Old innocence

It was August 1937. Frank Rawlinson got out of his car as Japanese and Chinese planes fought in the skies above Shanghai. Bombs from a disabled Chinese plane were accidentally dropped, killing him and 'about 1,000 Chinese'.

Rawlinson's son, John, related this story as he searched for the spot, 67 years later, on Xizang Road near the Nanjing Theatre. John's mother and 13-year-old sister, who were in the car, found him on a curb with a hole in his heart. With the help of a policeman, they dragged his body back into the vehicle and away from the chaos that followed, to a morgue.

Reverend Mimi Hollister told how her mother moved her and her siblings up into the mountains above Fuzhou.

'The Japanese occupied the coast and we wanted to get away from the bombing,' she said. 'From there, in 1943, for two weeks, we took mail trucks to Guilin and then flew to Kunming by US military transport. We flew over 'The Hump' to India and home by ship in 43 days to Boston, via Australia and the Panama Canal. This was a lark for us kids, but hard on our mother,' said Reverend Hollister. But by 1945, they were back in Fuzhou with other westerners.

'My father was one of the nine westerners who organised and ran Nanking's Safety Zones during the Rape of Nanking in 1937-38,' said Angie Mills. The international group argued with Japanese soldiers for the lives of Chinese civilians, many of whom they sheltered in their own homes.

'My father became leader after John Rabe was ordered back to Germany,' Ms Mills said. 'They saved thousands of Chinese lives.'

Ms Mills, Mr Rawlinson and Reverend Hollister were among the 20 mostly American members of the Shanghai American School Association, visiting China last month. They spent their time reminiscing about the extraordinary lives of their parents, and their own adventures. About 20 of the 38 people on the tour had gone to school in Shanghai in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Also there were their children or friends.

Missionaries started the school in 1912 to prepare their children for US colleges and to give them 'a contact with our own people and civilisation'. The children of diplomats, business and military people, journalists and technicians also living in China joined them. Its alumni association has more than 400 members and has organised China tours in 1990, and in 1998.

After his studies at the Shanghai American School (SAS), Mr Rawlinson went on to learn Chinese, worked for the US embassy in 'Chungking and Tientsin', and taught modern Chinese history in the US. He has also written books about his father, a missionary with the Southern Baptist Convention and the editor of the Chinese Recorder. Frank Rawlinson was one of the founders of the Shanghai school that opened less than a year after Sun Yat-sen's republican revolution.

'My parents came to China to save the Chinese,' John Rawlinson said as he spoke of the prejudices of the times. 'Our school here had an American curriculum. The kids used to talk about 'Chinky, Chinky, Chinamen' ... We lived in a solely foreign community. I only had two Chinese friends.'

For Reverend Hollister, it was different. 'I have always felt more American than Chinese,' she said. 'If it were up to father, I would have felt more Chinese. He was a socialist and sympathetic with the revolution. But mother identified more with Americans ...'

Reverend Hollister remembered her mother working to save 'girls abused or sold into slavery, at one of the early women's shelters ... And guns pointed at me by soldiers'. And she recalled living next to execution grounds and seeing both nationalist and communist military encampments from the highest floors of the SAS.

Travelling with this group during their two weeks in China was an opportunity to learn about early 20th century Chinese history. These people had lived it. Although they went on to spend their lives elsewhere, China still is a deep part of their psyches.

While sightseeing in Beijing, Margaret Greene spoke of living in 'a big house where a museum now sits, and at eight or nine riding my horse past the Japanese lines near the Italian Legation. Probably because I was a child, the Japanese never bothered me,' she said. Her father worked for the British American Tobacco Company and the family moved around the country a lot. She was born in Nanjing in 1924.

Cynthia Dunn's father, Randall Gould, was chief editorial writer for the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury and outspokenly anti-Japanese. His paper also reported on Edgar Snow's journey to communist-held Yenan in 1936. 'He worked with Sammie Chang, the editor of the Chinese version of that paper,' said Ms Dunn. 'Sammie was assassinated by the Japanese in a public restaurant. I think this was because dad was publishing editorials unfavourable to what the Japanese were doing and they put him on their list of undesirable foreigners. At that time, Americans were not considered enemies.' The newspaper closed after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour.

'We lived in Shanghai until we were evacuated in 1940,' said Ms Dunn, who later worked as a nurse. 'We had time to pack all our belongings.' Ms Mills' family was evacuated three times, and lost all their valuables.

David Merwin grew up in Baoding, Hebei, where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries and all his close friends were Chinese. He entered the SAS as a ninth-grader in 1948, but left a year later on the USS General Gordon.

'A US-imposed blockade of the coast prevented any ships from entering Chinese ports, so we had to take a barge from Tientsin out to international waters.' he said. 'But we couldn't for several hours because of the rough seas. We finally had to climb up rope ladders at 2am while terribly seasick.'

