Woman Who Could Not Forget (53 page)

T
o understand what transpired during the last leg of Iris’s lifetime journey, it would require a day-by-day, even hour-by-hour, account of the twists and turns and many of the inconceivable struggles with her demon. This chapter will present the chronological events as they took place; they are quite dramatic, but very real, to anyone who seeks a clue as to what exactly developed during those pivotal months:

In 2004, Iris focused her research on a group of American World War II POWs in preparation for the proposal for her next book. This was the story of the American 192nd tank battalion from the Midwest states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, and Kentucky. The 192nd was deployed to the Philippines in 1941. They fought the Japanese and were subsequently captured by the Japanese Army. This tank battalion unit went through hell in the Philippines. There were some survivors, but many died from starvation, disease, and torture. In November 2003, Iris had visited and interviewed several of the battalion survivors in those states. Now she systematically interviewed and tape-recorded each one of them over the phone. This involved many hours of Q&A and was a long and tedious process. The stories of these surviving POWs were horrendous and excruciating beyond words. Iris said even her typist could not stop her tears while she was transcribing the recorded tapes. This book project was certainly a dark subject and not good for her mental health, but Iris said she just could not turn her back on those veterans and let their stories be forgotten.

Right after the publication of
The Rape of Nanking
, we strongly suggested to Iris that she should not write on such a gruesome subject for her next book. That was how she decided to write about the Chinese in America. As soon as we heard she was going to write the following book about the American POWs in the Philippines, we expressed our concern, but Iris said she could not forsake them.

After the arrival of Christopher, Iris slept with him in the bedroom on the top floor of their townhouse. During the day, Christopher was taken care of by Ping while Iris worked in her home office. Brett was taking care of Christopher in the evenings, whereas Iris was taking care of him at night. Around this time, as Christopher moved from a crib to a toddler bed, he learned he could get out of that bed and jump into bed with Iris, which disrupted her sleep. Sometimes she worked late into the night. By the time she went to bed, it was almost time for the baby to wake up. It seemed that Iris was continuing to push herself to maintain the same productivity she’d had before Christopher was born. She did not realize that she was suffering constant sleep deprivation.

In March 2004, when Christopher was over a year and a half old, Iris decided that he should start playing with other children of his age. Besides, Brett’s mom Luann often called from Illinois to remind both of them that they should spend more time with Christopher and find a place for him to interact with other children. So Iris changed Ping’s schedule and put Christopher in the Cisco Day Care Center two or three afternoons a week.

In the meantime, we had made a plan for a trip to Italy for about three weeks, from April 2 to April 23. The trip unfortunately coincided with Iris’s book tour for the paperback edition of
The Chinese in America
. Fortunately, on March 31, Luann and Ken came from Illinois to help watch Christopher while we were away.

Before Iris left for the month-long book tour, she showed me the itinerary. I was shocked and said to her, “How can you travel to so many cities in such a short time?”

“I told them. That’s the best they can do,” Iris replied, slightly annoyed.

Iris had made numerous prior book-signing trips for
The Rape of Nanking
. Now that she was an old hand at book tours, I thought she knew what she was capable of managing. Therefore, I felt that I should just let her be, even though I was uncomfortable with the itinerary. Due to our forthcoming Italy trip, I had no time to think about it further.

After Iris left us in November 2004, I went back and traced what she had done during the last few months of her life. I rechecked the itinerary of her paperback book tour in 2004. The book tour was from March 31 through May 6, during which time she traveled to some twenty cities for thirty-five events. The most strenuous part of the trip was her zigzagging across the continent almost four times. Even a person in top physical and mental condition would have found this schedule highly stressful.

On March 31, Iris attended a function at San Francisco Public Library in the evening. The next day, she flew to Dallas on an early flight and started her month-long tour.

On April 2, we departed for Italy. Whenever possible, when we arrived at a different city, we would find an Internet cafe to check our e-mail and to inform Iris and Michael where we were. We were also happy to receive e-mails from Iris, who told us her book tour was going very well.

On April 4, when we were in Rome, Iris sent an e-mail saying she’d had a terrific time in Chicago. She also attached a letter from Professor Da-Hsuan Feng, the Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Dallas. The letter was the introduction speech to her lecture in Dallas. In the speech, Professor Feng gave glorious praise of Iris’s book
The Rape of Nanking.
Although Iris was on a book tour for her book
The Chinese in America
, people were still talking about her Nanking book.

On April 11, 2004, Iris wrote a short note saying she was at Colgate University, and on April 16, in reply to our e-mail, she said she was at the Baltimore airport and about to leave for Boston. These e-mails were short and revealed nothing unusual.

Shau-Jin and I returned home on April 23. Immediately we went to see Christopher, Luann, and Ken. Christopher was very happy to see us. We brought a gift for Christopher, a wooden replica of Pinocchio that we’d bought in Montecatini.

When Iris was on the road, she usually called home whenever possible to check on Christopher. On Monday, April 26, Iris arrived home in the late afternoon from San Diego, after almost four weeks on the road. This was the first chance she’d had to be home. She missed Christopher tremendously and wanted to see him.

The next day, she was scheduled to give a speech at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club. Iris felt that the speech was very important because the Club had a prestigious reputation. For this important occasion, Iris expressed her need for peace and quiet to prepare her speech, so she was scheduled to stay in a hotel in San Francisco. I saw her for only several minutes at the door that evening when she rushed out of the house to drive to San Francisco. She saw Christopher very briefly before she left. She looked extremely exhausted.

