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1937. A decade since Mary’s year in Shanghai, when she made significant reassessments about her life. Now the ground began to shift again in a variety of ways. Norman—her “first fledgling”—went away to the Mission boarding school in Chengtu. He was almost eleven years old and had gone as far in school as she could take him. She grieved being no longer essential to him and briefly “gnashed her teeth”—to Freda, the friend she trusted to receive any and all feelings. “I’m not going to nag about it,” she wrote “just air a grouse now and then to keep me from bottling it up.” In mid-May Mary received the news of her mother’s death. [I remember the day the cable arrived. The sound of my mother sobbing, all alone in the dining room, her head cradled in her arms. That sound has never left me. SJE] Mary found this grieving particularly difficult because letters giving all the details of the actual event took so long to arrive. What had the final days been like? How was the service, who attended, what had Father Endicott, who took the service, actually said? Eventually it was her longtime friend, Harold Brown, who gave her the kind of detailed information she craved. Mary, in turn, felt free to describe the painful feelings that needed to be expressed before healing from her loss could begin. Dear Harold, I can’t tell you how frustrated I felt—and still do—that I could not be there during Mother’s last illness, dreadful as it was—and to be with my family at her death. It was foolish but there was no use denying that I felt that way, though I didn’t allow myself to brood over it. That feeling of being cut off—of having nothing to do to produce nature’s balance after a vacuum—that was hardest to bear. I know everything was done for Mother but to think that it was possible there should be a time when I meant noth14 A Time of Transition 126 ing to her and yet she needed personal relationships as a child does—the world shut out—hurts me yet. Perhaps it is an unconscious desire to compensate her for all she did for me that makes it seem so poignant. You know, that old jealousy of Jane has occurred to me these months. I believe my grief has been harder because deep in my heart I am annoyed that she should have been the one to minister to Mother at the last. Perhaps she has always been as fond of Mother as I was—no doubt she was—but my impression of the past is coloured by the way Jane and Mother used to rub each other the wrong way and by the greater companionship I had with her. I expect it is all part of that old emotional conflict because I do know that in many ways Mother and I were not “eye to eye,” as it were. Perhaps it is a good thing that Blatz brought the thing to the surface. He didn’t make it vanish into nothingness, evidently, but at least I know it for what it is and not for a nameless unrest. (to Harold Brown, 1 November 1937) Early in 1937 Mary’s creative energies became focussed on what would be her most challenging assignment while in China—becoming a foster mother. We’ve taken on a new experiment. For me it’s branching out on my first intimate contact with Chinese life.…We’ve taken a little boy, George Whang, into our home—and into my school. Soon we’re to add another, his cousin, Gerald Chen.…They will have a tutor for two hours in the afternoon so they don’t get behind in their Chinese studies.… It came about because George’s father had been here once or twice and was impressed with the atmosphere of our home. He wants his boy to be ready to get the most out of an education abroad. So he urged us to take him. I was quite staggered by the idea at first. I wasn’t sure I could do it and feared for the effect on the family.… Mr. Whang wants to send George to West Point Military Academy. Jim warned him he would do everything he could to turn his son against the idea, and also that Christianity was said...

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