Stories of My Life

by Katherine Paterson

  I don’t know what happened, but one afternoon I was playing in the yard with three-year-old Helen when I heard a blood-curdling yell. I looked up and saw an army of nearly naked men rushing up the sand, their bayonets aimed right at us. I grabbed Helen’s hand, shut my eyes, and ran as fast as my six-year-old legs would carry me to the kitchen door, dragging my little sister behind me. For the rest of the summer, I never again let one p.m. sneak up on me.

  In the fall my parents were reassigned to Zhenjiang (known in those days as Ching Kiang), which is the port city where the Yangtze River meets the Grand Canal. After the one dorm room at SAS and even our tiny home in Huai’an, our new accommodations went to the other extreme. They comprised an entire wing of an abandoned hospital. It was a bit spooky, to say the least. In Huai’an I’d been the child lingering at the door while Mother taught Ray and Liz. Now I was studying the Calvert Course third grade. The Bridgmans lived in the house across the narrow valley, and since they had children Lizzie’s and my age, Mother and Mrs. Bridgman split the day. We had the morning with Mother and then the four of us would walk down the hill and up to the Bridgmans’, where “Aunt” Eleanor would teach us in the afternoon.

  Huai’an. Three not so happy little Womeldorfs.

  The walk each day between the hospital and the Bridgmans’ house took us through the village graveyard; the farmers’ huts were at the upper end. I’m not sure if all of us light-haired children were more stared at than staring, but I was fascinated by the burials. I couldn’t help but stare at the women rocking back and forth, keening so loudly that it echoed across the valley.

  Our most frequent visitors at the hospital were the Japanese officers who would come often to interview my parents. My mother always served them tea, just as she would any guest. But our most welcome visitors were the Americans from the US gunboats that patrolled the Yangtze. Admiral Glassford was a particular friend of my father’s. He let us children tour his gunboat and gave Lizzie and me ribbons from sailor hats that had Luzon embroidered on them. I kept mine for years. I have a memory that when we were ordered to leave China at the end of 1940, we went down by night to the port and took the Luzon to Shanghai. I recall that walking on the pier, I could see the reflection of the moon through the cracks between the boards, which somehow frightened me. But there is no record that this midnight gunboat ride ever happened, so I may have dreamed it. At any rate, I always thought of Admiral Glassford as our guardian angel.

  Me at six in Richmond, Virginia.

  At Home in an Alien Land

  People from seasoned journalists to curious fifth graders nearly always ask me about my Chinese childhood. It seems so exotic to have been born there and to have spent my early years there. But that part of my childhood doesn’t seem exotic to me. It was the only life I knew and, until the war began, I had a very happy childhood. It was America that was the alien land, exotic from the distance of half a world, but close up, a strange, unfriendly country. To try to clarify the chronology of my complicated young life, I need to say that we fled China twice for the United States—the first time was 1938, when I was five; the second time at the end of 1940, when I was eight.

  By the time I was five I had been through war and evacuation, but nothing had prepared me for the American public school system. In the last few months of my kindergarten year, we “China fleas” landed on my long-suffering aunt Anne Campbell and her family in Lynchburg, Virginia. There, Ray, Liz, and I went to Garland-Rhodes Elementary School. I recall the kindergarten teacher as a dragon lady who constantly belittled me, but, to my amazement, she declared that even though I was only five I was ready for first grade because I could already cut with scissors, a skill I’d mastered with some difficulty at the Chinese kindergarten I’d attended in Kuling. She didn’t mention that I could read fluently. She probably had no idea that I could, so that fall when we moved to Richmond, Virginia, to an apartment complex for missionaries on furlough, I entered first grade as a small, extremely shy five-year-old whose curriculum sentenced her to the early Dick and Jane readers. Dick and Jane seemed like a foreign language to me. The books I read at home were stories that made sense. These books at school made no sense whatsoever, and since my classmates were stumbling through them, I imitated their stumbling and was regarded as a slow reader.

