On May 24, Iris returned home after a month on the road non-stop without a chance to see Christopher and the rest of her family. I thought she could rest a while at home after the tour, but it was not very long before she was traveling again. This time the book tour was on the West Coast—mainly in California. On June 4, Shaun-Jin and I, as well as Michael and almost all of Iris’s cousins and relatives in California, were present when she was book-signing at one of the San Jose Barnes & Noble bookstores. We witnessed the huge crowds at the book signing and confirmed, as she had told us, that it seemed like people were still more interested in her previous book, The Rape of Nanking, than her current book. Many of the questions from the crowd and media still pertained to Nanking.
Once Iris came home, she faced millions of things waiting for her, not to mention a huge pile of mail that had accumulated on her desk. She found that Christopher was looking older and was surprised to see that he could push himself in his walker, skating wildly on the surface of their garage at high speed. She might have felt a little guilty that she had not been able to be with him for that month when he was growing so rapidly.
In the summer of 2003, besides the book activities, Iris was actively redecorating her house. Not only cleaning and throwing away boxes of junk; she was also rearranging the furniture in the living room.
Christopher started walking when he was almost a year old. His curiosity got him into everything and gave everyone in the family a headache. We had to keep our eyes on him every minute so he wouldn’t get into too much mischief!
On July 30, 2003, Iris described Christopher’s power:
Dear Mom,
We have a little Hercules on our hands. Yesterday, Christopher did a pull up on the changing cart, crawled down the equivalent of ten flights of stairs, partially pried open the sliding kitchen door and broke one of the shutters. He can rip off his bib with one fell swoop and even dismantle the tray from the high chair.
On August 31, 2003, Christopher’s first birthday, Iris not only ordered a big ice cream cake for the occasion, she also bought a bunch of colorful balloons. Ken and Luann came from Illinois for the big event. Michael came, too. Iris and Brett were busy opening gifts for Christopher. I don’t think Christopher understood why so many people were in the house and why he was asked to pose in front of the camera for so many shots. The house was filled with laughter, and Christopher was the star. One of the best shots was a family picture of all of us surrounding the handsome Christopher with his beautiful smile and startling eyes. It was printed on our New Year’s, 2004 greeting card and mailed to all our friends.
Iris continued to engage in many book activities, such as September’s San Francisco Litquake, which invited her, as well as many Bay area authors, for a reading of their works. Iris realized that she was lucky that we lived nearby. On July 29, 2003, she wrote, “We are blessed in so many ways, especially by having you and Dad so close by. . . . I’m grateful that I have many people around me who love Christopher and are willing to help.”
On October 3, 2003, in an e-mail, I asked Iris whether she was putting too much emphasis on her career, placing her career before her family. She replied:
That is not true. It’s just that I believe that I have some power to shape my destiny and I want Christopher to have in his mother a strong role model, a person who is his own individual, impervious to the whims of others.
I cannot teach Christopher to be an intellectual and a socially responsible person unless I demonstrate to him, through my actions, that I myself am such a person.
I want to teach Christopher that it is far better to belong the critical minority than the unquestioning majority. I want to teach him the ability to think independently, to evaluate ideas and information on his own—without the official sanction of the authorities—and, if possible, to create.
These qualities are not universally popular in our society. My tendency to stand alone, apart from the crowd, has caused me great pain and suffering throughout my life, but in the end, I am a stronger and better person because of it.
In the fall of 2003, I enrolled in a class of Ikebana, Japanese flower arrangement, at the Cupertino Senior Center. This was something I had always wanted to learn. In addition, Shau-Jin and I were taking painting classes and hiking frequently with groups from the Sunnyvale Community Center. Both of us were enjoying these classes and had a good time. Later, I also found a clay art class that I really enjoyed and devoted many hours to making vases, plates, flowerpots, and so forth. I was absorbed in my own hobbies and all the perks of the retirement lifestyle and did not realize until later that Iris was suffering a major setback in her quest for her movie project. The company that had optioned the film rights to The Rape of Nanking could not find investors to make the film. They did not renew their option after the end of a year.
So in the spring of 2003, Iris was back to square one. Of course, she was a person who would not take “no” for an answer. She was taking a different approach this time. She enrolled in a special workshop called the A-Team, in which the participants met once every two weeks. The leader of the A-Team would coach her and others in a strategy to achieve individual goals. She flew to Burbank every two weeks and spent two days over a weekend attending the fast-paced meeting to learn from her mentor and to get connected to movie industry people. She ended up in collaboration with an Asian-American movie producer. After half a year and long hours of discussion and negotiation and much effort, Iris still had not gotten anywhere. The major problem was finding investors. Even though she had a sound visionary script and business plan, people with capital were just not willing to make that final leap of commitment.
