Stories of My Life

I put John Jr. down for his nap, and Lin was watching me wash dishes when the Wongs arrived. (It seemed a happy coincidence that we had the same Chinese name.) I heard Dr. Wong suggest to John that he take him in to see the bedroom. Mrs. Wong, a tall, strikingly beautiful Chinese woman, came to the kitchen door. Lin looked up at her as though startled. Then Mrs. Wong squatted down to Lin’s level and, in a very gentle voice, said something to her in Cantonese. Lin gave her a long stare and then walked over to me.

“You don’t need to worry,” Mrs. Wong said quietly. “See? She’s already chosen you to be her mother.” I knelt beside my little girl and put my arm around her. She didn’t pull away.

In the bedroom, Dr. Wong and John were consulting. The doctor suggested that John take the railing off the crib and lower it as much as possible. “That railing is in the way of her getting to her high chair, the one place in the house where she feels safe. And she probably slept much closer to the ground in the orphanage. You can put a mattress beside the crib, so if she rolls out, she won’t get hurt.” John fetched a mattress off a twin bed in the guest room, and then the men came to the kitchen. Lin had fallen asleep against my shoulder.

“She’s asleep,” Dr. Wong said. “Why don’t you put her in the crib?”

I started to protest, that she would only wake up screaming, but he was the doctor, so I obeyed. I laid her in the crib, and sure enough she sat right up, but this time she looked around, took in the new set-up and, without a sound, lay back down. She was still asleep when the Wongs left. She didn’t sleep more than an hour that afternoon, and she didn’t sleep through every night for several weeks, but it was the beginning of a new, much better time for us all.

Besides food, which she could never get enough of, Lin loved two things: a tiny rubber dog and John Boy. She wouldn’t talk to Big John or me in Cantonese or English, but we could hear her talking to her baby brother in the bedroom. “Say, ‘ball,’” she’d order. And at six months, John said “ball.” And, certainly partly thanks to Lin’s coaching, he was talking in complex sentences before he was two. In the hall there was a full-length mirror and Lin would take the dog to the mirror and have a whispered conversation. I was never sure in what language, but she and the dog were obviously chatting with their mirrored selves.

Changing John Boy’s diapers was always a hilarious affair. I would tickle his tummy and he would shriek with laughter. Lin would stand by looking at this scene with what seemed to me a disapproving stare. But one day when I was changing her diapers she took my hand and put it on her tummy, so I tickled her. My reward was her first smile.

We took the children to Winchester to meet my parents in February. We felt by then that Lin was comfortable enough in her new home to risk a trip away from it. As far as Lin and Mother were concerned, it was love at first sight.

Lin talking to the mirror.

By this time Lin was not only sleeping at night, she might even take a nap. She was upstairs asleep when one of my mother’s friends arrived carrying a Raggedy Ann doll she had made to give to our little new daughter. The friend was so proud of her handiwork, she wanted to rush upstairs and wake up Lin to give it to her. She was almost at the bottom stair before I stopped her.

The doll, like all Raggedy Anns, had bright orange wool hair, black button eyes, a red triangle of a nose, a sewn-on grin, but, unlike any I had ever seen, this doll was at least four feet tall. If your mother had read you stories about Raggedy Ann and Andy from the time you were a tot, you’d be thrilled to have a Raggedy Ann of your very own with a secret candy heart sewn inside. You might even like one more suitable to cuddling you than vice versa. But I was sure poor Lin would be terrified. I was afraid the sight of a stranger bearing a huge, even stranger doll would annul all the progress Lin had made.

As I was trying to suggest that we go cautiously, Lin appeared at the top of the stairs and looked down at us. The woman held out the doll.

“Baby!” Lin exclaimed, and came straight down the stairs to claim her new treasure, which was bigger than she was. Baby, she was never to know any other name, stayed with us until she was loved into literal rags.

And as for my unhappy father-in-law, before much time had passed, he’d forgotten all about his dire predictions. Lin had become his favorite of our children.

John Jr. was no longer John Boy when I realized the neighborhood children thought it was hilarious that I called my tiny son “Jumbo.” It was the Southern accent that did it. I didn’t want him going through life having people making fun of what his mother called him, so long before his second birthday he was simply “John,” and, of course, the confusion of having two people by the same name in one family ensued. And, yes, I do remember his first complex English sentence, spoken when he was twenty-one months old. We were passing the public tennis courts in Silver Spring when he said: “When I get to be a big man, I play tennis ball like my daddy.”

