>> This is James Newberry,
and I'm here with Laurie Lee on Wednesday,
March 22nd, 2017
at the Sturgis Library at Kennesaw State University.
And Miss Lee, do you agree to this interview?
>> I do.
>> Thank you so much.
Just to start with, can you tell me your full name?
>> My full name is Laureen Ann Decker Lee.
>> Wonderful. And what's your birthday?
>> June 17th, 1936.
>> And where were you born?
>> I was born in a very small town
in Kentucky called Garrett.
And I've never really looked it up.
I've been through it and it is
a one horse town for my mom and dad
were there briefly before the rest
of their career was launched.
>> Well, speaking of their career,
I want to start with asking what were their names?
>> My father's name was
William Decker and my mother's name was Viola Decker.
>> And what did they do for a living?
>> My mother was raised on a farm.
My father was first generation American from Holland.
His dad was a baker and so he was raised in New Jersey.
But early on, through some influence that
he had or a person
that he met he got very interested in mission work.
So I think shortly after high school,
in fact, I don't think he finished high school.
He went over to Chicago from New Jersey and
entered a school that called
Moody Bible Institute. It's still going.
It's a thriving place of educating missionaries to be,
and he was there with
the express purpose of getting
a degree so that he could go abroad.
My mother from Ohio was influenced through
somebody visiting her church
who was very interested in India.
And that led to her investigating further education,
but neither one of my parents
ever graduated from high school.
So back in those days evidently,
you could go on and get some qualification from
a higher school of learning
without having to have a high school diploma.
And that's where they met
was during those years at Moody Bible Institute.
>> I see. So you've
talked about what drew them to mission work.
So when you were born,
what stage were they in,
what were they preparing to do?
>> That's a good question because after they graduated,
they had applied for a visa to go to India.
This is what they felt God wanted them to do.
But it wasn't forthcoming.
And so they were given
the option to have a little time
in doing mission work here at home,
and so they were given
this little church in Garrett, Kentucky.
And I think they were there for about a year and a half
and I was the first of four children and I was born then.
That visa to India never did come through.
But in the year and a half that they were in Kentucky,
they changed their interest or
felt that their interest had been
changed and applied for
a visit to China and that came through very quickly.
Even though we were on the verge of war
between China and Japan at that time.
It was still an open place for foreigners to go.
So when that visa came through,
then they left Kentucky and they went to San Francisco,
where they stayed with friends until the papers
were finalized and then when that visa did arrive,
they went from San Francisco to Vancouver,
and that's where they boarded
a ship and sailed to Hong Kong from there.
>> Did they have any apprehensiveness about going
themselves and taking a young child?
>> They never spoke about that.
I don't think so. They were
one among many that were doing that.
A lot of these graduates
were going into different parts of the world.
Many of them had time to wait and families were born,
but I never remember them thinking twice about taking me,
and I had by that time turned two.
And my mother was pregnant again
because shortly after we arrived in Hong Kong,
about six months, she gave birth to my brother.
But that was a three week journey
from Vancouver to Hong Kong.
Obviously, I don't remember that part,
but I have crossed the Pacific Ocean five times by ship.
>> Well, can you tell me what
their intentions or aspirations
in going to China would have been?
>> Yes. They had a very specific goal,
and the goal was to work and to evangelize
people that lived on these small boats called sam pans,
the 15 by five by two foot deep boats
where the Chinese people were born,
they lived and they died on these boats.
They were called sam pans because sam
means three feet or something like that,
and pan means,
it was five boards.
The sam pan means five boards.
And that's about all the boards that were in
this little boat that they lived in long and that wide.
But they raised their chickens there,
they had their little kitchen there.
They had canopies that dropped down
at night for privacy or because of weather.
And a lot of the rivers were just
inundated with both people
because it was a cheap way to live.
And they could maneuver and go up and down
the river and many of them sold wears.
They sold their ceramic wear or lots of food
and so you could live on the river very
well because the shops came to you.
And if you needed to get from one point to another,
you had your transportation.
So there was huge colonies of
these boat people as they were called.
And the mission group that my parents went
with was called the South China Boat Mission,
and it was particularly to work with boat people.
>> What was the closest large city
to where your parents were living and evangelizing?
>> Well, if I could just
back up a little bit as to how they got there?
>> Sure, please.
>> When we arrived in Hong Kong,
we were there for a year and a half,
and the primary purpose was to learn the language.
