Woman Who Could Not Forget (22 page)

I really admired her passion for reading and learning, even when she had so much work to do.

In the same letter, she also wrote:

I really miss both of you very much, I’ve been thinking about my family quite a bit these days, especially after my visit to Grandma and Grandpa’s home (in L.A.). . . . It depresses me to see how young, muscular and handsome Brett is now and then to imagine him sixty years later, stooped, coughing and old. One fourth of my life is over already and for Brett, it’s almost one third. People sometimes don’t understand why I’m so impatient, but how can I NOT be when time passes so quickly? It doesn’t seem to bother most people, however.

Then she was talking about a new book idea:

Every day, I think of a new idea for a book. For instance, the history of commuting in the United States. How did it begin? From the highway grew the suburb, the “bedroom community,” the community college, the commuter college, the shopping mall, the chain store, the mobile home and smog. To find the heart of our national soul, as many writers seek, we must start with the web of arteries that we call our highways. What has commuting done to the American community? Has it contributed to the decay of our inner cities? Has it brought people closer, or has it forced people to live and work farther away from each other, placing not just physical but emotional distance between the American people? What kind of psychological toll does a daily one or two-hour commute impose upon us? What does the rampant machine gun shootings on the highways of Los Angeles or the cross-fire of the streets of East St. Louis tell us about our society?

Apparently, she was not only writing her book proposal, she was also reading other books, thinking about ideas for a new book, and reflecting on her life.

On October 10, 1991, she finished her book proposal and mailed it to Susan Rabiner. On that day she wrote to us:

Dear Mom and Dad:

I just sent off the final version of my proposal to HarperCollins, and before long I will enter negotiations and a contractual agreement! Before I sign anything, however, I plan to read a couple of books on the subject in the library. Can you believe the proposal was 102 pages long, with an additional 6 pages of sources? The best investment I have made so far is my laser printer.

Brett and I have both been very busy, but when he comes home at night we take long walks together. This weekend will be a wonderful break for both of us. Sometimes Brett doesn’t come home from lab until 9 or 10 pm, and sometimes I’m typing away at the computer until 2, 3 or 4 am, occasionally waking him up, but he doesn’t get mad at all. Anyway, I miss both of you very much. Love, Iris

However, the break she had after she sent off her book proposal was filled with loneliness. She called us and complained that she was extremely lonely in Santa Barbara. One major factor, of course, was waiting for the answer to her proposal from HarperCollins. Iris told us that Susan Rabiner liked her proposal very much. Susan said she did not expect Iris to do so well on the book proposal; “It’s marvelous,” Susan said. And Susan assured her that she would be stunned if proposal did not get approved. Susan asked her to be patient, though, as the process would take time. In the meantime, Iris was worried that even if the proposal got approved, she still had to find other resources to support herself in addition to the book advance. She was actively looking for and applying for grants to support her research. She said she went to the UCSB library to find the names of grant agencies and had started applying. Then she said she was still lonely even after she had met a number of people in town. She even found two people from Urbana and had lunch with them. She missed the big cities like Chicago or New York and hated smaller towns such as Santa Barbara, populated mostly with “the newly wed and the nearly dead.” She said she felt trapped. She would love to live in Los Angeles, but Brett hated the traffic and the smog. She missed Chicago, Michigan Avenue, Water Tower Place. . . . I comforted her and told her to be patient. At the end of the phone conversation, she told me that this was just one of her down days, and she admitted that she should feel lucky for what she had.

On the phone, she also mentioned that she hated cooking and cleaning the apartment. Not the cooking and the cleaning itself, but the everyday routine. She said that she felt a sense of accomplishment when she finished the cleaning, but the fact that it always got dirty again, and the routine of constant cleaning, seemed hopeless. She vowed that she would delegate the cleaning to someone else when she had enough money.

At this time, Iris was desperate for money to support herself, but we did not really realize this until we visited her during the Christmas-New Year’s holiday at the end of 1991.

