Woman Who Could Not Forget (7 page)

The year in Princeton was a happy time, especially because we were already familiar with the Institute and the surrounding town. Most of the visitors at the Institute were scholars from foreign countries in the fields of mathematics, physics, history, and economics. We met families from Germany, Switzerland, France, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, and more. A person did have the opportunity to broaden his worldview in this setting. The interesting thing was that the children of most of those visitors could not speak English well, so you did have a sense that being bilingual or multilingual was an advantage for children. This confirmed our earlier belief that teaching both Chinese and English to our children would reap benefits for them in their later lives.

At the time, I was ready to start teaching Iris to read and saw an article on how to encourage children to read. It suggested that parents could write the name of an object on an index card and attach the card to the object. Therefore, the inside of our house was full of index cards attached to, for example, chair, table, lamp, sofa, cup, and so forth. Our friends could not believe that we were so devoted and had a fun time teasing us. They remarked, “Ah! Are you trying to produce an Einstein?!” Indeed, we lived on Einstein Drive, and all the roads in the Institute were named after famous physicists or mathematicians, so perhaps we did have “Einstein” on the brain!

Iris was attending the preschool located in the housing complex of the Institute. The teacher was a very kind lady. In class, she encouraged the children to express themselves. Iris was still very shy and did not speak much at school. The teacher was particularly nice to Iris, trying to help bring her out of her shell, and she told me that Iris loved to read. She suggested that maybe we could lead her to talk about the story in a book we read together, which would help her move on to talking about other things.

One day, Iris seemed to want to tell me a story, and I suggested we write it down. In the house we had piles of used computer printouts, which we gave to the children so they could write and draw on them. Iris started out by drawing pictures with colorful markers about the story. On each page, I then helped her write down the words she dictated to me. It was a “catch a robber” story. After we finished the story, I made it into book form by stapling the pages together. On the front page we wrote “The Story by Iris Chang.” She took the book to the school the next day and showed it to her teacher. When I picked her up, the teacher told me that she had let Iris read the story to the class. It was a big success. This was probably Iris’s first book and certainly her first “book reading.”

Princeton was just under an hour away from New York City. During weekends, we often took the two children to New York to visit my parents. My sister Ling-Ling had come to the U.S. before my parents had, and she also lived in New York City. Ling-Ling was four years older than I, and had been a news reporter in Taiwan. Like our father, she was also a writer and a poet and had published several books. Iris was impressed. I wondered: did she secretly want to be a writer, too?

When the term at Princeton ended in the spring of 1973, we prepared to leave for Europe for the summer. Shau-Jin was going to visit CERN in Geneva, but I had a bigger plan: I wanted to take this opportunity to tour as many European countries as possible.

During that summer, before we even reached Geneva, we toured London, Amsterdam, Belgium, and Paris. By the time we got to Paris, the two children were tired of the gypsy lifestyle and refused to see any more museums or historical buildings.

Finally we reached Geneva, where Shau-Jin would be working at CERN for the next several months. We lived in a high-rise building near the Geneva airport. During the day, Iris attended a nearby preschool called La Rond, where both French and English were spoken. We took the opportunity, since we had been already in Geneva, to visit the nearby cities in Switzerland and neighboring countries. At the end of our four months in Europe, everyone seemed to have had enough castles, cathedrals, museums, fountains, and sculptures for a lifetime, and all were longing to go home.

When we returned to the U.S., Iris attended kindergarten at Bottenfield School near our house in Champaign, Illinois. Michael went to the Montessori school across the street, the same one Iris had attended.

One day, Iris came home from school with a note from her kindergarten teacher. It was a letter that said that Iris had speech problems; the teacher asked our permission to send her to speech therapy class every morning for a half hour before regular school hours.

Our first reaction was: “Speech therapy? Impossible!”

Later, after we talked to the teacher, we realized that Iris was very shy at school and did not talk at all in class discussions. This was totally in contrast to the way she was at home. Iris talked a
lot
at home, more than average children. She talked endlessly to me, describing what had happened in school in every detail. We agreed to let Iris go to the special speech class every morning. We also took her teacher’s advice: inviting her friends to come to our house to play, to enhance her social skills. Before long, she was very active in school and had made a number of good friends in her class. Years later, when we watched Iris speaking eloquently on television interviews, I told our friends the story: that when Iris was a little girl, she had been shy and did not like to talk in school. No one believed it.