You cannot go into another country
and expect to start without
having some way of communicating.
And so they started their language course
and I was fairly well on my own and because of that,
I had what we called an Ama,
a servant lady who took care of me so that
my parents could use their time learning the language.
Well, consequently, she was
my best friend and a mother figure.
I learned the language very quickly,
much faster than my parents ever did.
And the story is told of
my parents when they would give
like a menu for a day or a week and all,
Little Laureen would always change that because she
preferred the Chinese food to the foreign food,
which was foreign to me.
So we had a lot of fun times because
my mother and dad were just so
amazed that I picked it up so fast,
but I was with her 12 hours a day.
So that was it. And then when my brother was born,
she of course, took care of him.
So they were there a year and a half.
And at that time, Japan had
actually already occupied Canton.
Canton is the Southernmost city,
Southern and Central in China.
And it's right on the river, the Pearl River,
and there was a large boat community there
and they already had mission workers there at that time,
and my parents were going to come and join them.
So Japan had already taken over Canton.
There were Japanese occupation there,
but it was still very free.
And so my father would keep
in touch with people that were there
to see if it was really permissible for
him and his little family to join them.
Well, in fact, it was.
So we left and
a year and a half later in 1939 and
arrived there and we're very happily situated.
Now that you find it interesting
because when you think of boat work,
the best way to do any kind of
work is to get in and among the people.
And so the mission had built actually
five different house boats, good size houseboats.
I think our houseboat had four bedrooms,
two large ones, two small ones.
We had a dining area, a living area,
a servants quarter, and so we live very comfortably.
But these boats were anchored
so that they faced each other.
And then over to the side was the chapel.
These fairly large houseboats sat right in the middle,
on the river among the boat people.
And that's how the contacts were
made because you lived right among them.
Well, between where my house, our houseboat was,
was a very large barge,
which led to another barge,
which led to a man made island called Shamin and Shamin
was the French and British concessions.
They had their embassies there.
And it was a manmade island that was just off of Canton.
In fact, it was attached to the city of Canton.
And it had a beautiful area for
playing and parks and lovely.
And so when we actually moved there, of course,
I had another Ama, we didn't bring her from Hong Kong.
She would take us onto Shamin Island, the two of us,
my brother and me for most of
the day while my parents were in language school.
And so we made great friends and learned to play
kick the can across the fields,
and I learned a little bit
about English football and things like that,
which I love and still do.
We were in a very happy situation and
the Japanese were there and they
treated us very, very well.
Now, the Chinese that were around us,
they were considered really second class.
But so far as the foreigners,
particularly the missionaries and their families,
they really did treat us very well.
In fact, my mother tells me the story of
officers coming and taking me as a four year old.
Blonde, blue eyed and taking
me onto Shamin to their horses,
sitting me in front of them in
their saddles and parading
me through the streets of Canton.
And when they brought me back,
I always had a bag of cookies or
some goodies as a thank you to my parents.
So that's all to say that we were treated very well.
>> So they didn't interfere with your parents work?
>> Not in the slightest, no.
>> And can you describe,
I know that you were very young at the time,
but maybe based on your mother's account,
what an average day for them would have
been doing this work.
>> The average day would have been up early.
And as a mission family,
they would always gather for prayer at
the beginning of the day followed by
breakfast and then the language classes would begin.
And then there was a break at lunchtime,
and then the language until the evening.
And then we always had Chapel services in
the evening where the Chinese were invited to come.
On occasion, my father would have
a little sam pan that he had somebody row him around,
he would have a flip chart,
because he was learning to write,
he would try and write say the name of
God or the name of the cross and gradually
introduce himself as a missionary
to teach them about who God was
and who Jesus was and why they were
there was to give them
that good news that God loved them.
So on occasion when they weren't doing language study,
they were out really evangelizing.
It sounds like a high falute name,
but just getting in and among the people,
introducing themselves and why they were there.
>> And do you have any impression of
what people's response to it was?
>> It was generally very good,
because like I say, they were
living right there among them.
They weren't coming from off
Shamin Shore and trying to force something,
they were actually living there.
And they had two children.
And my mother puts it this
way that I got right in with the Chinese kids.
I learned their language and I got their lice.
And I still remember my mother taking me over by
a window and snapping
the lice between her nails on my head.
And then I would have to take
castor oil to get rid of the worms.
So I was very much involved in life on the sand pants.