In November 1991, she had been happy again when she was about to go with Brett to a conference in San Francisco, where Brett was presenting a paper. On November 3, she wrote us a postcard from San Francisco in such small scribbles that I had to use a magnifying glass to read it:

Dear Mom and Dad:

Brett and I are staying at Peter Kim’s apartment in San Francisco and I LOVE IT!!! Never have I been in such a romantic city on the West Coast—(Forget Santa Barbara and Los Angeles! If I ever get the chance I want to live here!). . . . Today we rode down the hills on a cable car and ate crab sandwiches and squid and shrimp along Fisherman’s Wharf. The crowded booth of sea food, cheap jewelry and T shirts reminded me of the street markets of Taiwan. Brett and I enjoyed “Bread Bowls” of clam chowder: hollowed out rolls of bread filled with creamy white soup, with flaps of crust for lids! We crawled through the quarters of a World War II submarine and peered through telescopes at Alcatraz (the penitentiary that housed such felons as Al Capone) and Angel Island, where many immigrants from China had been detained. Then we walked up and down the streets, every corner a surprise: a gallery of original Disney animation sketches, a shop of romance and massage, a wax museum, a street magic show. In some ways, this city is Chicago, Baltimore and New York rolled into one—and warmer and cleaner as well.

Tomorrow we go to Monterey . . . I’ll write you then! Love, Iris

Shau-Jin went to Taiwan for a conference at the beginning of November for two weeks. Both Iris and Michael were in Santa Barbara, so I was alone at home if I was not working in the lab. Iris called and wrote often to check up on me. After San Francisco, she and Brett went to Monterey for an electrical engineering conference. Iris wrote me a postcard on November 8, 1991 and said that “During the 3-day Asilomar Conference, I did nothing but read, buy books, walk along the beach and eat bowls of clam chowder. By the end of our ‘second honeymoon’ I was itching to get back to work. I can hardly wait to see you again at Christmas!”

I told Iris we had decided to visit them after Christmas and then go to Hawaii for a much-needed vacation. I had just recovered from my illness, and Iris’s wedding was over; Shau-Jin and I thought we needed some time for ourselves. Michael came home for Christmas, which was lovely, as we had not seen him since Iris’s wedding. So, after Christmas, on December 30, we flew to Santa Barbara and drove to Goleta to visit Iris. Iris and Brett lived in a small apartment at 312 Ellwood Beach Drive. They lived like typical graduate students. Iris took us to see the UCSB campus and the beaches. The beaches and the architecture of the buildings were beautiful, and the student culture in Santa Barbara was very liberal. The five of us then drove down to Los Angeles to visit Shau-Jin’s parents, where we stayed with Shau-Jin’s brother Frank in L.A.

On the last day before we flew to Hawaii, in the early morning of January 3, 1992, Brett told us that Iris was spending money without proper planning and she had spent most of their savings. Brett suggested that Iris should find a regular job. Because we were in a hurry to catch the plane to Hawaii, we did not have the chance to find out exactly what had happened.

Iris never thought much about money. She usually spent it on books and all the things related to writing or publishing. She wanted to buy computers, laser printers, and file cabinets, for example. She never wasted money on clothes or cosmetics, so I could not say she was wasting it, although she did buy a large number of books.

We later learned that Brett wanted Iris to look for a nine-to-five regular job, such as a teacher in a high school or a college. She did apply to the UCSB Department of English and several small colleges near Santa Barbara. She complained that in Santa Barbara, not like Baltimore or Chicago, there was a very limited job market.

In December 1991, Iris found a book agent, Laura Blake of Curtis Brown, Ltd., one of the most prestigious literary agencies in the country. Laura represented Iris after HarperCollins approved the book proposal. As far as I remember, Iris got a $30,000 advance from HarperCollins—not enough to cover her living expenses, considering the book was going to take two to three years to write, let alone the money needed for her research. That was why Iris was under tremendous pressure to seek an additional source of income. She applied for a number of grants from foundations, big or small, such as the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment of Humanities, the MacArthur Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the United States Institute of Peace. She also contacted her former professors at the U of I to ask them to write recommendation letters, particularly to Professor Bob Reid, who wrote numerous letters on her behalf.

