The young couple spent the first year in China in Nanking (now Nanjing) studying the language. I have many letters and pictures from that first year when everything was strange and new. They usually walked to the language school, taking a rickshaw if the weather was bad or they were running late. “One’s conscience has many twinges as he rides behind a fellow in a comfortable little buggy and have this fellow pulling you through the mud always going at a trot,” my father wrote that first November. “[They] wear no shoes, merely a little straw mat woven to fit the bottom of their feet and fastened with strings. And they go through the winter with nothing more than this.”
Their walk to school took them through a graveyard where the mounds were several feel high and cone shaped. Here and there was a stand on which dead babies were placed, the tiny bodies eaten by the dogs that roamed the area. He didn’t say so, but I’m guessing most of those little corpses were unwanted daughters.
After a year of study they went to Huai’an, the mission station to which they had been assigned. Lao Tzeo, one of the rickshaw pullers that they had gotten to know in Nanking, was originally from Huai’an, and he insisted on accompanying them. He thought these two “babes in the woods” needed help and protection in his old hometown. He brought his wife and two small children along, and he became our gatekeeper and she the amah after we children finally joined the family. As my father declared many years later: “They were our trusted and wonderful helpers all the time we were in China.”
During those first five years as they continued to study the language, they began their assigned tasks. My father taught in a boys’ school and my mother in a girls’ school the mission had established. Daddy felt that they should find a property where the boys’ school could provide dormitory space as well as classrooms. To his great delight, property was located near the north gate that closely matched his vision for an expanded school. It was the sort of compound that a fairly well-to-do extended Chinese family might own with several small separate dwellings and some open space behind a gated wall.
My parents lived in one of the small houses, the gatekeeper and his family in another. The other buildings and the grounds were part of the school for boys from fifth grade through junior high. Apparently the teachers were reluctant to push the boys too hard—many of them, after all, came from families where no one else was literate. My father was a strict headmaster because he was determined that their boys do as well on the government examinations as boys from government schools. In the first graduating class of seven, among the eight hundred boys taking the exam, six of the boys from the north gate school scored in the top ten percent. The teachers were convinced.
My father loved sports and he was also determined that the boys be physically fit. He introduced basketball. The boys loved it, but basketball is the wrong sport for boys wearing the long gowns that set scholars apart from peasants. By the end of a game, the precious gowns had been stepped on and were dirty if not torn. Needless to say, the parents were outraged. Daddy’s solution was to have the boys take off their gowns and play in their skivvies and put the gowns on again before they went back into the street.
All went well until the spring of 1927. The young Communists that my parents had first heard of when they landed in Shanghai were now a force to be reckoned with. Two Russian generals had come in 1923 along with other officers and propagandists from the Soviet Union and helped the Chinese Communists organize and push their way up from Canton to Nanking. They killed several missionaries in Nanking and threatened others, so all the missionaries were told to leave—that if they stayed they not only risked their own lives, but put any Chinese who supported them in danger as well.
The boys’ school photo.
Welcoming Baby Anne in Kuling 1937.
My mother was very sick at the time, so the mission decided that my parents should go directly to the mission hospital in Seoul, Korea. The trip itself was a hazardous one. Hundreds of peasants began clambering aboard the dilapidated steamer, causing it to list from side to side. My father and several of the other foreigners finally persuaded the captain that if any more passengers were allowed aboard, the boat would surely sink, so some of the would-be travelers were left behind. Mother’s mysterious abdominal distress had gotten much worse, and she was lying below, doubled over in agony, when another missionary wife sharing her cabin began screaming that they were all going to drown. Mother got so angry that she forgot her pain and just yelled at the woman to have faith and shut up.
Once in Seoul, my mother was admitted to the hospital and taken almost immediately into surgery. When she woke up, the surgeon, who was also a gynecologist, was waiting. “Am I going to die?” she asked. “Not only are you not going to die,” he said. “You’re going to be able to have children.” This was news that both my parents were desperate to believe, as they longed to have children and there seemed to be no answer to why my mother could not become pregnant.
Don’t ask me to explain the diagnosis or the cure. Mother put it like this: “Besides taking out my misplaced appendix, he put all my other insides just where they should have been.”
And how. Within the next ten years, she had six babies. The first was my brother George Raymond Womeldorf Jr., born the following spring in Shanghai, as the Communists had taken over our compound in Huai’an, and it wasn’t safe for women and children to go “up country.” My father returned and when he arrived his Chinese friends greeted him warmly and said he should have stayed. “They might have killed you the first day,” they said. “But after that they wouldn’t have bothered you.”
Our compound was occupied, but Daddy and Mr. Yates were allowed to stay in the little office of the boys’ school. Every time the two of them went past the house that had been my parents’ home, the Communist soldiers cursed them. All the occupiers were young, from about eighteen to twenty-two or -three. The comrade in charge said, looking straight at my father, who was much younger than Mr. Yates, that anyone over twenty-five was too old to have any sense and should be shot. The speaker was a Harvard graduate.