My brother quite 2.5 years younger,
he was unable to do that as much as I did.
But my best friends were
the Chinese children and so I did everything with them.
I lived on their boats with them during
the free hours when I
wasn't either in bed or having a meal or on Shamin,
I was with the children all the time.
So they welcomed us.
I think having a family was a big plus for them.
There having said that,
there were a number of single lady missionaries
there who made themselves available in different ways,
teaching them knitting classes
or something or other that would be of interest to them.
But we were really part of the community.
>> I see. You were so young,
did you have any classes at that time?
Were you too young to have any education?
>> I really didn't go to
school because I was just six when we left.
But I do remember some of
the Chinese little classes and I would sit in on them,
but I got no education so far as
a kindergarten until we got back to the states.
>> Can you talk about, I know it's a big topic,
but why the Japanese were in China,
why the tension, why they were spreading into China.
>> I wish I could,
but I don't have that background to
say what was going on there at the time.
It was, of course, the very beginnings of the war
and we came into the war after Pearl Harbor.
And then everything changed.
>> Right. So let's transition and tell
me about the impact of
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
How did this change things for the community,
but most importantly for your family?
>> Well, let me tell you where we
were when that happened.
Because we lived on a houseboat,
there was periodic times when it was put
into dry dock for repair.
And this was happening in
that time that week of December 7, 1941.
And because we couldn't live on the boat,
my father stayed with our houseboat in dry dock,
there in that area where they took it.
But my mother and the two of us children were across
the river into a compound where we stayed with friends.
And we were there for about a week
while our houseboat was being serviced.
And my parents knew
that it was a very crucial time in the war
because they got news via the radio
and messaging that came in from
Hong Kong and through their a mission and everything.
But nobody expected what happened on 7th so December.
So my father was away from the family,
but we were with friends on this compound.
Now, for those who might not know what a compound is,
it is an area of land that is
walled off and there's usually a home,
garden, maybe a couple of homes.
But these high walls with
the gate are there for protection.
And a lot of the groups,
whether they be business groups
or mission groups or whatever,
lived in compounds for that reason.
Our friends were in a house on the compound.
And we had learned,
I think that Pearl Harbor had happened.
We had no idea really how that was going to affect us.
But the fact that we were separated from
my father had some significance.
Can I take a drink of water?
>> [inaudible]
>> At that time, there wasn't
even communication by telephone that we had.
Communication was via boats
that would go back and forth with messages.
But I remember the incident very
well because I was old enough to remember that.
But on 8th December,
we had come down for breakfast,
my mother and my brother and I and we
had finished breakfast and went
upstairs into our bedroom to get ready for the day.
All of a sudden we hear this enormous commotion,
looked out the window and the compound
was filling up with Japanese soldiers,
like an army of them in this small compound area.
And they were bringing people out
from wherever they were staying,
from behind the house,
in the kitchen area or over in the shed area,
and they were just lining them up against the wall.
Well, as we were seeing all of this,
we heard these heavy boots coming up the stairs.
They didn't knock on the door.
They broke the door down and at gunpoint,
they pointed those guns at my mother and my brother and
me and ordered us down the stairs and outside.
And my mother said, well, can we take something?
And they said, no, not now,
just come on down.
And so we became one of the groupings that were lined up
against the wall and we were there for hours.
My mother said hours went by.
And then we heard a truck that pulled up to the gate
of this compound and a few more soldiers
came out and they were the evidently the officers
or people who had authority to
give the next command as to
what to do with all these foreigners.
And so we were told that we had to board this truck,
get on the back of the truck.
And we were all my mother and
the other adults were saying, well,
can we not get a few things to take
with us for the children, some clothes?
No, we weren't allowed to go back in the house,
not pick up anything,
no food, no clothing, no nothing.
We were just pushed into the back of this truck.
A number of us, I suppose,
20 or more,
children, adults, teenagers, whoever was there.
And this was after hours of standing
without being able to use
the bathroom or anything in the house.
There was one interesting thing my mother said,
the Japanese always love children.
And she said, after a while,
and I was very frightened,
I was old enough to know what was going on.
And she kept reassuring me, Lori,
don't be afraid Jesus is with us and we will be okay.
And that was enough for me.
But my brother being younger,
he and a couple of other children started playing around
the trees hide and seek
and it softened the Japanese who were there.
They got interested in the children.
