Woman Who Could Not Forget (51 page)

On December 30, 2001, Iris got a call from her fertility clinic informing her that her surrogate mother was pregnant! Both Shau-Jin and I were downstairs in the house and heard her yell when she heard the good news. I immediately ran upstairs to hug her, and Shau-Jin did too. We both embraced her. Tears were streaming down Iris’s face. We congratulated her that she would be a mother soon, and she said, “You are going to be grandparents!” Brett was out of town in Illinois with his parents, and they were ecstatic too when they heard the good news. We knew how hard she had been working to solve her infertility problem, and all our tears were joyful.

In front of the TV, when Iris and Shau-Jin and I watched the ball drop in Times Square on the eve of 2002, all of us felt that the year of 2001 had not been so bad after all! Iris had solved her infertility problem through surrogacy, the movie rights of her book had been sold, and she had finished and handed in her first draft of the book
The Chinese in America
before the deadline. I’m sure she was proud of herself too. Once she set a goal, she worked hard to achieve it without any hesitation, and persevered despite obstacles along the way.

E
ven though Iris had hired a surrogate mother, she was still very involved in the pregnancy. In fact, it seemed she was even
more
involved than if she had actually been bearing the child herself. She constantly updated us on what was happening with her surrogate. She maintained a very close relationship with the surrogate and her family, both over the phone and via e-mails. She did everything to make the surrogate happy, and encouraged her to exercise and eat healthful food. When the surrogate complained of the heat and the burden of the weight on her belly during the last several months of pregnancy, it meant that Iris could not sleep either. When the surrogate told Iris that she could feel the kick of the fetus, Iris was as excited as if she had felt the kick in her own belly. It was a very intense emotional journey for both of them.

Iris had handed in the first draft of her book to Viking Penguin, but the manuscript still needed to be edited and revised. On February 16, 2002, Iris wrote to me:

Dear Mom,

The reason you haven’t heard from me is because I’e been working hard on the revisions of the book. . . . Today I woke up at 6 am and I’ve been writing continuously since then, stopping only to eat or to walk along the creek. Every phone in the house has been unplugged so I won’t be disturbed. Perhaps we can talk on Sunday.

When I’m not working I’m researching subjects like real estate, nannies and prenatal childcare. (To a certain degree I feel as if I’m writing several books at once.) . . .

Love, Iris

Iris and Brett were actively looking for a house to buy before the baby arrived. Besides the fact that they had wanted to buy a house for quite some time, the owner of the townhouse they were renting wanted the house back, so they had no choice but to move. Every weekend they went with realtors to see open houses in Fremont, Cupertino, and nearby areas. After several months of house-hunting, they finally bought a nice townhouse just across the street from their rental. On April 26, 2002, Iris happily informed us that they had moved into their first house. The townhouse was relatively new and the interior had been kept meticulously clean by the last owner. They were very happy about the price because at the time the housing costs in the Bay area had dropped due to the dot-com bubble’s bursting.

Not only was Iris busy with house-hunting, she was also looking for a nanny who could help her when the baby arrived. She told me that she felt she was racing against the clock and wondered which one would come first, the baby or finishing the revision of the book.

On our side, since we had returned home from California in January 2002, we were actively cleaning our house in preparation to sell it and move to California. It was a long and painful process, because I had to decide which items to save and which to throw away. I threw away literally truckloads of forty years of stuff from the basement and closets.

I wrote to Iris that sorting out our mail from the past twenty years was a time-consuming process because I was reading some old letters along the way. Iris wrote back: “It’s important to keep these old letters, as they have historical value. Letters and photographs—our last links to the past—are the two things that I would never throw away. Better to donate extra items to the UI archives than to toss them.” So I saved all the letters and brought them with us to California, and they certainly came in handy when I began writing this memoir.

On May 4, 2002, we got an excited call from Iris: the ultrasound result showed that the baby was a boy! Iris announced that they had already decided on the name of their son: Christopher Joseph Chang Douglas. Iris said their son was the product of four people: Iris, Brett, the fertility doctor, and the surrogate mother. She said she had named her son Christopher after her fertility doctor. Iris wanted to honor this doctor; without him, she would not have known the cause of her infertility problems and would never have had the baby.

Iris planned to visit us in May, as Wooster College in Ohio had decided to award Iris an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. She was scheduled to accept the degree at the commencement on May 13, 2002. After the ceremony, she wanted to pay us a visit. She knew we were sorting out stuff in the house and pretty soon the house would be on the market for sale. She wanted to come home to take one last look at the house we lived in for twenty-four years. She had been ten years old, in the fifth grade, when we moved into the house, and there were many memories within those walls.

Iris spent a week with us, looking over her childhood belongings in her bedroom. In the basement, several boxes holding her grade-school and high-school papers and schoolwork were still there. Sitting on the carpet in the basement and on the bed in her room, she spent hours going through her writing, letters, artwork, and so forth. She cherished every piece. Perhaps behind every one of her papers, there was a story taking her back in time. She had a strong memory; she could describe to you every detail of what had happened in those days. She was not very organized with other stuff like clothes or other knick-knacks, but for her papers and files, she had always organized them meticulously.

That week, in May 2002, we took an after-dinner walk with Iris around the pond across from our house. She talked to us endlessly while we strolled in the woods. This was the same woods and pond where she had spent years playing as a little girl. She was in a mood to reminisce: recalling her childhood dreams, her fears, her frustrations, and finally overcoming her obstacles. Now she was looking into the future with a son on the horizon. Again, there was uncertainty ahead, but her eyes sparkled with hope. Just as we were walking toward our house, the last rays of the spring sunset fell on everyone’s cheerful face.

