Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  Actually, the trip to China was carefully planned. Iris mailed us her itinerary and a long list of names of people she was going to meet in three cities in China: Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing. The itinerary included dates, and the places she could be reached on those dates.

  On May 31, Iris flew to Hangzhou, the city where Tsien had spent his earliest childhood years. On June 6, she took a train from Hangzhou to Shanghai. At that time, the National Science Foundation grant agent tried to contact her about her grant proposal; he managed to reach us instead. Her proposal was passed, under the condition that she would modify her proposed budget. We passed this good news to her when she reached the prearranged hotel in Shanghai. She was quite happy and surprised. She immediately revised her budget accordingly. Her carefully written grant proposal had paid off, although it had taken a long time.

  In the same phone call, Iris told us that upon arrival in Shanghai, she found that the rate of the guest house at Chiao Tung University in Shanghai had doubled, more than she had anticipated, and she was worried about having enough money to cover the whole trip. Finally, she told us that one of the professors in Beijing had offered her a place to stay in his house once she reached there. That solved her problem.

  On June 10, 1993, Iris wrote us a postcard from Shanghai:

  Dear Mom and Dad:

  Thank you so much for letting me know about the news from NSF! After talking with you on the phone, I called Brett and he faxed me the information. I went to the Sheraton Hotel and faxed back a revised budget and explanation of the figures. I reduced the budget from $70,000 to $60,000.

  As I mentioned to Brett, local historians in Hangzhou helped me find Tsien’s childhood home, his ancestral temple, his father’s old home and even his father’s alma mater and workplace. On the 6th I took a train to Shanghai. As I watched the scenery from my window, I was struck by how many people lived in China. Even in the countryside you are never out of sight of other people. On Brett’s farm, corn and soybean stretch unbroken to the edge of the horizon without another barn or house in sight. In China, the farmer’s houses look like dormitories or condominiums, and the land is a patch of rice paddies and maize.

  Today, I walked about Chiao Tung University and took photos . . . Tsien’s old dorm, library and classrooms. Tomorrow, a history major will help me search for material in the Chiao Tung archives. I’ll write back soon. Love, Iris

  Iris went to Shanghai, where Tsien had spent his college years at Jiaotong (Chiao Tung) University. There, Iris visited the school archives and found old yearbooks and photographs of Tsien, even his class rank and scholastic records. Iris hired a junior editor at a Shanghai publishing company to help her in searching secondary source material about the school and Shanghai in the 1930s. The editor also accompanied Iris on important interviews with Tsien’s former college classmates still living in the city.

  Aside from researching Tsien’s college years, Iris attended the International Space Conference of Pacific Basin Societies, held in Shanghai. She had learned of the Shanghai conference when she was at the 1992 World Space Congress in Washington, and had gotten an invitation from the Chinese missile scientists there. At the Shanghai conference, she met and interviewed more missile scientists and colleagues of Tsien’s and obtained more contact names in Beijing. As a Conference delegate, Iris was also given a tour of models of certain Chinese launch vehicles and satellites.

  On June 15, Iris took a train to Beijing. We had not heard from her for several days, so we called her at the hotel she was scheduled to be in. She was fine and happy and told us that she was able to meet people in Beijing who helped her a great deal. We got a postcard from her, dated June 20, 1993, which she wrote in small scribbles:

  Dear Mom and Dad:

  Thanks for calling me yesterday . . . I’m amazed you actually got through to me. Today I moved to Room 3202 of the Tsinghua Hotel. Dr. Tsien’s secretary’s son and daughter-in-law took me to see the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs today (Wang Shouyun, who is away on a conference, arranged for a special car and chauffeur) seems incredible to me that such a wall could have been erected hundreds of years ago, with raw manpower and stone. Spent a lot of time wondering how many lives were lost building the wall, and how it must have felt to be a laborer, walking up and down those mountains carrying those rocks. I also wondered if the wall symbolized a deep suspicion and paranoia of foreign ideas during the time of the wall’s construction, as well as tremendous bureaucratic and organizational skills. Felt kind of embarrassed when Wang’s son asked me to name American’s natural landmarks . . . Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Sears Tower, Walt Disney Land. . . . How uncultured we must appear to China! Love, Iris

  Iris spent two and a half weeks in Beijing, where Tsien had spent most of his life—first as a student in the late 1910s and 1920s, and later as the founder and administrator of the Chinese missile program from the 1950s until his recent death (in 2009, at the age of ninety-six). During Iris’s stay in Beijing, she visited Tsien’s grade school and high school (where she obtained priceless class photographs from the 1920s), and the Qinghua University archives, and the compounds where Tsien had worked and lived after he returned to China in 1955.

