Woman Who Could Not Forget (5 page)

In 1969, Shau-Jin was offered the position of assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So, in the summer of 1969, we ended our two-year stay in Princeton. But just before our move to Illinois, Shau-Jin was invited to a physics conference in Trieste, Italy. We were eager to take this opportunity to visit Europe.

We spent two weeks of June in Europe while Iris was only fifteen months old. My friends thought it would be too stressful to bring such a young toddler to foreign countries, but we managed. We brought with us dozens of disposable diapers and an infant back carrier, and we took turns carrying Iris on our back. We saw the Castle of Miramare in Trieste, the St. Marcus Square in Venice, the Vienna woods, and the River Danube. It was an unforgettable experience, walking through the magnificent Vienna parks that surround the summer palace, Schönbrunn. We were young and did not have any problems carrying a twenty-pound child. A photo shows the three of us sitting on top of a stone rail in a memorial overlooking the palace and the city of Vienna. Shau-Jin and I are holding Iris on our lap. We are all smiling and looking into the future with the brightest hope that our daughter will be a Chinese Phoenix.*

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* In the Chinese culture, people wish for their sons become a “Dragon” and their daughters a “Phoenix” (Feng Huang). The Chinese Phoenix is an ancient colorful bird of grace and high virtue. When paired with a dragon, a phoenix symbolizes the Empress, and a dragon represents the Emperor. These also are the symbols signifying the highest achievement one can reach.

W
hen Iris was less than a year and a half old, we made the move to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where Shau-Jin had accepted the teaching position. But he was also going to attend a physics workshop in Boulder, Colorado in August, before the start of the school year.

On August 2, 1969, we hopped into our first new car, a green Dodge Dart, and headed west. We bought the car from a dealer located on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania for $2,400. Because we did not have much money, we bought a basic car with no extras, such as automatic shift or air conditioning.

First, we drove to Urbana to visit the university campus and look for living quarters for the fall. We found a new duplex, of which we rented one part, and bought some second-hand furniture. After these arrangements were made, we continued our journey to Colorado. We drove through the contrasting landscapes of the cornfields of Iowa and Nebraska, to the beautiful Rockies of Colorado. Once in Boulder, Shau-Jin met all his physicist friends again, like a summer camp reunion. During the day, Shau-Jin was doing physics and I ran errands with Iris. In the evenings, Shau-Jin would have his friends come to our home for an informal gathering. On the weekends, we would often hike on the nearby trails with Iris in a carrier on our backs. We took turns carrying her. We explored many of the nearby state parks and, of course, Rocky Mountain National Park was the most impressive of all. I secretly wished that we could live in this beautiful part of the country for the rest of our lives.

After the workshop in Boulder was over, we began our drive back to Urbana. Iris, who was seventeen months old at the time, did not feel well. When we were about halfway home, she developed a high fever and, unfortunately, our new car’s lack of air conditioning didn’t help. It was the end of August, and the temperature in the car was unbearably hot. We decided to drive the rest of the way during the night while it was cool, and stay in an air-conditioned motel during the day. That evening, we stopped at a small town near Omaha. It was too late to see a doctor that evening, but we were able to consult one on the phone. Without seeing Iris, all he could say was to keep her temperature down, something we were already desperately trying to do.

I was so worried about Iris’s condition that I wanted to get back to Urbana as soon as possible. She was fussing and crying with the fever, and I was trying to soothe her as best I could, but all I could do was to watch over her helplessly. At that moment, I suddenly realized how my parents must have felt more than thirty years ago when my brothers, sisters, and myself were ill during those difficult war years in China when we were growing up. My thoughts flashed back to the 1930s and 1940s in China as Shau-Jin drove through Iowa on that dark, moonless night in August.

I was born in Chungking (now Chongqing), China in 1940. Chungking was the wartime capital of China during the eight-year-long War of Resistance against Japan,
Kang Ri zhanzheng
. Nineteen forty was a year of great suffering for the Chinese people. It was just one year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the war in Asia. China had been fighting Japan alone since 1931, when Japan had invaded Manchuria.

My parents escaped from Nanking in 1937 and retreated with a vast number of refugees, first to Wuhan on the Yangtze River, and then by train to Hengshan, a small town near one of the major north-south railroads. We stopped at Hengshan because my mother was in the last month of her pregnancy. She was carrying my elder brother, Cheng-Cheng, who was born in 1938, six days after the Chinese New Year.