So whether that made
any difference as to how we were treated, I don't know.
But we certainly were forced onto
the back of that truck and then
we were driven for hours out into the middle of nowhere.
And out in the middle of nowhere,
there was a very large building.
My mother does not know what it was,
was it a warehouse,
what is a stock,
auction place, they didn't know.
But we were there for a long time.
Now, I told you they came in at about breakfast time.
We're talking 7:30 or eight in the morning.
And we were herded onto
this truck probably around lunchtime.
And so we were out in this building out in
the middle of nowhere for any number of
hours until the early evening and
the command came back that we could go back to our homes.
So we never did,
I don't believe, go back to that compound.
But I don't recall my mother telling us whether we did,
but somehow, my father and us were brought back together.
But my father tells his side of the story
that he could not get over to where we were.
He was actually confined to where he was.
There was no communication at all.
He had no idea what was happening to us and he was
frantic until we were
actually able to come together again.
So then it was, what are we going to do?
What were the Japanese going to do with us?
They gave us the choice of actually leaving
then and going back to Hong Kong or going back to Macau.
And our parents, my parents,
and some of the other missionaries felt that no they
were going to stay there until
the Japanese forced us out.
And it was the right decision
because weeks later they learned about some of
the things that happened to some people that
went back to Hong Kong and particularly Macau.
The women there were treated terribly.
The Japanese tortured them, raped them.
I mean, it was awful.
Things in Hong Kong were not much better.
Hong Kong had also been bombed.
And so the people that were leaving where
we were in Canton thinking
they were going back to a place
of refuge or a place of peace,
found it anything but.
So we were there on our boat for another four months.
We were not allowed to leave,
nor was I taken on horseback again.
And everything changed because those who had been
our friends were now our enemies.
Where I stayed in our little houseboat,
I had a window in my bedroom that looked out over
this barge area and onto the shores of Shamin,
this man made Island.
And I saw some terrible things as
a youngster as to how they treated
the people that I had become my family.
It was heartbreaking.
And mothers said for many years
afterwards, I had nightmares.
They would try to keep
the children away from the windows.
But if you live among
a community as we did of boat people,
you couldn't help but see what was going on,
but the Japanese were extremely cruel.
I mean extremely cruel.
And I won't go into what I saw,
but it was enough to affect me for many years.
So we were confined to that boat,
we were not allowed to leave.
And so the question comes,
always, well, how did you live?
Did money come through?
What did you eat?
Well, when we first were confined
to that after this situation
over on that other compound area,
the missionaries that decided to
stay pooled all of their resources,
so far as funds,
so far as food, clothing, everything.
And then we had these little boats,
I said earlier that would come by with their wares.
So we were able to buy with the resources we had
some of the vegetables and the meat
from these little moving shops.
And then I think there was a time when money
was actually able to get through and
the Japanese did allow us
to have some resource to buy food.
But for the most part,
we were totally cut off from the rest
of Canton and literally from the rest of the world.
>> So there was no contact with
family or friends back in the states?
>> No. Not at that time.
The mission did know what was
happening and that was through contacts in Hong Kong.
But to get direct word to us was
quite a while before we got any notification.
I think my parents did hear about some of
the foreigners that were being
repatriated coming through Canton,
and we would hear through them what was
happening in the rest of the world.
>> What were your parents expectations during
that period of confinement on the boat?
Were they expecting and wanting
to do or where were they wanting to go?
>> I think because they had made that initial decision to
stay that they were prepared to stay.
And if the Japanese were going to stay
also to somehow work with
them so that they
could be with the people that
they had come to love and work among.
But now that Pearl Harbor had happened
and America was very much involved in the war,
America wanted all of the foreigners to come home.
And so that came through to
us and after four months of being confined,
we were literally told we had to
leave and get back to the states.
So that was a very difficult journey.
Canton is about 700 miles by river from Shanghai,
and we were put on a boat like
a launch and made this journey
those many miles over several days and
nights up the river to get us to Shanghai.
Well, there was no protection for these boats,
and the Japanese were still bombing,
the Japanese were still coming and going.
Here was this group of international people.
We weren't the only ones that were being
repatriated up to Shanghai on this boat.
And we would hear the planes go overhead,
there would be other boats that were passing us.
There was a lot of piracy on these river journeys,
and we had no idea that there was any protection over us.
Apart from what we believe that God gave us that we were
under his care and the Japanese were not our protectors.
