Woman Who Could Not Forget by Richard Rhodes Read Free Book Online Page A

All the kids announced with admiration how lucky Iris was. I could see that she was the center of the attention. She was very pleased, and her eyes were locked on the gingerbread house the whole time with a streak of pride on her face. I was pretty proud myself!
    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