in a Familiar Land
It was a different world that opened to my early childhood perception and acceptance. Our family was still the firm center. Dad was with us on work days, morning and evening, and for a short while around noon, when he came home for lunch. Leaving the lunch table, he would sit for a few minutes in his large Morris chair and relax, taking off his glasses. But if he dozed and they slipped from his fingers, he would get up with a start and quickly be out the front door and down the path toward the hospital buildings. Mother (she didn’t like “Mama,” “Mommy,” or “Mom”) was in charge of the household, which came to include Kang Si, our cook, and Pak, our “outsideman.” We didn’t have an “ammah” for child care, as some families did. Mother chose to take care of us herself.
I became aware that our house was at one end of a compound, which was the mission’s Taegu Station, built along the crest of a low hill that overlooked the city. Around the compound there was a mud-brick wall topped by clay tiles. If I were helped to the top of the wall, I could look out across a sea of straw-thatched houses built close together, with a few streets along which there were some tile-roofed shops or more affluent homes. That was Taegu in the 1920s—not the modern city of almost three million that it is today.
In my early world there were people, including my family, who were not like most of the rest. We were “foreigners.” The word had no hostile overtone in my child-world. In fact, it had a comfortable feel, because that was our identity—who we were. Around us, other people were Koreans, except for the occasional Japanese official of some sort. When Dad, for a rare outing, took us downtown in the family Ford touring car, children might gather around to gaze at us as a curiosity. That was not pleasant. We found that a solution was to pick out one of them and point and giggle, which tended to disperse the onlookers.
Why didn’t our parents—and most missionary parents at that time—encourage us to mingle and play with the children around us? There were small graves in some mission cemeteries to answer that. This was Korea of some ninety years ago. Not only were the familiar childhood diseases prevalent, but also more ominous ones—dysentery, typhus fever, even leprosy. In his practice, our dad was encountering these every day.
For a halcyon time, while I was small, Taegu Station had quite a few children. The “big kids,” mostly, went off to an English-language boarding school in Pyongyang. But there were enough younger ones, for a time, that their parents put together to employ a teacher for a one-room school. Mrs. Gordon’s School was a mysterious, near-legendary place to me, even in its final year, when Mother felt ready to start Elsie and Archie together there. I have a blurred recollection of being taken to the school for a visit once, near the end of the school day. Here was a new thing: familiar forms and faces sitting in rows—my own siblings among them—all with quiet, serious looks, paying attention while this one adult talked to them and some took turns answering her. How special it would be, I thought, to be part of that.
But that all changed. The Korea mission sometimes moved its personnel, according to its developing program. It happened that a couple of the families with early-school age children were transferred from Taegu. Mrs. Gordon’s School was disbanded.
*****
It was about this time that something memorable happened. Mother, exceptionally, was away in Andong, gone to comfort a new widow who had lost her husband to malaria. Dad encouraged her to go, saying we would be fine for a few days.
It was winter—cold enough, even in southern Korea, that our house had a furnace in the basement for warm-air, radiant heating. From the furnace, a sheet-metal flu pipe passed up through the first-floor and second-floor hallways and into the attic, where it bent and entered a brick chimney.
On this morning we three children were at breakfast with Dad. Still in our pajamas, we had kicked off our slippers under the table, as we liked to do, when suddenly the sewing-woman, who was upstairs, came rushing, almost falling, down the staircase. Her face was full of fear and she could hardly speak. As she frantically waved her hands, Dad went bounding up the stairs. Archie followed, and Elsie dared to go half way up; but I stayed at the bottom.
Archie told us later that when he got to the stair landing and looked up, he saw little tongues of flame licking down around the hall flu pipe, where it passed through its asbestos-insulated opening into the attic. When Dad opened the door, the attic stairway was full of fire.
Immediately, all was commotion. We three ran out into the yard, forgetting our slippers. Looking up, I saw flames shooting out of the attic windows. Fortunately for us, at the mission academy for boys, built on a low hill a quarter-mile away, the students were just gathering. The quick-thinking principal, catching sight of our smoke and flames, called together a group of the oldest boys and sent them over, on the run, to help.
They rushed in and began to haul out whatever could be saved. Upstairs, they pulled clothes out of closets and dropped them out windows to others below, who carried them to safety. Downstairs there was a piano. It wasn’t ours; our parents were taking care of it while its owners were on furlough. This was one of the old-fashioned “player pianos,” with its mechanism of perforated paper rolls coupled with foot pedals to create a suction that worked the keys. The whole thing was ponderously heavy; but somehow these schoolboys picked it up and carried it outside.
Most of this I had to learn afterward, from the telling and re-telling. To our chagrin, our neighbors’ daughter—one of the “big kids,” who was in her early teens—corralled us, all three, and shut us in one of their bedrooms with the blinds drawn. She was sure that if we watched our home burning we would be emotionally scarred for life. But how frustrating, more for Elsie and Archie than for me, that we couldn’t see the excitement—such a rare happening in our world!
I later learned, from a more adult perspective, more of the details—such as how the city fire company arrived but could do little. The weak water pressure in our compound—built on a hill—left their hoses useless. Nothing could be done to damp its flames, the house blazed like a torch for the whole city to see.
What about Mother, as all of this was happening? There was no telephone line to Andong, no means of emergency communication. The telegraph was all, and it was cumbersome, with text very limited. Besides, Mother was expected home that same day, and she would be unreachable as she traveled by jitney over seventy miles of rutted roads. The winter daylight was already waning when at last the jitney—a Model T Ford chassis fitted with three crowded seats—entered Taegu and Mother began to look for familiar signs.
They came into the wide street that she knew, but as she looked up, she thought, “That’s strange. I don’t remember an abandoned building there.” Above her, on the hill, there were some empty brick walls—no roof, and windows that were just holes through which she could see the evening sky.
Then suddenly it hit her. “That’s no abandoned building. That’s our house!”
The jitney honked its way, agonizingly slow. It seemed to take forever to reach the corner and turn toward the hospital. But there, before she could move to climb out, a figure came running. It was the sewing-woman. She had been waiting and watching, anticipating how Mother might feel.
“Lady, lady,” she called, “the Doctor is safe, and all the children! It’s all right!”
Mother hugged her, which was unusual in Korean custom. Gradually, as Dad came out to meet her and as she at last reached us at the house where our family would provisionally be lodged, she heard the whole story.
We had a new outsideman, who had been instructed how to light the furnace on a cold morning. He would use the small branches of dry pine needles that were effective in getting the molded balls of soft coal to start burning. But this furnace was large, as everything that these foreigners had seemed to be. He would pack in an extra amount of the resinous pine branches.
When he struck his match, the pine ignited with a whoosh. The almost-instant blaze leaped up the chimney. Flames, perhaps igniting some soot on the way, shot up the sheet-metal flu pipe, all the way to where it bent in the attic, with such heat that the pipe gave way. Quickly, stored items caught fire, with a sound that startled the sewing-woman,