Journey from Banna: My Life, Times, and Adventures

By Gordon Young

Journey from Banna is the incredible true narrative of Gordon Youngs three
life journeys: his journey through the world, from China to many parts of Asia,
and to the United States, where he lives today in California; his journey through
time, from childhood near the Golden Triangle to his teen years in India during
World War II, and from a young man during the Korean War to a married family
man during the Vietnam years, and finally to grandfather status; and lastly,
his journey toward enlightenment, from rugged individualist to dedicated
conservator of wildlife and humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456868567

Gordon Young

Gordon Young grew up in Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors, where his accomplishments included learning to parallel park the family’s massive Buick Electra 225. After reaching an uneasy truce with the nuns in the local Catholic school system, he went on to study journalism at the University of Missouri and English literature at the University of Nottingham. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Utne Reader, and numerous other publications. Young has published Flint Expatriates, a blog for the long-lost residents of the Vehicle City, since 2007. He is a senior lecturer in the Communication Department at Santa Clara University and lives in San Francisco.

Book preview

Journey from Banna

Gordon Young

Copyright © 2011 by Gordon Young

Second Edition

Library of Congress Control Number:                        2011902303

ISBN:                            Hardcover                    978-1-4568-6855-0

                                      Softcover                      978-1-4568-6854-3

                                      eBook                           978-1-4568-6856-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 07/06/2018

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

589124

For My Grandchildren:

Jesse, Steve, Matt, Caroline and Rachel,

and for Dad, who walked the same trails

*

But that’s all shove be’ind me — long ago an’ fur away,

An’ there ain’t no ‘busses runnin’ from the Bank to Mandalay;

An’ I’m learnin’ ‘ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:

If you’ve ‘eard the East a-callin’, you won’t never ‘eed naught else.

No! you won’t ‘eed nothin’ else

But them spicy garlic smells,

An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells;

On the road to Mandalay…

—Rudyard Kipling

Acknowledgements

M ANY PEOPLE HAVE HELPED TO MAKE THIS

book possible, and I wish to thank the following:

My wife, Peggy, who, when she was here with me, heard these tales, lived many with me and urged me to write the first draft of my memoirs;

My daughters, Lenore, Julie, Debbie and Carolyn, for inspiring their dad during a lifetime of listening rapt to his stories; and Julie, Debbie and Carolyn, for steadily carrying through the actions to manifest this and two other books;

My sons-in-law, Jon Howell, Jeff Chase and Ron McMath, for their genuine, lively curiosity and appreciation for my memoirs, their excellent questions, and their time spent reading drafts;

Paul Soderberg, who has so much in common with me as a naturalist, famed for his own achievements, for his professional guidance in bookmaking, for reading and editing drafts, for designing the cover for this and another of my books, for writing generously about me for Journey, and for delivering the sharpest, quickest critiques my daughters and I ever witnessed;

John Soderberg, Paul’s brother—my awesome and fabulously talented friend, famous for his magnificent bronze sculpture and known throughout the world for his art and altruistic work—for editing, giving the thumbs up and warmly writing about me in this book;

Daniel Furon, for his professional assistance in refining the old photograph for the book cover, and for improving photos for this and my other two self-published books;

Our many helpers at Xlibris, including: Sidney Cabalding for handling production of three self-published books, this being the last, withoutever losing her cool or sense of order; Kent Isuzuki, for conducting the marketing for this and two other books; Gemma Ramos, for managing Journey’s production, particularly cover details;and Sam Daniels for her meticulous focus on text corrections.

Contents

Photo of the Author

Maps

Preface

Journey from Banna Photo Album

Chapter 1      Banna-Nawfu 1927-1933

Chapter 2      Taunggyi 1935-1941

Chapter 3      Manglun 1937-1941

Chapter 4      The Mandalay Road 1941-1942

Chapter 5      Mussoorie-Pahar 1942-1944

Chapter 6      Nag Tibba’s Ghost 1944

Chapter 7      Trains from Delhi 1943-1945

Chapter 8      Passage from Bombay 1945

Chapter 9      Infantry Dogface 1945-1948

Chapter 10    California Sunshine 1948-1953

Chapter 11    Thailand—Old Siam 1954-1958

Chapter 12    Twists of Fate 1954-1956

Chapter 13    Ban Phra Asa 1956-1962

Chapter 14    Bangkok and Chiang Mai 1962-1967

Chapter 15    Round ’n’ Round 1967-1970

Chapter 16    Vietnam 1970-1972

Chapter 17    Laos 1972-1974

Chapter 18    San Luis Obispo 1974-Now

Postscript

The Appendices

Appendix A    Dates Mentioned in the Text

Appendix B    Gordon Young, My Hero by Paul Soderberg

Appendix C    Some Memories and Thoughts by John M. Soderberg,

1.jpg

Oliver Gordon Young, circa 1982

2.jpg

Map of India showing Mussoorie, Calcutta, New Delhi,

Katihawar State, etc.

