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Me at two in Huai'an.
Early Days in China
When I was set to go to Japan in 1957, a friend of my mother’s, who was appalled that I was heading across the world for four years, asked me: “How could you do this to your mother?” “Well,” I answered, “she did it to her mother.” But when my parents went to China it was different. They were going for seven years without a home leave. It took six to eight weeks just to get a letter home, no one would think of trying to telephone from across the Pacific, and telegraphs were very expensive. Unlike Japan in 1957, China was a dangerous country. Bandits roamed the countryside, and there was widespread political unrest, which would soon break into actual civil war. I’m not sure how aware the young, idealistic missionaries were of all the physical and psychic dangers they would be facing. My father, as by now you’ve realized, was fearless, my mother less so, but they were both very much in love with each other and dedicated to telling the good news of God’s love to those who had never heard it.
Their honeymoon before heading to China was a long one. They spent the first part in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There followed a lengthy visit to the Lexington farm that might or might not have been delightful. It was never reported upon, so one wonders, but I do know that on August 9, 1923, they left by train for San Francisco.
They had not completed all the shots needed for Asian travel, so the doctor gave them needles and a little vial of serum, and, as Daddy said, “We had a time sticking each other as the train jogged along.” There was a memorable stop in Colorado Springs, with a trip up Pikes Peak and a visit to a rodeo, before arriving for a final week in San Francisco gathering the supplies they would need for the next seven years. My father loved peanuts and bought quantities of them to take along, only to find to his chagrin that peanuts were one of China’s leading exports. They also went to Chinatown, feeling that since they were headed for China, they should try Chinese food. The only thing on the menu that they recognized was chicken, but when it came the bones were black, so they were afraid to eat it. Again, it was only after living in China that they learned that a certain variety of chicken, one that was considered a great delicacy, had black bones.
They sailed aboard the Taiyo Maru, originally a German liner the Japanese had acquired after the war. There was a glorious stop in Hawaii, but six days out of Yokohama, news of the terrible 1923 earthquake reached the ship by cable. Every day the news was worse than the day before. The Japanese crew and the many Japanese passengers had no idea how family members and friends had fared. My mother recalled trying to express concern to one of them, only to have the person cover his mouth and seem to giggle behind it. She had no idea how to react to such a response.
When the ship finally sailed into the harbor the pas
sengers were appalled by what they saw. In my father’s words: “Gun emplacements along the way were turned upside down, dead bodies were floating in the water, lots of oil had spilled on the water from broken pipe lines, and the ship could not dock because the dock was no more.”
The Japanese passengers were let off the ship, replaced by four hundred and fifty refugees who were taken to an open port and set ashore. Looking up, they had a view of Mount Fuji, its peak lifted above the clouds—an incomparably beautiful sight amidst a scene of terrible devastation.
When at last they reached Shanghai, the city was in turmoil. Workers in the Japanese and English cotton mills were on strike. To blame were two young radicals, a country bumpkin named Mao Tse-tung and a disillusioned intellectual by the name of Zhou En Lai. These two had had the nerve to ask the owners of the mills to install safety devices so that the children and old people who worked long hours would no longer in their weariness lose fingers and even hands in the machinery. Both the Chinese and foreign owners refused to modify the machinery, and told the troublemakers to mind their own business—hence the protests.
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