In 1940, the Japanese Army had occupied a good portion of northern, eastern, and southern China, and now they started to bomb the southwestern provinces. Since it was the capital, Chungking was one of the prime targets. Japanese airplanes dropped bombs on Chunking day and night, hoping to bomb China into submission. According to my parents, the air raids went from once a day to twice a day. Once the air raid sirens sounded, everyone dropped whatever they were doing and ran into the bomb shelters. At the time, China did not have sufficient airpower to defend her skies. Groups of twenty to fifty Japanese bombers would frequently appear over Chungking’s skies and drop bombs at will. Thousands of civilians were killed, their homes, schools, and hospitals destroyed. In later years, my parents described to us the many horrors they witnessed after the bombings. There were always numerous fires. Whole blocks of houses were destroyed. My father saw charred bodies everywhere and smelled the stench of burning flesh. My mother saw a severely burned woman holding the charred body of her child whom she had tried to save, but she herself was burned in the process. There were many other scenes of horror that my parents could not forget, such as a hand hanging from a tree, or part of a leg dangling on an electrical wire, grotesque reminders of the bomb explosions.

A few weeks before I was due, my father registered my mother in Chungking Central Hospital, located by the Yangtze River. He thought that since the hospital looked sturdy and well built, my mother would be safe there. Several days later, the Japanese bombed the hospital, and a part of it was destroyed. Fortunately, my mother was moved into the hospital bomb shelter just in time.

To avoid the constant bombing, my father arranged to have our family moved to a village in the mountains where there were many natural caves that served as bomb shelters. In those times, living was extremely difficult. There was a severe shortage of supplies—medical supplies in particular—and daily necessities were now luxuries. The Japanese had bombed and cut off our supply routes. All available resources were used to support the war effort.

During that time, I was sick with amoebic dysentery due to eating contaminated food and drinking unsanitary water. My parents told me that I had a high fever and bloody diarrhea. Nowadays it’s easy to cure such illness with modern medicine, but at that time and in those conditions it could lead to death. My father desperately ran from drugstore to drugstore in Chungking trying to find the needed medicine. Miraculously, he found it in a small store on a small side street of Chungking, and I was saved.

On that dark moonless night, our car speeding through the lonely cornfields of Iowa, I touched Iris’s forehead and truly understood the love of parents for their child. It was a sacrifice, an unconditional love. I could now identify with these feelings and was fully touched.

After we arrived in Urbana, near Labor Day 1969, we moved into our rented duplex. The house was located in the west of Champaign. Urbana-Champaign is a twin city and Champaign is west of Urbana. (The major campus of the University of Illinois is in Urbana.)

Once we settled down, I started to look for a job. I had applied to the Department of Biochemistry. After two months of waiting, Professor Lowell Hager called me and said that he could hire me on a part-time basis, which, given my situation, was ideal. So I started working as a research associate in November, when Iris was nineteen months old.

I was actively looking for a baby-sitter, and, to my good luck, I was introduced to a student’s wife, Mrs. Hsu, who had a son about Iris’s age. In the morning, we brought Iris to Mrs. Hsu’s home, and at the end of the day we picked her up. Iris cried the first several times we dropped her off, but gradually she got used to the routine and played with Mrs. Hsu’s son very well. To me, this was a big relief. Mrs. Hsu was a nice lady and a good mother. She was very kind to Iris.

One day, I told her that I’d noticed that Iris liked to frown and did not smile as she had before. I asked her why.

She said, “Have you smiled yourself lately?”

That one question enlightened me. Indeed, Shau-Jin and I had been troubled by a number of issues in our departments, and we were actually unhappy at the time. Mrs. Hsu encouraged me to relax and enjoy my life. From that day on, I often looked at myself in the mirror and practiced smiling. What a difference it made to my appearance when I smiled! What showed on my face was what Iris would see. She would imitate and use everything she saw as a model.

Shau-Jin and I were already thinking about having a second child. I found out that I was pregnant again in February 1970. Life was really busy. Shau-Jin was active in teaching and research and had published a number of papers. My time was equally busy in the laboratory doing my research, taking care of Iris, and doing household chores. Cooking and shopping consumed the majority of my time when I was not in the laboratory. I had no outside help—in fact, we could not afford to hire any outside help, because the amount I paid the sitter had already taken a big bite out of our salaries.

In March 1970, my mother in Taiwan became seriously ill, and in April I was sick too. The pregnancy, the research, and a small child to take care of made me physically and mentally exhausted. I was badly in need of rest, and I also needed to visit my mother in Taiwan. After six months on the job, I decided to quit. I was determined to be a devoted mother and to concentrate on raising Iris and on awaiting the arrival of our second child.

Iris seemed very happy when I decided to stay home with her, and it was a happy time for me too. I even bought a sewing machine and made simple dresses for Iris and myself. When we wore the dresses, made of the same fabric and from the same pattern, it caught people’s eyes in the street. They commented that we were a lovely pair, mother and daughter. By now, Iris had become a beautiful, energetic little girl. She was very active and loved to talk to me in Chinese.