3.jpg

Map of Southeast Asia showing my birthplace, Banna (in Yunnan),

and the other key places on my life journey from there

(Bangkok, Chiang Mai, etc.)

Preface

O NE DAY, AFTER I talked to my grandson Jesse on the phone, I decided to make a sketch of my life and times. Jesse was writing an essay for a class assignment about wild animals and wanted to get details on my snow leopard encounter, a story I couldn’t help repeating quite often. It seems that credibility had gotten somewhat stretched with the telling and recalling of this particular episode, like a good fish story frequently enjoys. "Grandpa, did that snow leopard really leap four hundred feet down that cliff? Did it, really? Yes, I believe it might have, but I decided to sound a bit more credible. Well, Jesse, it sure looked like it, but let’s go on record at three hundred feet. That’s a long jump anyway–a football field, end to end!"

I started writing about the snow leopard for Jesse, and that got me going. It seemed that I had more than one story to leave for my children and their children, my cousins, friends, and anyone who might be interested. So I backed up some years, still a short lifetime, to when I was born in Banna, Yunnan, China, a place that few tourists reach even today. Once started, I sketched my life’s twists and turns, as memory was kind enough to let me recall events and dates. I was surprised and happy to find that events, times, places, and even names were easy to recall. If anything, I simply didn’t have space for the many details coming to mind. The experience of looking back, event by event, at one’s past is a special kind of pleasure, a return to memory’s lanes and emotions of long ago; it has fulfilled me amply. How good it would be had my parents and my grandparents left accounts of their experiences! Many questions only they could answer come to mind since their passing; but they are not here to answer them, and no one else can ever satisfy my need to know.

At the least, I have hoped to present a fairly complete scan of life as I was privileged to experience it. But much, of course, is left out of the reflections because it is not my intention to talk endlessly. However, I wish I could have picked up more of my childhood, of how my thoughts ran as a small boy, slinking around in the jungles with Lahu boys, usually on bare feet myself, chasing small game with a primitive pellet bow. I reminisce quietly over a cup of coffee in the backyard and hear and see in my mind’s eye so much that I couldn’t grasp in chapter 1 or 2 until I had printed them out. Perhaps that is understandable. But I wish I could convey those lost-forever thrills I experienced then and what they meant to me: the sounds and sights now gone from most of those environments, such as great flocks of wild fruit pigeons and hornbills winging in and out of fruit-filled banyan trees; the booming of imperial pigeons, the loudly distinctive wing swishing of great hornbills, the flutelike whistling of a dozen species of green fruit pigeons, the shaking branches as many gibbon apes and leaf monkeys and big, cat-sized tree squirrels crashed through the high canopies of rain forests. They had still been spared from extinction. I saw much of this again some sixty years ago when Peggy and I first went to Thailand, but I also saw the last of the real Southeast Asian wilderness disappear shortly after that. Like visiting the animals in a zoo, it isn’t the same to see wildlife in refuges where at least a bit of the old has fortunately been preserved in a few places.

In November 1993, Peggy and I made a trip to Banna, China, where I was born. It was still a very difficult place to reach, even by Jeep. I was a little over six years old when I left Banna, yet it was deja vu everywhere we stopped and looked about in the general area of Banna. I even sat again on the church pew in the old chapel that my father and grandfather had built in 1925. The nostalgia one gets from such an experience is indescribable. Ghosts of the past brush against you. You are caught up in the grips of a wish to re-live experiences. I hope that my efforts to share that past with you will invoke a few smiles and enable you to picture as well as possible what it was like.

The English alphabet doesn’t permit us to spell names in Lahu as they should sound. My spellings are based on missionary-taught script. This script is a good, even if quaint, effort to express the exotic sounds and tones of the Lahu language, which is full of un-aspirated and exotic consonants. Most names I’ve used have un-aspirated consonants; therefore, the Ch in names I’ve used – for example in Chanu, Chakaw, etc. – is meant to be pronounced somewhere between a J and a Ch sound, more like Chah or Jah. Likewise, the k in Chakaw is un-aspirated, sounding more like G in our English word, go. So to be very basic and simple, just say Jah for the Cha and Gaw for Kaw. If un-aspirated consonants are not that important to you, then pronounce my Lahu spelling just any way you like.

