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The Kaifeng Cosmopolitan
Entry 13 of 42 | show all | print this entry |
As Max was discussing American Literature with his student Godfrey a couple of weeks ago, Godfrey asked Max if he knew who Sally White was. Saying no that he didn't, Godfrey proceeded to tell Max that she is an American woman who is a very famous American Literature professor and has lived in Kaifeng since the 1940s. The idea of an 80-year-old American woman living in Kaifeng through the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward made us snap to attention. Investigating her as much as the Chinese Internet firewall would allow, we found out that she married a Chinese professor who came to visit Michigan State University in the 1940s, where Sally was studying botany. We then found out that her daughter-in-law works at Henan University and was very willing to give us Sally's phone number. So Max called Sally up and scheduled a time for us to meet her.
"What did she sound like?" I asked, all excited.
"Not like what I thought," he said while practically beaming from finally making contact with this woman we have been obsessing over for the past few weeks. "She sounds like a high-society woman. But we're meeting her Thursday afternoon!"
Her apartment is only a few minutes walk from campus and when she came to open the gate for us, I was baffled by the woman before me. I was expecting an elderly woman who would be stooped over and frail from living through China's turbulent modern history and from living such a long life. But Sally is a sprightly and feisty woman. She greeted us wearing a pink New York City sweatshirt, sweatpants, a definitive bounce in her step and a voice with an accent I couldn't quite peg.
"Should we take off our shoes?" the three of us asked tentatively, not quite sure if she would follow the Chinese shoe custom.
"Oh no. I'm not particular. If you had to take them off then so would I!" She told us as she moved over to the kitchen to make hot water for tea.
Her living room featured a large collection of books in English, which made me drool because I've already exhausted my collection of books. On her couch a "Cat Xing" traffic sign was propped up by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Pictures of her and her family were scattered over the whole area and the air was peppered with the squawks and flutterings of the birds in cages stacked by the doorway. But mostly I was surprised at how un-Chinese her apartment seemed. The floral printed furniture, the stack of Nature Valley granola bar boxes, and the decorations on the walls made it seem like any elderly American woman's home. The only vestiges of Chinese influence was the character that was swooshed in red in the stairwell, the hot Chinese tea we were sipping, and the very Asian glass partition folded up next to my chair. As I curled up on the teal-green floral chair with a cup of tea in hand, Sally started talking. I started to enter a level of awe I never knew possible.
The story of this woman's life, as well as her mother's life, can not possibly be real. People like her only exist in novels and movies. She was born in Northern Rhodesia on the coffee farm her mother and her Haitian father owned. The family moved around Africa until she was five, when they boarded a ship bound for the United States. It was on this ship that Sally would celebrate the first of many birthdays on a voyage across an ocean. After landing in the States, the family settled down in Arkansas, just in time for the Great Depression to hit. To make ends meet, the family was divided up while her mother worked as a housekeeper. When Sally was sixteen, a family friend in Detroit told Sally's mother that they needed someone to take care for the two children, so she hopped on a train and headed to Michigan. She then lived in Michigan for the rest of her time in the States where she attended MSU where she met her husband. After they married in the States, her husband wanted to go back to China to teach.
"How did you get to China in the late 1940s? Did the US government let you do that?" I asked.
"They weren't encouraging citizens to go over after the war, but I told them that I was three months pregnant and that if I didn't leave now, then I would miscarry. I of course wasn't really pregnant," she said, with a sly look on her face.
Again, she boarded a boat going across an ocean and again, she celebrated another birthday. This time it was her twenty-first. Once in China, she and her husband were shuffled from university to university, leaving cities as soon as there was a threat of their liberation by the Communist forces. They ended up in Kaifeng as Henan University was one of the five Chinese universities that was recognized by the UN.
"When they realized I spoke English, they put me on the teaching roster as soon as they could. I taught here until I retired," she said.
Now, even though she is retired, she travels on a monthly basis around China acting as a guest lecturer.
When she first arrived in Kaifeng, the only other foreigners were a German family and a Russian lady, a woman she affectionately calls Aunt Galena. She spent the rest of the two hours telling us about how Kaifeng has changed since she arrived, what it was like during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward (both movements which she fully supports, even to this day and the open acknowledgement of their failures by the Communist government in regards to the tolls they took on the humanity of China) and what it was like raising six children in China. Her mother decided to move to Kaifeng when she was 67 because she "would rather live in the country that would most likely be the first country to receive the atom bomb than in the country that would most likely be the first country to drop the bomb," Sally said.
Her mother's life sounds unreal. Originally from South Africa, she either was living in the United Kingdom or the United States around the start of World War I. The aunts she was living with at the time didn't want her to be around because there were a lot of soldiers around that were being sent off to fight that could "corrupt a young sixteen-year-old girl."
"They decided that instead of exposing her to all of these soldiers about to go off to war, they would send her back to Africa. So, they put her on the first boat back to South Africa where she was one of four women on a boat with over one thousand soldiers. All four of the women were engaged by the time they got off the boat," Sally said, chuckling.
As Sally said, her "first would-be daddy got blown up." After hearing this, her mother inherited large sums of money from a family death. The sudden inheritance propelled her family members to send her off to Scotland to land herself a posh husband. Her mother, having none of this, took all of her money to the nearest shipyard and asked the ticket office how far away she could travel on their boats.
"Well, we have a boat leaving for the United States tomorrow," the ticket office said.
"Excellent, I want one ticket," her mother said. So at sixteen, her mother ran away from her home in South Africa and found herself in New York City as a secretary.
After a series of events, she ended up marrying a Haitian soldier she met on a train and moved to Northern Rhodesia with him to buy a coffee plantation. Then they ended moving to the United States where she became a housekeeper. Eventually after the Great Depression, her mother ended up in Berkeley, California, next door neighbors with Anna Louise Strong who quickly became her mother's best friend. Strong was an incredibly influential workers rights activist, journalist, and a communist sympathizer. She spent a large portion of her life traveling through China and supporting China's communist movement. While living next to Strong, Sally's mother read Strong's book I Change Worlds, which consequently changed her world. After reading the book, Sally's mother up and left the States at age 67. She moved to China to live with Sally, her husband, and their six children. She lived in China until she died, shifting time between Sally and Strong who also ended up moving to China. She died before "the great leaders died or started to be criticized. Thank God, I don't think she could have borne to see Mao slandered," Sally said. That comment lightly shook all of us out of our drooling, dreamy stares.
"Out of curiosity, do you consider yourself to be Chinese or American? Or any nationality?" I asked, my head whirling from all of the nationalities, countries, and places that constitute her background.
"I consider myself to be a cosmopolitan," she said.
"Fair enough," said Max, shaking his head in disbelief.
Not wanting to exhaust her with our undivided attention and seemingly endless line of questions, we decided it was time to leave.
"Would it be all right if we came and saw you again?" Max asked tentatively, clearly falling in love with this woman and not wanting his dreams of future conversations to be smashed.
"Of course!" She said enthusiastically. "Just not next week, I have to travel to Wuhan for a lecture."
"Do you travel alone?" I asked, curious as to if she was still able to get around China on her own.
"Oh yes, there's nothing quite like travel to keep you going," she said.
As she walked us out of her courtyard talking about the upcoming chrysanthemum festival, we enthusiastically thanked her for letting us see her. After we started walking down on the road, the three of us literally beamed from our conversation with her. We all now had full blown old woman crushes.
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