Woman Who Could Not Forget (2 page)

Not without fear! Her admirers praise Iris as a fearless crusader. That is only partially true, though. Iris was a fighter. That’s for sure. But she incessantly lived on edge and in fear of unpredictable harm to herself and her family rising from the constant threats from rogue history deniers. She did not ever let the fear overcome her determination to pursue justice, though. This young woman somehow harnessed the ultimate courage of a spirited soldier to charge forward nevertheless.

An insightful book. This memoir was written from a loving mother’s perspective in chronicling Iris’s life and career, many of her joyful moments, love of life and literacy, deepest fear, courage, and her succumbing to the weight of depression in the end. Readers will learn facts that were previously unknown to most of us, the ups and downs in the life of a small-town girl from the Midwest who became a bigger-than-life star in modern American literacy. With Iris’s firm belief: “anyone can do it,” we should and must follow her steps to strive for greatness.

Public service. Despite the social taboo in discussing mental illness and the excruciating recount of Iris’s final journey through depression and a nervous breakdown, Ying-Ying has painstakingly documented all turns of events, day by day and sometimes hour by hour. It is to inform readers how and what might have happened to an apparently outgoing and all-around healthy woman psychologically. She has thoroughly recorded what Iris went through and how the family dealt with the difficult situation, from the sudden news of Iris’s breakdown during a research trip, through months of treatment with their desperate attempt to learn and cope with something totally unknown to the family members as often happening to others caught up in comparable circumstance. She has documented the diagnoses, their interactions with doctors, and various medicines used.

In addition, Ying-Ying has also included in the epilogue the findings and valuable references from her follow-up studies after Iris passed away. Her intent is to offer this book about mental illness, related treatments, choices of medicine, and precautionary measures as a public service so others would hopefully be benefitted from taking appropriate preemptive actions to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

One must understand how hard it was for Ying-Ying to go through her recollection, relive her nightmare once again, and spend several years to compile and document the relevant information. It was very honorable on her part to do so. This is a great gift to the public. It is done to honor the memory of her beloved daughter, Iris Chang.

—Ignatius Y. Ding

I
want to forget that day. But I never will.

It was Tuesday, November 9, 2004. The phone rang at 8:30
A.M
. Our son-in-law, Brett Douglas, told us that our daughter, Iris, had slipped out of their home during the night. Her white 1999 Oldsmobile Alero was not in the garage.

We rushed to their townhouse, just a two-minute walk from our own home. A San Jose police officer had already been there, talked to Brett, and left. Brett showed us a printed note he had found next to Iris’s computer. It was addressed to Brett; my husband, Shau-Jin; Iris’s brother, Mike; and me. She had printed out the note at 1:44
A.M
. It read, in part:

Dear Brett, Mom, Dad and Mike:

For the last few weeks, I have been struggling with my decision as to whether I should live or die.

As I mentioned to Brett, when you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years; when you do not, you live not just by the day—but by the minute.

ou don’t want someone who will live out the rest of her days as a mere shell of her former self. . . . I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts.

I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead. Each breath is becoming difficult for me to take. . . . The anxiety can be compared to drowning in an open sea. I know that my actions will transfer some of this pain to others, indeed those who love me the most. Please forgive me. Forgive me because I cannot forgive myself.

Love, Iris

My heart was pounding in my chest so loudly, I could hear it. I could barely breathe. I told Shau-Jin and Brett we needed to go find her, to bring her back.

In the past few weeks, Iris had often talked about how she didn’t want to live any longer. She had been severely depressed since she’d returned from Louisville, Kentucky, where she had gone to interview American POWs of World War II for a book on the Bataan Death March. Before she went to Kentucky on August 12, she had barely slept for four straight nights and had eaten almost nothing. Soon after arriving in Louisville, she’d had what seemed to be a nervous breakdown in her hotel room. Shau-Jin and I had jumped on a flight and brought her back to San Jose, where she had seen three psychiatrists for depression and taken antipsychotic drugs and an antidepressant. In October, Iris’s two-year-old son, Christopher, went to live with Brett’s parents in Illinois.

My husband and I couldn’t understand how Iris’s life had unraveled so quickly. That spring, she had gone on a whirlwind five-week trip to promote her latest book,
The Chinese in America.
Before Iris had left for the book tour, she’d seemed perfectly fine. When she returned home in early May, she became apprehensive and preoccupied, believing someone wanted to harm her. After she had the breakdown, three months later, her paranoia had worsened.

