Our guide said the great bridge we were crossing had been called one of the ugliest bridges in the world, but to me, whose memory of travel in Jiangsu was of days on crowded riverboats and tiny canal barges, the long Yangtze River bridge in Nanjing looked quite wonderful. Of course, the modern bridge was younger than I am and the superhighway much younger, but when we had to make a detour onto an almost one-lane country road, I was almost back to the China of my childhood.
It was the 29th of May. The harvest of spring wheat was complete. Our Volkswagen bus drove over sheaves, the road being the only place available for winnowing the grain. The fields were already flooded, and while some farm families were in the roadway pitching the wheat into the air, others were planting rice seedlings in the paddies. Now and then a farmer could be spotted behind a rototiller, but just as often it was a water buffalo that powered the plow in the compact fields. After three hours, we came to a bridge that took us across the Grand Canal. The houseboats looked just like the ones I remembered, the same washing hung out to dry above the deck, the fishing gear stowed, the women calling out to neighboring women on nearby boats.
We were in Huai’an before I realized it. The massive city walls that predated the Christian Era had been torn down after the revolution. Now the city sprawled like a great country town, the main streets wide and bustling with cars. There was little to remind me of the ancient walled city of my childhood.
I had asked myself many times before that day, Why am I going back? It had been sixty-three years since I was there and nearly sixty years since my father was there. There would be no one alive who even remembered my family. And there I was taking Ms. Maissen, Mrs. Zhang, and my daughter Lin to a town far off the tourist track in search of something or someone that was in all probability no longer there. And yet, driving through those fields and crossing over the ancient canal, I felt somehow that I was going home.
At last we arrived in Huai’an. The young pastor of the city’s now more than 2,000-member Christian church asked, through our interpreter, “What do you wish to see?” I explained that I knew that my old home and courtyard had been razed, and that I knew it had been many years since any of my family had been in Huai’an, but I was hoping that there might be someone there who remembered my parents. “There is an old pastor here who remembers your father,” the pastor replied.
In the courtyard of the old West Gate Church where I had sometimes gone as a child, there was an old man seated in a wicker chair. He looked almost blind, and I wasn’t sure at first what he remembered, but at last he began to talk. “There were four families,” he said. Since I knew of only three, the Yates, the Montgomerys, and my family, it took me a moment to recall that the first American family to come to the city had left before I was born. “Your parents were the youngest,” he continued. “Your father had one leg.” I knew then it was indeed my father he was remembering. “I called him Big Brother Wong,” he said. “When your father finally had to escape, I was the one who found him a boat. So many years.” He shook his head. “So much has happened.” And then he began to weep.
Me with Miss Li and Pastor Fei, Huai’an 2000.
Mr. Li’s daughter as a teenager.
Just then a white-haired woman came bouncing in on a cane. She spotted me at once and sat down beside me. “We lived behind the same gate!” she exclaimed, thumping her chest. “My father and your father were best friends. They did everything together!” It was impossible. It could not be Mr. Li’s daughter. I asked her name, and still unsure, I had her write it down and the interpreter transliterated it into the English alphabet. She was indeed the daughter of my father’s best friend, and who, as a teenager, had played with us children when we were small. “I saw you here and I thought I was seeing your mother,” she said. I do look like my mother, though I was twenty-five years older than Mother was the last time Miss Li saw her. She asked about my brother Didi and my sisters and shook her head to think that the children she’d played with were now grandparents. “Decades and decades have passed,” she said.
We spoke of our fathers. Hers had suffered through war and disappeared during the first Communist purge after the revolution. My father grieved for his friend until his own death. We wept together over our fathers’ pain and then laughed with joy that after all these years two of their children could meet. Weeping and laughing with Pastor Fei and Miss Li, I had truly come home again.
Liz, Mother, and Ray. Our Huai’an house.
Enemy at the Gate
Huai’an was home, and in some ways until I’d lived for many years in the same house in Vermont, Huai’an would always be what I thought of as home. And yet, I wasn’t quite five years old the last time I saw the courtyard with its moon gate or ran down to Mrs. Liu’s house for lunch. There had been rumblings of war with Japan for quite some time, but it broke out in earnest in July of 1937. Our family of seven had gone to the mountain resort then known as Kuling for a few weeks’ respite from the brutal heat and humidity of a Hua’an summer. The president of China, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and Madam Chiang were also vacationing there when we arrived. I was told that we met the first lady on a walk one day, and she patted my sister Elizabeth and me on the head and admired our blond curls. But soon thereafter, the general and his retinue left the mountain. The Japanese had invaded North China. We were at war.
Before the month ended, the Japanese had landed at Shanghai. We could not go home. Three weeks later, my sister Anne was born. The mission decided that the men and single women could return to their mission stations, but the women with children must stay on in Kuling until the situation quieted down. It was a terrible time. Bombers flew over our house nightly while we sat in dark rooms with all the curtains closed, wondering where those bombs would fall. We waited for word every day from our father, never knowing if he was safe or when he might return. I could only imagine how my mother must have suffered with a baby, a toddler, and three children five, seven, and ten who were old enough to be terrified but not, I’m afraid, much help to her.
