The prospect—all unknown—was exciting, bewildering, unnerving. Elsie and Archie seemed to regard it as something wonderful, so I tried to feel the same. When the time came that Mother and Dad took us to the station and we got on a train, leaving them there, I tried to enter into the excitement; but inside I was already torn by the loss of what I was leaving behind, wrestling with what this drastic change would bring.
4
Needing to Be Brave in a New World
From the landing there were four more steps to upstairs, four more of these padded steps. As I climbed them, I looked up. There was a hallway, and at the end of it an open door.
There she was! That had to be right! I knew that skirt! The rest of her was hidden by the doorway, the way she was sitting. I could just see the ankle-length skirt and her feet; but I knew the skirt.
It looked far away, infinitely far. Could I reach it? Could I get to it? I took quick steps. She heard me, and I could see her face, smiling at me. The skirt—I was close to it—and seeing her now, as she was, above it. That, just that, was what mattered. The whole scene is still vivid to me: how I felt on Mother’s first visit.
“Why, Don, dear!” she was saying. “I didn’t expect you to come over from the dormitory.”
I wasn’t saying anything. I wasn’t crying, either. I was just pressing close to her, close to that skirt that had been so impossibly far away. Mother had come up to see us after our first couple of months at Pyongyang Foreign School. Perhaps Elsie had written her that I was homesick, although I tried not to let it show. Now her visit gave me a tremulous happiness; but the visit was short. When she left, a wave of homesickness washed over me again.
It was a wave, though, and waves pass. Although Elsie and Archie were making their own friends, I had them with me in the dormitory. The dorm, at that time, was just one building, two-and-a-half stories, housing forty or fifty of us in rooms on the second floor and in large open areas on the third, up under the sweep of the heavy, clay-tiled roof. Secure doors on each of the upper floors separated them in two halves, girls on one side and boys on the other. The ground floor was for the kitchen, dining room, living room, and the matron’s small bedroom and bath; the laundry was in the basement.
I lacked the outgoing nature of my siblings, I nonetheless experienced pleasurable times. I’m remembering one spring evening of that first year. I was behind the dorm, on a steep bank where flowering weeds grew among some trees. I had found a slender, pliable stick, which was my sword. I was wielding it in knightly combat, beheading weeds of my enemies, when Ben, one of the high school boys, came up where I was—a unique event for me.
Ben joined in, had me describe my combat and shared in my make-believe world. After a while, he said, “Yonder, there is a damsel who is waiting for me. You will excuse me, Sir Knight, as I go to meet her!”
I have never forgotten Ben’s kindness to a younger, solitary boy on that spring evening. Possibly Elsie put him up to it. If so, I never knew.
A new thing for me in dorm life was that there were many girls—older as well as of my age group. Of course, I didn’t speak to them; but there were two whom I selected as the most beautiful and bewitching. The older and taller one, whose blonde hair hung in waves, I privately called the “Queen,” while the other one, was “Princess.” Only later did I learn that these two, whose real names were Marilyn and Rachel, were sisters.
One day in late spring, after dinner, our housemother called us together in the living room. She told us that Marilyn was sick, very sick, and had been taken to the hospital. She led us in a fervent prayer for Marilyn’s recovery and told us also to pray in our rooms.
The next day, the principal gathered all of us, those from seventh grade on up, in the Assembly Hall, to tell us about Marilyn—that it was meningitis. The doctors were doing what they could, but the fever was very strong. Marilyn and Rachel’s parents would be coming from Chefoo, in China, as soon as they could.
He invited us to kneel at our benches, and anyone who wished to, one by one, to lead us in prayer. I was in awe, hearing the emotional outpouring of my schoolmates—particularly one of the senior boys, who began to pray and broke down, while several senior girls were sobbing.
That evening word was passed that Marilyn had died. The light of my Queen had gone out. I didn’t cry, as that senior boy had done. I asked Elsie to let me, and I went to climb that bank behind the dorm, finding an open place where I could sit still for a while, letting my feelings sink into place before I went up to the third floor, where Archie and I had our beds, side by side.
The next year I was in eighth grade and more confident. In our small school at that time, seventh and eighth grades were in one classroom on the ground floor. (Elsie and Archie had moved upstairs to the high school.) I began to speak up more and take initiative; and I began to notice girls of my own age. One of them was Beatrice—called Bea. Dark haired, with eyes that could flash, she was bright and a leader. In class I was sometimes in competition with her. That winter, though, there was one rare and memorable experience.
Behind the high ground on which our school, dormitory, and a number of missionary homes were built, the land fell away to a wide, level valley. There were mud-walled, thatch-roofed houses with rice paddies, and among them, a small river, the Pothong (POH-tong). The large Taetong River flowed past Pyongyang, far away on the other side of the city, as it was then.
In the cold north Korean winter that I’m writing about, both rivers were frozen over. There came, one Saturday, an evening of clear sky and full moon. Some of the older kids, and some adventurous teachers, arranged a new and one-time-only event for all of us who wanted to join in: a moonlight skate on the Pothong. Elsie, Archie, and I went, and in the excited group gathered in light and shadows at the river’s edge, putting on our skates, I saw that Bea was there.
The better skaters took off quickly, Archie among them. The rest of us did some circles, getting the feel of the ice. Then I saw that some of the older kids were pairing off, skating side-by-side and matching strokes, while they crossed arms, holding hands, left with left and right with right. I went up to Bea and asked if she’d like to try it.
We weren’t skilled on skates but found that it went quite well. We followed those who were skating up the river, away from houses and people, but always we stayed near others of our group who were passing in one direction or the other. Bea had a fur-trimmed jacket, and mittens with fur on the back. She was also a “dormite” (as we called students living in the dorm), whose parents were in China, an area near Korea, and this was real fur.
I got to know those mittens well, as we kept skating together a long time. Bea seemed to like it, and I knew that I did. We went quite far up the small river, skirting places where the current had made the ice rough. It was hard to spot and negotiate them in the moonlight, but that made the adventure more enjoyable. The emotion of that night is with me yet, after these many decades.
As I said, this moonlight skate on the Pothong happened just once; but there were also walks home from study hall at night, sometimes with Bea. We dormites had study hall each school-day evening, all of us in seventh grade and above. There were two forty-five-minute periods, with the lower three grades staying for just one period and the upper three for both.
It certainly wasn’t far from study hall to dorm—maybe eighty or a hundred yards; but we didn’t have to walk fast, and it provided a brief, sentimental interlude. It turned out that Johnny, a classmate who also fancied being with Bea, began to try to get in ahead of me some evenings. She seemed to have the same smile for both of us, and to prefer, quite often, to walk with her girlfriends instead.
As we moved up the ladder in school there were other emotional interests, but Beatrice was always there in my thought, at least in the background. Finally, in my senior year she was totally eclipsed by my infatuation