Stories of My Life

by Katherine Paterson

  After arriving in Shanghai, he gathered twenty-five ship tons of supplies (this refers to measurement, not weight, but in any case it’s a lot of baggage), enough for the two hospitals, bandages of every description, medicines of all kinds, including the last shipment from Germany of a very rare and expensive drug for black plague. Now the challenge was to get everything to the hospitals without it being confiscated by the Japanese or stolen by bandits or guerrillas. He wanted especially to protect the black plague medicine, so he bought a small steamer trunk, put the small package of medicine in the bottom, and covered it with lots of bandages.

  The Grand Canal would have been the preferred way to take baggage up country, but it had been thoroughly blocked by the Chinese army and was unusable. So the plan was to load the supplies onto an American gunboat and take them up the Yangtze River as far as Ko An, where they would be loaded onto a small boat that could navigate one of the back canals.

  Just as the gunboat was loaded, a wire came from a missionary at the hospital in Taichow saying that the Japanese had taken Ko An and they wouldn’t be able to land there. They should wait until the army cleared out. So Admiral Glassford ordered the crew to unload the supplies from his flagship gunboat, the Luzon. Daddy watched the gunboat leave without him. For a while he just stood there, surrounded by his twenty-five ship tons of luggage, until finally he went and found adequate storage space. Many days later another wire came saying the Japanese were dug in and probably wouldn’t be leaving any time soon, so Raymond should try to get a pass from the Japanese general to bring the supplies anyway. He knew that although the Japanese had declared the Yangtze closed to foreign shipping, Admiral Glassford was planning to take the Luzon on another trip up the river. My father asked for passage once again. The admiral agreed, but despite every attempt, Daddy was unable to obtain a pass. He went to Admiral Glassford to tell him that his attempts had failed, but the admiral suggested that they go ahead and reload the supplies and make another appeal to Major Otori for a pass.

  The morning of the day that the loaded gunboat was scheduled to leave, my father made yet another visit to Major Otori’s office to plead for a pass. The major who was the liaison between foreigners and the military asked how the supplies were to be carried. When Daddy explained that they were to go by US gunboat, the major flew into a rage, and although my father couldn’t understand Japanese, he was quite aware that he and the entire American navy were being roundly cursed. The major was furious that the admiral of the Yangtze fleet would run a blockade and carry goods to Ko An on his flagship. “Give you a pass to land goods at Ko An? Never.”

  My father went back to the gunboat to give Admiral Glassford the bad news. The admiral said he had a mind to just take the goods and run the blockade with them, but he said, “I see he has you.” So once again the gunboat was unloaded.

  A week later Daddy heard that a river steamer was going up the river under Japanese supervision. He rushed to make arrangements. One of the missions’ single ladies heard he was going and asked to go with him. She would be traveling with two Chinese friends. He said the women could go along with him if they would bring very little baggage, as he had this mountain of supplies. When he went to buy steamer tickets for the four of them, he learned that the river was closed, so he got in touch with Miss Jessie and told her they would have to try to go as far as they could by train. They were to meet him at the station an hour and a half before train time with very little baggage, as the authorities would inspect every piece. The ladies got to the station on time bringing twenty-four pieces of luggage among them.

  Chinese workers under Japanese military supervision carried out the actual inspection. One of the inspectors rooted around in the steamer trunk and came up with the small package containing the precious black plague drug. “What is this?” he asked. My father’s heart skipped a beat, but just then a second inspector came over. “Keep quiet and close that trunk,” he muttered. “You know that man is not carrying anything that would hurt the Chinese.”

  The train trip proceeded without incident, but the next day they were to board a small launch that would take them on the next leg of the journey. Once again all that baggage had to be inspected. Daddy had untied the steamer trunk and was going through some hand luggage with the guard when a Chinese helper tied up the trunk and began dragging it across the line to the already inspected side. My father breathed a sigh of relief only to hear Miss Jessie call out: “Wait a minute! The official hasn’t inspected that trunk yet!”

  “I looked daggers at Miss Jessie,” my father said, “and told her to keep quiet and let my conscience work this time.” Somehow, the trunk was spared, and they were able to board the launch, moving up the Yangtze for several hours until they landed at a small village where my father had to round up enough rickshaws to take the four of them and all the ladies’ baggage the five-hour overland trip to the hospital at Taichow. The hospital supplies were left under the care of a Chinese helper who had taken them on the several small boats to the port of Ko An.

  In Taichow Daddy was able to finagle two passes—one pass would allow him passage through the territory controlled by a guerilla general and the second would allow him to go to Ko An, now held by the Japanese. After finally arriving at Ko An, he managed to negotiate a “landing fee” so that the Japanese authorities would allow him to unload the supplies brought up by his assistant from the village. Here the supplies were loaded on other small boats. It was a two-day boat trip to Taichow. When Daddy and his assistant saw soldiers on the banks of the canal, they looked carefully to see whether they were Japanese or Chinese so they’d know which pass to pull out.