  Iris conducted a series of taped oral-history interviews with Tsien’s former scientific colleagues as well as people who had been very close to him such as secretaries, family friends, and high-school and college classmates. Iris said she had gathered unpublished documents and memoirs about Tsien, as well as more than fifty hours of interviews. However, she was never able to get an interview from Tsien himself or his wife, who were still living in Beijing at the time. According to Iris, Tsien was an exceedingly private person. His refusal to grant an interview did not come as a surprise: Tsien, since his return to China, had never granted an interview to any American writer, perhaps still hurt about being falsely accused by the American government during the McCarthy years. Iris told us, according to Tsien’s secretary, that he also forbade anyone in China to write a biography on him (except the person he appointed to do so) while he was still alive.

  The fact that Iris was able to talk to Tsien’s secretary and a number of powerful officials and military generals in Beijing was based on their presumptive hope that Iris would write a biography according to their wishes. However, Iris had clearly expressed to them that she had to gather all the materials, sort them out, and write a fair account. She told us that her frank and non-appeased attitude put them on uneasy terms.

  In the summer of 1991, a few months after Susan Rabiner had given Iris the book idea on Dr. Tsien, Iris was able to locate Tsien’s son, Yucon, in Fremont, California, who (against his family’s wishes) granted Iris an interview in his car. That Iris was able to track down Tsien’s son and secure an interview with him in the U.S. impressed Susan Rabiner, who fully appreciated Iris’s journalistic ability and dedication.

  The trip to China completed the research on Tsien and gave Iris a full picture of his life and a deep understanding of the impact of his work on China’s missile program. On her return on July 4, 1993, Iris had far more materials on Tsien than she could write about in one book. The NSF grant, which finally arrived in September 1993, helped Iris tremendously.

  On January 14, 1994, we flew to California to attend the wedding of Shau-Jin’s nephew, Bernie, in Los Angeles. While we were in Los Angeles, we experienced the violent earthquake on early morning of January 17, 1994. It was 6.7 magnitude, and the epicenter was near Northridge, a mere twenty miles north of Santa Monica where we were staying. Fortunately, we escaped the disaster and were able to get back home safely.

  Sadly, there were more tragedies to come in 1994. On Monday, March 14, I got a call from my brother in New York telling me that my father had passed away in the early morning. He had been very sick for the past year, and we knew he would not live long, but still, the feeling of sadness and loss is hard to describe. He lived to be ninety-five years old, but this was the first death I had experienced in our family. Up to that day
, I had not really felt the sting of death. My paternal grandparents had died when my father was very young, and my maternal grandpa died when my mother was in her twenties, so they were never a part of our lives. My mom’s mother died in old age, but she was trapped in mainland China under Communist rule and we could not visit her or be present at the funeral because of political reasons. Therefore, there was never a death in our close family until my father died in 1994. I immediately flew to New York. On the plane, my tears would not stop. The flight attendant looked at me with curious eyes.

  All of the children and their spouses and grandchildren of my father flew to New York for the funeral, including Iris and Michael. The funeral was on Friday, March 18, at a funeral home in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown. Besides family members, some Chinese community leaders and Chinese newspaper reporters were there too because my father had a reputation as a writer and author in the New York Chinese circle. In the ceremony, my two brothers and my younger sister and I each gave a short speech on how our father had influenced us when we were growing up. My older sister Ling-Ling, who had taken care of my father in his last years, was so devastated that she could not speak. While the members of my family spoke, I saw that Iris was quickly writing something down on a small piece of paper; and then, at the end, she stood up and said she would like to speak a few words. What she said at the funeral was recorded in a memorial pamphlet that my brother Cheng-Cheng compiled. Iris said:

  My grandfather had an incredible life. He was born in 1899, the year when the Boxer Rebellion swept through China. He was twelve when the Qing Dynasty collapsed, ending more than two centuries of rule. He was a teenager when the Republic of China was established and World War I broke out. He was thirty-eight when the Japanese invaded China. He was forty-six when World War II ended. He was fifty when China fell to the Communists. He was seventy-three when he first stepped foot on American soil, the very same year Nixon made his historic visit to the People’s Republic of China. He was ninety when Chinese tanks massacred students in Tiananmen Square.

  I caught only glimpses of that life. They came to me first through stories my mother would tell over the dinner table when I was a little girl—stories of grandpa being captured by bandits, writing stories that got him arrested, inciting riots in prison and even suffering torture. They created in my mind a portrait of my grandfather as an intensely headstrong, vociferous and individualistic man—a man who was determined to air his opinions even during politically dangerous times.

  . . .

  My grandfather may have passed on, but I’ll never forget his courage, his dedication to education and most of all, his passion and enthusiasm of life. He died a fighter.

  I was really impressed by this speech. First, she told me later, her desire to talk had been driven by a last-minute impulse. She quickly wrote down an outline on the back of a small piece of a sales receipt. She could write down the historical events chronologically in her grandpa’s life in such a short time—which must be due to her latest research on the book she was writing, as well as her previous career as a news reporter. It was impressive, not just that she could relate to her grandpa’s life with history, but the fact that she could speak so eloquently despite being so emotional at the same time. I remember that she was wearing a long-sleeve black brocade dress that showed her elegant figure. She stood very gracefully with her long dark hair while she spoke, standing out in the crowd.