We moved to Maryland when David was well on the way, but we had to live for several months in an apartment in Silver Spring before the house we were buying in Takoma Park was vacated. So six days before David’s actual birth, we moved into the house we would live in for the next thirteen years. The obstetrical practice recommended by my Princeton doctor worked out of George Washington University Hospital in downtown DC. I had nightmares of trying to get to the hospital through Washington rush hour traffic, but David conveniently decided to be born on Sunday morning. We went through nearly empty streets to the hospital, checked in, and David was born at eight a.m. It happened so quickly, the doctor almost didn’t get there in time.

John welcomed his new son, and then went back and preached the Sunday sermon that he had written about the Prodigal Son. It was entitled “The Father’s Two Sons.” He thought that was a delightful coincidence. I only hoped that neither of our boys would turn out like the Biblical pair—the one a wastrel and the other a self-righteous prig.

Before long people began to remark how much our two boys looked alike and Lin began asking for a sister that looked like her. We had always planned to adopt a second child, but we now had three children and a mortgage and a very modest salary to support us all. The cost of adopting from overseas again would be beyond our means. We went to the local Lutheran Social Service that we were told was the best agency in the area and asked if they ever had an Asian or part Asian child available for adoption. They hadn’t had such a child for years, they said, but they had just been asked to handle the adoption of American Indian children. Would we be interested? In the pictures the social worker showed us, there were many children who could pass Lin’s test, so we agreed. Could we just wait, I asked, until David was at least two before we got a new baby? Even then we went from childless to the parents of four in four years and six weeks.

We were matched in the late spring of 1968 with a baby who was half Apache and half Kiowa. Her birthday was February 22, so her foster parents who had taken her home that day called her “Georgie” in honor of our first president. There was no way a daughter of mine was going through life with that name. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to name her. We had thought we could wait to name her after we actually saw her, but a day before she was due to arrive, we were told that the state of Arizona was demanding a name to put on her amended birth certificate. We had decided on Mary, a family name on both sides, and the name of my closest friend from early days. We thought briefly of Mary Helen or even Helen Mary, which would combine my mother’s name with that of my younger sister. John decided he preferred Mary Katherine, but Lin had kept her Chinese name. Wouldn’t it mean something to Mary to have either an Apache or Kiowan middle name?

A member of our church in Takoma Park worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I called Ken up and asked him if anyone in his office could help us. The problem was we had to send the name to Arizona by the end of the afternoon and it was already mid-morning.

About two hours later, we had a call from Ken. “Do you have pencil and paper handy?” he asked. When I did, he began to spell a name. It seemed to go on forever.

“Ken,” I said weakly, “could we have something a little shorter?”

“Listen,” he said sternly. “I called Will Rogers Jr. in Oklahoma and he sent a runner to the reservation to the old woman who gives names, and this is the name she sent back. I think you’d better keep it.”

I showed the name to John. “Maybe we’d b

etter drop the Katherine,” I said.

He looked stricken. “But I’ve always wanted a little girl named Mary Katherine,” he said. I doubted that, but we didn’t have time to argue. We sent the name: Mary Katherine Nah-he-sah-pe-che-a Paterson. The name means: “Young Apache Lady.” And we were right. She loved having that name. I asked Mary when she got married which of her many names she was going to drop, and she said, “None of them.” So she is our five-name daughter, though she usually resorts to initials for the three middle names.

We went to the recently opened Dulles Airport to meet our new daughter. Two-year-old David and four-year-old John were racing back and forth across the giant, empty concourse that the airport was in those days. Lin was very still, and John Sr. and I were, as we had been when waiting for her, our nervous selves. At last the social worker came through the gate carrying a very large five-month-old.

“Can I hold her,” asked tiny five-year-old Lin.

The baby was about as large as she was, but how could I say no? I told her to sit down and I would put her new sister on her lap.

Lin put her arms around Mary and gave a beatific smile. “She’s got the same color hair, and the same color eyes, and the same color ears as me,” she said.