  I only remember one classmate from the first grade at Ginter Park School. Her name was Martha and she had a beauty mark on her cheek beside her lip. She was the queen of the class, and although I didn’t know much about Valentine’s Day, I knew that everyone was expected to give Martha a valentine. When the valentines were passed out, the pile on Martha’s desk proved that everyone, including me, had complied. I waited a bit anxiously, but the valentine delivery boy passed by my desk every time without putting anything on it. I don’t think I was particularly surprised. I understood somehow that I was invisible in that class. But on the way home I realized that my brother and sister were carrying the valentines they received, which they happily showed off to Mother as soon as we arrived. I was embarrassed when she asked to see mine. I hated to confess that I didn’t have any to show. It seemed like a character flaw. But Mother was outraged. “How could any teacher let a little girl come home from first grade without a single valentine?” It was a question she pondered more than once over the years. After I was an established writer she asked me why I didn’t write a story about the day I didn’t get any valentines.

  “Why, Mother,” I said. “All my books are about the day I didn’t get any valentines.”

  I was happy to be going home to China not long after that. Of course, with all the fighting, we couldn’t go home to Huai’an and stayed in Shanghai. The first grade at Shanghai American School that spring was busily preparing for the circus. Since I was small but no longer invisible I got to be the bareback rider atop the first grade’s largest boy. I was a star!

  The second time we were evacuated to the States, in December of 1940, I was glad to be in a country where occupying soldiers didn’t run across our front yard or question my parents—where no bombs were falling and our father would come home safely every night. The few months we spent in Lynchburg, where we once again landed on our Campbell relatives until we found a tiny apartment nearby, were happy ones for me.

  This time at Garland-Rhodes School I had a wonderful third-grade teacher and a second cousin in my class who was a real friend. After playing a bareback rider and a firefly in Shanghai American School productions, I was ready for the big time, so I was thrilled when the teacher cast me as the wicked fairy in the third-grade production of Sleeping Beauty. I overheard her after my exuberant performance telling my mother, “Katherine really raised the roof!” I half knew it was a compliment, but it was also a bit of a London Bridge moment when I had to worry about the structural integrity of the auditorium.

  The next fall we moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and I was enrolled in the fourth grade at the Calvin H. Wiley Elementary School, leaving my kind teacher and cousin behind. The fourth grade was a time of fear and humiliation for me. Nothing I had learned in my previous schools seemed to matter in this one. The Locker Method of handwriting that I had finally caught on to in Lynchburg was invalid in Winston-Salem, where the Palmer Method was the only proper system. Spelling words using the wrong kind of cursive letter were defaced with large red X’s even when spelled correctly. The lunches my mother made were nothing like those of the other girls’, whose mothers somehow cut off all the crusts from the sandwiches and included cupcakes and other delicacies. Mine might be a thin slice of bologna on crusted bread. One day to my delight there was an egg in my lunch box. I cracked it on the table with gusto, and saw, to my horror, that Mother had mistakenly put in a raw egg rather than the one she had boiled for my lunch. On those occasions when I was given lunch money, it was always fifteen cents, which I am sure was all my parents could spare. I remember vividly a lecture by the teacher on lunchroom duty about my failure to bu
y a balanced meal. Fifteen cents didn’t buy balanced meals in the cafeteria, but it would buy my favorite lunch, which consisted of a bottle of chocolate milk, a small dish of black-eyed peas, and a box of chocolate-covered raisins. I suppose I could have skipped the Raisinets and bought another vegetable, but what nine-year-old would want to do that? And worst of all there was Pansy, the seventh-grade bully, who, along with her two large friends, terrorized me on the playground. Since there were no girl friends to hang out with during recess, I would stand trembling as close to the school building as I could, watching Pansy and her friends coming toward me from the bottom of the huge playground.

  “I’m going to report you,” she said to me one day. “You’re walking on the grass.”