GY

San Luis Obispo, 2011

Banna-Nawfu 1927-1933

Chapter 1

O N AUGUST 16, 1927, I made a precarious entry into this world in a grass-roofed house on a remote mountaintop near the Burma border in China’s Yunnan Province.

It wasn’t a safe place for my parents to have their first child. In fact, it was a very dangerous place, at a very dangerous time in China’s feudalistic provinces. Petty Chinese warlords – or more appropriately, bandit chiefs – ruled in the countryside, barbaric headhunters ambushed the trails, and Shan bandit gangs roamed the valleys. Therefore, the odds were not good for my parents’ survival or for seeing me safely aboard. But my parents were not to be stopped. They were evangelical Baptist missionaries, and extending the Christian Gospel came first.

So it came to be that I first opened my eyes in a thatch-roofed, wood-framed mission house perched atop a forested hill above a Lahu village. The location had the unlikely Shan name of Banna, denoting paddy-field rice culture. The Chinese called the place Nawfu. Perhaps some lost civilization had in the distant past grown rice in paddy fields. No one seems to know for sure. The Lahu didn’t grow rice that way. But by any account, Banna was a long ways from the outside world.

When I saw the first light of day, Ford’s Model-A began replacing the old Model-T automobile. But at that time, people in Yunnan’s deep interior, from the mountains to the sea coasts, had never seen motor vehicles. With many days of walking, a person could reach a railroad in construction, or get to where a narrow-gauged line ended. But there were no motor vehicles. The nearest railhead was at Thazi, Burma, a pony or foot trip of some five hundred miles. Except for the much talked-of railroads being built by colonial French and British governments, things hadn’t changed or progressed much in the distant mountains from what Mongol invaders had left behind in the thirteenth century.

There are reasons to believe that as early as some three thousand years before Kublai Khan, various original ethnic groups of mountain peoples established their tribes and clans in mountain fastnesses, and separated into their different cultures and tribal languages. Perhaps many of these people hadn’t changed for a thousand years before the Mongol invasion. These were, however, modern peoples as compared with their possible ancestors of some six thousand years BC, who left stone implements in many places, even within the earth of where the Banna mission house stood. So what my parents found in this land was a mixture of cultures and peoples who embraced very ancient ways of life, cultures that had even preceded the early Chinese and Mongols in many respects.

Many of these groups, like the Lahu, remain quite separate linguistically from Chinese speakers, including the Yunnan dialect of Mandarin. Their physical features suggest a strong likeness to the Burmese rather than Mongoloid features found in China and Mongolia. There are many other aspects of Lahu ethnic origin that remain hidden from our knowledge, much like the rest of Southeast Asia’s many ethnic origin mysteries. Most ethnologists and anthropologists consider the Lahu part of the Tibeto-Burmese stock, and this is very plausibly the case.

Wherever they came from, the Lahu people were there in this mountain village long before I was born. So were the Akha, Wa, Mincha, and Shans in the adjoining hills and valleys, their cultures probably unchanged since time immemorial. Their distinctive tribal dress styles, their work implements, their Mongolian ponies, and perhaps their languages, too, had likely seen little change in a thousand years. Among the few outside influences of importance to reach them was the making and use of gunpowder. In time, they learned to make and use crude fuse-locks, then homemade percussion muzzle-loading shotguns, for hunting and war. But the majority continued to rely on crossbows for hunting, adding sword and spear for defense and battle.

The Chinese ruled this land ever since Kublai Khan established the Yuan Dynasty in the thirteenth century. By 1927, Sun Yat-sen’s Republic of China was about to be unified by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. But this would not significantly change the situation deep in the hills of Yunnan: feudal warlords would continue to have sway in the remote districts, sparing only the villages that were too distant and well nestled within immutable mountains. Whatever modern influences the Chinese acquired from the outside world were not shared with the people of the remote mountains.

Yunnan is a large province, bordering almost all of northeast Burma, northern Laos, and the western half of North Vietnam. Three great south-flowing rivers, the Salween, the Mekong, and the Red, pass through Yunnan into Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. Yunnan’s capital, Kunming, had historical focus in World War II as the destination of the China-Burma Road, and also because General Chenault’s famous Flying Tigers were based there in the 1940s.