So we got to Shanghai my mother was eight months
pregnant and was very ill on that trip.
And as soon as we got to Shanghai,
they put her into the infirmary
and my sister refused to budge.
She was not born for another whole month after that,
but at least my mother got the care that
she needed and we
stayed in Shanghai and this was now 42.
We're talking about May of 1942 we got there in April,
Carol my sister was born in May,
and then we left the end of June
and I had just turned six by then.
A ship had come into
the harbor there it was an Italian ship,
and it was called the Contiverd
and it was an Italian ship that had been
seconded from Italy to help with
the repatriating of internationals.
But they couldn't go all the way we all got on
the ship and we got to Singapore from there.
I think leaving on 29th of June,
we got to Singapore a
week or so later and we're talking about mid summer.
And the ship had
to dock outside of Singapore for 30 days.
There was no air conditioning,
no breeze, no nothing,
just tropical equator heat
and three of the children now got very ill.
In fact, almost everybody got ill because of the heat.
And children got something called patago in those days
where their skin would
break out in a little crusty sores and all.
We all had boils.
It was a very difficult time.
Well, we finally set sail from there after
30 days of being anchored in I
guess it would have been the China Sea outside of
Singapore and got over to Mozambique,
Loranco Marcus was a port
in the northern part of Mozambique.
And as we came in,
another ship was coming from
America and as we as the Conti Verde,
the Italian ship came into Harbor, the grips home,
which was a Swedish ship
that was a hospital ship had been
turned into a repatriation ship
was coming in from the other direction.
And so that ship was full of
Japanese prisoners being sent home to the Orient.
So you have at one end of
this very large Swedish ship was
a gang plank of
800 Japanese disembarking from the ship and on this end,
you had 1,500 US citizens
or other maybe European citizens
and I still remember that,
I still remember the gang planks with the oriental folks
leaving the ship and
the other end of the ship, the rest of us.
And my mother recalls that as we all got on ship,
the decks were loaded with food,
some of the people that left
Shanghai were actually skin and bones.
They had come from the interior and the northern part of
China and they had been so
emaciated and had suffered so much that they
literally just had the breath
within them to get on the ships.
But when you see all this food that you haven't seen,
a lot of them gorged themselves,
and then the whole boat was sick.
Everybody was sick because
of all the food that was given to us.
It was free, it was there,
and everybody just indulged.
And so for days after we set sail,
there was nothing but sickness on the boat because
people had just over indulged in the food.
But as a six year old,
that journey was very
interesting because we had a game that we played.
Now, this ship left
Loranco Marcus and came down across the coast of Africa
and then across the South Atlantic and to the coast of
South America and then began
the trek up South American Coast.
Well, during that time,
you have a lot of ocean and
we were on the ocean for a month.
Well, we had a game and we were told spot the mine.
Because the Japanese had littered the oceans or
at least the ocean where traffic was with
water mines and should a ship hit that mine,
it would do a good bit of damage.
So every morning you had the children and we
would get a candy bar if we saw a water mine.
So that was the game that we played every
day as we were going to look for water mines.
Ana at the end of the day,
how many had the most candy bars.
They had entertainment, they had movies it
was a good life for a child of six.
Lots of fun met lots of friends.
And we get over to the southern coast of
South America and the ship
continues up Northernly towards,
of course, North America.
But we were able to stop in
Rio de Janeiro for three days,
and that was the first time we had been on land.
I remember going up
Sugar Loaf Mountain to where the statue
of the Christ is up on top and having a wonderful time.
It was a great break for everybody on the ship.
So that part of it was very pleasant, I must say.
And then it was another two or three weeks before we
actually made our way up into New York Harbor.
What is interesting about
that and I will never forget it.
I think that we actually got there late at night,
and so the ship actually anchored out in the harbor.
But it was first thing in the morning when the sun was
rising that everybody was
up on deck and as we came around,
there was a statue of liberty.
And people who had
been through what they had been through,
not knowing whether they were going to live or die,
to all of a sudden see that
statue was like life began again.
And I shall never forget.
People often ask me,
when you look back over your life,
Lori, and the significant things
in your life, that is one.
Even as a six-year-old,
because you had decks just lin.
Ed with people. They were hooping
and they were hollering and they were crying.
Because here was home, here was security.
Here was the statue of liberty,
which meant liberty.
It was amazing.
Amazing journey.
Amazing conclusion to that part of the journey.