Once we came home from Europe in the fall of 1973, Shau-Jin and I firmly believed that we needed to teach both children not just to speak Chinese, but to read and write it as well. At home, we spoke Chinese and enforced it by answering the children in Chinese even though they spoke to us in English. It was hard to enforce the rule sometimes, because Iris and Michael spoke to each other in English. By the time Iris enrolled in kindergarten, I was seriously thinking about establishing a Chinese class so Iris could learn written Chinese in an organized setting.

At the time, there were not many Chinese-Americans in Urbana-Champaign. The number of Chinese children was so few that to form a Chinese class was not possible without recruiting. To gather enough students was even harder due to the fact that some Chinese families believed that learning Chinese at such a young age would slow down their learning of English. Nevertheless, with my persuasion and that of others, a Chinese class was established later in the fall of 1973. On Saturday mornings, about ten children were gathered in a classroom on the University of Illinois campus.

The children attending this class could not watch Saturday-morning cartoons on TV and had to get up early, like they did on school days. They did have lots of complaints. When Iris asked why she had to go to Chinese class on weekends, we told her that knowing one more language was to her advantage in a world that was becoming smaller. We also ensured her if she could master Chinese, at least she could work in the UN as a translator in the future, if there were no other opportunities for her. Already quite precocious, this answer seemed to satisfy her.

We struggled through many years for this Chinese class, until both our children had graduated from elementary school. In teaching Chinese, we decided we should teach children the traditional Chinese characters (as opposed to the simplified ones used by the People’s Republic of China), but decided to use the PRC’s Pinying phonetic system for pronunciation. At the time, teaching traditional Chinese characters and Pinying phonetic together was an innovation. We ignored the political implications by using Pinying. Time tells us we made the right decision, and the teaching method obviously was an advantage for our children. We were also fortunate to have the famous linguistics professor, C. C. Cheng of the University of Illinois, to be their first teacher.

Looking back, we felt the reason that Iris later had no identity problems as a minority in the U.S. may be due to the fact that she had been exposed to Chinese culture in her very early years. She was aware of her roots and was proud to be a Chinese-American.

The house on Broadmoor Drive was really too small for a family of four, although it had that nice big yard. Iris and Michael were big enough now to need their own bedrooms. After we returned from Europe, I spent time trying to find a bigger house for the family. In 1974, Shau-Jin was promoted to full professor in the Department of Physics. It seemed that we were going to stay in Champaign-Urbana for a while, so finding a better place to live was vital.

We bought a new house under construction in southeast Urbana, in a district with an excellent elementary school. After the house was finished, we moved into our new home in April 1974, and Iris attended Yankee Ridge Elementary School in Urbana, near our new house.

While I was busy decorating the new house that summer, Shau-Jin was starting a new vegetable garden in the back yard. Again, we erected a new gym set beside the garden. Because the house was new, we had done all the landscaping ourselves. After we laid the sod down, Shau-Jin and I planted trees and brushes in the front and back yards. Both of us did the digging and planting in the intense, hot summer sun. Doing this gave me some idea of what the lives of the American West settlers had been like, but minus the cattle! It was a period during which we worked very hard to provide a good home for our children and to fulfill our own American dream.

Our house was next to the last lot on the block. The last lot was empty, and beyond the lot was a vast cornfield. Iris was starting to ride her bicycle with training wheels on the sidewalk, exploring her surroundings. Michael stayed busy catching butterflies and other insects with his baseball hat in the empty lot next to our house. The empty lot was full of weeds, including clovers, which attracted many butterflies. For a period of Michael’s childhood, he was obsessed with catching the most beautiful butterflies and moths in that region. He shared his interest with Iris, and we often saw the two of them go on insect hunts: Michael carried a glass jar, and Iris held an insect-catching net. Once they caught a most beautiful and delicate moth, the size of a baby’s palm.

In the summer before the new school year started, we settled into the new house. We bought a new upright Baldwin piano for Iris to learn to play. When I was young, I’d never had a chance to learn any musical instruments. Playing the piano was one of my childhood obsessions. As I mentioned, I was born in Chungking, the war capital of China, in the intensive Sino-Japanese War during the ruthless Japanese invasion. After the war ended in 1945, China fell immediately into a civil war. My parents brought us thousands of miles to escape the war. My memory of my childhood is full of fears, worries, pains, and frights. My parents were constantly planning how to survive, with no time to think about anything more than our basic education. Of course, there was no such luxury as piano lessons. When Shau-Jin and I were finally able to buy a piano in 1974, my childhood dream was transferred onto my own children. I love classical music, and I wished to cultivate my children’s love for it too.