Eventually tensions eased and Daddy was even invited into the office of the head of the communications bureau. The man wanted to show off the elaborate road system he had planned for the district. My father was very impressed and asked when he planned to begin the project. “Well,” he answered, “the only thing we lack now is money.”
Ray, me, and Liz.
Me at about eighteen months.
Me at five in Kuling.
Occupiers left, but new ones came in to take their places in the compound, so it was months before our home was vacated. Before the first Communists arrived, our faithful gateman Lao Tzeo and his wife had hidden all the furniture and sealed off the room with a cat inside to eat the mice and rats that might want to chew on the upholstery. So their belongings were safe, but the house itself was a mess. It had been occupied by sick soldiers who had slept on the floor on rice straw mats. The whole place crawled with a variety of vermin. After a thorough cleaning, Daddy and Lao Tzeo got large earthenware jars, filled them with sulfur, and then closed up the house as tightly as possible for three days. If any reader is anxious to know how to get rid of bedbugs, this is apparently a no-fail solution.
When Mother and Baby Ray came home, there was great rejoicing. All their Chinese friends loved the blond blue-eyed baby with a passion and he was dubbed “Didi,” which means “little brother.” He was only able to shed his baby nickname after he had four little sisters and pronounced in no uncertain terms that he was nobody’s little brother. He became a big brother in December of the following year when Charles Bennett was born just before Christmas. Charles was a beautiful, perfect baby who lived only three weeks. Today, what was probably a congenital anomaly would be quickly diagnosed and repaired, but this was 1929, and they were ten miles from the nearest hospital. Because it took mail almost two months to go back and forth from fa
mily and friends in America, they were still receiving presents for the baby long after he was dead. “Unless,” my mother said in her recollections of those days, “you have gone through the experience of giving up your own baby you’d never understand the grief of it.”
The first term of seven years was up in 1930, so that summer the family of three came back to Virginia, where my older sister, Elizabeth, was born, also a December baby, loved and cared for by two grandmothers and a passel of aunts and uncles.
Liz, Helen, Ray, and me (petting baby kid), in Huai’an.
At Home in Huai’an
My mother managed to anchor her peripatetic life by places in China. If it was a big city, she’d call it Shanghai; if it was a vacation spot, she’d call it Kuling; if it was home, she’d call it Huai’an. Even though I left Huai’an when I was not quite five, I always knew what she meant. Huai’an always meant home to me too, though we had fled from home so often over the years that my aunt Anne used to refer to my family as the “China fleas.”
The family, now four, returned to China in 1931 to terrible floods, caused by the Yellow River breaking its banks. The Grand Canal overflowed as well. The dikes around the city of Huai’an were high enough that the city itself was spared, but the surrounding rice fields were covered with up to fifteen feet of water. This meant starvation for most of the population. Any spot of dry ground was covered with shacks housing sick and starving people. There was no place to bury the dead. My father spent the next long year in famine work. His constant companion now was a scholar turned minister, Li Chang Chiang. After the Communists effectively shut down the boys’ school in 1929, it never reopened, so there was a house for Mr. Li and his wife and daughter in our compound. He and my father were not only neighbors and colleagues, but the closest of friends.
Daddy and Mr. Li formed teams of five or six men who went from place to place in small boats handing out secretly marked vouchers. They gave these tickets to everyone they saw in need and directed them to go to a certain temple that was on high ground where the wheat, flour, clothing, and seed rice for later planting provided by the China American Famine Relief Committee was warehoused.
One day Charles Lindbergh flew over the area, expecting to land on the water. Fortunately, my father said, he had not cut off his motor before he saw hundreds of little boats racing toward his plane and he was able to fly off safely. People were desperate, and from time to time Daddy and Mr. Li were accosted and held by people demanding food. When it was apparent that they had no food with them, they were let go. At the end of that very long year, as Daddy was writing out the last famine relief ticket, he said to Mr. Li that he hoped it would be the last such ticket he would ever have to write out. “Then you must be planning to leave China,” Mr. Li said, “as famines occur every eight or ten years.”
Besides the natural disaster, two other tragedies scarred the autumn of 1931. One of the Presbyterian missionaries they knew well was taken hostage and killed by bandits. But even sadder was the suicide of a missionary wife, a special friend of my mother’s. In his letter to his family, my father wrote: “Many at home fail to realize the strain under which people live out here.”
Once the famine was over, my father was given a new assignment by the mission. Up until that time, the missionaries had been in charge of the Chinese Church, but a new day was dawning. The Mission Board decided that instead of being in control of the work in China, the missionaries should seek to assist the indigenous church. Daddy was asked to work in the area previously served by Mr. Yates, the feeling being that a new, younger man would be better able to effect this change in philosophy than one who had been for many years the man in charge.