Often when we met up, Iris expressed her disappointment and frustration over the movie project. Her frustration stemmed from the fact that she felt a movie would reach out to an even wider audience than the book and further educate people about Nanking and the history of Chinese-Americans. She had delivered those sentiments in a speech at the Committee of 100 in June, in front of many influential Chinese-Americans, by asking: “Have we, as Chinese-Americans, done enough to educate our children about our heritage and our contributions to this country? If the answer is no, we have to ask ourselves why. If even we Chinese-Americans don’t care about our own history, why should anyone else?”
Iris continued: “It’s disgraceful that there is still not a major feature film on the subject of the Rape of Nanking, or on the subject of the Comfort Women, or on the subject of Unit 731. We have to ask ourselves some hard-hitting questions. Like, why isn’t there a Chinese-owned studio. Certainly the talent, passion, and intelligence are there. Is it that we simply don’t care? Or are we not able to work together effectively to bring about change?
“There is only one group of people who can really prevent this project from happening, and it isn’t the Japanese or the Hollywood system: it is ourselves. We are the ones who get to decide whether it happens or not.”
On October 5, 2003, Iris asked us to watch over Christopher so she, Brett, and Michael could go to the Asian Business League banquet in San Francisco where Iris was going to receive an award. She delivered a short speech in accepting the award. The speech was in the same tone, telling Asian-American business elites that “First, we need to support each other. . . . Secondly, and even more importantly, we have to create our own power. We should stop asking others for permission. Rather than beg for entree into non-Asian organizations, we must create our own. It is high time that we stopped banging our heads against the glass ceiling and started using our own capital resources and entrepreneurial drive, to build more of own hospitals and companies and law firms and media empires and venture capital funds. . . .”
She advised the audience that “If there is one thing I have learned from my career as a writer, it is that the surest path to success is to listen to your heart, your own inner passion, while striving to create something of enduring value. Quite often this means standing alone and forging one’s own path. To quote Sigmund F
reud: ‘I became aware of my destiny: to belong to the critical minority as opposed to the unquestioning majority.’”
At this time, she was turning her attention to her next book project. Iris had proposed several ideas to her book agent, and the story of American POWs in the Philippines struck a chord. In early November 2003, with the help of a military historian, Iris was preparing a trip to Ohio. She asked us to help Ping and Christopher while she spent a week in November in interviewing a group of surviving American veterans who had been captured in the Philippines by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Again, she returned to the profession and topic she knew best: writer, investigative journalist, and historian, working to dig and expose a forgotten historical event of World War II in Asia.
The Breakdown
To understand what transpired during the last leg of Iris’s lifetime journey, it would require a day-by-day, even hour-by-hour, account of the twists and turns and many of the inconceivable struggles with her demon. This chapter will present the chronological events as they took place; they are quite dramatic, but very real, to anyone who seeks a clue as to what exactly developed during those pivotal months:
In 2004, Iris focused her research on a group of American World War II POWs in preparation for the proposal for her next book. This was the story of the American 192nd tank battalion from the Midwest states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, and Kentucky. The 192nd was deployed to the Philippines in 1941. They fought the Japanese and were subsequently captured by the Japanese Army. This tank battalion unit went through hell in the Philippines. There were some survivors, but many died from starvation, disease, and torture. In November 2003, Iris had visited and interviewed several of the battalion survivors in those states. Now she systematically interviewed and tape-recorded each one of them over the phone. This involved many hours of Q&A and was a long and tedious process. The stories of these surviving POWs were horrendous and excruciating beyond words. Iris said even her typist could not stop her tears while she was transcribing the recorded tapes. This book project was certainly a dark subject and not good for her mental health, but Iris said she just could not turn her back on those veterans and let their stories be forgotten.
Right after the publication of The Rape of Nanking, we strongly suggested to Iris that she should not write on such a gruesome subject for her next book. That was how she decided to write about the Chinese in America. As soon as we heard she was going to write the following book about the American POWs in the Philippines, we expressed our concern, but Iris said she could not forsake them.
After the arrival of Christopher, Iris slept with him in the bedroom on the top floor of their townhouse. During the day, Christopher was taken care of by Ping while Iris worked in her home office. Brett was taking care of Christopher in the evenings, whereas Iris was taking care of him at night. Around this time, as Christopher moved from a crib to a toddler bed, he learned he could get out of that bed and jump into bed with Iris, which disrupted her sleep. Sometimes she worked late into the night. By the time she went to bed, it was almost time for the baby to wake up. It seemed that Iris was continuing to push herself to maintain the same productivity she’d had before Christopher was born. She did not realize that she was suffering constant sleep deprivation.
In March 2004, when Christopher was over a year and a half old, Iris decided that he should start playing with other children of his age. Besides, Brett’s mom Luann often called from Illinois to remind both of them that they should spend more time with Christopher and find a place for him to interact with other children. So Iris changed Ping’s schedule and put Christopher in the Cisco Day Care Center two or three afternoons a week.