Mr Merwin never felt at home in the US, because his heart was not there.

'I felt uncomfortable when some professors taught US-China relations in a colonialist and imperialistic way, and remember one class where the professor ridiculed the Chinese people,' he said. 'I had an intellectual and ideological crisis on how to think about China.' Mr Merwin did feel at home in China as a child, and has returned for months at a time since. But he also said: 'If I lived in China and became a permanent resident today, I don't know if I would feel at home.'

The father of Shanghai-born Betty Barr came from Scotland in 1924, a teacher with the London Missionary Society. Her American mother taught at SAS for three years. Barr is the only member of the group who has lived in China since her school days and the only one married to a Chinese.

She spent two years from the age of 10 taking care of goats in 'Lung Hwa' Internment Camp, operated by the Japanese in Shanghai. Like many other alumni, she has published her story, co-authoring two recent books with husband George Wang, Shanghai Boy and Shanghai Girl, Lives in Parallel, and Between Two Worlds - Lessons in Shanghai.

Ms Mills said growing up in China gave her an international perspective that most US-born and schooled people lacked. 'But as a result, I have struggled, like many others with 'third-culture syndrome',' she said.

When the visitors talked of 'home' most meant the US, but many felt uncomfortable there, at least at first. But neither did they feel completely at home in China.

'SAS was our home country, the place of our full belonging,' wrote Betty (B.J.) Elder of her school in her book The Oriole's Song, An American Girlhood in Wartime China. 'At last, I found a group that shared my origins. No longer suspended between two worlds, at SAS I fell into place.' It was a sentiment many of her schoolmates shared.

Like other students, Elder seemed oblivious of the turmoil around her, even as the communists entered Shanghai for the first time in 1949. The school advised her to leave for Hong Kong on the hospital ship USS Repose. Her parents intended to return to work in China under the new government. Then the Korean war erupted in 1951, with China and the US on opposing sides. Her father was imprisoned as a spy and then deported.

During their visit, the alumni group walked through the corridors of one of their old school buildings, now a naval research centre. The current staff put out a sign of welcome. It is the red-brick, New England building, across the road from the Community Church on Hengshan Road. The building was sold when the school closed in 1950.

The group visited the water tower they were forbidden to climb, and on top of which Teddy Heinrichsohn once put his initials. Outside the former girls' dormitory where four of them lived, Elder reminisced about having chicken pox and the messages they sent between their windows on a string. The group also visited the successor of their school. Though not directly connected to it, the current SAS is equally elitist, expensive, and academically excellent. Unlike the old school, 70 per cent of its students are from countries other than the US and the school has a strong Chinese-language programme. 'If only we had had such teaching in our era,' wrote Ms Barr enviously.

Unlike the old school, it is not missionary-based. And of the old city, Ms Mills said: 'I found Shanghai much less chaotic than in 1999 and certainly cleaner ... There seemed to be more trees and grass ... the people's outlook was confident ... a recognition of the historical importance of its past, a sense of hopefulness in the future. I found Shanghai fascinating, cosmopolitan, prosperous, proud of itself. I would like to return.'

The tour itself bewildered some of their guides. 'I've never had a group like this before,' said one of them in Changsha, when the visitors asked to stop for photos in front of a specific hospital. They also kept complaining that the food was not spicy enough.

When they arrived in a nearby city where no foreign tourists ever go, they wandered around the old part, shopping. They said they were looking for another hospital, and when they did find the building, the woman who asked to see it burst into tears.

Mary McMahon's father had been medical director there when she was about 11. She remembered the mustard gas and the bubonic plague that the Japanese had inflicted upon the people. She also remembered the tiny child she had taken care of.

Three of the 12 who had opted to visit Hunan had been born in Changsha. One of them, Mr Heinrichsohn, had lived in a big house with 27 dogs and a horse on Orange Island. His father had arrived in China as a German missionary, but found politics interfering with his church. He became a trader.

Mr Heinrichsohn had argued with the guide about the name of the island and the young man admitted later that the old name was Ox Head, as Mr Heinrichsohn had said. There was no bridge then, and Mr Heinrichsohn remembered watching the retreating Nationalists set fire to the Hunan capital.

At one restaurant where they ate, westerners were such a rare sight that staff wanted to take a photo with the group before they went on to spend the night on nearby Nanyue Peak on Hengshan Mountain. The childhood playmates decided that the house the guide took them to see was the one where they stayed one summer. They remembered hearing about its secret bomb shelter but had never found it. When their current guide revealed its entrance in a wardrobe, the 50-year-old mystery was solved. The then-governor used the house for the Nationalist government to meet in after Nanjing fell.

Ruth Lor Malloy is a freelance writer specialising on China who helped to organise the SAS tour. Her website is: www.china-travel-guide.com