Woman Who Could Not Forget (20 page)

Everyone gave me a present, but the words in the card Iris gave me touched me the most. Apparently, she had taken time to choose a card carefully to express her feelings:

“The worlds we’ve grown up in are very different, calling for different choices in each of our lives. I know that you may not agree with every choice I make, but I think it’s great how you’ve taught me to choose for myself. It’s been a precious gift to me, and I just want to say thanks, Mom, for loving me enough to let me be me.” And in addition, she added, “Thanks for being not only my mother but the best girlfriend I’ve got.”

At the end of May, Brett’s thesis adviser, Professor Hua Lee, decided to leave UI for a position at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Brett had two more years to go for his PhD, so he was going to Santa Barbara with his thesis adviser. And Iris was going to Baltimore to attend JHU. There was no other way but for them to separate for a year. Before they parted in August, they decided to get married the following year. This was an important date to set, since the reservation of a church and a reception location usually needs to be made a year in advance, so they were right on schedule. Iris and Brett had discussed their wedding plans before they left for the East and West Coast. They decided to get married in the United Methodist Church right on the U of I campus. And the reception would be in the Illini Union next to the church on Green Street. The wedding date was set for August 17, 1991.

Once the date of the wedding was set, I started to plan. After all, I had been told that, according to the Western cultural tradition, the bride’s family was supposed to spearhead the wedding plans. On July 29, Brett’s parents, Ken and Luann Douglas, came to visit us, and that was the first time we met them. Ken was tall and sturdy and was a farmer in Mason City. Luann had red hair, the same color as Brett’s. She was teaching in a grade school and was more talkative than Ken was. We happily discussed the plan for Iris and Brett’s wedding in the coming year.

Iris was scheduled to move to Baltimore in the middle of August, and I knew once she left, we would not have time to go shopping together for the wedding gown and the accessories. So in July, Iris and I went to a wedding shop to choose her wedding gown and all the other necessities including the bridesmaid’s dress, the shoes, the veil, and so forth. We were quite efficient; in one afternoon we got most of the things done.

While we were shopping for her wedding gown, Iris seemed somewhat absent-minded. It seemed she wanted to get the things done as soon as possible. Iris had never liked shopping; but, I thought, this was for her own wedding, after all. It turned out that I was more interested in the wedding than she was. I had the feeling at the time that she was very single-minded about her career, and it seemed her mind was only on the forthcoming trip to Baltimore. The excitement of studying in a prestigious university on the East Coast excited her. To her, the wedding was something she wanted to get over with and out of her way as soon as possible, so she could embark on the path of her dream of becoming a writer. Perhaps the wedding ceremony was a mere formality in her mind. What was really important to Iris was their mutual commitment for their future hopes and dreams together.

Iris told me that she did not want to waste time on the dating game as most girls in college did. She had met Brett in 1988, when she was twenty years old. They had been together ever since. Iris had many male friends, but all for academic or business purposes. Since she met Brett, she had never dated anyone else as far as I knew. One of my friends said to me that Iris was a person who gave people a strong impression at the first meeting. Iris was quite aware that she was beautiful, judging by how she said that many male admirers gave her compliments all the time; but she seemed to really not be too concerned about how she looked. Rather, she was quite wary about whether she could achieve something in her life. She valued human existence very differently from the rest of pop culture.

On August 11, Iris moved her stuff back home from French House. On August 13, Shau-Jin and I helped her load her suitcases, the sturdy Apple IIc computer, books, and other necessities in the car and drove her to Baltimore. My younger sister Ging-Ging lived in Potomac, Maryland, not far from Baltimore. We visited Ging-Ging’s home first and then, on August 15, we moved her stuff into her dormitory, Homewood Apartment. As soon as we settled her in her dorm, Brett called from Santa Barbara. He had recently moved to Santa Barbara and said he’d found an apartment and would be sharing it with three girls. Three girls? I was a little surprised, but Iris told me that I worried too much. Indeed, I was too old-fashioned and had not been able to adapt to the current pop culture of young people at this stage in their life. When I was a graduate student in 1962, there were no co-ed dorms that I knew of, let alone any male students sharing apartments with female students.

