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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.
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.