In the meantime, we had made a plan for a trip to Italy for about three weeks, from April 2 to April 23. The trip unfortunately coincided with Iris’s book tour for the paperback edition of The Chinese in America. Fortunately, on March 31, Luann and Ken came from Illinois to help watch Christopher while we were away.
Before Iris left for the month-long book tour, she showed me the itinerary. I was shocked and said to her, “How can you travel to so many cities in such a short time?”
“I told them. That’s the best they can do,” Iris replied, slightly annoyed.
Iris had made numerous prior book-signing trips for The Rape of Nanking. Now that she was an old hand at book tours, I thought she knew what she was capable of managing. Therefore, I felt that I should just let her be, even though I was uncomfortable with the itinerary. Due to our forthcoming Italy trip, I had no time to think about it further.
After Iris left us in November 2004, I went back and traced what she had done during the last few months of her life. I rechecked the itinerary of her paperback book tour in 2004. The book tour was from March 31 through May 6, during which time she traveled to some twenty cities for thirty-five events. The most strenuous part of the trip was her zigzagging across the continent almost four times. Even a person in top physical and mental condition would have found this schedule highly stressful.
On March 31, Iris attended a function at San Francisco Public Library in the evening. The next day, she flew to Dallas on an early flight and started her month-long tour.
On April 2, we departed for Italy. Whenever possible, when we arrived at a different city, we would find an Internet cafe to check our e-mail and to inform Iris and Michael where we were. We were also happy to receive e-mails from Iris, who told us her book tour was going very well.
On April 4, when we were in Rome, Iris sent an e-mail saying she’d had a terrific time in Chicago. She also attached a letter from Professor Da-Hsuan Feng, the Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Dallas. The letter was the introduction speech to her lecture in Dallas. In the speech, Professor Feng gave glorious praise of Iris’s book The Rape of Nanking. Although Iris was on a book tour for her book The Chinese in America, people were still talking about her Nanking book.
On April 11, 2004, Iris wrote a short note saying she was at Colgate University, and on April 16, in reply to our e-mail, she said she was at the Baltimore airport and about to leave for Boston. These e-mails were short and revealed nothing unusual.
Shau-Jin and I returned home on April 23. Immediately we went to see Christopher, Luann, and Ken. Christopher was very happy to see us. We brought a gift for Christopher, a wooden replica of Pinocchio that we’d bought in Montecatini.
When Iris was on the road, she usually called home whenever possible to check on Christopher. On Monday, April 26, Iris arrived home in the late afternoon from San Diego, after almost four weeks on the road. This was the first chance she’d had to be home. She missed Christopher tremendously and wanted to see him.
The next day, she was scheduled to give a speech at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club. Iris felt that the speech was very important because the Club had a prestigious reputation. For this important occasion, Iris expressed her need for peace and quiet to prepare her speech, so she was scheduled to stay in a hotel in San Francisco. I saw her for only several minutes at the door that evening when she rushed out of the house to drive to San Francisco. She saw Christopher very briefly before she left. She looked extremely exhausted.
I knew Iris very well. She had already felt guilty that she could not spend more time with Christopher, just like any other working mother. She tried her best to be a good mother to her child, but her time and energy were limited. She was under tremendous pressure to be a good mother in a conventional sense, to conform to traditional family values. I sympathized with her because I myself was a professional woman. I could feel the pressure society in general puts on working mothers, something that many women surely still feel even today.
In retrospect, Shau-Jin and I felt that Iris had become preoccupied and somewhat absent-minded right after the April book tour. She looked tired and seemed to have lost her energy. This could have been due to the five-week, non-stop travel on the road, but she became exceedingly moody, more quiet and apprehensive than expected. I have m
ulled it over and tried to figure out what factors caused such a change. Finally, there was one thing in particular that bothered me and stood out in my mind.
On one occasion after the April paperback book tour, Iris disclosed to me that she had been threatened on the tour, but she did not specify where and at which event. She just said, “One person came and approached me after the talk and said in a threatening tone, ‘You would be safer if you joined our organization.’ I was stunned and did not know what to say, and I just quickly walked away. Did I do something wrong?” she asked me.
At the time, I assured her that she had done nothing wrong and she should not worry about it. I even suggested, in order to put her mind at ease, that she might have misinterpreted his words.
But she said, “I don’t think I should have just run away immediately . . . I don’t think I handled it right. . . .”
She mentioned the incident again on October 5, 2004, to both Shau-Jin and me when we took her for a walk in the Hakone Garden just a month before her suicide. Again, we did not know who this person was and where and when this incident had happened, or whether the person was really threatening her. We usually listened and tried not to press for more details when Iris was reluctant to tell us. That had been our habit over the years.
Woman Who Could Not Forget Page 38
