HANGCHOW, MY HOME

From a daughter of American missionaries, a poignant memoir of growing up in Hangchow, the beautiful Chinese city known as “heaven below”—before war and urban planning destroyed so much.

Born in 1913 in Shanghai but raised in Hangchow, Schultheis spent most of her early life in China. Although she went to college in the US (and her family returned there on leave), she became part of what sociologists now call a “third culture”: neither an immigrant nor a native, she straddled both worlds and has felt all her life an affinity with the country where she was born. And Hangchow (celebrated by poets and artists for its canals, its bridges, and its majestic West Lake) will always be home for her—an impression that was only reinforced by later visits she made during the 1980s, as China once more became accessible. Schultheis’s father worked for the YMCA, and she relates how many of their excursions (to the island in the middle of West Lake, for example, or to observe the great tidal bore on the Hangchow River) were shared with other missionary families living in the area. There were also frequent tennis parties and picnics, and (because there were no western-style hotels in existence then) Schultheis’s family played host to a long succession of American guests (among them the great John Dewey) who stayed in their home. The author’s prose is graceful and free of artifice, and her vividly detailed recollections—of her family servants, visits to the silk shops, the street vendors who came to the house selling toys as well as walnuts, the famous landmarks of the city, and seasonal events such as the Lantern Festival and the Chrysanthemum show—succeed in breathing life into what might have remained a dry exercise in nostalgia.

Low-key recollections of a distant place that once was, and still is home.