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

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