On October 28, after I discovered an application to own a gun and a firearms safety manual in her purse, I found out she had visited a gun shop in east San Jose. When I confronted her, she realized I was watching her closely and became distant. She didn’t return my phone calls or answer my e-mails. I brought flowers and food to her doorstep, but she didn’t even allow me to come into her home or get near her.

Now she had left a suicide note and disappeared. But I still held out hope. Maybe she had changed her mind about killing herself and would soon come home—as she had in September, when she had checked into a local hotel for the day but returned that evening. I had never really been a religious person, but as my knees shook and my hands trembled, I started to pray.

Shau-Jin and I returned home and got ready to leave. But we soon realized that it would be impossible to find her without a plan.

“What are we going to do?” Shau-Jin asked me in desperation.

“I don’t know,” I said, my voice shaking. “Let me check with the police.”

I called the San Jose Police Department with the case number Brett had given us and asked whether the police had any news about Iris. One officer told me that the police had already put her name and her car’s license plate number into the missing-persons database.

“No new information,” he told me, assuring me that police would inform us of any developments right away.

I was so desperate, I called the Police Department every half hour or so. I always got the same answer.

“What do you think Iris will do?” I asked Shau-Jin.

He didn’t answer. He was as scared as I was.

I decided to share the news with all our close relatives. First I called my son, Michael. He was the only other person who really knew what was going on with his sister. Michael was a software engineer for a Silicon Valley company, and his office was close to our home. Unfortunately, Michael was in New York on business. I reached him on his cell phone and he listened in stunned silence, quickly deciding to fly back home as soon as possible.

I also called my older brother, Cheng-Cheng, in nearby Palo Alto, my younger brother, Bing, in New Jersey and my younger sister, Ging-Ging, in Maryland. In the meantime, Shau-Jin called his two brothers, Shau-Yen in New Jersey and Frank in Los Angeles, in hopes that they could offer guidance. They were all in shock, because Iris had prohibited us from telling anyone, even close relatives, about her nervous breakdown. None of my siblings even knew Iris had been depressed. They tried to calm me down, saying that Iris would certainly change her mind about taking her life and return home soon. But they offered no concrete ideas of what I should do.

Each of them soon called me back and asked me details about Iris’s recent struggle with depression. Repeating the details over and over left me exhausted.

It was ironic that one of the worst days in my life up until that point, September 21, 2004, had given me hope. That was the day that Iris went missing for several hours. At the time, Brett was out of town and we were taking care of her.

When she didn’t return home by late afternoon as promised, we reported her missing to the police. At the time, she was taking a new antipsychotic drug called Abilify, plus the antidepressant Celexa. She had experienced side effects from the drugs: shoulder and leg pain, drowsiness, and agitation.

Against my wishes, she had insisted on driving herself to the library that morning. When she returned home at about 8
P.M
., she told us that she had checked into a Crowne Plaza Hotel close to where we live. She said she had become so sleepy after shopping that she had gone to the hotel and fallen asleep for several hours. We were extremely relieved, of course.

So I thought that maybe she had checked into a hotel again. I opened the Yellow Pages with shaking hands and called the Crowne Plaza and other major hotels in the area, asking whether they had a guest named Iris Chang or Iris Douglas, her married name. They didn’t.

I then looked up the phone numbers of spas in the seaside city of Santa Cruz and in the forested mountains west of San Jose. Iris liked getting massages and had often gone with Brett and her friends to spas there. But spa employees told me they didn’t have any guests named Iris, or anyone who matched her description. Still, I had some hope that she’d registered under a different name.

My brain was fried, my body trembling. I kept calling Brett to ask if he had any new information. He didn’t. Brett had informed his parents in Illinois about her disappearance and was busy searching Iris’s home office for clues and sending all the information he could to the missing-persons detective assigned to Iris’s case.

As Shau-Jin kept pacing back and forth in the family room, I suddenly envisioned Iris browsing in a bookstore, one of her favorite things to do since she was a child. I systematically called several big bookstores in the area. I asked them whether they had seen a thin, tall Asian woman with long black hair in the store. Again, no luck.

I called Iris’s cell phone but, as usual, it was turned off. I also wrote her an e-mail, pleading with her to come home. I assumed she would be checking her e-mail periodically, even if she was hiding somewhere.

By late afternoon, my throat was dry and coarse from talking on the phone. I was drained and devastated, and the police continued to tell us that there was nothing new. I told Shau-Jin that we needed to go look for her car, even though I figured the chances of finding her were slim. Still, I told Shau-Jin, we needed to search for her. I couldn’t just sit at home and do nothing.