Benefits of Teaching Memoir: Amazing stories

The memoir-writing classes I lead are all on break now, so I have time to file through essays they wrote for our last six-week session and choose some to share with readers here. At Halloween I asked writers in my class at The Admiral at the Lake to use 500 words to answer the question “What Are You Afraid Of?” The essay Angie Mills came back with seems particularly appropriate as we think about the new year ahead of us.

There was a lot to be afraid of. Angie and her sister are among those in Iris Chang’s acknowledgements in the “The Rape of Nanking.”

Angie and her sister Harriet were born to Presbyterian missionaries and grew up in China attending American schools in Nanking and Shanghai. Just before the Japanese occupation of Nanking, her father, Wilson Mills, played an important role in efforts to bring about a truce to allow the Chinese army to withdraw from Nanking — the hope was the Japanese army would enter the city without fighting. I learn so much by hearing Angie read her work in class. History lessons, yes, and life lessons as well. Here is her essay.

by Angie Mills

Everyone has had at least one tic of fear in their clock of life. As a child, growing up in China, I was afraid of snakes and spiders which were plentiful in the mountain range where we spent our summers. One summer, my mother dispatched my fear of snakes when, as we walked through a bamboo grove toward home, a poisonous green pit-viper lay coiled a few feet in front of us in the middle of our narrow path. It raised its head several inches and flicked its tongue. Snake and human stared at each other then mother, undaunted, bent down, picked up a clutch of small rocks and threw them — the viper stretched into a glistening green ribbon and glided away.

As to spiders, my father, on several early mornings’ was moved to action by a scream from me, indicating that a spider (sometimes even a tarantula) had landed on my bedcover and I was afraid to get out of bed. Armed with a flyswatter and a roll of newspaper, he managed to maneuver the intruding arachnid, dead or alive, out the window.

Fear of snakes and spiders were thus easily quelled, but a fear of kidnapping lingered. The year was 1932, we were on furlough in New York City living on the fourth floor of a five-floor walk-up. I was in second grade when news of the kidnapping of Charles Lindberg’s young son filled the papers. I feared someone could raise a ladder up to my bedroom window, gag me, tie me up and carry me away. My parents and sister laughed, as they assured me no kidnapper would consider the seven-year old daughter of a depression-era minister worth the time and effort.

Snakes, spiders, unlikely kidnapping, I realize, do not a scary, fearful life make, but all were beginning steps to steel me for worse to come — and come it did — not in fear of personal danger, but of fearful worry. The next couple of decades were difficult — war, looting, disruption of home and family, refugee status for a brief time for my mother and me, Japanese internment camp for my father, Chinese prison for my sister. Compared to these memories what is worthy of my being truly fearful now?

In my tenth decade, the aforementioned fears and worries have long since faded. I doubt there will be more. I am resigned now to leave my final fear to Lord Time, who sits alert, calm, inscrutable, at the edge of voids and, as he fingers quickly through the abacus of my life, through the whys and wherefores to reach a final sum, I listen for his whisper.

“Not yet. Not yet.”