Barbara Brooks Wallace - Small Footsteps in the Land of the Dragon

SMALL FOOTSTEPS IN THE LAND OF THE DRAGON

2009 by Barbara Brooks Wallace

ISBN: 9780996136839
PDF ISBN: 9781943642038
EPUB ISBN: 9781943642021
PRC ISBN: 9781943642045

All rights reserved, including the rights of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Commonwealth Books
1800 Edgehill Center
Alexandria, VA 22307
703-407-3719
www.commonwealthbooks.org

An imprint of Scofield OLeary McLean, VA 22101

PREFACE

Growing up in China! People often ask if I liked growing up in China. Did it feel different? Different from what? How could it feel different if the sights and sounds, and, yes, even the pungent smells had always been there in my life from the time I was born. Now, looking back on it, I suppose I can see where it was different compared to growing up in America, and perhaps can understand why people might ask. But it wasnt different back then. No, it wasnt then at all.

Even when we were caught up in the swirl of things happening in China on a national scale, the Communist uprising, the attacks by Japan that presaged World War II, things that actually affected my life more directly in one way or another, I was only a child busy with growing up in my own little world, taking my own personal small footsteps in the Land of the Dragon.

Contents

SOOCHOW THE BEGINNING, BOY, COOLIE, AMAH, AND PIDGIN

TSINAN LOVE AFFAIRS, NO KINDERTARTEN, AND WARLORDS

HANKOW - THE CHING MING, SUMMER, AND A LEATHER SLIPPER

HANKOW BRITISH SCHOOL RULES, RIOTS, AND WITCH HUNTS

HANKOW HOME LEAVE A KING, A PATSY ANN DOLL, AND A LESSON IN INDIAN GIVING

TIENTSIN, NO. 1 NEWCHWANG LOO STAIRS, WEDDINGS, A FUNERAL, AND A VAMPIRE REMEDY

TIENTSIN SPIT, SMELLS, CHINA SOUNDS, AND SCHOOL

TIENTSIN - SISTERS, FUNNIES, THE BOYS, WONKS, AND SATURDAYS

PEITAHO DUSTY STREETS, DONKEYS, SEASHELLS, SUNSETS, AND A GLASSY SEA

PEITAHO OF MICE AND SADNESS AND A SCARY JOURNEY

SHANGHAI SAS, AND PEITAHO REDUX

PEITAHO FAREWELL INCIDENTS, US TWO, AND THE U.S. NAVY

BETWEEN CHINA AND THE PHILIPPINES CRUISING ON THE USS CHAUMONT

THE PHILIPPINES BAGUIO, BOARDING SCHOOL, AND BALOOTS

CHINA - THE CLOSING CURTAIN

CHAPTER I

SOOCHOW

THE BEGINNING, AND BOY, COOLIE, AMAH, AND PIDGIN

It is 9:00 oclock one Sunday morning in the Year of the Dog, in Soochow, China. My father is struggling to climb into his trousers, and all the while moaning to himself, Omigosh! Nicias dying!

That is, at least, what Ive always been told. Of course, Nicia, my mother was not dying at all. She was simply upstairs in their bedroom having me. My father must have heard a little moan, or squeak, or some kind of proper noise that it seems to me my mother was allowed to make under the circumstances.

Father had at least had the presence of mind to send Boy with a chit for the missionary doctor who was to have been present at the event, but instead was attending church services.

How could he have gone off to church that morning and not stayed at home waiting for me to arrive? I asked Mother years later when I was told this story. I dont believe I ever had a satisfactory answer to this question, probably because there wasnt one.

By the time the doctor finally did arrive, Mother said, I had sent Coolie off to fetch boiled water, delivered you myself, and had you cleaned and wrapped in flannel like a little cocoon.

The doctor examined the two of us and said we were both in fine shape. Then he returned downstairs and administered to Daddy, who was in a state of collapse, and the only one needing his attention.

Well then, maskee, never mind, I thought, it wasnt a wasted trip after all, and justified his leaving the Sunday church service. It was all so quick, I wouldnt be surprised to know that the congregation hadnt even arrived at the final hymn.

This event took place in a house I only knew from two small snapshots. In them I see a drab looking box of a brick, two-story house sitting alone by the Soochow Creek. It is surrounded by a grim wall topped with shards of glass like a spiked guardian dragon. But this must not have offered much comfort to my mother. While my father was off on a donkey cart, accompanied only by his Chinese translator, to sell oil for the lamps of China for the Standard Oil Company of New York, SOCONY, my mother slept with a gun under her pillow.

She had been advised to go to Shanghai to await my arrival, but she did not want to leave my sister, Connie, then only fourteen months old, even in the care of her devoted baby Amah.

People have often said to me, I suppose your mother could do what she did because she was a nurse. Yes, I suppose so. But then knowing what to do when what is happening is happening to someone else, is quite different than when it is happening to you. One might as well suppose a surgeon could remove his own appendix because hes a surgeon, taking into account, of course, the obvious differences in the procedure. I know also that Chinese peasant women in those days were known to go out into a field alone to have their babies.

But I still think my mother was able to deliver me so successfully because of the kind of person she was. Being a nurse was only part of it. Anyone who knows her story of leaving Russia as a sixteen-year-old, going to Shanghai, and finally graduating as a nurse from the Harvard Medical of China, would have to agree.

As for me, uncomplicated as my birth was, I turned out to be a scrawny little thing, and quite a contrast to my cheerful, curly-haired, chubby sister, Connie, who had gurgled and cooed through her babyhood, while I screamed my head off with colic. The state of my health was to be a worry to my parents for years. Furthermore, I certainly could not have given any promise of adding to the reputation Soochow had, besides being considered the Garden City of China, of producing the most beautiful women in China, assuming they were all beautiful babies at birth.

You were both named after movie stars, Mother always told my sister and me. That was all well and good, but I never felt being named after glamorous movie stars accomplished much, not where I was concerned at any rate.

But I will leave me in that unhappy noisy state for a moment for a necessary explanation because I see that though my story has barely started, I have already mentioned Boy, Coolie, and Amah. They were our servants, and so much a part of our lives as children that it is impossible to think of growing up in China without them. They were for us a kind of extended family.

You must have been terribly rich to have all those servants, relatives and friends in America said.

No, we werent rich at all, we always replied. In China everyone has servants. But nobody really believed us. It did no good to explain that in China of those days having servants was a way life.

Boy, called simply that or sometime by his first name, was the equivalent of a head butler. Families who were indeed rich, or at least much richer than we were, more often than not had several Boys, Number One Boy, Number Two Boy, and so on. Naturally, Number One Boy was a very powerful person in a household. His position gave him a great deal of face. Our family never had more than one Boy, of course, so we didnt have to worry about numbers.

Coolie was the man who performed the more menial duties in the house. Cook almost always went by the name of Dossofoo, or man of important business. And then there was Amah, a Chinese nanny always faithful, devoted, loving children, never letting a child in her charge out of her sight for a moment, and ready to protect that child with her life. It was a rare child of China who did not love his or her Amah.

About the word maskee. It was a long time before I stopped using that word and others like it, and puzzling American friends with it. It wasnt intentional. It just ran in my blood, and it took me a long time to lose it. The word is Pidgin Pidgin English.