Stories of My Life

by Katherine Paterson

  Now, I can’t relate the exact words. I think I went into a state of shock as this near stranger explained that he had to leave to go back to Buffalo that evening, but that—what on earth was it he said? Anyhow, I was sure from what he said that this young, very handsome young man that I had hardly met, had decided he wanted to marry me. Needless to say, I thought he had lost his mind.

  I’m not sure what prompted me in my weekly letter home to mention quite casually that I had had lunch with a young Presbyterian minister from Buffalo. My mother rushed over to her best friend’s house with the terrible news. “Katherine has gotten involved with a minister from Buffalo.” “Well, that’s wonderful,” Helen said. “If Katherine marries him, she’ll stay in this country and won’t go back to Japan alone.” “But I’ve been to Japan,” my mother said. “I’ve never been to Buffalo.” I was still considering John nuts. I mean, I was never the girl that all the boys fall for, but Mother, apparently, was already on John’s wavelength.

  Beginning as soon as John got back to Buffalo on Tuesday, I was barraged by phone calls and letters from the handsome stranger. My apartment mates couldn’t believe what had happened, and many wry comments about my successful practice sessions were thrown about. I was still convinced that this John Paterson (I soon learned there was only one t in his name) was out of his mind. He would call and I would answer the phone and hear this strange New England voice. Growing up in the South, to me the cultivated Southern voice has always been beautiful to the ear, and this Yankee speech seemed totally alien. If I were to marry him, I thought, all my children would talk like Yankees. It was impossible to contemplate. Besides, he was far too handsome. How could I trust any man that good-looking?

  In addition to the letters and phone calls, there were the visits. Between the middle of February when we met and the end of March, John came to see me. He’d catch the midnight bus from Buffalo after his Sunday duties were done, spend Monday in New York courting me, and catch the midnight bus back so as to be on the job Tuesday morning. He was tired, and I was frantically trying to get my work done for school, so these visits were far from idyllic.

  In March he suggested that I come to Buffalo to see him during my Easter break. I did not walk, I ran to see Dean Craig. “This crazy man wants me to come to see him in Buffalo!”

  To my surprise, Dean Craig thought it was a good idea.

  “But if I come he’ll think I’m ready to marry him.”

  “I thought you said you’d like to get married.”

  “Well, yes, but I don’t even know him.”

  “Well, how did you plan to get to know him?”

  I explained that I was due to go back to Japan after graduation. We could write and stuff and then after I got to know him . . .

  “Katherine,” she said, “John is ready to get married. If you go back to Japan, you’ll never see him again.” I knew she was right. I couldn’t get to know him unless I went, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t scared to death at the idea of spending a week on his turf.

  So it was with Dean Craig’s encouragement and my stomach in knots that I took the bus to Buffalo in April. We were married in July. Just a note about the actual proposal. When he asked me to marry him that Easter, John said that he knew I was a strong woman with many gifts, and he wanted to promise me that he would never stand in the way of my exercising those gifts. As I’ve said before, he didn’t know when he said those words that he would be creating a Frankenstein monster, but despite the books and awards and notoriety, he’s always been my chief supporter and has never stood in my way.

  When we’d been married for enough years to be the parents of four lively children, we were living in Takoma Park, Maryland. Dean Craig had moved to Washington after her retirement, and we saw her a number of times before her too-early death. She confessed to me that in 1962, after she had urged me to go to Buffalo, she was seized with the fear that she might have done the wrong thing. All her training in counseling was of the indirect school. A counselor was never to prod a client on a particular course—simply help her to see the alternatives and let her make her own choice. She had never met John and she really knew nothing about him. So while I was in Buffalo, she went to the confidential files for 1953–56 and looked up John Barstow Paterson, and to her immense relief found nothing but raves.