  At Taichow, the supplies for the first hospital were unloaded, one more to go. There were no locks on these small canals, so every time a boat had to go up a level, everything would have to be unloaded and carried to a boat on the next level. Since it was almost impossible to keep track of this procedure with several small boats, Daddy decided to get one large boat that could carry the remaining load to Tsing-Kiang-Pu.

  They got it all loaded, but there was hardly any place left to sit or stand except on top of the boat. Things went fairly well until the boat found itself aground in a huge swamp buffeted by a strong north wind when the boat needed to go north. So there they sat sunk in the mire for one day, two days, three days, four. On the fifth day Daddy urged the boatman to try to move. He tried but they only slipped back into the swamp. The area was known for bandits, so the sailors were as eager to move on as my father was. Finally, later on the fifth day, the wind changed and they were able to push the boat out of the swamp.

  They moved ahead for a couple of days and then the boat hit bottom again. This time, happily, they were able to maneuver the boat to the bank and were not stuck in the middle of the swamp as before. Daddy and his Chinese helper went ashore to round up wheelbarrows and rickshaws so that they could continue the journey. The large boxes of bandages were loaded onto wheelbarrows, but the next thing he knew they were all unloaded. The barrowmen said they couldn’t see over the tops of the boxes. They feared they might run off the path and end up in the canal.

  So they loaded everything else on the wheelbarrows and hired carriers to haul the big boxes. When they got to a village where Daddy could hire three-wheeled ox wagons, they loaded the large crates on the wagons. Then they started the thirty-five-mile trek across to the hospital, three ox wagons, thirty-four wheelbarrows, and a couple of rickshaws for the men. On the second day, they were met at the hospital door by Dr. Bell.

  “What took you so long, Sarge?” he asked.

  “And what did you say to that?” I asked Daddy when he told me the story many years later.

  He grinned. “Nothing,” he said. “What was there to say?”

  Going through some of my father’s things looking for pictures, I found a letter to him from Admiral Glassford, dated 24 April, 1940. “Dear Womeldorf” it begins. “Your letter from somewhere in
China came along yesterday to cheer my heart with the knowledge that all is well with you and that the things we were to have taken up river for you have reached their destination at long last. I can imagine the reception given both to the supplies and to the lad who brought them. My only regret is one born entirely of the desire that I might have had a hand in their delivery . . .”

  The moongate in our courtyard. Mother is holding me.

  The Last Year in China

  While my father was up country or trying to get up country, the rest of us lived in the dormitories at the Shanghai American School. I recall in September a reporter from the English language newspaper, whose funnies I read religiously, coming to interview students about “the war.” Six at the time, I’d already seen more war than I cared to, and, quite naturally, I thought the man meant the war currently raging in China. But, no, he meant the just declared war between Britain and Germany with which I had had no experience aside from the devoted Nazis on the Potsdam. I remember realizing that my confusion as to what war he was talking about annoyed the interviewer and he quickly moved on to another child to talk about the war in Europe—the war that mattered.

  That was a hard year for our whole family. Our father was gone most of the time. Our big brother was one of the youngest in the boys’ dormitory, and, as we learned much later, being miserably bullied by the older boys. And Mother and us four girls were squeezed into a single room in the girls’ dorm.

  I began piano lessons that year. It was a large class and we sat at our desks in front of cardboard keyboards on which we “practiced” until called up by the teacher to perform on the one actual piano. I was small for my age and somewhat shy, but, even then, I loved to perform. So on the night of the recital when all our class of more than twenty went up on the school stage and played for a live audience, I was delighted. I played my little piece and sat down again quite satisfied that I had done well. My mother certainly thought I had.

  At our next class session, our teacher seemed pleased with the recital. She said that all of us had done well, and she had been proud of us. With a single exception. She sat down on the piano bench and demonstrated, to the glee of my classmates, how “little Katherine Womeldorf” had slid up and down the bench to reach the keys. Our teacher had evidently not learned that a child’s feelings might trump even a perfect performance at a piano recital.

  Despite the war raging in the countryside and the occupation of much of Shanghai by the Japanese army, life in the French Concession, where Shanghai American School was located, was deceptively calm. There were even moving pictures from America. My mother took us older children to see a movie on the life of Stephen Foster, but when he died, I had to be carried weeping from the theater. Watching Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I was so terrified by the ghosts that, once again, I had to be carried out of the theater.

  The big film event was the coming of The Wizard of Oz, which was to be in glorious Technicolor and starring Judy Garland. All the children staying in the dorms were eager for the great day. My sister Elizabeth, well warned that I did not know proper theater etiquette, made me promise to behave. She knew there would be scary parts and I must promise not to scream or cry if I were allowed to go. No one wanted to carry me out of the theater and miss the show because of me. She would sit next to me and warn me when to hide my eyes and punch me again when she deemed it safe for me to watch. She was as good as her word, and although I did get a glimpse of the flying monkeys that haunted my imagination for some time to come, I did not cry or scream or make anyone miss any of the movie.

