Woman Who Could Not Forget (4 page)

T
he apple and cherry trees were in full blossom on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Baby Iris was lying in a brand-new stroller under the pink quilt my mother had just mailed her. I looked at her tiny little face; she was so peaceful in her deep slumber. It was mid-April 1968, two weeks after she’d been born.

Iris was born at Princeton Hospital in Princeton, New Jersey on March 28, 1968. At the time, my husband, Shau-Jin, was doing his postdoctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and I was doing my own postdoc at the Department of Biology at Princeton University just down the road. We were both freshly graduated from Harvard University, where we’d received our PhD’s, he in physics and I in biochemistry.

The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton is a one-of-a-kind place, a haven for theoretical physicists and mathematicians. Albert Einstein was one of its first faculty members and spent the last twenty-two years of his life there. It is a unique place because postdocs from colleges and universities throughout the world come for pure research and do not have to teach. There are no students, only faculty and postdocs. The Institute encourages and supports the original and speculative thinking that produces advances in knowledge. After five years as a graduate student, Shau-Jin was able to devote all of his time to doing what he found most interesting in his field—theoretical high-energy particle physics.

In the summer of 1967, we lived in the on-site housing project of the Institute. The place was unbelievably beautiful. It was a completely furnished one-bedroom apartment. The living room was spacious, with big wide windows, and the furniture provided was very contemporary and artistic. Huge pine and flowering trees, such as cherry and crab apple, surrounded the house, which had acres of grassy lawn. It was something of a culture shock after five years of graduate-student life in Boston.

I started working at Professor John T. Bonner’s laboratory in the Department of Biology in the fall of 1967. Dr. Bonner is a world-famous authority on slime mold. My research was on the biochemical aspect of the attractant of the amoeba at the early stage of slime mold. Just before I arrived, the laboratory had identified the chemical identity of the attractant. It was a very exciting time. Dr. Bonner wanted me to find out why the extracellular concentration of the attractant of amoeba was so low. I was able to identify an enzyme that degraded the attractant very quickly. I worked very hard to get it done. I became pregnant shortly after we arrived at Princeton, and I needed to produce some results quickly, because this was my first postdoctoral job. Before I quit my job at the end of January 1968 due to my pregnancy, I was able to finish the experimental part of my research. The work was subsequently published in the journal
Science
, a combination of hard work and a little bit of luck.

My pregnancy made me feel awful in the mornings. Iris was overdue and was eventually born two weeks past her due date, and I was anxious the whole time. When I finally arrived at the OB unit of Princeton Hospital, I had been in labor for over fourteen hours. Iris was born at 1:12
P.M.
on Thursday, March 28, 1968. I was exhausted but happy. Looking at her little face, I was in awe. At her birth, Iris did not have much hair, and her face was plump and pink, but I already thought she was the most beautiful baby ever.

We had decided on “Iris” as her English name and “Shun-Ru” as her Chinese name before she was born. At the time, there was no easy test to determine the gender before a baby was born, so we prepared a name for each possible sex, which took weeks of thinking. Both of us felt Iris was a good name for a baby girl; Shau-Jin especially did, as he loved Greek mythology. According to Greek mythology, Iris was a goddess of the rainbow who carried messages between heaven and earth and trailed a rainbow behind her as she passed. Greek scholars thus suggested that Iris and her rainbow represented a brief union of the earth and sky. At the same time, the word “iris” is also a vital component of our eyes for seeing the world—though, at the time, we did not realize it was also the name of a flower. Her Chinese name was my idea. Shun-Ru in Chinese is an adjective to describe something pure and innocent. The names in some ways reflect her life, which we never anticipated at the time.

The Institute’s housing department was very kind—after they heard that we had a newborn, they let us move to a bigger housing unit, which had two bedrooms. They also gave us a brand-new baby crib. Indeed, the Institute knew how to provide a loving and nurturing environment for intellectuals and scholars.

With no relatives around, Shau-Jin and I raised Iris completely by Dr. Spock’s famous book. Iris had a very small appetite. From the very beginning, she would only take a few ounces of formula at each feeding, and I always wondered whether she’d had enough. Being a scientist, I faithfully recorded her amount of intake at each feeding. At the end of each day, I would add up the total ounces of formula Iris had had. My friends laughed at me for being so systematic and analytical.

For many months after Iris was born, Shau-Jin was very happy and jubilant. When he got home from work, he would ask to hold her and feed her; he even changed her diaper. I did not realize how happy he was until one of his physicist colleagues told me that Shau-Jin had been continuously smiling at work since the time Iris was born.

The colleague said “I have not seen him close his mouth since then. Does he smile while he’s sleeping?”