  I looked down at the hard, bare ground under my feet. “There’s no grass here,” I protested.

  “Of course not,” she said, “because people like you keep walking on it.”

  Being “reported” was like being indicted for a felony. I lived in dread for days. I couldn’t tell my parents, they had gone to my aunt Katherine’s funeral in Lexington. And even after they returned, I couldn’t tell them. The disgrace would have been too much for them to bear.

  Every recess Pansy would tell me that any moment now I would be called to the principal’s office. One day I was so frightened that I broke into tears in music class. Mrs. Obershein, the beautiful music teacher, quietly took me out into the hall and gently asked me what was the matter. I blurted out my crime and Pansy’s threat. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile. She simply assured me that I would not be expelled for walking on the imaginary grass, indeed she was quite sure I wouldn’t even be reprimanded. I should just go to the girls’ room and wash my face and come to class when I felt better. If only my classroom teacher had been this warm and understanding.

  I recognize now that some of my best writing has its seeds in that awful year, but I can’t remember once saying to my nine-year-old self: “Buck up, old girl. Someday you’re going to make a mint out of all this misery.”

  There were, however, a few people that I remember with great fondness from that horrible year. One was, of course, Mrs. Obershein, who not only taught me how to do-re-mi, but also showed me that there were adults who could deeply empathize with a child’s irrational fears. Another was the librarian of the Calvin H. Wiley School, who made the library a sanctuary and a source of comfort and delight in an otherwise frightening place. And there was Eugene Hammett, the other weird kid in the fourth grade. I have told the story of Eugene so many times that I am sure there are people who could lip-sync it, but I can’t resist telling it again here.

  Though Eugene and I became friends sometime in the course of that year, there was an important difference between us. I was weird through no choice of my own. I spoke English, as my friends in Shanghai had, with something of a British accent. I could, as I noted, hardly afford lunch, much less clothes, so my classmates would, from time to time, recognize on my back one of their own donations to charity. On December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and because it was known that I had come from that part of the world, there were dark hints that I might be one of them.

  Eugene, on the other hand, was weird by choice. Or mostly by choice. I guess he didn’t choose his looks. He was a perfectly round little boy who wore full-moon, steel-rimmed glasses, long before John Lennon made them acceptable, and sported a half-inch blond brush cut. My only ambition in the fourth grade was to become somehow less weird. Eugene’s declared ambition was to become a ballet dancer. In North Carolina, in 1941, little boys, even well-built or skinny little boys, did not want to be ballet dancers when they grew up.

  Now, sometimes outcasts despise even each other, but Eugene and I did not. We were friends for the rest of the fourth grade and all of the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades. During my public school career, Calvin H. Wiley was the only school I went to for much more than a year, and by the time Eugene and I were in the seventh grade, I had fulfilled my modest ambition. I was no longer regarded as particularly weird. I made friends, I wrote plays for my classmates to act out on the playground, my teachers began to realize I was actually intelligent, and, amazing as it seems, in my last year at Wiley School I was elected president of the student body. Eugene, on the other hand, continued to march, or should I say, dance, to a different drummer.

  We moved the summer after my seventh grade. I grew up at last and had a full, rich life in which people loved me and didn’t call me names, at least not to my face. But from time to time over the years I would think of Eugene and worry about him. Whatever could have happened to my chubby little friend whose consuming passion was to become a ballet dancer?

  Me in junior high school in Richmond.

  After many decades and scene changes, the Paterson family was living in Norfolk, Virginia, and our son David had become, at seventeen, a serious actor. But in order to get the parts he wanted, he realized that he needed to take dancing lessons. There was, however, a problem. Even in 1983, boys in Norfolk, Virginia, did not generally aspire to become ballet dancers. He asked me to find out about lessons he could take without the rest of the soccer team knowing about it.

  My friend Kathryn Morton’s daughter took ballet, so I said to Kathryn, “David needs to take ballet lessons, but he’s not eager for all his buddies to know about it. Do you have any recommendations?”