  I loved Judy Garland. When I walked out of the dark theater into the sun, I was Judy Garland. Betty Jean’s mother bought a record album of the songs, and the rest of us dorm kids were invited into their room to listen. Afterward we began to reenact the movie in the quadrangle every afternoon after school.

  I was sure I would be chosen to be Dorothy. Wasn’t I Judy Garland incarnate?

  I knew all the songs by heart. But, to my distress, Betty Jean, who had long blond pigtails with a beautiful curl at either end, was the unanimous choice of the crowd. It wasn’t fair. Betty Jean was an only child whose mother had the time to brush and pigtail her hair and enough extra money to buy her records. She might look more like Dorothy, but she wasn’t Judy Garland on the inside like I was. Disappointed, I listened as all the speaking parts got taken by others—the scarecrow, the tin man, the lion—Lizzie was the Wicked Witch of the West, which she played with gusto wearing a cape of my mother’s for her costume. There were no parts left for me. “You can be a Munchkin,” my sister said.

  I bravely sang about the Yellow Brick Road in a high nasal voice, but it was declared that one Munchkin was inadequate, so everyone else must chime in and drown out my solo. The Munchkin role disappeared after the first act, so I mostly sat and watched the others play out the rest of the movie with vigor and delight. I was jealous and miserable.

  But not as miserable as I was to become. In the spring when we came out of the dining hall after supper it was still daylight, so the boys my brother’s age and a little older began a new game. Workmen had dug a ditch across the quadrangle in preparation for laying a new pipe. The boys invented a game they called “Snake in the Gutter.” One of the twelve-year-olds, the bigger, the better, would be the snake. He would stand in the gutter and everyone else would jump across the ditch while the snake ran up and down trying to touch the jumpers. If you were touched by the snake you were DEAD and had to drop out of the game. Betty Jean’s mother wouldn’t let her play. I sneered at that. The ditch was only about two feet deep and certainly no wider than that. It wasn’t really dark yet, and, besides, there was a certain glamour in being included in a game invented by the big boys. But with Betty Jean out of the game, I was the youngest and slowest player—every evening, the first to die.

  One day that spring Lizzie and I came home to the dorm room after school to find Mother entertaining a visitor. There was no space for chairs, so the two women were sitting on a bed chatting when we came in. As usual, Mother had the two little ones crawling on and over her as she visited, but when we came in she introduced us to the strange lady as her two older daughters. I hardly had time to be proud to be presented as one of the “older” daughters before I realized that the woman was looking us up and down as though she were shopping for a piece of furniture.

  Finally, the visitor smiled at Lizzie. “Isn’t she lovely?” she said to Mother. “Such charming freckles.” Then she turned her attention to me. “Now, Mary,” she said, “you can’t tell me this one belongs to you. She doesn’t look a bit like the rest of the family. Where did you pick up this little stranger?” My mother sputtered in protest, but I couldn’t hear it. I could only hear the visitor’s pronouncement. So that was it—the explanation for everything. I had been adopted and my parents were too kind to tell me that I wasn’t really theirs. That was why my mother had no time to brush my hair, why Lizzie didn’t take up for me in front of the others, why I wasn’t beautiful like my mother or brave and clever like my father.

  That night when the snake bit me, I just started to walk away. It wasn’t worth the struggle. I wasn’t thinking of what lay in the gathering darkness beyond the safe school campus—war, crime, beggar children with their dirty hands stretched out—all that was forgotten. I was leaving.

  I got to the edge of the quadrangle and was nearing Petain Avenue when I realized that Lizzie had left the game and was running to catch up with me.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded, holding her side as she tried to catch her breath.

  “I’m running away,” I said calmly. I hadn’t considered for a minute that when you run away you need someplace to run to. I was just going away.

  “What do you mean ‘running away’?” She grabbed my arm. She was clearly furious. “It’s nearly dark.”

  “I know,” I said. “I don’t care.” I started to walk away.
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br />   “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid. But it’s no use staying here. Nobody likes me, and I know I’m adopted but Momma is too nice to say so.”

  She really grabbed me now and whirled me around to face her. There was fire in her eyes. “You can’t run away. I won’t let you. And if you even try, I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live.”

  I considered running away a few times after that, but I’d immediately discard the thought. I couldn’t run away. Lizzie wouldn’t let me. It was a very comforting thought.

  The following summer the family went for a time to the coastal city of Tsing Tao (where they still brew their famous beer). We had the loan of a small cottage right on the ocean. The Japanese had occupied the city some time before and life was relatively calm—except in the early afternoon. Every day starting at one p.m., little landing boats would hit the beach disgorging troops, hundreds of soldiers clad only in loincloths. They ran up the beach shouting and brandishing rifles, bayonets fixed. When the officer told my father about the maneuvers, he said they were practicing for the invasion of San Francisco. We could watch them from the window of the cottage if we cared to, but we were never to be in the yard between one and two in the afternoon.