  In 1967 when we were applying to adopt our daughter Mary, the social worker did individual interviews with John and me. “Why did you marry your husband?” she asked. I was a bit taken aback and fumbled for an answer. It wouldn’t be quite true that I had been madly in love—I hardly knew the fellow at the time. “Well,” I said. “He asked me, and I liked him a lot.”

  It seemed a pretty puny answer regarding a person whom I now really and truly loved. I couldn’t wait to hear John’s answer. “What did you say when she asked you why you married me?” I asked. He replied, “I said I married you because I wanted to marry a grown-up, not somebody I’d have to raise.” Whether I was worthy of this compliment might be debatable, but I still treasure it.

  Soon after Lin came.

  Motherhood

  Many of the young girls I talk with these days want to grow up to be famous. I probably wanted to be famous too, sort of—I mean, why else would I so love performing that I dreamt of becoming a movie star? But even more than famous, I wanted to grow up to be a mother. Outdoors, with the boys on Piedmont Avenue, I played street football, marbles, and junior commandoes, but in my secret indoor life I cherished my dolls. They would have to do until I grew up and had real children. As it turned out, I had four children in just over four years, but for a long time it looked as though there’d be none at all.

  Nearly all my friends and classmates had become parents while I was still a single lady missionary in Japan with no prospects of a husband, much less children. I remember standing on the train platform in Ashiya one day surrounded by small black-haired Japanese school children, saying wistfully to myself: “I want one of those.” But back in the late fifties and early sixties, single women were not allowed to adopt children, so it looked, as I approached my thirties, as though I would miss out on my dream of motherhood.

  But then, when I was twenty-nine I met John Paterson and we were married the summer before we both turned thirty. On our honeymoon we decided that we would have four children—two the old-fashioned way and two by adoption. We were both concerned that the world’s population was exploding, and that in that population were children who needed families. The adopted child would come first. It would give him or her status as the eldest.

  In Japan I had visited orphanages for the children born to Japanese women, children whose fathers were members of the American occupation. These children had no place in either country. We had been married less than a month when I wrote to a friend who did social work in Japan and asked her to make inquiries for us. My Japanese was still quite good in those days. It made perfect sense to us that we should adopt one of these forgotten children. My friend wrote back at once saying that it would not be possible. The Japanese government had just passed a law that Amerasian children in Japan could only be adopted into families in which at least one of the parents was Japanese. The fact that the orphanages were full, with almost no eligible parents stepping up to adopt, seemed to be beside the point. This law was later changed, but at the time it effectively ruled us out. However, my friend gave us the address of International Social Service, an agency that was doing adoptions of children from Hong Kong and Korea. My Mandarin was gone and I had never spoken Cantonese, but I did have roots in China, so we applied for a child from Hong Kong.

  A social worker came out from a Buffalo agency and did a case study and then there was nothing to do but wait. We bought a child’s rocking chair as a sort of talisman for the child we were waiting for, and I would look at the chair and daydream about a little girl with black hair sitting in the chair and rocking happily. But the wait went on. At this rate, w
e thought, we’d soon be too old to have those two homemade children. But a pregnancy that started out with hope ended in a miscarriage.

  After the miscarriage, the prospect of motherhood seemed as dim as it had been since before my marriage. No progress was being made on the adoption front in the more than a year since our initial inquiry, and I didn’t seem to be able to conceive again. We moved to Princeton so that John could pursue a graduate degree at Princeton Seminary and where, as I said earlier, I started teaching at the Pennington School for Boys. John had accepted a part-time job as assistant pastor in the First Presbyterian Church, and not long after we arrived in town, the senior pastor and his wife invited us for dinner. The door was opened by their preschool son, who asked where our children were. I said we didn’t have any children.

  “Don’t you want to have some children?” Wayne asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “but we just don’t have any.”

  “Pray to Jesus,” he said, as though that would solve everything. Don’t ask me to explain it, maybe Wayne started praying for this poor childless couple; at any rate, in a little more than a month, John Jr., was on the way.

