island, New York in the summer of 1972, very close to my parents in New York City.

  My parents lived in a part of a rental house where my brother had helped them settle down temporarily. My father was seventy-three years old at the time, and my mother was fifty-eight. This was the last stop of their long life’s journey. They had grown up in China, lived through both the Sino-Japanese War and the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists, and finally settled down in Taiwan. They had never thought they would come to the U.S. to retire, despite the fact that their five children were all here.

  When we visited my parents in the summer of 1972, they had just arrived a few months before and were having difficulties adapting to their new lives. This was especially true for my father, who continuously complained that he had bad headaches due to the trans-Pacific and transcontinental flight. It took him a long time to correct his jetlag. My mother was overjoyed to see Iris and Michael, though. She had raised five children and had loved children all her life. Iris was her first granddaughter, and, as mentioned above, she had taken care of her in Princeton for several months when Iris was just a few months old. Therefore, she had a special place in her heart for Iris. My mother was a very good cook, and the first thing she did when we visited was to go to the kitchen to fix some good food for all of us. She derived much enjoyment from watching others eat her food, which for her was an expression of love as well as nourishment.

  Iris was impressed with the books my father had brought over from Taiwan, now crammed in box after box in the bedroom. I told Iris that her grandpa was a great writer who had read and written many books.

  Grandpa was taking every opportunity to lecture Iris and Michael. He didn’t miss a chance, even with a bad headache, to tell them that they should not forget Chinese culture and that they should learn to speak and read Chinese as well. I was sure Michael did not understand what he was talking about, and I saw him sneak away. Iris was curious, however. She listened but later asked me why grandpa spoke so loud. Smiling to myself, I was sure both of them secretly agreed that they liked grandma, with her yummy food, better.

  My father at one point asked me to come to his side. He specifically instructed me that I should remember to teach Iris and Michael Chinese. The way he spoke to me, he seemed to think that we would not see each other again. He was wrong: he lived into his nineties. But on that day when we first saw each other since I’d left home for the U.S. ten years earlier, he said “You came to America to learn Western modern technologies. You should know that China has a five-thousand-year-old history. As for philosophy and ethics, the West needs to learn from us!”

  My father was a very proud man. He was loyal to his old country and a fervent admirer of Chinese culture. He always reminded me of the beauty of Chinese literature and philosophy. He wanted me not to forget ou
r Chinese roots, no matter where we went. He told me, emphatically, “You should be very proud to be Chinese!”

  In the spring of 1972, Shau-Jin was awarded a Sloan Fellowship. This gave him the opportunity to relinquish his teaching duties. He decided to visit the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton again in the fall of 1972 for one academic year. His plan was that after the end of the Institute visit, he would go to Europe to visit CERN, a center for European nuclear research based in Geneva. So when we came back from the Brookhaven National Lab at the end of the summer of 1972, we sublet our Champaign house for one year and left for Princeton.

  As for me, I still waged a constant struggle in my mind between career and family, as so many women have done and continue to today. I wanted both to have a successful career and to raise a happy family.

  After Michael was born, I had stayed at home raising children without working for a year, but I just could not help feeling bored and frustrated even though I loved Michael and Iris with all my heart. So I had gone back to work, but then felt frustrated for different reasons. The baby-sitter was not as competent as I had hoped, and when I got home millions of house chores were waiting for me. I was physically exhausted. The break I was about to take in 1972 at Princeton would give me a chance to think and reflect and ask myself what was really the most important thing in my life.

  When we moved to Princeton, I got a chance to be a full-time mom again. Maybe due to the beautiful scenery in this attractive small town in New Jersey, things would improve. I was very happy to be back in Princeton.

  Iris was almost five years old; her birthday was coming. I always envied the full-time housewives who could take time to make good meals for the entire family and bake some cookies or a nice cake. I thought I should do something for Iris’s birthday party. I happened to see a picture of a beautiful gingerbread house in one of the home or women’s magazines. This is it, I told myself.

  I told Iris I was going to make a gingerbread house for her fifth birthday and would invite her little friends to come over and enjoy it. Iris was very excited. The day before her birthday, she watched me in the kitchen. She also served as a self-appointed guard to prevent Michael from taking the M&M candies that we were going to use for the decoration of the gingerbread house. Since I was not working, and I was no longer rushed or nagging at them, both Iris and Michael seemed very happy and behaved amiably. There was a peaceful atmosphere in the house, the kind of peace that had not been in our home for a long time.

  We first baked a full sheet of gingerbread and then cut it into the size of the walls and the roof according to the recipe. We used powdered sugar mixed with a little water to serve as glue to put the house together. Also, we baked several gingerbread men hand in hand, and put them standing in front of the house to serve as a fence. Using red-and-white candy canes, chocolate chip cookies, and colorful M & Ms, we decorated the front door, the roof, and the chimney. Finally, a beautiful gingerbread house appeared. Iris was very excited, overwhelmed by the beauty, and suggested that we should not eat it, or at least let it stand there for a while after the party.

  When the party finally came, all the little girls and boys adored the gingerbread house. They surrounded it and pointed to the décor and exclaimed how beautiful it was. All the kids announced with admiration how lucky Iris was. I could see that she was the center of the attention. She was very pleased, and her eyes were locked on the gingerbread house the whole time with a streak of pride on her face. I was pretty proud myself!