My grandfather William Marcus Young was the first American missionary to work in this part of China, exploring beyond the border from his mission into northeastern Burma by 1905. Fifteen years later, he established a mission station at Banna. His son Harold, born in Kengtung, Burma, in 1901, also became a missionary after returning for education in the United States. He met and married my mother Ruth Pinkerton in California, and in 1926 they were appointed Baptist missionaries and sent out to assist my grandfather in Banna. It took them over three months of ocean travel and jungle-trekking to reach this remote corner of China. A year later, I came along to add to their many burdens.

To have dared to go there, let alone to give birth to me in that place, at that time, is difficult to fathom. There were absolutely no guarantees against life-threatening situations, either by the welcomed government protection as existed then in British Burma, or by reliable and available medicines. They had every expectation to die of illnesses or be killed, but their faith in God transcended all; they’d be kept safe from harm and danger, for holy angels would be there. In my mind, it indeed took the angels and miracles answering Almighty God to save them and to save me from early death in my infancy.

It was a busy year at the mission bungalow in Banna when I came into the world. With the newest member of the Young clan about to arrive, additional preparations had to be made just at a time when evangelistic efforts were paying off among the Lahu and Wa, who wanted to become Christians. And because of this trend, Chinese officials became very upset and threatened to erase the mission house at Banna. By then, my father’s younger brother Vincent was there, as well as his bride Vera. Their presence, together with the many Lahu and Wa associates they had acquired over the years, would make a critical difference. Without having acquired this tribal following in the early development of the mission, history for the Young clan would surely have ended there.

The Chinese bandits came, hundreds of them, eventually surrounding the mission house. Grandfather, a true pacifist, never carried or used a weapon. However, Harold and Vincent were hunters as avid as Lahu men, and they armed themselves whenever dangers challenged. In addition, some fifty Lahu men, armed with home-made muzzle loaders, cross-bows, and spears came to the mission house before the bandits got there and took up defensive positions.

The bandits tightened their siege, shouting from the perimeters. At that point, my uncle Vincent, his old Springfield rifle in hand, stepped out in full view of the bandits and hollered out his famous words in Yunanese, forever legend in our memories: You come as guests – too many of you; you come to fight–not enough of you!

This sheer audacity, inspired divinely we believe, was certainly the reason why the Chinese in this particular bandit army just melted away without a word and left Banna. Vincent carried out this audacity magnificently. Those who knew my grandfather well told of his knowing smile and humble understanding. He believed it was God’s hand alone that saved the mission, never having doubted for a moment that his prayers would be answered. He had not been looking over the barrel of a rifle, he had been on his knees. It happened many times, again and again, during my grandfather’s life and Christian ministry.

It took months to set things up so that the missionary doctor Richard Buker could come up from Kengtung, Burma, to oversee the event of my birth. Dr. Buker then rode a mule for seven days over the jungle trails. It was not the sort of out-of-way and hazardous trip Dr. Buker often made, but he had a more important aim than simply to administer to a woman giving birth, even for a fellow missionary woman. As it was, he agreed to go to Banna only because it was part of a planned project to set up a dispensary there. He had planned that for a later date and simply made it earlier for a small additional task. Missionaries out on the limb really couldn’t take precedence over the huge workload missionary doctors had at their own posts.

In any event, Dr. Buker was kind enough to come to Banna and ensure that mistakes weren’t made. As it was, there were no complications, but it was gallant of the good doctor to tally up a total of fourteen mule days, even marginally, on my small, five-pound account. And with this August event wrapped up, my grandfather, father, and uncle could all be free to go off into the far hills on their annual evangelical tours following the rainy season. My father was not happy about leaving my mother and aunt alone at the mission house in Banna, but he had a job to do; both he and his brother were needed since they spoke languages my grandfather didn’t command. My grandfather had learned Shan from his earlier missionary work in Burma, south of Banna and Kengtung, before my father was born; however, he never learned to speak or understand the Lahu and Wa languages.

Starting in the early days at Banna and during their twenties, my father and his brother spoke bilingually in Lahu and with fluency in Shan, Chinese, and Wa. Their boyhoods in and around Kengtung, Burma, had exposed them to all of these major, separate languages that have no common basis at all. In addition, they were both natural linguists who were rarely matched in their particular language skills by other foreign missionaries, or even by any other white man for that matter. My brother and I at our linguistic peaks a generation later, both fluent in several languages, could never match our father or uncle. They knew and spoke as many as five or six Wa and Lahu dialects alone!