  “Well,” said Kathryn, “if he’s really serious, Gene Hammett at Tidewater Ballet is the best teacher anywhere around. Of course, you may find him a bit strange, but—”

  “W-w-w-wait a minute,” I said. “Gene who?”

  “Hammett,” she replied. “He sends dancers to the Joffrey and New York City Ballet and Alvin Ailey every year. He’s especially good with young black dancers. Terribly hard on any kid that he thinks has talent, but he’d give his life for them.”

  “Gene who?” I asked again.

  “Hammett,” she said. “You may have seen him around town. He’s enormous and wears great flowing caftans. He does look a bit weird, but he’s a wonderful teacher.”

  “You don’t happen to know where he came from?”

  “Well, he came here from New York.”

  “New York? He wasn’t a dancer?”

  “Oh, yes. He was quite good in his time. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him now, but he was a fine dancer twenty, thirty years ago.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where he grew up?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “North Carolina somewhere, I think.”

  “Next time you see him, would you ask him if he remembers anyone named Katherine Womeldorf from Calvin H. Wiley School?”

  Some days later the phone rang. “Katherine?” said an unknown male voice. “This is Gene Hammett.”

  “Eugene! Do you remember me?”

  “I even remember a joke you told me in the fourth grade. I asked you why if you were born in China you weren’t Chinese. And you said: ‘If a cat’s born in a garage, does it make it an automobile?’”

  “And what about you? You danced in New York, and now you’re a famous teacher of ballet. It’s hard to imagine. You were a little round boy when I knew you.”

  He laughed. “Well,” he said, “now I’m a big round man.”

  I saw Eugene a number of times after that, and he was a big round man. But I also saw pictures of him, leaping like Baryshnikov from the boards of a New York stage. And even if I missed knowing him when he was slim and gorgeous and at the height of his career, I wouldn’t give anything for knowing that it happened as he had determined it would, back there when we were both weird little nine-year-olds at Calvin H. Wiley School.

  I’ve tried a couple of times to put Eugene into a novel, but I’ve found that you can’t put real people into books. Characters in books have to be believable, and real people, especially people like Eugene, are simply not believable.

 
I did try to put Pansy, the seventh-grade bully, into Bridge to Terabithia. It was going to be the perfect revenge for all those terrifying recess hours she caused me, but, there, again, I don’t know why Pansy was a bully. I know that people aren’t born bullies, and that no one is a bully or a snob who is comfortable with himself or herself. But I had to know why Janice Avery was a bully, and when I knew, I felt sorry for her. Before I finished the book, I rather liked her. It ruined my plan for revenge. I heard somewhere that unless you can find yourself in your villain, he or she will remain a cardboard character. Good advice for fledging writers, I think.

  We had to move after I had finished the seventh grade at Wiley School. The house the church had rented for us was sold and two moves later we ended up living totally across town, so I began eighth grade again with no friends. It might have been a terrible year for me, except for Pat Sewell and Jeannie Snyder. They were best friends, but somehow decided to adopt me as their other best friend. Not long afterward, Audrey Lindner arrived at Gray High School, and the three of us adopted Audrey as the fourth best friend in our little crowd. Unlike most of the girls in the eighth grade, the four of us were still girls rather than adolescents. None of us had a boyfriend, and we hadn’t begun to long for male attention.

  After eighth grade, we thought we were returning to China and left Winston-Salem. I lost touch with Pat, Jean, and Audrey, but I’ve never forgotten them. I still have the pictures taken on my little Brownie box camera of the week we spent at Pat’s family vacation house on Manteo Island. Pat’s mother was a wonderful hostess for four thirteen-year-olds. She took us to see where the Wright Brothers had made their historic flight and to a production of The Lost Colony, introducing us to the romantic mystery of the disappearance of those early settlers. All four of us longed to grow up to be actors in that great outdoor drama. One morning there was a contest to see who could eat the most pancakes. I won.