Woman Who Could Not Forget (52 page)

On March 22, 2003, Iris received the first copy of her newly published book,
The Chinese in America,
which she showed to us with pride. Although this was the third book she had published, I could still see her joy and emotion when she held that thick hardcover. The jacket was beautifully designed, with a bright red background throughout. On the front was a photo of a three-generation Chinese-American immigrant family, the old dressed in ancient Chinese costumes and the young in modern Western clothes. It was a thick book of 500 pages, the product of four years of hard work!

Once the book was published, Viking Penguin arranged a multi-city book-signing tour for Iris to promote the book; it was one solid month on the road, from April 24 to May 24, 2003. While Iris was on the road, Ping took care of Christopher during the day and we took over after Ping left at 5
P.M
. until Brett came home around 7
P.M
. By this time, at the age of about eight months, Christopher could sleep through the night, which helped Brett a great deal overnight. We had promised Iris that if Ping needed our help during the day, we were nearby and would pitch in, and this gave Iris much peace of mind while she was out on the book tour.

Iris sent us e-mails and called frequently when she was on the tour. Her book signings, speeches, and media interviews were tightly packed from city to city. She called to ask about Christopher whenever she got a chance. She traveled to the East Coast first, and we followed her news through New York, Princeton, Philadelphia, Washington, Durham (North Carolina), then Chicago, Denver, on and on. Whenever a newspaper had published a review of her latest book, she would e-mail us the article. Most reviews were good and positive. She told us that she was welcomed at every stop, and her speech was always well-received.

In an e-mail on April 30, 2003, Iris wrote:

Hi Mom and Dad! I’m typing this from a computer in the Nassau Inn at Princeton. Hope all is well with you, Brett and Christopher. The Yale event was extremely well received, with all books sold, and C-span will cover my lecture tonight at Princeton. I’m going to take a nap now before the event. Love, Iris

I knew she was concerned about Christopher, so I usually described how he was doing and asked her not to worry. Shau-Jin and I went to visit him quite often to see whether Ping needed our help. Iris was very happy that we lived so close to her.

On May 12, 2003, Iris wrote:

Thank you, Mom! Give Christopher a big kiss for me!

Everything went beautifully in Chicago today. First, I gave a long interview with Patrick Reardon at the
Chicago Tribune
this morning, who identified all of the important themes of my book. Then I posed for a photo shoot with a freelance photographer who turned out to be a U of I graduate. She spent hours taking countless portrait pictures of me for the Tempo section of the
Tribune,
some of which I can later use for publicity purposes after the
Tribune
selects and runs one image.

Next, I signed copies of THE CHINESE IN AMERICA at local bookstores . . . one young woman approached me, saying she was a graduate of Uni High in 1993 and that I was an inspiration for her.

Afterwards, I delivered a lecture at the Chicago Public Library, which was well-attended and praised (every seat was taken), with people in the audience fighting to ask questions afterwards. . . .

Finally, I had a relaxed and enjoyable interview with Milton Rosenberg, a radio talk show host in the Tribune building. He had interviewed me for THE RAPE OF NANKING and called THE CHINESE IN AMERICA “a spectacular book.”

In many ways, I felt I had returned “home”—embraced not only by old friends and acquaintances, but by strangers who knew of my reputation through Uni High, the U of I, the
Chicago Tribune
or my previous books. This was certainly one of the best days of my tour.

Much love, Iris

In her later life, Iris told us that she certainly never forgot the day in 1989 when she’d called us, crying, from a public telephone booth in the
Chicago Tribune
’s building. Sometimes, Iris felt that the fact that the
Chicago Tribune
had not hired her was the best thing they could have done for her career!