My grandfather, father, and uncle might have guessed but couldn’t have known that Chinese bandits would choose just that time of their absence to hit Banna again. The two ladies and a small howling baby were sitting ducks. All the men were away on the big annual tour in northern regions. The only recourse when the bandits appeared, my mother told me, had been for Vera and her to pray, and the results were simply amazing.

The bandit leader, a particularly onerous and infamous character, suddenly lost all ambition to loot and burn the mission since he developed a powerful toothache. He felt compelled to change his plans and, having heard of the foreigners’ good medicines, asked my mother for toothache medicine. Indeed, she might help, she told him, but if they didn’t leave for good, the ache would return. In the process of a theatrically fussy treatment with oil of cloves and a deft extraction, the man almost vowed to change his wicked ways and become a Christian. He never did, but there were no more bandit threats from that particular group. I was six years old before bandits again threatened the mission house.

When my grandfather, father, and uncle returned to Banna after many months, they were angered to learn that bandits had tried to slip in behind them. That had been bad enough, but there was now another serious problem: my health. My inexperienced mother, relying only upon her own milk to feed me, realized almost too late that she hadn’t been lactating normally. It was an amazing oversight that no one thought to raise milk animals to back up a first white child to be born in Banna, considering that my grandfather had been a farmer! Apparently, my grandfather hadn’t advised my father of this because his own wife had no problem feeding her babies, and mother’s milk was best anyway. As for the Lahu people, they didn’t drink milk at all, nor did they keep animals for dairy purposes. I was caught with no available fresh or preserved milk to supplement my mother’s abnormal lactation.

My mother also suffered from worry and depression, which further affected her milk supply for me. This was very unfortunate for me; unknown to my mother for months, I actually suffered serious malnutrition! At such a critical time in my life, this deficiency affected my growth later on. I grew slower and remained shorter than my younger sister during most of my teenage years; and I looked only about sixteen when the army drafted me. It may or may not be medically accurate, but I am inclined to believe that my delayed growth during those years, while my peers shot up like weeds, owed much to this early unfortunate problem. It was one gamble my parents didn’t win, and it cost me a great deal in athletic competition with other boys my age. I loved all sports, trying futilely to make the teams; but where size didn’t matter, I did well enough.

I was fortunate at that critical time to have a number of Lahu women who volunteered their ample breast milk as wet nurses to stop my malnutrition. I was saved by the breasts of sturdy Lahu women! Perhaps that somehow modified my genes to include things of the Lahu, their ways and preferences? Did it make me a Lahu in other ways as well? Whatever, it made me proud to have been raised on the milk of Lahu women, and they have my gratitude and love.

My parents resolved not to be caught like that again. Once I was put back together again by wet nurses, my father conducted a wide search to buy up a herd of goats for future milk supplies. Later, I was raised on goats’ milk, and that too was available when my sister joined the clan.

When the bandits came and surrounded the house again, I was about

six years old. My mind received an indelible impression that had to remain among my earliest memories. I can remember being wide-eyed, watching as agitated people were shouting. I wondered what was happening as I stood by my grandfather while he knelt there praying. At that time, my grandfather couldn’t understand me anyway because I didn’t speak any English and he didn’t understand Lahu, which was my first language. During all of his forty years as a missionary in Burma and China, he learned and used only the Shan language.

The scene will always be there in my memory. We were barricaded in my grandfather’s room at the west end of the bungalow, mattresses piled against the walls. My mother, sister Helen, Aunt Vera, and a number of Lahu women were huddled together; and my father, uncle, and more armed Lahu men were crouched around the windows and doors with their guns. My grandfather, who didn’t believe in guns, was praying softly, calmly, and deliberately over the din of excited voices. I remember being distressed that he seemed fearful of the situation (though I understood later that he had been unafraid), and I wondered why he had not expressed anger at the bandits like my uncle and father did as they loaded guns and shouted back and forth to the other men.

Then I remember that there was a lot of shooting outside, some distance from the house from an adjoining hill. I was too young then to understand what had happened, and my parents hadn’t troubled me with the details. Years later, I learned more details as the story was told again and again at campfires, including accounts by the man who had actually led the attack on the Chinese that day. A number of Lahu men under the leadership of Sara Chakaw, a superb warrior chief and legend among Lahu people, came to the rescue. He had organized a rear attack on the bandits to put them into confusion, and then he had ambushed those who retreated, following and tracking stragglers until he and his men killed many of them. Sara Chakaw personally killed nine of the Chinese bandits.