  After the ceremony, several cars carrying family members escorted the casket to the New Jersey Rosehill Cemetery burial ground. When we reached the cemetery, it was late afternoon and it had started raining. The rain soon changed to a wet snow. All of the family members opened umbrellas to shield themselves from the snow, and we surrounded the freshly dug hole in the earth. The huge snowflakes dropped down like small cotton balls being dumped on the tops of a sea of black umbrellas. We huddled together in the cold, wet wind and witnessed the coffin of my father being lowered into the grave. My eyes blurred with the warm tears and the icy snowflakes falling on my face.

  That night after the funeral, the four of us stayed in the warm room of a hotel in Manhattan. Shau-Jin and I started to tell Iris and Michael about our childhood, telling stories from when we were growing up in China and Taiwan. We also told them about our early days when we came to the U.S. to study.

  We stressed to them that we, not like them, had had nothing when we came to this country. All we had were our scholarships. We alone had to support ourselves. Our parents could not support us once we reached this country. To secure a job and to survive in this country after graduation was our prime goal at the time. We were not like them; they could take a risky route or try out a new path based on their interests. After all, they always had us to fall back on in case they failed. We explained this part of our lives to them because sometimes they said that Shau-Jin and I were too timid, that we did not take enough risks. We still remembered the day on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, when Iris had criticized us, saying that our lives were too conventional and that we were too apprehensive to try something new. The discussion was candid and the emotion was high; maybe the death of my father had made me very sentimental. The conclusion was that my father’s generation was a generation that strived to survive poverty and the wars, whereas our generation was better than my parents’, but the next generation, the generation of Iris and Michael, was even luckier than ours. “Here is the opportunity,” we told them, “if you work hard enough, you will achieve something in this country!”

  We flew back home right after my father’s funeral, but Iris stayed in New York for several more days. She went to see Susan Rabiner, and Susan gave her a timetable and urged her to give her a completed section of the book, which she would then edit and help Iris polish and revise. Iris also showed Susan the incredible photographs she had collected for the book, and they discussed the title and subtitle of the book. Iris was also wondering what name she would use as the book’s author: Iris Chang, or Iris Douglas, or Iris Chang Douglas. She had thought about that for a while. She said she had been using Iris Chang as the name on all her previous publications and she might just keep her name as it was.

  The most important thing, though, was that Susan wanted Iris to give her the first draft of the entire manuscript by August 1994, just four and a half or five months away. Iris said Susan praised her writing lavishly and said that, so far, she had found her writing “marvelous! Impressive!” This gave Iris tremendous confidence and the stamina for the final push in her research and writing.

  The next day, Iris went to see her book agent Laura Blake at Curtis Brown. Laura Blake was very satisfied with the progress of the book and praised Iris highly for her writing skill. Laura said her next book advance should be much higher than this one; maybe as high as $50,000. It turned out that her next advance, for The Rape of Nanking, was $60,000, which was double the advance of her first book and would give Iris a little more of the financial security she needed to keep researching and writing at a high level with minimal distraction.

  At this time, Iris disclosed to me her worry about the fact that she had become more materialistic. Perhaps the financial strain she had been under for the past few years had helped bring this on. She told me that she did not care about money, only the experiences and adventures money could bring. She said she just couldn’t stand the idea of someone sneering at her, simply for her lack of money. I asked Iris if California could be the wrong place for them to live, because when she’d been in Urbana, money had never been in her thoughts. Indeed, I suspected that Brett and Iris were influenced by the more materialistic culture in California.

  Iris told me that she had recently joined a local writer’s group and met many interesting people. Some were retired entrepreneurs, professors, or novelists, and some were even movie stars. Talking to them, she said, broadened her horizons. She told me she’d been invited to a local Celebrity Author’s Luncheon in March, and she said people there had been impressed by her youth and surprised to learn that sh
e had already landed a book contract. The people she met were also impressed by her book ideas and her opinions. She also met a number of famous contemporary authors around Santa Barbara, and she sought their advice on book publishing and other aspects of the writing “life.”

  Iris told me that she also continued reading many books, such as Jonathan Spence’s Search for Modern China, David Brinkley’s Washington Goes to War, and Walter A. McDougall’s The Heavens and the Earth.

  For my own life, in the next few months after my father died, I was in a sad mood. On April 22, former president Nixon died, and on May 22, Jackie Kennedy died. I was super-sensitive to the word “death”; it seemed that I could not expel my father’s death, or death in general, from myself.

  To move past my grief, I decided to go with Shau-Jin to Taiwan in the middle of May. Shau-Jin had been invited to the Academia Sinica in Taiwan to give lectures at a physics workshop. We stayed in Taiwan for a month. This was my second trip to Taiwan since I’d first left home in 1962. The first trip had been in 1982, when Iris was in high school and the whole family was visiting there for two months. Twelve years had passed since our last trip to Taiwan, and it had changed completely. When I visited my old house where we used to live, in the suburbs of Taipei, the house was gone and the surroundings were barely recognizable. I did not take a photo of this new landscape, because I wanted the memory of my childhood to live forever.