Woman Who Could Not Forget (10 page)

In the fall of 1978, when we had just moved to our new house in the Yankee Ridge Subdivision, Iris had developed a strong interest in newspapers. She not only read the local newspaper of Champaign-Urbana,
The News-Gazette
, but also “published” her own homemade newspaper. She and her good friend Elaine, who shared her fascination, often spent hours after school working on their newspaper. They used the back of Shau-Jin’s discarded physics computer printouts to make a sophisticated “newspaper” layout. The newspaper “The Mouseville Gazette” in Iris’s story “The Mouse Family” must have derived from these homemade newspapers. It’s particularly interesting to see that Iris had such passion for solving others’ problems, which were shown in the Dear Anne Gerbil Column’s question-and-answer section. These must have been inspired by the “Dear Abby” column of
The News-Gazette
of Champaign-Urbana.

In the spring of 1979, a man came to Iris’s school and talked about his idea to publish a newspaper for children called
That Newspaper,
and tried to collect writings from the students. Iris immediately submitted her writings to the newspaper. Her two poems and one advertisement, as well as Elaine’s, were accepted and published in the first sample issue of
That Newspaper
. She got excited, and she and Elaine went so far as to peddle that issue of the newspaper on the University of Illinois campus. Iris and Elaine asked students to buy the issue and support the continuous publication of
That Newspaper
. Their presence on the campus caught the eye of the reporter Karen Brandon of
The Daily Illini,
the UI student newspaper. Brandon wrote an article in
The Daily Illini
on April 19, 1979. She described that “Iris Chang, a fifth-grader at Yankee Ridge Elementary School, ‘hoped’ that the paper will continue to be printed and had further suggestions for it to include comics, more poems, and horoscopes. Chang not only writes for
That Newspaper
, but also co-writes with a friend a ‘very private newspaper’ she refused to comment on.” In the article, Brandon continued, “Who knows?
That Newspaper
may be fostering future Erma Bombecks, budding Art Buchwalds, or even prospective publishers of underground newspapers at the grade school level.” Indeed, who could have predicted that eight or nine years later, Iris herself would become a major contributor to
The Daily Illini
and later a best-selling author? Perhaps it all really did begin with Mr. Mouse!

On Sunday, April 26, 1980, we drove Iris to Bloomington to participate in the Central Illinois Regional Young Authors Conference. It was a very big and exciting event for Iris. When we arrived, there were many young authors about Iris’s age. The conference gave every representative from each school district a certificate. Iris was one of the representatives from the Urbana School District and went to the stage to accept the certificate congratulating her for her achievement. The conference also invited a best-selling author to give a speech and later to have a book signing. Iris’s eyes were sparkling throughout the conference. From that moment, I think the fact that being an author was glamorous was planted in Iris’s mind.

When Iris’s poems and story were selected by the Yankee Ridge School for the Young Author competition, one of Iris’s friends told her that her mother did not believe that Iris had written the poems. “Iris’s mom wrote them,” the girl told Iris her mother had said. Iris was upset and told me the story. I laughed and told Iris that she should not be bothered by those comments, but should consider it a compliment. “Alas!” I said, “I wish I
could
have written them!”

From 1978 till 1983, Iris made all greeting cards by herself for Christmas, my birthday, Shau-Jin’s birthday, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day. She wrote the words and added hand-drawn pictures. I was always moved to tears when I read the words she wrote on her self-made cards, such as these lines in the card she gave me on my birthday in June 1980:

I hope that this card will make you happy and glad,

For I mean to tell you that you are the best mommy I ever had! . . .

Iris was very interested in making greeting cards for any occasion and wished to make a career out of it. She wrote to Hallmark to ask whether they needed a freelance greeting-card writer. To her dismay, the company replied that they had too many already.