During the first half of 1992, Iris was not only continuing the research on the biography, but also applying for all those grants or fellowships, on top of looking for teaching jobs. During the waiting period, she tried all the ways she could think of to find a freelancing job at business magazines or newspapers. One time, she called us and said she’d met a person working in the local Kaplan, Inc. who said that if she wanted, she could teach the Kaplan classes to students for test prep and college admission; there were openings. Another time, she said she could work as a telemarketer for a product company. But when she heard nothing from the grant agencies or received rejection letters one after another, she was desperate. When we heard she was delivering pizzas, my heart sank! We couldn’t believe she would do this; we immediately expressed our concern. Fortunately, it didn’t last long. Shau-Jin and I, as well as Brett, immediately asked her to stop. We were not against the job itself, but we worried about her safety, since we had all heard horrible things about how people who delivered pizza got kidnapped or killed, especially if they were women. Even under these circumstances, however, Iris still remained optimistic and very focused on collecting materials for the biography.

Due to my illness the year before, I had not seen my parents for more than a year, and their poor health had prevented them from attending Iris’s wedding in 1991, so I decided to visit them in May 1992 around Mother’s Day. I arrived at my parents’ apartment in New York on May 18. Iris was already there. Iris’s trip to the East Coast was multi-purpose. She had a business meeting with Susan Rabiner at HarperCollins in New York, and she wanted to do some research at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. She also wanted to go to Boston to visit MIT, where Dr. Tsien had taught from 1947 to 1949, and to interview his colleagues as well as the librarians and archivists there. Iris also wanted to go to Providence, Rhode Island for Kathy Szoke’s graduation from Brown University, as Kathy had been one of the bridesmaids in Iris’s wedding and the two were very close. Iris had planned the trip carefully and tried to accomplish many things in one trip.

I was very happy to see Iris, even though we had just seen each other at New Year’s and she called us almost every week. Still, she seemed to have endless things to tell me. She now was not only my daughter, but also my best friend. We could talk about anything and everything. I clearly remember the night of May 19, 1992; we spent it together in my parents’ New York apartment. We slept together and talked and talked till past midnight. She was very happy and in a good mood and told me that she and Susan Rabiner had discussed how the book would come together. It seemed like Susan had high hopes for the book, and her enthusiasm rubbed off on Iris. She also updated me about what she had found in the Archives about Tsien’s life, and about the interviews she’d conducted with his friends and colleagues (and had recorded on numerous tapes). She was a good investigative journalist, digging deep and following leads wherever she found them.

Then our topic turned to her next book project. At the time, she had just started working on her first book and was far from finishing it, but she had already begun to think about what would come next. She even showed me a list of possible topics. Her list of book ideas varied widely, from deep-sea industrial diving to the rise of the city of Las Vegas. I told her that, quite frankly, the topics she showed me were not personally interesting to me, and I feared it might be the same for others. Then we talked about fiction. Iris told me she wished one day she could write a book such as Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone with the Wind
—a novel of a love story mixed with a historical war in the background.

I told her that many heroic and love stories had happened in China during the wars of the twentieth century. I said that since she had a bilingual and bicultural background, she should write about China, which would be something new and fresh to English-language readers. There was too much competition if she wrote the same kind of stories about the West. I told her it was a pity that there were not many epic novels in English describing China in the era of the Sino-Japanese War. Then she remembered my parents’ war experience during the Japanese invasion in the 1930s. We talked about the Nanking Massacre. I repeated the story of how my mother had almost been separated from my father forever in Nanking, just a month before Nanking’s fall at the hand of the Japanese Army in 1937. She said she remembered that, and would like to do some research on that war once she had some free time. That was the beginning of
The Rape of Nanking
book project, although we did not know it yet. I will never forget that night—we talked so much that we almost lost our voices.