I knew Iris very well. She had already felt guilty that she could not spend more time with Christopher, just like any other working mother. She tried her best to be a good mother to her child, but her time and energy were limited. She was under tremendous pressure to be a good mother in a conventional sense, to conform to traditional family values. I sympathized with her because I myself was a professional woman. I could feel the pressure society in general puts on working mothers, something that many women surely still feel even today.

In retrospect, Shau-Jin and I felt that Iris had become preoccupied and somewhat absent-minded right after the April book tour. She looked tired and seemed to have lost her energy. This could have been due to the five-week, non-stop travel on the road, but she became exceedingly moody, more quiet and apprehensive than expected. I have mulled it over and tried to figure out what factors caused such a change. Finally, there was one thing in particular that bothered me and stood out in my mind.

On one occasion after the April paperback book tour, Iris disclosed to me that she had been threatened on the tour, but she did not specify where and at which event. She just said, “One person came and approached me after the talk and said in a threatening tone, ‘You would be safer if you joined our organization.’ I was stunned and did not know what to say, and I just quickly walked away. Did I do something wrong?” she asked me.

At the time, I assured her that she had done nothing wrong and she should not worry about it. I even suggested, in order to put her mind at ease, that she might have misinterpreted his words.

But she said, “I don’t think I should have just run away immediately . . . I don’t think I handled it right. . . .”

She mentioned the incident again on October 5, 2004, to both Shau-Jin and me when we took her for a walk in the Hakone Garden just a month before her suicide. Again, we did not know who this person was and where and when this incident had happened, or whether the person was really threatening her. We usually listened and tried not to press for more details when Iris was reluctant to tell us. That had been our habit over the years.

Up to this day, I believe something must have happened during the April book tour that made her very fearful. In the past, she’d known how we would worry about her safety, so she usually hesitated to disclose to us the details of anything unpleasant that had happened to her. She believed that on that tour, someone had threatened her and she hadn’t handled it well. As a result, she felt like someone was after her. Was this true? I don’t know. I guess I will never know. But we do know that she became increasingly fearful.

At the beginning of May, Iris was finishing up her public appearances. Around this time, Brett went to his hometown in Illinois to attend his high-school class reunion. For Mother’s Day, with Brett not being home, Iris said she wanted to invite me to a Mother’s Day concert at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. I told her, “You are a mother too. Why don’t we celebrate together?”

On Saturday, May 8, the day before Mother’s Day, Iris came to our townhouse holding a dozen red roses and a dozen purple irises in one hand. In the other hand, she held a lovely white basket that contained a beautiful purple flowered plant. She was determined to celebrate Mother’s Day with me and to forget about her recent unhappiness. I was deeply touched, but at the same time I felt that something was missing.

On Mother’s Day, Iris drove me to the concert hall in Mountain View. At the concert, she sat beside me. When the lights dimmed, I could see that her facial expression was unsettled. She was also quiet in the car while we were driving to the concert. This was unusual, quite unlike her usual talkative self. I wondered what was going through her mind.

When the choir sang Handel’s
Silent Worship
, my eyes welled with tears. I was thinking of my mother. I wondered what Iris was thinking about. Was it about her book tour? Was she thinking about being a good mother? I looked at her sitting next to me, but could not figure it out; I could only see that she was sad, feeling a sense of loss.

Around this time, Iris was looking into daycare facilities for Christopher. She was also earnestly engaged in talking to her neighbors who had children of Christopher’s age, hoping to organize a playgroup. When both Iris and Michael were young, I had organized a playgroup with my friends in Champaign-Urbana. Once a week, the mothers took turns hosting and watching over the children, so that not only could the kids play with each other, but the mothers could get a little break. Iris liked this idea.

One day, Iris was happy to report to us by e-mail that “Christopher now knows his numbers! Yesterday, he laid out before me three wooden numbers—1, 2, 3—in a neat row, and this evening, he handed Brett, one after another, a perfect sequence of numbers from a jumbled pile of numbers (1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0). Isn’t that amazing?”

On June 9, Iris called me because she had a phone interview over the phone at 6:00
A.M
. with a radio station in Boston. She asked Ping to come earlier that day to take care of Christopher. She said she would like me to come to watch Christopher at 4
P.M.
when Ping left. When I went to her house at 4
P.M.
, I noticed that Iris’s face looked gray and very tired. She said that she had just finished the phone interviews with the tank battalion survivors and she wanted to take a nap. I was heartbroken. It was obvious that she had not gotten enough sleep.

On Saturday, June 12, Iris was awarded an honorable degree from the California State University at Hayward. Iris had told us several months before that the university president had informed her that she was the 2004 recipient of an honorary degree. She would be the keynote speaker at the graduation ceremony that day. Shau-Jin and I were very happy for her and told her we would be there. In 2002, when Iris had been awarded the honorary degree from Wooster College in Ohio, we were not able to go. Now we lived in the Bay area, and we certainly were honored to be there to observe the ceremony and see Iris honored.

The president of the university, Norma Rees, invited Iris and us for an early breakfast before the ceremony. At the end of the ceremony, Iris came over to us with the president and asked us to join them to take several pictures. Iris was dressed in a cap and gown, holding her honorary degree certificate in her hands. She was very happy and had a big smile. This was one of the happiest moments of her life and it was also, as far as I ever saw, the last one.