So as a youngster,
I joined the rest of them as we
disembarked there on the island.
And of course, my father's family
was there to greet us, to meet us.
And interesting that about a year or two ago,
my granddaughter was looking up on
ancestry.com with my name on
it and up flash the boarding pass that had my full name,
my age, where I had traveled from and
the ports that I had stopped in as a six-year-old.
It was that detailed.
So it's true.
Everything that I'm saying is all on record.
But that was an amazing journey.
>> Well, I want to talk about the war years,
when you were back in the states.
Where did you live during that time?
>> We were living in Wisconsin.
The mission that my parents
had been with knew of a church
in Wisconsin just out of
Lake Geneva area called Genoa City,
and it was a small church.
And they needed a pastor.
Now, the whole idea was to wait
out the war years and then return.
My parents didn't feel their work was finished at all.
And so for those four years,
before my father returned,
we lived there in
Genoa City and he pastored a small church.
He returned in 1946,
the door, it was open again.
The war finished in '45 and he was
able to get back to Hong Kong in 1946.
But it has a little bit of
a sad part to it because he was so keen on getting back,
he thought nothing of leading my mother, and by then,
four children, to fend for ourselves while he was gone.
And so we moved from the little house that
we lived in in the church that they provided,
in those days, what was called a parsonage or in England,
we would have said a vicar's home.
We had to leave there and had this little tiny house out
in the farm area.
But we had really good friends,
but my youngest sister was born when we were there.
And so she was barely a year old when my father left.
So my mother was there with the
four of us children for a whole year on her own,
and she had to make
all the preparations of
getting on a ship herself with the rest of us.
So from Wisconsin, she went back to
friends in San Francisco.
And we boarded a ship,
and it was an troop ship that had been turned into
a passenger ship for taking people back
across to Europe and the orient,
Asia, all the rest of it.
And I remember the ship very well.
Getting back to your question about the warriors,
a lot of that had happened
actually before we even got to America.
That was in full force by then.
And so the few years
that we were in Wisconsin during the war,
we weren't much taken up with it,
other than just waiting for it to finish,
to complete before we had the opportunity to return.
>> Were you affected by rationing,
these things that people in
the home front were dealing with up to that point?
>> No. My husband
is British and they went through a lot of that,
but we never did.
We never had that problem.
>> And did you attend school?
Were you educated in the home?
>> I did. My first school was
in New Jersey because when we arrived,
my father's parents met us from New Jersey.
That's where they had settled
when they had come over from Holland.
And so we lived in Hawthorne, New Jersey,
for a year before this opening came for
my father in this little church
in Wisconsin. So I did go.
Something very traumatic happened to me.
I arrived that morning for my first day of kindergarten,
but the language that I spoke was Cantonese.
That was my language.
And it wasn't long before I was in
tears because the children were laughing at me,
because I was speaking a different language.
And I guess you could say
children can be cruel to other children.
Totally innocently, but I took real offense.
And when I arrived back home that night, my mother says,
I walked through that screen door
and I stamped my little feet and I said,
I would never speak Cantonese again.
And they could not force me, cajole me,
entice me in any way to continue to be bilingual,
which is such a shame.
But I had made up my mind.
My peers and their opinion of me was far
more important than what my parents wanted of me.
So we were there for a year before,
and then of course, I was in school in Wisconsin.
And those were happy years for us.
We really did enjoy our life in Wisconsin.
Always remember that.
>> So let's transition to the post
four years and being back in China.
How did your parents' mission work change at that point?
>> It changed very dramatically
because the mission that they were with
decided that the work that had been done in
Canton was changing very much.
And a lot of
the boat people had come out of Canton into Hong Kong,
and a lot of them couldn't bring
their boats or there was no boats available.
And so the British government at that time,
built a number of
housing blocks called H block buildings.
And they were high rises,
some as high as 40 stories.
And so you have accommodation here,
and then the crossbar,
along would be where the lavatories and bathrooms were.
And these boat people were being resettled.
Well, that's not really what
my parents at that time were wanting to do.
It was just the beginning of that happening.
And so there was an opening or a challenge.
Shall I say that the mission took to work with some of
the boat people in the interior of
China up in Hubei Province.
In up in Hubei Province in Hankao,
there's the big Yangtze River,
which everybody knows about.
We were sent up there
and we're in a housing area in a place called Wuchang,
which was across from the big Han River,
which fed into the Yangtze River.
