Homesick: Foreword–Chapter 3

Since my childhood feels like a story, I decided to tell it that way, letting the events fall as they would into the shape of a story, lacing them together with fictional bits, adding a piece here and there when memory didn’t give me all I needed.

Houseboats swarm¬ing with old people and young, chickens and pigs.

I sang with my fingers crossed but still I felt like a traitor.

“No, Miss Williams. It is not my national anthem.”

I was looking up at a little white cloud skittering across the sky when all at once someone tramped down hard on my right foot.

“You’ll sing tomor¬row,” he snarled, “or you’ll be bloody sorry.”

She would teach me to embroider if I would teach her English.

I felt myself glowering.

She might look old-fashioned, for her feet had been bound up tight when she was a little girl so that they would stay small, and now, like many Chinese women, she walked around on little stumps stuffed into tiny cloth shoes.

Part of me wanted to laugh at the thought of Lin Nai-Nai maybe meeting Dr. Carhart, our minister, whose face would surely puff up, the way it always did when he was flustered.

When my sore arm hurt, I just beat on the keys harder.

He consid¬ered himself superior to common workers.

The running sores, the twisted legs, the mangled faces.

A long time ago other countries had just walked into China and divided up part of Hankow (and other cities) into sections, or concessions, which they called their own and used their own rules for governing.

Not like those in the Chinese part of the city: a jumble of rickety shops with people, veg¬etables, crates of quacking ducks, yard goods, bamboo baskets, and mangy dogs spilling onto a street so narrow it was hardly there.

My mother would wear her broad-brimmed beaver hat when we came and my father would swing his cane in that jaunty way that showed how glad he was to be a man.

He was wearing a ragged blue cotton jacket with a red cloth, pincushion-like charm around his neck which was supposed to keep him from getting smallpox.

(Gods didn’t bother much with girls; it was boys that were important in China.)

Through the ribs of the boat, I handed him a segment of orange.

Ever since she’d written in my autograph book, I was afraid that goodness was what she really wanted out of me.

“Be good, sweet child,” she had written, “and let who will be clever.”

Dear Grandma (I wrote in my next letter): I want to warn you so you won’t be disappointed.

They must have believed in goodness because, like us, they were a Y.M.C.A. family, but what they stressed was being free and natural.

Actually both of us forgot all about being queens because at that moment an old woman stepped out of a hut and started shrieking and cursing at a man in the next farmyard.

Actually both of us forgot all about being queens because at that moment an old woman stepped out of a hut and started shrieking and cursing at a man in the next farmyard.

“May all your children fall sick! May you outlive every one of them! May the gods heap misfortune on your head!”

Now we were trying so hard to catch all the language, not to miss a word, that we were surprised when at the height of her rage the woman stopped short.

For us she found new words so bad we couldn’t translate them, although our Chinese was as good as our English.

As her voice grew more shrill, her neighbors did come to listen and look.

We were used to insults.

Young boys began picking up stones and hurling them at the wall.

Grown-ups were constantly talking about these war¬lords, hoping that one of them would finally bring the country together in peace.

It all sounded so complicated, I thought of my father when he was discouraged.

“But China’s so big,” he’d say, as if he were apologizing for having come so far and doing so little.

They were all alike—tall, castlelike cakes, each with white icing and pink characters that said LONG LIFE AND HAPPINESS and sprinkled all over with tiny silver pellets that my mother wouldn’t let me eat.

Eleven guests altogether: the Hulls, Lee, two elderly missionary ladies who would otherwise be alone at Christmas, and three sailors (whom we’d never met) from an American gunboat.

This was the way Chinese offered congratulations on special occasions, and the greeting, as it was re¬peated, sounded like little bells tinkling.

My father lighted the tree and he distributed the first gifts of the day—red envelopes filled with money for the servants.

When I had finished, I was sitting inside a circle of presents: four books, a fountain pen, an Uncle Wiggily game, a stamp album, a skipping rope, a pocketbook, a bracelet, a paperweight with snow falling inside, and best of all, the “pound of but¬ter” present—a box of pale blue stationery with my name JEAN GUTTERY and HANKOW, CHINA printed in gold at the top with a little gold pagoda at each side.

When I had finished, I was sitting inside a circle of presents: four books, a fountain pen, an Uncle Wiggily game, a stamp album, a skipping rope, a pocketbook, a bracelet, a paperweight with snow falling inside, and best of all, the “pound of but¬ter” present—a box of pale blue stationery with my name JEAN GUTTERY and HANKOW, CHINA printed in gold at the top with a little gold pagoda at each side.

3
ONCE THE REVOLUTION BEGAN IN EARNEST IN Hankow, it was impossible to ignore it.

There were demonstrations and marches and agitators haranguing about how foreign¬ers ought to be kicked out of China and how poor people should take money from the rich.

He shouted about the Y.M.C.A. being a foreign organization with a foreigner in charge who should be run out of town.

Occasionally there were riots.

Oh, Grandma, I thought, that is the same moon and the same stars that will be over your grape arbor and your henhouse tomorrow.

There was upheaval all around me that spring, and although it was often scary, it was also hazy, like pas¬sages in a book that you just skim over.

My father came home one evening with the news that Mr. Hull had been transferred to the Shanghai Y.M.C.A.

Since we didn’t have a modern bathroom, he’d shave over an enamel basin and use hot water from a pitcher.

Two coolies, one in front and one in back (four or even six coolies if the person were heavy), carried the shafts of your chair up a narrow, pebbly, dirt path that twisted its way up the steep mountain.

We all wore pith helmets to protect us from the sun except Lin Nai-Nai who wore a Chi¬nese straw hat.

One of the priests led our procession; my mother came next, then my father, me, the other priest, and Lin Nai-Nai.

The muscles bulged in the legs of my father’s coolies and the sweat poured down their bodies.

“Yes. You and Mrs. Jordan can go together. Or you and Lin Nai-Nai. But I want you to remember one thing. You mustn’t worry Mother. If something goes wrong or if you don’t feel well, just don’t mention it. We want her to get well fast. All right?”

Every time I saw the baby in the next few days, I thought she looked more and more like a Marjorie, but I knew that was a lost cause.

“I think it’s a nice Bible name,” I said primly.

Not grief.

Standing up in a pulpit and saying death was a glory!

In fact, she was probably still getting used to her being born.