Stories of My Life

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.

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