Stories of My Life

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.

“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.

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.