Although we were very happy with this new addition to our lives, the outside world was in chaos. Not only was there war in Vietnam, but, just a week after Iris was born, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. The whole country plunged into shock. Violence broke out in major cities across the nation, from Los Angeles to New York. Holding Iris in my arms, I could not breathe as I watched the burning and looting on TV. My heart sank as I wondered what kind of world Iris would grow up in. When that week’s issue of
Newsweek
arrived, the magazine’s front cover was of King lying in his coffin, with an old lady crying over his body. I told Shau-Jin I would save this issue for Iris, so that when she grew up she would learn what had been happening in the world at the time of her birth.

Then on June 5, when Iris was only two months old, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. Again, the whole country went into shock. It reminded me of the day John F. Kennedy had assassinated in Dallas in 1963. Shau-Jin and I had then been graduate students at Harvard. We had been in the U.S. only one year at that time, having just arrived from Taiwan. The whole country had been in mourning. Now, however, in addition to the sadness, I felt anger. As I embraced Iris close to my chest and fed her, I looked into her eyes and murmured to myself: how can I protect you from this senseless world?

I still have that issue of
Newsweek
from April 15, 1968, but the cover and the paper have turned yellow. Iris has been dead for six years at this writing, and the United States is trapped in another “Vietnam.”

I was quite uncertain at this time whether I should stay home as a full-time mom or return to work. On the one hand, I wished to stay home and take care of the baby, and believed, as my own mother told me, that no one was a better caretaker than the mother herself. On the other hand, I had just received my doctoral degree, and I really loved my work. Besides, from the very beginning, my dream was to become a scientist, and I wished to contribute what I had learned to society. After six months at home as a full-time mother, my continuous internal debating and struggling had made me miserable. Seeing me so unhappy, Shau-Jin encouraged me to go back to work. He said he believed that an unhappy mom at home would be worse than a happy working mom. I therefore landed a part-time postdoctoral research job in the lab of Professor Jacque Fresco in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton. I started working three days a week in the fall of 1968, when Iris was six months old.

In the 1960s, the majority of women stayed at home once they had children. There were not many childcare facilities or support groups for professional women, or working-mother models I could follow. I managed to work part-time for a year, but it was not without physical and mental challenges.

When I went to the lab to work after dropping Iris with her sitter, I could not stop thinking about what was happening to her. Had she stopped crying? What was the sitter doing with her if she continued to cry? These thoughts were excruciating. Sometimes, I could not concentrate on work, as I wondered whether I had made the right choice.

One way to solve the problem was to persuade my mother in Taiwan to come help. My mother was very willing and happy to do so. She spent about three months with us, but after three months my father back in Taiwan was unhappy and lonely. My mother returned home.

Yet I learned so much from my mother during those three months. First of all, my mother told me that Iris stopped crying once she saw me leave for work. She said “As soon as your car disappeared from the driveway, she turned to me, smiling with her tears still in her eyes.”

As a biologist, I’ve always been interested in child development and fascinated by the biochemical basis of brain function. Although Shau-Jin is a physicist, he too is very interested in many biological phenomena. We often discussed at the dinner table how to bring up Iris using the best available knowledge. For example, we had read an article in one of the child-behavior magazines indicating that it’s essential for normal brain development for children to go through the crawling stage. Before Iris could walk, we let her crawl all over our living room.

Shau-Jin was especially eager to expand Iris’s brain function. He bought two three-dimensional wooden puzzles, one a sphere and one a cube, and put them in front of her when she was only a few months old. Since Iris seemed to have no interest in them other than putting them in her mouth, Shau-Jin started to play with the toys himself. It took
him
, a physicist, several hours to figure out the puzzles, as well how to put them back to their original shape after taking them apart. After that, these puzzles went onto Shau-Jin’s office desk to test his graduate students’ IQ!

When Iris was born, Shau-Jin and I agreed that we should teach Iris both English and Chinese. There are several advantages to speaking two or more languages. We knew for learning languages, it was better to start in a child’s early years. It was natural for us teach her Chinese in addition to English, because Shau-Jin and I speak Chinese at home. At the beginning, we were not so sure about teaching two languages at the same time. Some of our Chinese friends told us that if we let our children learn both Chinese and English, they would get confused. They said that life in the U.S. for Chinese immigrants was hard, and they strongly urged us to teach the next generation only perfect English for survival. However, a visiting professor from Holland in the Bonner lab where I was working assured me otherwise. He told me that in Holland every child learned several languages when they were little without difficulty. He added that children who learned several languages were smarter than those who learned only one language. I therefore did a little research and found that indeed new language centers could be formed in the brain when children were introduced to multiple languages early on. With this knowledge at hand, we determined to teach Iris both languages. We would speak Chinese at home but English outside of the home.