  At almost the same time that I found out I was pregnant again, we got a call from one of our references in the Buffalo area to say that International Social Service was trying to locate us. Did we still want a child? Of course we did. The agency sent us a picture of the little girl they had matched with us. She was a determined-looking six-month-old with huge dark eyes and fierce black hair that stood straight up on her head. We fell in love at first sight. The orphanage had given her a name—Yeung Po Lin. The Po meant “precious” in the Canton dialect and was also part of my own Mandarin Chinese name, which was Wong Ja Bao or Wong (our family surname ja, a middle name we all had, and bao, “precious”), and her birthday was October 30—the day before my Halloween one. Surely she was meant to be our daughter.

  But there was a problem. The state of New Jersey would not recognize the family case study that had been done in Western New York. We would have to start all over again. New Jersey prided itself on very low taxes, which translated means very few government services, so by the time a social worker came to our apartment I was great with child. She took one look at my stomach and decided that John and I were out of our minds. Why would we be trying to adopt when we could obviously have children? She went off on her own maternity leave and never finished the home study, but fortunately another much more sympathetic worker was put on our case. The following June, John Jr. was born. Still nothing was happening with the adoption process and our daughter was spending her first two years in an overcrowded Hong Kong orphanage.

  Our friendly social worker would not give up and kept pushing until she found out that our papers were languishing on some bureaucrat’s desk because on some of the pages Paterson was spelled with one t and on others with two. Then, when everything seemed cleared up, there was a chickenpox epidemic in the orphanage and little Po Lin was not to be allowed to leave until all danger of contagion was past.

  When we were sure that our daughter was truly coming, we began eagerly to tell family and friends what was about to happen. My China-loving parents were overjoyed—a Chinese granddaughter in the family—but John’s father was deeply concerned. He predicted darkly that a child who had spent her first two years in an orphanage would never be able to trust or to adapt to family life. One of the friends we felt closest to in Princeton was appalled. How could we do this to little John? He would never recover from the shock of a sudden sister. And how dare we snatch a child from her own culture and bring her into our own? My confidence was shaken. We were taking a two-year-old out of the only life she knew and plunking her into an environment that would be alien in every way. I had no worries about happy little John Boy—I was sure he would quickly adapt—but what about our new child? What were we doing to her?

  At just this time, I went to a weekend private school retreat with several of my students. One of the teachers that I met there was Chinese, so I screwed up my courage and asked him if I could speak with him privately. He listened thoughtfully as I told him what we were proposing to do and how some of our closest friends and family members were telling us that we were making a huge mistake. What did he think? Were we being fair to this child?

  “I’ve just met you this weekend and I don’t know your husband at all,” he said. “But I know enough about the situation in Hong Kong that I can promise you that whatever you give this child will be better than what she has to look forward to there.” His words somehow assured us that it would be all right to proceed as planned.

  We began to think seriously of names for our new daughter. We wanted to keep her Chinese name, Po Lin, but we wanted her to have an English first name that would be special to our family. My grandmother was Elizabeth, my mother was Mary Elizabeth, and my older sister was Elizabeth, so we settled on Elizabeth PoLin Paterson and began trying out various nicknames. My older sister was Liz, an improvement on Lizzie, to be sure, but Liz seemed too old a nickname. I looked at the rocking chair and imagined a pig-tailed daughter called Betsy.

  The long-awaited day finally arrived. Our daughter would be handed over to us planeside in LaGuardia Airport. The three of us waited—John was holding six-month-old John Boy and I was trying to hold myself together. John and I were excited and terrified. The baby, even far past his bedtime, was his usual bouncy happy self. There was another family waiting for their new daughter as well. In addition to the parents, there were three older children, thrilled with the thought of a new baby sister. We exchanged nervous conversation with the parents and took each other’s addresses. Finally, after all the passengers had deplaned, a flight attendant appeared carrying a chubby smiling baby. The other family’s name was called and, as the mother stepped forward to claim her, the little girl put out her arms. “Mama!” she said.

