The Foreign Service Journal, January 2012

38 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 2 cautiously out of their way. My memory has caught them like a pho- tograph; unlike other motion-pic- ture-style memories, there are no other frames to be seen. I carry another memory of the Communists, one that is just as sharp and more cinematic. Jimmy Li, an embassy chauffeur, was driv- ing Fred, two friends and me to a party. We were all in costume, so it may have been Halloween 1949. As Jimmy backed out of the driveway, a Chinese boy darted behind the car. The little body, dressed in the padded clothes worn in cold weather, lay in the street as a crowd gathered. I did not really understand what had happened to him, but I knew that it was very bad, because he was completely still. Communist police came and took Jimmy away. Then the four of us sat in the car for what seemed like a very long time, as the dead boy lay where he had fallen and cu- rious onlookers peered through the windows at us. Finally, another driver came and took us on to the party. (Jimmy was released weeks later.) A Terrible Surprise In February 1950 Dad was transferred south to Shang- hai, by then also in Communist hands. The abortive Amer- ican effort to establish relations with the new regime in China was coming to an end, and the StateDepartment was soon to reassign the few remaining officers in the country. We were bound for Dad’s new post in Hong Kong, once it suited the Communists to let us leave. Mother was very pregnant, but had no idea where the baby would be born — Shanghai, Hong Kong or at sea. As she wrote to our Aunt Phyllis and her friend Emma Rose Martin in Manila, “If only this is a little daughter, I’ll be ready to call it quits. Having babies in the Foreign Service is just too hectic.” The civil war was virtually over, but it seemed to follow us south. The Nationalists sent air raids over Shanghai in February, attacking the Bund where Dad worked and the French Concession where our family lived. I remember squeezing with other mothers and kids into a long, narrow underground shelter where we waited, in tense claustro- phobia, for the sounds of the bombs to gradually fade away. To Phyllis and Emma Rose my mother wrote, “It is such a helpless feeling. Most of Shanghai is without water and light the majority of the time.” She thought of these as the worst weeks she had spent in China: eight months pregnant, desperate to see her dying mother in Seattle, eager now that things were coming to an end to get her family out safely, fear- ful that with the bombing some- thing terrible would happen to Dad or to us at the last minute before we could escape. February was not a typical month for polio, so when I came down with a high fever the doctors first diagnosed tonsillitis and then paratyphoid. I was sick for 11 days and completely unconscious for four of them; Mother nursed me through the days, relieved at night by Dad. In an unfinished letter to her parents she began on March 2, 1950, she wrote of my recovery: “If you could hear him singing as he plays propped up with pillows you would know howmy heart is singing, too.” (I have nomem- ory at all of my illness itself, only of the pain in my legs and how I had to crawl up the stairs for weeks afterwards.) Later that same day, Mother was talking with her good friend Marylois Kiernan outside my room as my friend, Shawn, and I played together on my bed. She complained of a headache from sitting too long in the sun that morning and, after the Kiernans left, she went to bed with a fever. By the time Dad got home, she was very ill. I know that I must have been up and about the next day, because Fred and I came to see Mother in her bed; pale and very weak, she tried to reassure us but could barely speak at all. Shortly afterward, the ambulance came, and my last memory-picture is of her rolling away from our front door strapped to a gurney and swathed in blankets, weakly calling our names. Fred and I never saw her in the hospital. Some days later Dad told us she had died. While I remember Fred crying, I don’t recall doing so myself. So perhaps I did not yet understand what had happened. Memories My mother’s sudden death was a terrible surprise. Rel- atives and friends in Seattle, friends in the Foreign Service in Asia and Central America, and church friends in China sent Dad dozens of telegrams and letters. In Nanjing the congregation of Han Chung Church held a special memo- F OCUS Rushing into a city virtually under siege seemed an ironic choice, but the Nationalist generals’ well-known distaste for serious combat gave her some comfort.