On May 21, 2003, an Op-Ed Iris wrote for the
New York Times
titled “Fear of SARS, Fear of Strangers” was published while she was in Denver on her book tour. We wrote to her that we liked the article. It was a proper time to voice the Chinese-American community’s concern that the ban of Asian students coming from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to the summer school of UC-Berkeley was not fair. The SARS epidemic cases were found not only in Asia, but in other places globally as well. Iris wrote in the Op-Ed, “As long as any university maintains criteria for exclusion based on nationality, not sound medical diagnosis, it will face charges of prejudice. After all, SARS is a global disease. A blanket ban on Asians isn’t protection against the virus—it is simply discrimination under a different name.” In the article, Iris listed all the health-related discriminations Chinese-Americans had faced in the past 150 years. It was a proper article for her to write at the time she had just freshly finished the book
The Chinese in America
.

On May 24, Iris returned home after a month on the road non-stop without a chance to see Christopher and the rest of her family. I thought she could rest a while at home after the tour, but it was not very long before she was traveling again. This time the book tour was on the West Coast—mainly in California. On June 4, Shaun-Jin and I, as well as Michael and almost all of Iris’s cousins and relatives in California, were present when she was book-signing at one of the San Jose Barnes & Noble bookstores. We witnessed the huge crowds at the book signing and confirmed, as she had told us, that it seemed like people were still more interested in her previous book,
The Rape of Nanking
, than her current book. Many of the questions from the crowd and media still pertained to Nanking.

Once Iris came home, she faced millions of things waiting for her, not to mention a huge pile of mail that had accumulated on her desk. She found that Christopher was looking older and was surprised to see that he could push himself in his walker, skating wildly on the surface of their garage at high speed. She might have felt a little guilty that she had not been able to be with him for that month when he was growing so rapidly.

In the summer of 2003, besides the book activities, Iris was actively redecorating her house. Not only cleaning and throwing away boxes of junk; she was also rearranging the furniture in the living room.

Christopher started walking when he was almost a year old. His curiosity got him into everything and gave everyone in the family a headache. We had to keep our eyes on him every minute so he wouldn’t get into too much mischief!

On July 30, 2003, Iris described Christopher’s power:

Dear Mom,

We have a little Hercules on our hands. Yesterday, Christopher did a pull up on the changing cart, crawled down the equivalent of ten flights of stairs, partially pried open the sliding kitchen door and broke one of the shutters. He can rip off his bib with one fell swoop and even dismantle the tray from the high chair.

On August 31, 2003, Christopher’s first birthday, Iris not only ordered a big ice cream cake for the occasion, she also bought a bunch of colorful balloons. Ken and Luann came from Illinois for the big event. Michael came, too. Iris and Brett were busy opening gifts for Christopher. I don’t think Christopher understood why so many people were in the house and why he was asked to pose in front of the camera for so many shots. The house was filled with laughter, and Christopher was the star. One of the best shots was a family picture of all of us surrounding the handsome Christopher with his beautiful smile and startling eyes. It was printed on our New Year’s, 2004 greeting card and mailed to all our friends.

Iris continued to engage in many book activities, such as September’s San Francisco Litquake, which invited her, as well as many Bay area authors, for a reading of their works. Iris realized that she was lucky that we lived nearby. On July 29, 2003, she wrote, “We are blessed in so many ways, especially by having you and Dad so close by. . . . I’m grateful that I have many people around me who love Christopher and are willing to help.”

On October 3, 2003, in an e-mail, I asked Iris whether she was putting too much emphasis on her career, placing her career before her family. She replied:

That is not true. It’s just that I believe that I have some power to shape my destiny and I want Christopher to have in his mother a strong role model, a person who is his own individual, impervious to the whims of others.

I cannot teach Christopher to be an intellectual and a socially responsible person unless I demonstrate to him, through my actions, that I myself am such a person.

I want to teach Christopher that it is far better to belong the critical minority than the unquestioning majority. I want to teach him the ability to think independently, to evaluate ideas and information on his own—without the official sanction of the authorities—and, if possible, to create.

These qualities are not universally popular in our society. My tendency to stand alone, apart from the crowd, has caused me great pain and suffering throughout my life, but in the end, I am a stronger and better person because of it.