  The year in Princeton was a happy time, especially because we were already familiar with the Institute and the surrounding town. Most of the visitors at the Institute were scholars from foreign countries in the fields of mathematics, physics, history, and economics. We met families from Germany, Switzerland, France, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, and more. A person did have the opportunity to broaden his worldview in this setting. The interesting thing was that the children of most of those visitors could not speak English well, so you did have a sense that being bilingual or multilingual was an advantage for children. This confirmed our earlier belief that teaching both Chinese and English to our children would reap benefits for them in their later lives.

  At the time, I was ready to start teaching Iris to read and saw an article on how to encourage children to read. It suggested that parents could write the name of an object on an index card and attach the card to the object. Therefore, the inside of our house was full of index cards attached to, for example, chair, table, lamp, sofa, cup, and so forth. Our friends could not believe that we were so devoted and had a fun time teasing us. They remarked, “Ah! Are you trying to produce an Einstein?!” Indeed, we lived on Einstein Drive, and all the roads in the Institute were named after famous physicists or mathematicians, so perhaps we did have “Einstein” on the brain!

  Iris was attending the preschool located in the housing complex of the Institute. The teacher was a very kind lady. In class, she encouraged the children to express themselves. Iris was still very shy and did not speak much at school. The teacher was particularly nice to Iris, trying to help bring her out of her shell, and she told me that Iris loved to read. She suggested that maybe we could lead her to talk about the story in a book we read together, which would help her move on to talking about other things.

  One day, Iris seemed to want to tell me a story, and I suggested we write it down. In the house we had piles of used computer printouts, which we gave to the children so they could write and draw on them. Iris started out by drawing pictures with colorful markers about the story. On each page, I then helped her write down the words she dictated to me. It was a “catch a robber” story. After we finished the story, I made it into book form by stapling the pages together. On the front page we wrote “The Story by Iris Chang.” She took the book to the school the next day and showed it to her teacher. When I picked her up, the teacher told me that she had let Iris read the story to the class. It was a big success. This was probably Iris’s first book and certainly her first “book reading.”

  Princeton was just under an hour away from New York City. During weekends, we often took the two children to New York to visit my parents. My sister Ling-Ling had come to the U.S. before my parents had, and she also lived in New York City. Ling-Ling was four years older than I, and had been a news reporter in Taiwan. Like our father, she was also a writer and a poet and had published several books. Iris was impressed. I wondered: did she secretly want to be a writer, too?

  When the term at Princeton ended in the spring of 1973, we prepared to leave for Europe for the summer. Shau-Jin was going to visit CERN in Geneva, but I had a bigger plan: I wanted to take this opportunity to tour as many European countries as possible.

  During that summer, before we even reached Geneva, we toured London, Amsterdam, Belgium, and Paris. By the time we got to Paris, the two children were tired of the gypsy lifestyle and refused to see any more museums or historical buildings.

  Finally we reached Geneva, where Shau-Jin would be working at CERN for the next several months. We lived in a high-rise building near the Geneva airport. During the day, Iris attended a nearby preschool called La Rond, where both French and English were spoken. We took the opportunity, since we had been already in Geneva, to visit the nearby cities in Switzerland and neighboring countries. At the end of our four months in Europe, everyone seemed to have had enough castles, cathedrals, museums, fountains, and sculptures for a lifetime, and all were longing to go home.

  When we returned to the U.S., Iris attended kindergarten at Bottenfield School near our house in Champaign, Illinois. Michael went to the Montessori school across the street, the same one Iris had attended.

  One day, Iris came home from school with a note from her kindergarten teacher. It was a letter that said that Iris had speech problems; the teacher asked our permission to send her to speech therapy class every morning for a half hour before regular school hours.

  Our first reaction was: “Speech therapy? Impossible!”
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  Later, after we talked to the teacher, we realized that Iris was very shy at school and did not talk at all in class discussions. This was totally in contrast to the way she was at home. Iris talked a lot at home, more than average children. She talked endlessly to me, describing what had happened in school in every detail. We agreed to let Iris go to the special speech class every morning. We also took her teacher’s advice: inviting her friends to come to our house to play, to enhance her social skills. Before long, she was very active in school and had made a number of good friends in her class. Years later, when we watched Iris speaking eloquently on television interviews, I told our friends the story: that when Iris was a little girl, she had been shy and did not like to talk in school. No one believed it.

  Once we came home from Europe in the fall of 1973, Shau-Jin and I firmly believed that we needed to teach both children not just to speak Chinese, but to read and write it as well. At home, we spoke Chinese and enforced it by answering the children in Chinese even though they spoke to us in English. It was hard to enforce the rule sometimes, because Iris and Michael spoke to each other in English. By the time Iris enrolled in kindergarten, I was seriously thinking about establishing a Chinese class so Iris could learn written Chinese in an organized setting.

  At the time, there were not many Chinese-Americans in Urbana-Champaign. The number of Chinese children was so few that to form a Chinese class was not possible without recruiting. To gather enough students was even harder due to the fact that some Chinese families believed that learning Chinese at such a young age would slow down their learning of English. Nevertheless, with my persuasion and that of others, a Chinese class was established later in the fall of 1973. On Saturday mornings, about ten children were gathered in a classroom on the University of Illinois campus.