Within six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in late 1941, Japan carved out a territorial empire in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. They conquered the Philippines, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and more. The tide turned in 1942 with Japanese losses in the Coral Sea, at Midway Island, and off the Solomon Islands. Slowly, the Allied forces engaged in island hopping. Insistently, American planes attacked Japan itself. Finally, in August 1945, after atomic bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese Emperor Hirohito called for an end to the war.

It may be that Japan’s Pacific War eased the conflict in China, at least for a while. But it certainly did nothing to ease the conflict between Jiang Jieshi and General Joseph Stilwell, the American officer who tried to organize Jiang’s forces and coordinate the war effort in China. Stilwell simply could not remedy the corruption, the timidity, and the poor leadership he witnessed firsthand. In fact, Jiang chose to save his weapons and his troops for the inevitable showdown with the Communists. He also met with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in Cario in the fall of 1943. There, the three leaders set war and post-war policies favorable to China. Unfortunately, Jiang still had to face the Japanese. In April 1944 they launched Operation Ichigo, a successful offensive into the interior of China. China’s forces abandoned Changsha and worried about the fate of Chongqing. None too soon, the Japanese called off this offensive. For those who lived in the interior of China, like Nettie’s family, the enemy had come plenty close before they surrendered.

By 1942, Shanghai residents had endured more than four years of Japanese occupation. Elsewhere, in southern China, these “liberators” had shot my future husband’s grandmother—eight times in the back—until she fell over, dead. On another occasion, a helpless young man had stood by and watched Japanese soldiers as they gang-raped his sister, hanged her from a tree, and, to end her life, disemboweled her. Similar occurrences, even in Shanghai, were too common. If only these foreigners would leave! Maybe then we could manage our own politics and live at peace with one another. But not yet.

Two years earlier, in January 1940, my well-educated parents had married and settled down. In Shanghai, they rented a small house and took up teaching posts, he at a music school and she at a kindergarten. Two years later, on February 2, my uncle’s wife took my very pregnant mother to the doctor’s office for a check-up; she still had three weeks before her due date. (Her husband hadn’t come along for the visit because Chinese tradition excluded prospective fathers from obstetrical matters.) The doctor assured his patient that everything was in order, but this did little to relieve her anxiety. As a palliative, he invited her to spend the night in his clinic; in the morning, he suggested, when she realized that all was well, she could return home. It turned out that the patient had judged her condition better than her attending physician. Early the next morning, the patient cried out, “The baby is coming, and I can’t wait!” An emergency. No time to warm a bed or to administer an anesthetic. Years later, my mother always referred to these events when she wanted to explain her chronic back pains.

It is here that I made my grand entrance into the world: at the wrong time, but in the right place. Such good care from my family. I needed a name that reflected my parents’ hopes and commitments. “See how pretty she is; look into her intelligent eyes. Maybe we should call her Shu (‘gentle beauty’) Hui (‘intelligent’).” “But remember also the missionary who served as our matchmaker, the woman who left her country to show us God’s love. Like our parents, we too have embraced that Way; and we pray that in God’s time she will do the same. Let’s call her ‘Nettie.’”

I received such good care from my earliest days, as my parents’ love embraced and nurtured me. Mother nursed me and tended to my other needs. One hundred days later, when Mother returned to work, she put me on the bottle. During my infancy I slept in a small crib beside my parents’ bed. Each evening at midnight my father got up to prepare my milk and feed me. Eight months later, when I uttered my first sentence, I offered him my hungry and grateful response: “Papa, milk!” Later, and in a different setting, I spoke my second sentence: “Pick up a flower.” These words reflected my simple recognition of the beauty of God’s creation. Although speaking came early to me, walking came late: I only rose up off all fours and attempted this unnatural, bipedal method of locomotion when I reached my sixteenth month.

Grandma Sheng became my special baby-sitter when Mother was away at work. All my cousins were female, so we knew nothing of the preference that Chinese families normally gave to boys. Still, these cousins thought they should be higher than me in the pecking order because, unlike me, they bore Grandpa Sheng’s name. Grandma would have none of this, for she knew that the two of us shared the same blood. Day after day, week after week, month after month, we spent so much time together! Grandma spoiled me as only grandmothers can do. When I was too young to learn, she, like my parents, taught me that love is patient and kind, that love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things; that love never ends. Wonderful households! The right place indeed!