My father told one remarkable story about that fall he spent in Huai’an. The Japanese army was fast approaching. He had heard stories of the atrocities the invaders had committed elsewhere, so he gathered as many women and children into our small compound as he possibly could, hoping somehow to protect them, though he feared it would be impossible.
I’m sure he could tell from the sounds on the street outside that the army had entered the massive gates of the city. Eventually, there was a knock on the wooden gate of our compound. The gateman asked who it was and was told it was the Japanese commander, who wanted to be let in to speak to the reverend.
The commander came in alone, as I recall the story, and handed my father his card. Then he said in English, “I know you are a Christian. I am a Christian too. I am not sure I can control my men. But if anyone tries to break down this gate tonight, you must send someone over the wall to find me. I will come and try to stop their entering your compound.”
That night there was pounding on the gate. My father got a boy, perhaps the son of the gateman, I don’t know, handed him the card, and sent him to find the commander. The commander came. He ordered his men to leave the area, and, miraculously, they obeyed.
The infamous “Rape of Nanking” that occurred not long afterward, just 102 miles farther north, tells a story of what might have happened at my childhood home were it not for that commander.
On the beach at Hong Kong before evacuation to the US.
Refugees
I wrote a book about a family caught in war that had to flee their home and eventually ended up refugees in a foreign land. Our life in China was not as difficult as that of the Lleshi family in The Day of the Pelican, but from the time my parents arrived in China in 1923 and all through the years they lived there, China was in constant turmoil. My parents’ lives had been frequently disrupted. The evacuation to Korea in 192
7 was only one of several dislocations. My parents were painfully aware of the sufferings of ordinary Chinese, but the more fortunate foreigners were not safe. The bandits that roamed the countryside were only too happy to relieve the rich foreign devils of their lives as well as their livelihood.
As a tiny child, secure in the love of my parents and the Chinese friends who lived in the compound that was home in Huai’an, I was blissfully unaware of the things that were happening beyond our gate, but I was to understand it all too well by my fifth birthday.
We had gone to the mountain resort the summer of 1938 and we were caught there when the war with Japan began in earnest that July. Even with the cold weather fast approaching, it was too dangerous for the family to travel, so only my father was allowed to go home. After five frightening months of air raids, news of battles and atrocities, not knowing what was happening to our beloved father, he finally returned. In late January we began our journey out of China. For vacationers, whether Chinese or foreign, there was only one way to get up or down the thousands of stone steps that were the path to the top of the mountain. You rode in a sedan chair carried by two strong coolies. But this trip was only made in summertime. It was January by now and the thousands of steps dug into the edge of the mountain were coated with ice. It was only the sure-footed skill of those carriers that got all the stranded foreigners down that precipitous route without a tragedy. I’m sure that no one breathed easily until all the chairs were safely at the foot of the mountain. There we caught a river steamer to take us to the city of Hangzhou, where we boarded a specially designated train covered with large red crosses.
We traveled from Central China all the way south to British-ruled Hong Kong. The seven of us had spent a week on the journey, and on the evacuation train we were crowded into a single fourth-class sleeping compartment where we both ate and slept. My sister Helen was not quite two and baby Anne was less than five months old. I’m still wondering what my mother did about diapers.
Once we arrived, the British authorities had no idea what to do with this trainload of foreign refugees, so while the fathers were out scouring the crowded city for reasonably priced shelter, the mothers and children just sat on their luggage in the vast lobby of the Peninsula Hotel, which was then and may still be the grandest of all Hong Kong’s grand hotels.
Naturally, the elegant British, European, and American tourists who had paid hundreds of pounds for the privilege of staying in the Peninsula were appalled and offended by this filthy lot of women and children who were cluttering up their lobby.
My mother, who was not a bitter woman, could not recall that long day without bitterness. “I watched them as they passed by with sneers on their faces and I wanted to cry out to them: ‘Do you think I like being here? Do you think I want my children to be dirty?’” She would shake her head. “They couldn’t even smile at the baby,” she said. “What kind of person can’t even smile at a baby?” And she would always end this story by saying, “I can never see a picture of refugees in the paper without remembering how it feels.” She later said: “In all the years in China, it was the only time I felt completely sorry for myself.”
When I told this story to my good friend Mary Sorum, she said: “Oh, that’s why you wrote The Day of the Pelican. You remember how it feels to be a refugee.” I hadn’t really thought about it, but Mary is probably right. The story of the Haxhiu family escaping the war in Kosova and coming as refugees to America that had inspired my novel, must surely have reminded me of that day in the Peninsula Hotel.
I did not remember what happened next. It seems that no place was found in the city for us that day. Someone in the hotel management took pity on the refugees and told the staff to put up cots for them in one of the dining rooms. My father was helping the staff set up the cots, and he said to one of the maids that he had five children, two of them babies. “Nobody wants to sleep with that kind of family,” he said. The maid told him to come with her and she fixed up one of the private dining rooms just for us. So after the humiliation of the Peninsula Hotel lobby, we spent several days in comparative luxury in the private dining room.