Nineteen seventy-nine was a time of transition for both Iris and me. Iris found her interest in writing, and she was like a flower in bloom. As for me, I was surer of what I wanted in life: to be not only a mother to my children and a wife to my husband, but also a useful researcher in the science I loved.

On February 27, 1979, I got an unexpected call from my mother in New York. She informed me that she had just discovered a lump in her left breast. I flew to New York immediately. On March 26, my sisters and brothers and I were gathered and accompanied our mother to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital for the biopsy procedure. After several hours, the doctor finally came out and informed us that the biopsy showed that the lump was cancerous, so he had immediately performed the necessary surgery and removed the lump. My mother was sixty-five years old.

My mother’s illness put my life in perspective. Upon returning home, I continued to ponder the question: what should I do with the short life a person had? I was not happy with my research on SV40 in the Department of Biochemistry. After almost four years in Dr. Hager’s lab, it seemed like I hadn’t gotten anywhere. I became determined to go back to the biochemical research on bacterial membrane lipids, on which my earlier thesis research had been based. At that time, I found a professor, Dr. John Cronan, who came to the Department of Microbiology at UI from Yale University, whose research was on bacterial membrane lipids. In April, I went to see him. To my surprise, he told me that he knew my PhD thesis work with Dr. Eugene P. Kennedy at the Harvard Medical School, whom he admired. He said he had a grant with which to hire me. In September 1979, I joined his lab and started a long research journey with him. Happily, we published a number of very good research papers together, and my time collaborating with him lasted twenty-one years, until I retired in 2000.

Although we encouraged Iris’s love of books, she almost loved them too much: her eyes became nearsighted and she started wearing glasses when she was in the fifth grade. Her reading speed was very fast, and she was reading all kinds of books. When we drove both our children to the public library every weekend, she would borrow at least ten books at a time. She was a real “bookworm.” This made me think of the silkworms, which consumed mulberry leaves day and night during their growing period. Their only goal at that period was eating. Like silkworms, the books Iris read or consumed over the years were transformed internally and later became her own words in her own writing.

Iris never missed a chance for a reading or a writing activity, even at this tender age. I remember that she was very serious about her school-sponsored “Battle of the Books” activity. The school tried to encourage students to read, so it sponsored a reading competition among the children. At first, their parents were asked by the children to donate reward money for each book the children read. The money collected would be used for a school project, such as purchasing video equipment for the class. We had to pay 25 cents for each book they read. Iris would inform me which books she had read. The speed with which she read those books, and their sheer number, made us jokingly say to her that we were going to be bankrupted.

Iris and Michael made a good pair of playmates; they played well together, but also competed and fought with each other as all siblings do. Iris was always Michael’s big sister. At this time, Iris was very interested in magic. She was fascinated by it, and she wondered how the magicians did their tricks. She borrowed many magicians’ trick books to read and secretly practiced by herself in her room. She liked to carry a soft flowing silk handkerchief in her left hand and a wand in her right hand. She was often twirling her wand and pretending she was a magician on stage with the words “Abracadabra!” and “See!,” pointing the wand at me. Michael was busy trying to find a way to ruin his sister’s magic tricks. Iris did perform several magic tricks in front of us and fooled us. Once Iris was interested in something and was driven by her curiosity, she would devote her time and energy passionately to work on it; that was the hallmark of Iris’s character.

Iris also loved to play the piano and really enjoyed her lessons. By this time, she could play many classical pieces by Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven. It was an absolute pleasure to listen to her practice on our piano in the living room. I usually stopped my work and listened when she was playing Beethoven’s “Für Elise” or “Moonlight” Sonata. The images of her profile in front of the piano—her long black hair on her shoulder and the reflections of the wavering birches in our tranquil back yard on the living-room window—had been eternally sealed in my memory.

Iris was open and very talkative at home, but she was shy and more reserved in public. I don’t know if she was conscious about her minority status, or if she just felt more comfortable within her family. Iris was a child who was very frank about expressing what she liked or disliked; she would not hide her feelings. She was sometimes very naïve and believed everyone was just as outspoken and open as she.