My father worked with five Chinese evangelists in the area, but the person he worked most closely with and almost always traveled the countryside with was Mr. Li. Once, in a country village, the hospitable farmer moved his pigs out of the next room and gave it to Daddy and Mr. Li for the night. The next morning Daddy woke up to see Mr. Li shaking his long garment as hard as he could. When Daddy asked him what was going on, he replied that he’d been feeding those fleas all night and now he was leaving them behind to chew on someone else’s body. Daddy would shake his head when he told this story. Mr. Li was a gentleman and a fine classical scholar. My father was a farm boy from Virginia who had lived through unbelievable conditions in France and Belgium. For my father, sleeping in a pig room wasn’t too much of a stretch, but he just couldn’t get over Mr. Li being willing to put up with such a life. It is hard for me to fully realize that my father was living this same life with damaged lungs and an artificial leg, which, we only learned many years later, constantly irritated his stump and made walking painful.
Mr. Li and he made the circuit of the tiny churches in the area. They also went to villages where there were no Christians. In one such village they came upon the village elders seated under a tree sipping tea. As they approached, speaking as politely as they could, the elders ordered them to leave. Just then a man came riding up on a donkey. He was obviously drunk and shouted a hilarious hello to Mr. Foreigner. The surprised elders asked if he knew the big-nosed foreign devil. Oh, yes, he said. He had been healed at the foreign hospital in Tsing-Kiang-Pu. The elders relented and shared tea with the Christians and listened while they told them about the love of God.
The two friends not only talked about the good news of the Gospel, they gave medicine to the sick, food to the hungry, clothes to those in need. My father even pulled out an abscessed tooth once at the insistence of the owner. There was also an elderly burn victim that he treated with cold tea leaves who always bragged that it was the preacher who had given her such a beautiful pink skin. He and Mr. Li often traveled by donkey. “It was easy to get off the thing,” my long-legged daddy said. “I just put down my feet and he’d walk away.”
Kurling, August of 1937
The road up to Kurling.
There was one organized church in Huai’an with seventy-eight members located at the west gate and the tiny chapel in our front yard. In the entire area of about two million people there were about five hundred churches, most of them tiny. My father and Mr. Li had a vision of a strong national church and for this they worked day after day.
My father loved China and was always eager to learn as much as he could about the country, its history and its people. When the Taoist priest invited him to visit the temple, he went. The priest showed him around the room that held the images of various gods, one of which, to my father’s amazement, was an ancient but clearly recognizable painting of Marco Polo, who must have visited Huai’an during his thirteenth-century travels about China. The priest asked my father to donate a picture of Jesus for his collection, and, after thinking about it, Daddy did. He didn’t think Jesus would mind having a twentieth-century Sunday school portrait displayed alongside the other venerables in the temple.
I was born the year after the famine. I remember those years of my early childhood as idyllic. I began speaking in both Chinese and English as soon as I could speak at all. In the August before my second birthday my father wrote of me: “Katherine is talking Chinese more than the Chinese children are. I believe she is talking more for her age than the other two.” I’m imagining my quiet father, who never spoke unless he had something worthwhile to say, wondering what he would do with this child who wouldn’t shut up in either language.
Along with the Lis and the gateman’s family, there was a widowed woman living in our compound. Her name was Mrs. Liu and I was her special pet. Every day I’d trot over to her little house, timing it for lunch hour, as I was assured of Chinese food at her house and there was no such guarantee at my own. Once my mother said to me as I was on the way out of our house, “If you eat so much Chinese food, you might turn into a little Chinese girl.” I stopped to consider this. I loved my momma and daddy and would hate to give them up, but even that thought did not keep me from trotting down to
Mrs. Liu’s that day or any day.
Perhaps my earliest memory is one from a lunchtime visit with Mrs. Liu. She had told me to wash my hands and I stood over the basin playing in the water for so long that the tips of my fingers went pruney. I was alarmed and ran to show Mrs. Liu how I had damaged my fingers. She explained to me quite gently that it had happened because my hands had been in the water for a long time, but soon they would be good as new. I don’t think she had any children of her own, but she remains one of the kind parenting figures from my childhood.
In June of 2000 I was invited to Beijing to launch the Hans Christian Andersen Award Series of books that Hebei Children’s Publishing House had envisioned and handsomely published.
When the editor, a Mrs. Zhang, first approached me about the proposed series, I replied immediately and enthusiastically. Yes, I wanted books of mine to be a part of the project, and, yes, I would plan to come to China to help launch the series when the books were ready. “What you probably do not know,” I said in my fax, “is that I was born in Jiangsu Province, and, therefore, it means a great deal to me to know that my books will be read by children in the land of my birth.” “When you come to China,” Mrs. Zhang replied, “we will take you home.”
We launched the series in the Great Hall of the People, built by Mao Tse-tung to celebrate the Communist State. Wouldn’t my parents have been amazed that their daughter was speaking in the Great Hall? There followed a conference with writers both Chinese and foreign talking about children’s books in their respective countries. At the close of the conference, Leena Maissen, the executive director of the International Board of Books for Young People, Mrs. Zhang, my daughter Lin, who had come along for the adventure, and I took an early morning flight to Nanjing. We were met at the airport by a guide, a driver, and an ancient Volkswagen van. We boarded the van and headed northeast across the city.
Stories of My Life Page 6
