Life Story: Every Cloud CAN have a silver lining;
Look for It.
There is one thing that I’ve learned in my 75 years on this planet --- no matter how awful the event surrounding you, enveloping you and those around you, you must try to keep your eyes and heart wide open. If you look hard enough, you will find something positive – because every cloud can have a silver lining. This is true, at least, in my own life.
I was not supposed to be born in Berlin. My Chinese father, Hsu Dau-Lin went to Germany to study for his PhD in international law. He met my mother through his best school friend and fell in love. Once my father graduated, returned to China, and landed a good job, he proposed. My German mom had left Berlin at age 20, because she was furious at the Nazi treatment of Jews, and she was ashamed to be German, so a solution was to travel to China and marry my father. It was in 1933. The elaborate wedding was arranged by my father’s family. They considered my strikingly beautiful mother so unattractive that they chose especially ugly bridesmaids to attend her so that she’d look better in comparison. My sister Joan was conceived soon after the wedding.
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Joan was raised in Nanking according to a book. The book said for the parent never to pick up the baby except every four hours for a feeding. To this day, my sister has felt unloved. In 1937, Nanking was about to be attacked by the Japanese, so my mother, now pregnant with me, went home to her mother in Berlin. When I was born, my grandmother dismissed the baby guide and convinced my mom to nurture me. The dreadful circumstances surrounding the outside world did not affect my safe, warm, nurturing beginning.
Soon my father was appointed Charge’ D’Affair in Rome. We moved to a huge marble palace, which housed the Chinese consulate. It had been built as a bribe to Mussolini, which he didn’t want, and therefore sold. There was an enormous garden with 27 fountains bedecked with mythological statuary. Elegantly trimmed bushes lined the walkways. The servants: our French-Swiss Nanny, our chauffeur named Augustino, a butler, maids, and cooks, pampered my sister and me, but we saw little of our busy parents. I must have loved those years as the photographs show me with happy smiles, as Joan sits scowling beside me. I spent the next 4 years speaking French to our nanny and Italian to everyone else. My father did not make a good ambassador as he was not terribly tactful and in 1941 Chang Kai Shek asked him to be a member of his cabinet in Chong Qing, the war capital. I was four.
We moved from this Italian grand palace to a one-level simple compound of several buildings, one for us, one for my grandmother, and one for servants. There was no running water and no electricity. Although we still had plenty of servants who cooked, cleaned, took care of us, washed, shopped, fetched, and carried, we had little in the way of material goods. And in Chong Qing, my brother George was born.
I had to quickly learn Chinese and forget my French and Italian. Two years later, I was old enough for school and my sister took me. We walked a long distance through muddy roads to our elementary school, which meted out draconian punishments to the children who broke any rules. Children who argued were made to stand during recess in the playground with a placard describing their deeds. They had to stick their tongue all the way out for the entire half hour while the other children mocked them. This change from our palace in Italy to this little place must have been difficult for my parents.
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My mother who was used to having everything she could want, now did not have a thing. Her trunks with her precious possessions were lost in shipping. But for me, I met my Chinese grandmother, my Nai-Nai, and grew to love her dearly in those four years as the Japanese bombed all around us. My grandmother may have instilled my outlook on life. She had such an auspicious start in life, much loved by her parents, and sought after by dozens of suitors. Her parents chose my grandfather because he was brilliant and his future looked bright. Indeed my grandfather fulfilled his promise as he became a five-star general who conquered Mongolia and represented China in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. But because of his fame, he was pressured to have four concubines and so my grandmother spent much of her life alone, especially since my grandfather was assassinated at the age of 45. In spite of her disappointing life, which she spent without the husband she adored, she had a most positive view of life and all that it offered.
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In 1945, the war was over and my father resigned and accepted a job as dean of a law school in Shanghai. We moved again. This time to a townhouse in the French quarter of Shanghai. I was accepted to a private school but needed daily tutoring in math to try to catch up with my better-educated classmates. My brilliant sister was sent to a boarding school during the week as she was not easy to live with. Joan commanded people’s constant attention and insisted on getting her way, always. My brother, the apple of everyone’s eye, was too young to attend school.
