Woman Who Could Not Forget (9 page)

When the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival came in September, we bought moon cakes for the celebration. The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the three most important Chinese holidays in the year, and it is on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, according to the lunar calendar. When I was little, my parents and our whole family usually sat outside the house on the patio and ate moon cakes while we enjoyed the beautiful bright full moon. It’s a festival that originated in ancient China, to celebrate the abundance of food after the harvest, when the moon is at its fullest. We did the same thing that night. We sat on the patio and looked at the moon, and we told Iris and Michael the story of the beautiful lady Chang’e Wo who ascended to the moon after she drank the elixir of life, according to the legend. And we also told them the legend about how on the anniversary of Chang’e Wo’s ascension, there was an uprising of Han Chinese against the Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty in the fourteenth century. Although the legend might not be entirely historically accurate, we told them the tale nevertheless. Iris was fascinated by all the Chinese stories we told her. To her, China was far away, mysterious, and enchanted. She was quite aware that her ancestors had come from that mystical ancient country.

The Chinese New Year fell on February 18 in 1977. It could occur either in January or February in different years according to the lunar calendar. Po-Po and Gong-Gong in New York, as well as Ye-Ye and Nai-Nai in Los Angeles, mailed a big parcel of goodies to Iris and Michael. In addition, they also asked us to give each of their grandchildren a red envelope on behalf of them—an old tradition on Chinese New Year’s Eve. In the envelope we put money, and we gave it to the children on New Year’s Eve as a gift, a welcome symbol for starting a prosperous New Year. Needless to say, Iris and Michael welcomed all the gifts; they were the beneficiaries of both cultures. They were glad to celebrate both Chinese and Western holidays!

Iris’s school teacher wanted her class to learn different cultures in the world. Iris had the chance, and was proud to “show and tell” the Chinese New Year traditions to her class. Once she brought her Chinese notebook, so she could show her classmates the Chinese characters she wrote neatly, column after column, from top to bottom and from right to left.

Shau-Jin not only brought back Chinese children’s books from Taiwan; he also brought back a sheet covered with hundreds of silkworm eggs, each egg the size of a sesame seed. Raising silkworms was a common hobby for almost all Chinese kids in China when we were young. Shau-Jin especially cherished this practice and had fond memories of raising silkworms as a boy. He was very happy he had gotten the eggs from a friend in Taiwan, so he could show Iris and Michael how to raise them.

When the spring finally came in 1977, Shau-Jin saw that the mulberry trees along the Boneyard Creek near the U of I Physics Department were covered with tender leaves. He carefully took the eggs from the refrigerator, where they were stored and hibernating, and put them in the warm kitchen air. Over the course of a couple of weeks, the tiny eggs hatched and the black larvae came out of the shells, and the whole family was busy raising the baby silkworms. Every evening when Shau-Jin came home from work, he would bring a branch of mulberry leaves for the baby worms to eat. Iris and Michael would hover over the box and watch the baby silkworms chew on the leaves. They ate day and night. The old dried-up mulberry leaves from the previous day were replaced by fresh mulberry leaves each evening. We had to clean up the tiny black excrement left behind in the box. The baby silkworms grew very fast and gradually became white caterpillars, with a horn at the end of their backs.

Iris and Michael were very excited each day to check the worms after school. They also shared their excitement with their friends by inviting them to come to our house to see the silkworms. The worms molted four times and finally reached about two or three inches long, and they consumed more and more mulberry leaves each day. A week after the last molt, the worms became semi-transparent, their bodies full of silk fibers, and started looking for a place to make a cocoon.

Both Iris and Michael were fascinated watching the worms make their cocoons; the worm’s mouth spit out the thread of silk fibers while its head moved back and forth and left and right. Day and night, it spun the silk thread around itself until its body was enclosed inside and out of our sight. The cocoon was made of a single continuous thread of silk at least a thousand feet long, according to the silkworm experts.

The first year we got close to fifty cocoons, mostly white. We also got some yellow, gold, and even pink cocoons. Raising silkworms in our family became a tradition that lasted several years.

One night, Shau-Jin excitedly called us from the family room and asked us to come quickly. Iris, Michael, and I went immediately, and Shau-Jin showed us that several moths were squeezing out of a small opening in a cocoon. Some of the male moths were mating with the females. After mating, the eggs were released from the female moth. Iris and Michael witnessed and learned the complete life cycle of the silkworms. Because of this experience, Iris mentioned silkworms in the poems she would write a few years later. It’s interesting—and perhaps not a complete coincidence—that Iris’s first book’s title, many years later, was
Thread of the Silkworm
. The Silkworm in this instance was the name of a Chinese missile developed by rocket scientist Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen, the father of the Chinese missile program and the primary subject of the book.

One day in the spring of 1977, Iris’s third-grade teacher, Mrs. Hemp, sent the parents of her class a note asking the parents to come to the class for a class unit called “American Hero.” Iris was a diligent student, so, a couple of weeks before, she went to the public library to find a book for the unit. Finally, she chose Clara Barton’s
The Angel of the Battlefield
for her book report. I learned alongside Iris that Clara Barton was a dedicated woman caring for wounded soldiers in the American Civil War and later became the founder of American Red Cross. On the day the parents were invited to the class, I saw that Iris was wearing a white early American colonial hat, apparently provided by her teacher to portray a nurse. The long medieval-looking dress I bought for her to wear with that hat made her really look like a woman from the nineteenth-century Civil War era. Iris told me she had chosen Barton because of “her courage” and because “she cares.”