She liked to ask a lot of questions and made many thought-provoking comments. When we could not answer her questions, we encouraged her to look things up in the encyclopedia and reference books. We were very open and democratic in our family discussions. Everyone could have a voice to express his or her opinions over the dinner table. Iris had by far the most opinions, about anything and everything. She was very talkative and often dominated the entire conversation. We sometimes needed to stop her to give Michael a chance to talk. Because Iris spent most of her time talking at the dinner table, she ate very little or ate slowly. Sometimes everyone else had finished the meal, but she had not even started her main course, so concerned was she with finishing her train of thought. However, everyone enjoyed listening to her because of her eloquence and dramatic expression.

I think it was around this time, in the 1979-1980 school year, when Iris was in the fifth grade, that she developed a great interest in her own roots. She was extremely curious about our family history and background. When my parents lived with us for three months in 1975, she had been too young to understand the historical significance. But by this time she would ask Shau-Jin and me many questions, such as where we came from, respectively, and why we’d had to come to the U.S. What had it been like when we were her age in China? We usually told her over the dinner table about our parents’ stories*: How my father was orphaned at the age of nine, and, in spite of his poor family background, he was able to beat the odds, challenge his fate, and struggle through and make a name of his own by working hard. I told her about my father’s hard working ethics and his emphasis on education. I told her the words my parents said repeatedly, “Money can be lost or stolen but the knowledge inside our brains can never be taken away by others.”

We also told her of the sufferings of both our parents’ lives during the Sino-Japanese War and the subsequent civil war between the KMT (the Kuomintang: the Nationalists) and the Communists. Among the many stories we told her, the one about how my parents were almost separated from each other during the 1937 Japanese invasion of Nanking was particularly prominent in her mind. The story was described by my parents numerous times when we were growing up, so we repeated the story to our children. In brief:

On July 7, 1937, Japan attacked the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing and started a full-scale war with China. On August 13, Japanese warplanes bombed Shanghai and Hangzhou. My parents still lived in Nanking, the capital, at the time. All branches of the government of Nanking were planning to retreat inland. My father was informed that he and his family could take a ship provided by the government to travel upstream on the Yangtze River with the working unit to the Hunan province. On November 14, a month before Nanking fell to the Japanese Army, my mother took my sister Ling-Ling back to her home village near Yixing, to retrieve her mother and her younger brother, so they could escape together with her family, since my mother’s father had just died. Ling-Ling was one year old, and my mother was seven months pregnant with my brother Cheng-Cheng. After my father learned that his working unit was going to retreat to Wuhu, he immediately sent a person with a message to inform my mother that when she came back, she should take the intricate waterways to Wuhu, a city southwest of Nanking, upstream on the Yangtze River, instead of coming back to Nanking, because public transportation—buses or trains—was often interrupted by the Japanese bombings.

On the day my father was boarding the ship at Wuhu, my mother and her family still had not arrived. They had been supposed to get to Wuhu four days before. My father waited and waited on the waterfront every day. He walked up and down the piers and checked every little boat loaded with refugees approaching the dock, but my mother was not in sight. When the government ship was about to depart on the last day, my father almost went crazy. In desperation, he started screaming my mother’s name “Yi-pei, Yi-pei” at every arriving boat. Then, a miracle happened. Along came a little boat and my mother’s head popped out and answered “Yes, I’m here.” My father repeated this story many times in family gatherings when we were growing up, and told us that he thanked God for the miracle: otherwise, my mother and all the family members with her would not have survived the Sino-Japanese War.

We also described the subsequent Nanking Massacre and told Iris that every Chinese person should remember the brutal war crimes that Imperial Japan committed during the war. We never anticipated then that those stories at the dinner table would later become the impetus for her to write the book
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
, which would become an international best seller and change the world’s view of World War II forever.