After we bought some necessary furniture for Iris and met her roommate, who was a nice Chinese-American girl, we toured the campus. Iris led us to see the Baltimore harbor district. She had been to Baltimore for an interview given by the University program in May, so she knew the area better than we did. She even introduced us to a special local seafood dish in a famous restaurant near the harbor. We enjoyed the harbor scene while we dined. We gave Iris our best wishes, and the next day we left Baltimore. Iris was left on her own to pursue her dream!

Not long after we left Baltimore, Iris called and said she was lonely and missed home. After all, this was the first time she had lived that far from home. On August 27, 1990, about ten days after we left her, she wrote us a long letter describing her life at Johns Hopkins and her observations of her surroundings:

Dear Mom and Dad:

I’m sorry I cried and made such a big emotional scene over the phone last night, but I was lonely.

Actually, I’m often quite happy being alone. It gives me the freedom to devote myself entirely to my books. Within the past few days I’ve read almost 30 short stories from an anthology of 81, a few plays by Eugene O’Neill, several nonfiction pieces by John McPhee (renowned staff writer for the
New Yorker
), an autobiography of a black comedian and civil rights worker,
The Year of Silence
by Madison Smart Bell,
Woman Writer
by Joyce Carol Oates,
Lost in the Funhouse
by John Barth, stories by Franz Kafka, Pearl Buck, John Updike, Truman Capote, John Steinbeck,
White Fang
by Jack London, four plays by Tina Howe (she’ll be teaching at Hopkins next spring),
Beowulf
(the oldest English epic) plus
Dubliners
by James Joyce. From the moment of I woke up I would read, run errands and study French. I think my roommate was worried about my spending so much time in my room. Occasionally she’d knock on my door to see if I was still alive.

It was, I admit, a thrill for me to borrow books from the Hopkins library (and be allowed to keep them for the next four months!) I also visited the local used bookshop and bought a heap of classics for less than $10. Do you ever get so excited in a bookstore that you feel a spattering of ice drops running down your legs and a cold fist squeeze your bowels and a crawling of the skin—thousands of tiny ants!—until you almost fall to the knees? Other people must feel this way. . . (I can’t be the only one!) Other people, like the couple who ran the bookstore. I love talking to owners of used bookstores! Unlike many people I know (who confine their reading material to
Cosmopolitan
and Harlequin romances), these commercial librarians are as well read as any English professor. They are likely to have read every book by any author you can mention and they’ll recommend at least ten more books before you’re out of the store. They tend to be curious, liberal, politically active and very opinionated. I asked the young man behind the counter if he had a copy of the
Best Short Stories of 1989,
edited by Margaret Atwood, and he got all excited and asked me if I had read Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale.
I said yes and suddenly he was running all over the store and yelling that he loved Atwood’s
Cat’s Eye
and that it was a must-read; then the other owner, a Jewish woman in her 40’s, asked me if I liked women’s literature—I said yes and soon she was running down the aisles and came back with a copy of Mao Tse-tung’s writings in her hand. She said she was a feminist in the 1960’s and that some big women’s center in San Francisco grew out of the teaching of Mao! “Every feminist I knew was reading Mao at the time—it was the thing to do!”

Then Iris continued about the people and the street scenes in Baltimore:

By the way, I have to admit that the people in Baltimore are nicer than the ones in Chicago. Sometimes I feel as if I’m in Champaign-Urbana again when I walk down a street of rowhouses, it seems no different from a neighborhood in a suburb except that all the mansions are fused together. And each block is flanked with trees, lawns and bushes. Often the street is so peaceful it’s almost eerie. There are times when Sandra and I are walking down through a neighborhood, and I don’t see a single person, car or cat. It’s as if everyone died during the night and all that’s left are the houses.