In the summer of 1977, Shau-Jin visited Aspen, Colorado for a summer physics conference. We brought Iris and Michael along to hike on the many beautiful trails nearby. At the end of the conference, we drove to Arches National Park in Utah, and to the Grand Canyon and then the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona on our way home. This part of America had the most beautiful landscapes we had ever seen. The magnificent sandstone arches were so grand and impressive that they took our breath away. The color of the red sandstone under the sun was more bright and beautiful than any photos we had ever seen. I felt that Iris, in particular, was the one who was really inspired by these wonders of nature, as she was always curious about the world around her, and here were landscapes beyond people’s wildest dreams.

It was when Iris was almost ten years old, in the fourth grade, that she began to derive a real joy from writing. Iris not only read books like a bookworm, but she enjoyed writing so much that she compiled her own stories and poems into a self-made “book” and proclaimed that she was the author. Her fourth-grade teacher taught the class to make a so-called “Poetry Book.” Iris showed me with passion what she wrote in her book. On the front of the book, bound by brownish wooden-patterned wallpaper, the title “Poetry Book, by Iris Chang” was displayed. On the first page, there was a Foreword wherein she introduced herself as a fourth-grade student and said she liked to write poems. On every page, she wrote with a pencil in the best neat cursive she could muster. Each poem or story had a title and date.

On March 21, 1978, titled “I used to . . . A poem,” she wrote:

I used to have tadpoles,

But now I have baby frogs, . . .

I used to write stories,

But now I write poems. . . .

The next was her prose on “The Wonderful World of Cat.” Then “A Haiku Poem” and a “Limerick,” which I believe her teacher taught the class how to write.

There was also a description of “Loneliness,” which she wrote in several short sentences:

Loneliness is a silent chirp of a cricket across a lake

Where the leaves on the trees rustle at sunset.

It smells like a violet patch.

It sounds like wind blowing through the tall prairie grass.

. . . .

Reading her words, I could imagine that she was reflecting on what she saw in her surroundings and in her mind. In the summer of 1978, we had just moved to the big brand-new house at 309 Sherwin Drive in the Yankee Ridge Subdivision, which was more secluded; it was surrounded by woods, prairie grass, and cornfields. From the wide front windows of her second-floor bedroom, Iris could see the beautiful oak and maple trees lining the stream and the acres of cornfield. Indeed, the landscape could inspire feelings of loneliness, especially when we were separated from her accustomed surroundings. At the time, her loneliness was also compounded because a girl in her Chinese class had tried to ostracize her, and despite the fact that she had many other friends, this petty cruelty still hurt her. Fortunately, I completely understood how she felt, and she could pour her misery on me. We had endless talks, which I believed soothed her lonely sensitive feelings and gave her strength.

It’s interesting to note that all the little things that happened during that time, Iris wrote into her stories and poems. For example, there was a little pond in the Yankee Ridge Subdivision that was not far from our house, hidden in the woods. During the spring it contained swarms of tadpoles. Iris and Michael were fascinated by the tadpoles. We helped them catch a bottle of tadpoles and brought them home. We put them in our fish tank, and the tadpoles eventually became tiny frogs—so small, like the size of a lima bean. The transformation of tadpoles to frogs amazed them.

Iris loved cats, starting from when she was very little. When we moved into the new house in the Yankee Ridge, there was a tabby that always came to play with Iris and Michael. At first, we did not know why this cat was so friendly to them. We learned later that both of them saved the meat from the dishes I cooked to give to the cat. No wonder the cat just sat outside of our back sliding door and waited patiently in the evening. Iris begged us to adopt the cat and finally I gave in, but with the condition that the cat should live outside, not in the house. She named the cat Cat, short for Catherine, but she later renamed her Tash, although the cat always remained Cat to me.

In many of the stories and poems that Iris wrote, she mentioned cats. It was Cat who was her best companion after school. She took many pictures of Cat. When she did her homework or read a book, Cat was always beside her, even though I told her that Cat should not be in the house. She managed to smuggle Cat into her room behind my back. She was no longer allergic to cats at age ten; at least not
this
Cat. One day, when I opened Iris’s bedroom door, I found Cat sleeping on her bed! This cat became one of our family members and lived until 1999, twenty-two or twenty-three years.

Our interest in reading Iris’s writings had given her a sense of achievement and encouraged her even more onto the path of literary writing. The impact of parents’ attitudes on their children is unbelievably significant, which we sometimes did not realize.

Iris’s love of writing was even more apparent in a note she wrote in class in 1979: “Writing is one of my favorite pastimes. It improves my English. It makes me think, and I understand more about things. I never think of it as work. I always think of writing as something enjoyable, because it is something that I really like to do.”

From 1978 to 1979, she wrote many poems and recorded them in several booklets that she made. When Iris was in fifth grade, Yankee Ridge School held their first Young Author writing competition. Since I had read many of Iris’s poems and other writings, I encouraged her to enter the competition. I also volunteered to type her work for her. Iris submitted a collection of her poems and a short story titled “The Mouse Family.” The poems were selected from her writings and titled “Where the Lilies Bloom” (which was the title of one of the poems in the collection).

Both submissions won the Yankee Ridge School competition. Then her two pieces represented Yankee Ridge School to compete in the Urbana School District. Again, her collection of poems and the short story won and were chosen to participate in the Central Illinois Regional Young Author Conference in Bloomington.

“The Mouse Family” described a mouse family of seven; Father Mouse, Mother Mouse, and five children mice. The most elaborate part of the story was a newspaper published in Mouseville called
The Mouseville Gazette,
in which Iris was able, on one page of the “newspaper,” to give readers the news that “Mr. Mouse wins a house-building contest,” “Mouseville Bank robbed,” and, of course, Letters to the Editor and the Dear Anne Gerbil Column.