Our next stop was an abandoned British army barracks and then on to a single room in the missionary hostel, where the cots had to be folded up before anyone could move around the room, except for those of us who thought it great fun to walk from bed to bed without ever touching the floor.
One morning my father took the older three of us out, so Mother could bathe the babies. I was looking into a shop window when suddenly I realized that Daddy and Ray and Elizabeth had disappeared. In a panic I entered the shop. They weren’t inside. I ran into the neighboring shops. They were nowhere to be seen. Terrified, I sat down in the middle of the busy sidewalk with hundreds of feet and legs going past and began to cry. Before long I heard a kind British voice ask if I was lost. I looked up into what I remember as a beautiful woman’s face. “Where do you live?” she asked. Somehow the day before Mother had impressed on us the fact that we now lived in “The Phillips’ House.”
When my new friend arrived at the door of our room with me in tow, my mother’s first words were: “But she has a father.” To which my rescuer replied: “I’ll go back and find him.” And she did.
There are things that happen to us when we are children that we never quite recover from. I know that even now, as much as I have traveled, when I am in a foreign city and feel even the slightest bit disoriented, I can feel the panic of that day on the Hong Kong street begin to rise in my chest. My story of being lost ended quickly and happily, but it still haunts me. Young readers look at my nearly white hair and ask: “How do you know how we feel?” And I know because I still carry that child that I was inside myself. She is very much alive.
Ships headed for the States across the Pacific were booked far into the future, but my father discovered that with the favorable rate of exchange, we could go in the other direction around the world for about the same amount of money. We started our trip back to the United States aboard the Potsdam, a German liner. At the end of every passageway one ran into an enormous portrait of Der Führer.
I remember the Potsdam chiefly because I nearly drowned in the swimming pool and was reprimanded by crew members after my rescue for tracking water on the carpet. Then there was the children’s dining room presided over by a diminutive female Hitler of a stewardess. The dessert was some miserable kind of pudding that I loathed. She would stand over my chair and command: “Eat your puddink, Katrina, my luff!” My older brother and sister imitated this command for years, and my mother often teasingly called me Katrina after that.
The fun of the voyage was the ports of call, and there were many: the Philippines, Singapore, Sumatra (where the flags were flying in honor of the birth of the new Dutch princess), Ceylon (where the snake charmer charmed us children), and Suez, where the sight of German warships brought the entire crew on deck to cry “Heil Hitler!” I didn’t know who Hitler was at the time, except that he was someone my parents didn’t like. Port Said (If it was Africa, where were the lions? I wanted to know), the Mediterranean to Genoa (where we saw where Columbus was born), through the Straits of Gibraltar to South Hampton, England. From there we took the train to London and four days of sightseeing between ships. For me there was one major disappointment and two terrors. First, the royal princesses did not show when we went to see the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. I had been sure they would. Didn’t they know how much I admired them? The waxworks were scary enough, but when the taxi was about to cross London Bridge I shrieked and refused to go. It was falling down! Everybody knew that.
My mother said that tourist class on the Europa was more like steerage on an ordinary liner. I hardly remember the Europa, but I’ll never forget my first glimpse of the land my parents called home. It was the Statue of Liberty. A sight to thrill any refugee, even one five years old.
Mother and Dad in Beijing.
My Fa
ther the Drug Smuggler
By the spring of 1939, the Japanese had occupied much of eastern China, and, after our year in Virginia, it was determined that we could return to China. Again, because of sporadic fighting between the two armies, as well as roving bands of guerrillas and the ever-present bandits, women and children were not allowed “up country.” The six of us stayed in Shanghai while our father went back home to Huai’an. There the older three of us went to the Shanghai American School, and for most of that time we actually lived in the school dormitory, my brother in the boys’ dorm and my mother and the four of us girls in one room of the girls’ dorm.
The occupation made the missionaries’ work very difficult. My father could not get permission to visit the small country churches that were his and the Reverend Li’s chief responsibilities, unless he agreed to report to the Japanese headquarters the number and location of any Chinese soldiers in the area. He refused to do this, so he was pretty well confined within the city walls. Meantime, the mission hospital in Tsing-Kiang-Pu, ten miles away, was running out of medicine and supplies. The doctor in charge, Nelson Bell (later best known as Billy Graham’s father-in-law), asked Daddy to go and fetch some that were waiting in Shanghai.
There was no problem with funds. Apparently, the hospital had plenty of money to pay for the needed items; the problem was getting the money safely to Shanghai and then getting the valuable supplies safely back to the hospital. There was another hospital in Taichow in need, and my father was asked to bring supplies back to them as well. He purchased some large cracker cans, put the money in the bottom of the cans, and covered the cash with crackers. He hitched a ride on a Japanese army truck to take him through the next general’s territory, where the money would be contraband. He rode the entire way with a machine gun sticking over his shoulder and a bunch of nervous Japanese soldiers on the lookout for remnants of the Chinese army. After a long day’s travel, they reached the railway station located within the second general’s territory. At the station soldiers opened up a couple of the cans, saw the crackers, and closed them up again while my father stood by sweating and praying the train would hurry up and come.