In the fall of 2003, I enrolled in a class of
Ikebana
, Japanese flower arrangement, at the Cupertino Senior Center. This was something I had always wanted to learn. In addition, Shau-Jin and I were taking painting classes and hiking frequently with groups from the Sunnyvale Community Center. Both of us were enjoying these classes and had a good time. Later, I also found a clay art class that I really enjoyed and devoted many hours to making vases, plates, flowerpots, and so forth. I was absorbed in my own hobbies and all the perks of the retirement lifestyle and did not realize until later that Iris was suffering a major setback in her quest for her movie project. The company that had optioned the film rights to
The Rape of Nanking
could not find investors to make the film. They did not renew their option after the end of a year.

So in the spring of 2003, Iris was back to square one. Of course, she was a person who would not take “no” for an answer. She was taking a different approach this time. She enrolled in a special workshop called the A-Team, in which the participants met once every two weeks. The leader of the A-Team would coach her and others in a strategy to achieve individual goals. She flew to Burbank every two weeks and spent two days over a weekend attending the fast-paced meeting to learn from her mentor and to get connected to movie industry people. She ended up in collaboration with an Asian-American movie producer. After half a year and long hours of discussion and negotiation and much effort, Iris still had not gotten anywhere. The major problem was finding investors. Even though she had a sound visionary script and business plan, people with capital were just not willing to make that final leap of commitment.

Often when we met up, Iris expressed her disappointment and frustration over the movie project. Her frustration stemmed from the fact that she felt a movie would reach out to an even wider audience than the book and further educate people about Nanking and the history of Chinese-Americans. She had delivered those sentiments in a speech at the Committee of 100 in June, in front of many influential Chinese-Americans, by asking: “Have we, as Chinese-Americans, done enough to educate our children about our heritage and our contributions to this country? If the answer is no, we have to ask ourselves why. If even we Chinese-Americans don’t care about our own history, why should anyone else?”

Iris continued: “It’s disgraceful that there is still not a major feature film on the subject of the Rape of Nanking, or on the subject of the Comfort Women, or on the subject of Unit 731. We have to ask ourselves some hard-hitting questions. Like, why isn’t there a Chinese-owned studio. Certainly the talent, passion, and intelligence are there. Is it that we simply don’t care? Or are we not able to work together effectively to bring about change?

“There is only one group of people who can really prevent this project from happening, and it isn’t the Japanese or the Hollywood system: it is ourselves. We are the ones who get to decide whether it happens or not.”

On October 5, 2003, Iris asked us to watch over Christopher so she, Brett, and Michael could go to the Asian Business League banquet in San Francisco where Iris was going to receive an award. She delivered a short speech in accepting the award. The speech was in the same tone, telling Asian-American business elites that “First, we need to support each other. . . . Secondly, and even more importantly, we have to create our own power. We should stop asking others for permission. Rather than beg for entree into non-Asian organizations, we must create our own. It is high time that we stopped banging our heads against the glass ceiling and started using our own capital resources and entrepreneurial drive, to build more of own hospitals and companies and law firms and media empires and venture capital funds. . . .”

She advised the audience that “If there is one thing I have learned from my career as a writer, it is that the surest path to success is to listen to your heart, your own inner passion, while striving to create something of enduring value. Quite often this means standing alone and forging one’s own path. To quote Sigmund Freud: ‘I became aware of my destiny: to belong to the critical minority as opposed to the unquestioning majority.’”

At this time, she was turning her attention to her next book project. Iris had proposed several ideas to her book agent, and the story of American POWs in the Philippines struck a chord. In early November 2003, with the help of a military historian, Iris was preparing a trip to Ohio. She asked us to help Ping and Christopher while she spent a week in November in interviewing a group of surviving American veterans who had been captured in the Philippines by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Again, she returned to the profession and topic she knew best: writer, investigative journalist, and historian, working to dig and expose a forgotten historical event of World War II in Asia.