Of the many Lahu leaders I’ve known, Sara Chakaw was the only one

obsessed with injustices and the need to stop criminals. Law enforcement

wasn’t exactly what he called it in a land where justice wasn’t upheld by laws. Chinese courts catered only to Chinese who could pay, and their so-called police were nothing but bandits themselves. The independent Shan state princes had their own police, but they didn’t reach remote villages except to levy unfair taxes upon them.

Sara Chakaw was the only lawman in this very wild place in those days. And it is understandable that my father and uncle packed pistols when they traveled, even if this seemed incongruous with missionary work. But there were no equals in that land where it came to Sara Chakaw’s brand of enforcing justice, which nobody else dared to enforce. He subsequently went on to lead a band of Lahu guerrillas against invading Japanese and Thai soldiers in World War II, decimating and devastating them at every turn. I was privileged to know and work closely with this great Lahu Wyatt Earp during my activities in the 1950s and ’60s. He was in a class by himself all his life, the last of his kind.

No shots had been fired from the bungalow or into it. The gunfire was all outside the big house, directed elsewhere (Sara Chakaw’s people drawing fire away). My grandfather had insisted that no one was to fire at the bandits unless their bullets threatened any of us in the bungalow. I will always marvel at this and the many times when events simply turned abruptly from life-threatening to peace and calm, whenever my grandfather was there with his towering faith. He was seemingly a strangely detached and humorless man, yet there was great warmth in his love for his family and for all people. His was the kind of rock-solid faith that gave us lesser mortals a glimpse of ultimate realities, teaching and reminding us not to doubt so easily but to truly believe in God. His example inspired all those near him and showed us that his communion with God was real, that the promises of Jesus Christ are real.

I was just past my sixth birthday when we left Banna for the last time. My parents were due for their first eighteen-month furlough in the United States after the standard seven-year tour of overseas duty. The mission was in the hands of my Uncle Vincent and Aunt Vera, with the added responsibility for a new station located a week’s travel north of Banna at Mang Mang, a very wild place in the heart of Wa territory. My grandfather had been reluctantly retired by the mission board the year before at age seventy, and he returned to California against his wishes. It was as though his heart and his enthusiasm for life had been left in the Lahu and Wa hills he loved. He died within a few years after that, but his legacy will never be lost among the Lahu, Wa, and Shan people of China and Burma.

From Banna, the pony caravan took the usual seven days to Kengtung, Burma, where we stayed briefly with the Buker family before moving on by oxcart and pony-back to Kawlaw. Since the train now reached this point, the normal month of foot travel was cut to only ten days from Kengtung. In another year, the first of the motor lorries would be on the scene to dramatically shorten the travel time from the railhead to Kengtung. Once we were on the train, we reached Rangoon in only two more days. So the trip from Banna to Rangoon had been accomplished in a record nineteen days of travel. It had taken over two months when my parents journeyed from Rangoon seven years before, riding or following the oxcarts all the way from Thazi, the end of the railroad.

We were on the steamship by January 1934 for the slow trip from the Port of Rangoon via Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, and eventually across the Pacific to Long Beach, California. The Dollar Lines in those days that preceded the bigger, faster President Lines took the cruise leisurely, some six weeks and more, for the pleasure of the majority of passengers who were vacation cruisers. We celebrated my sister Helen’s fifth birthday onboard ship shortly after we got started, and to our great joy, her present was a life-sized, big-eared black-and-white stuffed spaniel doggie. Our parents had decided to ease our continued grief at the loss of our beloved Jackie, a real-life spaniel that a leopard was unkind enough to grab and devour just before we left Banna. Jackie had been especially dear to Helen and me, and his death had been quite traumatic to both of us. Now, Jackie had returned. Yet he was only one of the twenty or more dogs – a favorite prey for leopards – my parents had lost to the constantly marauding felines around Banna in those days. In retrospect, it is small wonder that people had such a scarcity of domestic livestock in Banna.

Neither of us kids understood much English and could speak even less, preferring to learn the one language used most around Banna: Lahu. It may seem odd that we had not learned the language of our parents as well, but this phenomenon wasn’t peculiar to just Helen and me; it was quite the norm for many missionary children raised in remote areas, especially when their exposures to the local natives was never constrained. In our case, we played so exclusively with Lahu children that English was refused out of hand. It baffled us later when we reached California that our various relatives didn’t speak or understand our Lahu; and we decided, particularly to the amusement of our grandparents on my mother’s side, that there was something oddly wrong with Americans not speaking Lahu. But eighteen months later,