When Lady Liberty welcomed my mother

Lady Liberty and my mother first met when the Lady was in her 50s and my mother was about 10. It would be one of the most memorable moments of my mother’s young life. No, my mother was not an immigrant, but she was a refugee of sorts.

It was one of those stories that entered the family lore, becoming a staple storytelling fare when I took my college friends to visit my grandparents. Even into my grandfather’s waning years, I could still light up his eyes with a request for a reciting of that long trek from China to the New York Harbor just by saying, “Tell us about escaping Kunming for America.” He’d be off on the tale, Grandma standing ready as editor-in-chief.

Born of U.S. missionaries in China, my mother, Anita Ruth Osgood, grew up in one of the most turbulent times of the 20^th century. Even as the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists was sending residents of Kunming, her hometown, fleeing into the countryside, the Japanese, loathed by both sides, was busy conquering China, the Emperor’s bombs reaching as far as her remote corner of the nation.

Mom and her brother, my Uncle Brenton, four years her younger, had been sent to a missionary boarding school high in the foothills of the Himalayas, with other missionaries as house parents and beloved Miss Jay of England as their teacher. The missionary parents felt the isolated location to be much safer than Kunming which was constantly under attack. And without worrying about their children, they could better carry on their work.

Back then Dali was an arduous two-day trek by bus from Kunming, along a perilous road with the occasional threatening bandit or warlord. Today, Dali is only about four hours’ scenic drive – or an hour’s flight – from Kunming. I visited Dali with my mother in the late ‘90s, the Three Pagodas still standing tall along Erhai Lake. Old Dali, where my mother lived, borders that lake deep in the mountains.

While in Dali as a child, news reached my mother that her house in Kunming had been destroyed by a Japanese bomb, but that everyone was safe. The letter telling of the news devastated my mother and she responded by putting her life in the hands of her beloved Jesus – for life.

Meanwhile just before Christmas 1941, Miss Jay went on a much-needed holiday to Hong Kong. She wrote the missionary families requesting to stay a few more days. Then on Christmas Day, the Japanese invaded the colony, and she spent the rest of the war a prisoner in a Japanese concentration camp.

In the camp, Miss Jay managed to survive while others could not make it on the meager rations. Newspapers covered the windows, so the prisoners could not see out – and Miss Jay used the window coverings to teach the children in the camp how to read.

With school and housing in disarray and my grandparents’ health on the edge, they determined to leave Kunming so as not to be any further burden to their Chinese friends and coworkers. My mother recalled seeing the Flying Tigers fighting the Japanese bombers overhead, but it was the U.S. Army Air Force which evacuated them on one of its many return flights from their airlift into China in 1942. They were flown over the Burma Hump to India, where they boarded a train for Bombay (Mumbai).

There they embarked on a ship headed for New York. The ship was overcrowded with others fleeing China and Southeast Asia as well as returning troops. The figure I have in my memory is 4,000 passengers and crew, but I have no way of verifying that now.

I do remember visiting the Chinese Church in Springfield, Missouri, with my grandparents back in the mid-80s and meeting another couple, retired Baptist missionaries, who had been on that very same ship. Only the husband had had to travel steerage while his wife had the relative comfort of a crowded berth up above, as they could not afford a ticket for him. He worked in the kitchen to pay for his passage and was unable to see his wife until they disembarked. They and my grandparents never met until that Sunday in Springfield 40 years later – two families among a vast assortment of humanity who had fled to safety.

Mom recalled how the ship was under forced blackout at night. For her it meant she could enjoy her beloved stars all that more brilliantly. She would cherish that view of the Southern Cross all her life.

Smokers were forbidden to light up at night as even the light of a cigarette could be detected out to sea. All the way the ship zigzagged, attempting to avoid the enemy ships and submarines chasing them. Their ship was reported sunk twice by the Germans and once by the Japanese, but as they steamed around the Cape of Good Hope and north through the Atlantic, they managed to evade their pursuers unscathed.

As they neared the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., my grandparents told my mother and her brother that when they saw the Statue of Liberty, they would know they were safe. But as they approached the New York harbor, everything was enveloped in a thick fog, and nothing could be seen.

I remember visiting the Statue of Liberty as a youngster. Decades after they had closed the stairs to the torch, you could still crowd into the head and look out through the crown. I imagined Lady Liberty searching for my mother far below as her ship steamed into the harbor.

Lady Liberty has welcomed countless weary travelers since she herself arrived as an immigrant in 1886, a gift 140 years ago this month by the French on the other side of the North Atlantic. With shackle and chains lying at her feet, the statue commemorates both the French and American partnership in the American Revolution, and the abolition of slavery.

Declared a national monument in 1924, the designation now includes nearby Ellis Island, entry point for millions of immigrants. In 1903, Emma Lazarus’ famous lines were inscribed on the statue’s pedestal.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

My mother knew those lines by heart. She said she loved them for the way they showed welcome to immigrants and refugees, from the world over, in search of freedom. I often wonder if they reminded her as well of her own wretched welcome during World War II.

There she was, she and her little brother, standing on the ship’s deck, straining to see the Lady, that promise of safety. And then, all of a sudden, the fog lifted and there gleaming in the sunlight the Lady stood. My mother said she greeted Lady Liberty with joy and relief all jumbled together. They were safe at last.

Public Domain Photo by Sérgio Valle Duarte

She would spend those summer months roller skating on the cement floor of the tabernacle on the campus of Central Bible Institute, the school from which she would graduate more than a decade later. Then she and her family left the Ozarks for Berkeley, California, where her parents joined other veteran and rookie missionaries studying Mandarin and preparing to return to China after the war’s end. Among the new recruits was a young couple, J. Phillip and Virginia Hogan; he would later serve with distinction for years as the head of what is known today as the Assemblies of God World Missions.

It was also in Berkeley that my grandmother gleaned a recipe from a favorite local Chinese chef. The recipe, something we call goulash, is not necessarily Chinese and it’s not really goulash as most people think of goulash. But it has become a family favorite passed down through the generations and is a dish – or rather a soup – I still cook regularly. With its egg noodles, ground beef, stewed tomatoes, corn, soy sauce, some spices, and a bit of sugar, it is multicultural comfort food in our family, especially on a cold winter’s eve.

But I digress.

My mother, uncle, and grandparents steamed out of the San Francisco Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge in 1946, on their way back to Shanghai and eventually Kunming for more amazing tale gathering. But she would never forget the welcome Lady Liberty had given her.

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