One thing that intrigues me about Baltimore is the class structure. The people one block west of where I live talk differently from the people one block east. As you know, one block west brings me across N. Charles St. and onto JHU turf where people discuss Max Weber and existentialism and the Hubble Space Telescope. One block east takes me into the drugstores or delis where the cashers chew gum and use “ain’t” in every sentence.

And there’s one point where three roads intersect and form a star-shaped crosswalk. If you stand right in the middle, you’ll find that one road slides into an upper class white neighborhood with stained glass windows and mansions, another road winds into a predominately black professional neighborhood where you can see black men wearing ties and suits and well-dressed black women pushing babies in strollers, and still another road that leads to a block of rowhouses with broken windows and littered with garbage and black panhandlers sitting on sidewalks. Three different worlds, side by side. It was the strangest thing I had ever seen.

Iris was keen in her observations and sensitivity. We always enjoyed reading her letters. No doubt, Iris read so much classical and contemporary English literature voraciously in the year she was at JHU. She was like a sponge, absorbing as much as she could.

Iris’s coursework in the writing program was heavy, and besides that she had to help grade students’ papers as a teaching assistant. Even with such a huge workload, Iris told us that she continued to look for career opportunities by submitting writing proposals to major magazines and building up her published portfolio of “clips.”

When Thanksgiving was approaching, Iris decided to visit Brett in California and said she would come home for Christmas. Her assistantship was really not enough to support her. When she complained that the meals in the dorm were poor, we immediately sent money and asked her to buy healthful food to supplement the deficiency. When she returned to the JHU campus after Thanksgiving, she wrote humorously, “People have come back to Hopkins with colds so I hope I don’t get sick AGAIN. Really, I consider myself a careful person, but Johns Hopkins seems to be loaded with sick people all year round (maybe that’s why they have such a good med school!)”

In November, I too had a cold and took the antibiotic ampicillin. A month later, on December 3, I found blood in my stool. I was very scared and thought I had colon cancer. I immediately saw a doctor and did tests. To my relief, it was only inflammation of the colon, not colon cancer. However, I was tired and had constant abdominal pain and diarrhea. When Iris came back home from Baltimore during the Christmas break, my health had not improved. Brett also came back from Santa Barbara to his home in Mason City for Christmas. For Christmas, 1990 and New Year’s Day, 1991, because of my illness, I was not able to do any cooking or house chores. Even with this condition, I forced myself to be with Iris and Brett when they were shopping for a bridal registry for their forthcoming wedding.

After Christmas and during the winter break, Brett brought Iris to Mason City, to visit his hometown, see his parents’ home, and meet his grandparents, whom Iris hadn’t met yet. Iris also visited Luann’s classroom, and the children in the class enthusiastically welcomed her and commented on how beautiful she was. Iris sensed that Luann’s mother was worried when she learned that Iris was not a Christian. However, Brett assured her that even though Iris was not a Christian, she had very high morals, and that was comforting to his grandmother.

Over the winter break, Iris was working on a proposal called “Chinatown” for
National Geographic
. She also constantly toyed with ideas for a possible future book. This became her habit. She was always thinking about a book idea at any place and any time. When the winter break ended on January 15, 1991, she returned to JHU, and Brett to UCSB.

My gastrointestinal discomfort, in spite of my seeing a number of doctors, continued on and off for several months without being completely cured. Finally, another test on a stool specimen and a colonoscopy revealed that I had “pseudomembranous colitis,” which was caused by an intestinal pathogenic bacterium,
Clostridium difficile
. The toxins released by the bacteria had destroyed the protective lining of my colon and caused the inflammation of the colon and the bloody diarrhea. My case of colitis was considered to be a severe one and was finally cured by the last line of antibiotic, vancomycin. It took me almost another half year to recover fully.

Because of my illness in the first half of 1991, I was physically weak and tired all the time. The failure to find the real cause of my illness for the first several months compounded my anxiety and distress. Worse yet, Iris’s wedding was coming up and there was still a lot to do, stressing me out even more during those months.