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The contrast in Shanghai between the “haves” and “have-nots” was startling. The streets were overrun with beggars. Every day children rummaged through our garbage trying to find little crumbs of leftover food to eat. They picked at uneaten portions of meals, separating that from the egg shells, old tea leaves, and banana peels. They’d find apples with a tiny bit of fruit attached to the core, and bones with a shred of meat. I found it heartbreaking. There was no public education, I knew I was lucky to be learning and felt it unfair. I thought I could help the neighbor kids whose families lived and worked in the garage where our car and the cars of the complex were housed. So at age 9, I started a school in my room and invited these kids to come to learn to read and write.
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My parents and servants tolerated my venture. My sister (when she was home on weekends,) hated the fact that I invited the dirty ragamuffins into our bedroom. It was then that my love of teaching must have been ignited.
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A couple of years later, the Communists were defeating cities as they headed towards us in Shanghai. My mother got wind from her best friend in the U.S. that the Communists hated foreigners and begged her to leave China quickly and bring the children, offering her home as a temporary refuge. So we escaped. Leaving three weeks before Shanghai was lost. My father stayed in China to protect his reputation.
We arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1949. Adjusting to life in the U.S. was difficult for all of us. For my mother, it must have been a herculean task. She had to find a job to support three children in a foreign country for the first time in her life. Yet she kept her chin high and rarely complained. Did I learn to look for the silver lining from her? The Chinese Naval attache’s office offered her a job as a secretary. I suspect it was a favor to my famous and well-loved father. We had to learn a new language, a new system of education, and a new culture. My energy went into studying ballet. It was my passion and I thought, my talent. When I was invited to be a member of the studio’s dance company, I was elated. It was a dream come true. But when I missed the first rehearsal because I obeyed my mother and attended a family picnic and was kicked out before I even had a chance, I thought my world had come to an end. I didn’t realize until years later that it was fortunate that I was dismissed. Because I was out of favor with the ballet director, I began to study modern dance. These modern dance teachers were loving teachers who mentored me and supported my dance with full scholarships to several modern dance studios in D. C. My dance experience culminated with a job as a dancer with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Broadway production of The King and I where I earned enough money to attend St John’s College in Annapolis.
It was in college that I met my future husband Ray. He proposed two days before his graduation. We had not been on one single date with each other. But we both had crushes on one another, but that is another story. We married and moved to New Haven where Ray attended Yale Divinity School. At the end of the first semester one afternoon in February, he announced that he just quit because the students’ “holier than thou” attitude was too much to bear.
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I was shocked and asked, “What are we going to do now?”
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“ Don’t worry,” he replied, “I will get a job and we will start a family.”
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These words were the words I had hoped to hear since our first day of marriage. That very night, I became pregnant with Susan. As it happened, this was fortuitous. The draft board drafted Ray as soon as he notified them that he was no longer in school. But when they learned that his wife was pregnant, the notice to report for basic training was rescinded.
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Ray was offered a teaching job at Glen Burnie High School, so we moved back to Annapolis, and all three of our girls were born here. He then switched to Key School. Ray thought the math texts were substandard, and he decided to change careers and become a math textbook editor. So our odyssey to a Chicago suburb lasted four years followed by three years in San Mateo. By then, Ray felt that he spent too much time working and traveling and not enough time at home with his family. So with my brother George as his partner, Ray purchased a 900-acre farm in North Dakota and leased 700 acres.
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The partnership turned sour. We lost all our money, and I lost all respect for my brother. But we also lost our hearts to North Dakota -its people, its land, its sky. This is now the state that our family loves more than any other place on earth.
About three weeks before my beloved husband died, I had been reflecting on my own life and mentioned to him that out of every horrible event, something good also happened.
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He looked at me and asked, “Katherine, What good could possibly have come out of my pain and illness these past two years?”
I thought for a moment and answered him, “We found out who our friends were, Ray.”
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Later, after his death, which was the most difficult time of my life, I realized something. As ghastly as his suffering had been for many months, suffering that I would not wish on anyone, there was a positive force that made its way out of the stark pain to warm the both of us. Because we knew that the end of his life was approaching, we told each other how much we loved and treasured one another. Again and again. Had he died quickly of a heart attack, as his father did at age 50, a departure that Ray hoped to duplicate, we would have had no warning. As it was, each day each minute was precious. Cherished. And there it was, once again, in the darkness of it all, the light of a very good thing.