Back at home, Iris was constantly in contact with her surrogate mother, and she was doing very well. Two months later, on August 10, Iris told us that she and the surrogate had started packing their suitcases in preparation for the delivery, even though the due-date was still weeks away. She wanted to be ready just in case. Meanwhile, she was very busy and made good progress on the rewrite of the final chapter of her book, so that the bulk of the work would be done in time.

Then, ten days later, on August 20, after a trip with Brett to Carmel to celebrate their eleventh wedding anniversary, Iris reported that the surrogate was entering her thirty-eighth week of pregnancy, and everything was still going well. About her book, she said that “all that is left is the epilogue, introduction, and footnotes. I should be done with the epilogue within a week or two.” It seemed like it was a race between the arrival of her baby and the finishing of her book.

The next day, August 21, Iris informed us that the surrogate mother had told her that Christopher had begun to “drop.” She said that typically, once the baby started his descent, delivery was about two weeks later. She predicted that Christopher would arrive at the end of the month.

She was right. As predicted, Christopher Joseph Chang Douglas was born on the evening of August 31, almost exactly two weeks from when she first felt the “drop.”

We flew to Iris’s home on August 29, just in the nick of time. Iris and Brett drove immediately to the hospital when they got the call on August 31 that the surrogate had started to go into labor. Three days later, Iris and Brett brought the tiny Christopher home, tightly wrapped in his receiving blanket. Iris was exhausted, due to the emotional drain, yet it was such a joyous occasion. For the next several days, all of us, plus Ping, the nanny they had recently hired, surrounded Christopher day and night, feeding, changing diapers, burping, but still loving every minute of it.

On September 4, I started sending e-mails to all our close relatives about the arrival of Christopher. In the announcement, I had to explain the fertility problems Iris had faced and how Christopher had been born by IVF and surrogacy. Many relatives asked a lot of questions, and some were quite bewildered and surprised at this news, as Iris had not wanted us to disclose her complicated pregnancy before this. However, all our relatives seemed understanding and respected Iris’s wish for privacy, and were just happy that everything had worked out so beautifully. Iris told us later, after she’d watched a Charlie Rose interview of Michael J. Fox, talking about his Parkinson’s with courage, she’d decided she wanted to write a book about her emotional journey in struggling to conceive and have a child. She wanted to help others and to tell those in similar situations that they were not alone.

We stayed with Iris for three weeks after Christopher was born. We took care of the baby while Ping was busy with other chores. Ping not only took care of Christopher when Iris was working or running errands, but she also cooked dinner for them. Iris took the night shift with the baby once Ping went home. One day, at the dinner table, Iris expressed to us that she had fears that she would not be able to accomplish all her life goals, such as the books she wished to write, the oral history project she had initiated with the Asian-American activists, the film project, and so much more. She must have been overwhelmed with finishing her book, the baby, and the family chores. We told her she should not put so much pressure on herself. Shau-Jin said to her, “Do your best, and don’t try to be a perfect mother!”

Earlier, in May, I had gotten some bad news from my sister Ling-Ling in New York. She had been diagnosed with colon cancer. The news upset all my siblings. My brothers, my younger sister, and I decided to visit Ling-Ling in July to support her. She had been living alone since my parents died in 1994 and 1997. While all my siblings and I gathered in New York City, we recalled emotionally our innocent childhood with our parents. We also resolved some of the misunderstandings among ourselves over the years, and really came together as siblings. It was so sad that our parents had passed on not very long ago—and now cancer cells were spreading to Ling-Ling’s vital organs. Shortly after I returned from New York, our house was sold after less than a month on the market. Facing leaving our house of twenty-four years along with Ling-Ling’s illness, I felt the heavy weight of sadness bear down on me even harder.

The buyer of our house allowed us to stay there until November so we would have some time to clean up our belongings and move out to California. Nonetheless, we only had two months to sell all the furniture and items that we did not want to take to California. Thankfully, once I determined which items we should take with us and found a mover, things moved quickly. On November 18, 2002, we handed over the house keys, said good-bye to the house, and flew to San Jose. I was eager to join Iris, Michael, and our new grandson. Leaving Illinois was difficult for Shau-Jin. He gave up his office in the Physics Department on campus and left his physics colleagues with whom he was quite close. The most difficult part was that we would miss our old friends whom we had known for the past thirty years.

We first rented a small apartment in Cupertino for two months and looked for a house. Just at this time, a townhouse similar to Iris’s, in the same neighborhood where Iris and Brett lived, came on the market. It was only a two-minute walk from our house to theirs. We immediately bought it.

Because we were so busy, first looking for a house and then moving, during the first several months after we moved to California we did not have time to help Iris as much as we wanted. Worse yet, Ling-Ling’s cancer had become terminal and she was near the end of her life. Shau-Jin and I flew to New York and took care of her for the final two weeks of her life. Ling-Ling died on March 18, 2003.

Life with a baby surely was very different from life before. Although Iris’s nanny helped a great deal during the day, sometimes she still felt exhausted with all the chores related to the baby. However, she told us that when Christopher threw a broad smile to her or stared at her with his beautiful big eyes after he was fed, burped, and changed, she thought of her struggle with infertility and how she had dreamed of this day. She cried and laughed at the same time.