  “Your baby is coming.” The way the flight attendant was not smiling when she said it made me even more anxious. What was the matter with our baby?

  At length a Chinese woman emerged. She looked exhausted, and the tiny, dazed little girl she handed to me simply flopped in my arms. “She hasn’t slept since we left Hong King,” the escort said, indicating that neither had she. I struggled to hold our new daughter. She weighed hardly anything but she was totally limp. Had she never been cuddled? I couldn’t help but wonder what we had gotten ourselves into.

  We drove back to Princeton that night, and my new daughter dozed off in my arms. We’d put a crib for her in John Boy’s room, thinking that having another child about would feel less lonely than a room alone, but the moment I put her down in the crib she woke with a start and began to cry. That was Tuesday night. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights were the same story. John and I took shifts walking the floor carrying her, because it was only when we were actually walking that she would fall asleep. If we stopped walking or worse, sat down, she’d wake up; if we tried to put her in the crib, she’d sit bolt upright and begin to cry.

  She never smiled, but when she was sitting in her high chair at the dining room table she at least seemed content. One morning at about five I put her in the high chair and began to feed her. She ate, not greedily, but steadily, through four or more bowls of cereal and at least three eggs. At ten o’clock I put her down. She needed to know that there would be more meals to come—that she could count on three each day.

  It was quickly apparent that our little daughter looked nothing at all like a Betsy. I called my mother on the phone. “She’s too tiny to be called ‘Elizabeth,’ and ‘Betsy’ and ‘Beth’ just don’t fit.” “Why not Lin?” asked Mother, who had yet to see even a photo of the child. It felt perfect, and she’s been Lin ever since.

  Little John loved racing around in a walker and Lin steered clear of our tiny reckless driver, but otherwise, if she were put down in one spot, she would seem almost rooted to it until picked up and moved somewhere else.

  Si
nce neither John nor I had had any sleep to speak of by Sunday morning, I suggested he go on to church with John Boy, who loved the nursery at church (well, he pretty much loved everything), and I would stay home with Lin. We had a set of colored blocks of different shapes that fit neatly into a square box. Trying to entertain her that morning, I dumped the blocks out on the floor and showed her how they fit back into the box. Then I dumped them out again. She studied them and began very carefully trying to fit them back into place. Oh, dear, I thought. This is too much for her. She’s a two-year-old that has hardly slept for a week. So I helped her rearrange the blocks so they would fit. She gave me the same determined stare that looked out from her baby picture, watched me finish the job, and then she picked up the box and dumped all the blocks on the floor. The look she gave me made me know I was not to help, so I put my hands in my lap while she proceeded to fit each block into the box. It’s going to be all right, I thought. She’s really smart.

  A bit later the two Johns returned from church. The senior pastor had asked him that morning how things were going with our new daughter and John had told him how we were getting practically no sleep—that Lin was sleeping only when we were walking the floor with her. Dr. Meisel offered to call a church member, a psychiatrist, who happened to be Chinese; maybe Dr. Wong would have some ideas that might help.

  By the time we’d finished lunch Dr. Wong called. He asked if he and his wife could drop by, not for a professional visit, but just in friendship. I still remember the thoughtful way he put it, reassuring us that he didn’t expect the poor preacher’s family to come up with his professional fee.

  I put John Jr. down for his nap, and Lin was watching me wash dishes when the Wongs arrived. (It seemed a happy coincidence that we had the same Chinese name.) I heard Dr. Wong suggest to John that he take him in to see the bedroom. Mrs. Wong, a tall, strikingly beautiful Chinese woman, came to the kitchen door. Lin looked up at her as though startled. Then Mrs. Wong squatted down to Lin’s level and, in a very gentle voice, said something to her in Cantonese. Lin gave her a long stare and then walked over to me.