And there was a large boat population there.
But now, again, you have the same problem
because it's back to language school.
They learned Cantonese.
My father had become quite fluent in it,
but now you're working with a different group of people.
And in those days,
Mandarin was more a northern language while
Cantonese was more of the southern area.
So that year and a half that we were there was
primarily again learning another language.
But I remember some very interesting because
by that time I was 10, 11.
And living in this house,
we were being educated through
a correspondence course called at that time,
the Calvert course coming out of Baltimore, Maryland.
And we would get our supplies and I had
my school routine as did my brother and my sisters.
But the fun part was the afternoon
when we would go out into
the village or not far from where
we live was Chinese girls school.
And I became friends with some of these Chinese students.
And I remember sitting out in very hot summer days
and trying to teach them English and
they were trying to teach me their language.
And so we had quite a rapport.
But I remember a very funny thing
that happened in the wintertime.
We were there for a year and a half,
so we went through the four seasons
where one of the helpers.
A Chinese lady had given birth to
a baby and everybody was very excited about that.
Well, the Chinese in those days had
a wonderful way of keeping their babies warm.
They would literally swaddle them like a bunting,
like blankets that were filled
with warm wool or whatever.
But they would do their heads,
they would do everything.
They were just like little papooses totally bundled up.
This lady had a little cradle and
she would put this baby outside to get some fresh air.
But it was all bundled up and in this little cradle,
so it was good and warm.
Well, we were playing out there at the time when
this little baby was there and unbeknownst to us,
my brother kicked this little cradle
over and the baby came
rolling out and down the little road,
went over there in panic.
It was still sound asleep.
[LAUGHTER] It was so bundled.
It had not felt the impact to even wake up.
And I remember how the mother was
so panicked and then just laughed and
laughed and laughed when she picked
this little bundle up and he was still sound asleep.
One of the other things that I remember
very starkly was the way in those days,
the women were treated.
In those days, we saw women
whose feet had been terribly
bound when they were little girls.
That was beginning to change,
but these women with
little tiny feet that were bound as infants.
Their toes were were crushed back into
the bottom of the foot and then they were
bound because at that time,
that was a sign of beauty with small feet.
So these women we would see
paddling along and they would carry great loads
on their shoulder with a doming pole and
then their baskets of fruit
or whatever on these tiny little feet.
And we all just felt so
sorry for them because of
the pain that it must have been.
But the women were not treated as they are today.
I don't think the way they were in those days.
And little girls were not so special as little boys.
And I remember one night my father coming
in and nightfall had occurred and we
were just having supper and he
said that there had been an accident in
the village and he
was going to go into the village to see if he could help.
What had happened was that a truck had struck
a little girl on the road and actually had killed her.
And so I accompanied my father to go
into the village and saw the body of
the little girl and saw the grieving mother
with her back up against the wall just beside herself.
But the scene wasn't complete until
I saw the father who was
berating the mother for being so upset because after all,
it was just a girl.
So that was the environment in
those days in that part of China.
And it's lasting.
You don't forget those things.
You just don't.
But then we had the hordes from the North starting to
come down and it was the communist this time, not Japan.
And so we were forced to leave again the work that had
hardly begun and get back down into Hong Kong area.
And by that time,
a lot of that H block resettlement building
was taking place.
And so my father really got into that in a big way.
And instead of working
among the boat people on the water,
he worked among the boat people that
were now housed in these buildings.
And the buildings were left flat on the roofs.
So a lot of different groups bought up
the flat roof areas and made them into schools,
primarily for the children that lived in that complex.
And so that was very successful.
My mother and father both did that
and a number of schools were built.
But my father before he died,
actually established eight schools,
not all of them on the rooftops,
but he got into
the education side of mission work, if you would,
and not the evangelism side of
it and became well known in Kowloon and in Hong Kong.
And the government was more than
happy to have missionaries and other charity groups
build schools for these people that were
being land lobbed and off the water.
So that was the work that they did then.
But then it was time for my schooling and it was in
the summer of 1950
that a determination was made to send me back home.
But it wasn't back to the states.
I had two cousins who were
living in Canada in a boarding school.
Their parents were missionaries
in Bolivia, South America,
and they had been sent to that school because it
was a mission boarding school,
very strict,
and we had heard or my parents
had heard good things about it.
>> Where was it?
>> This was in Canada outside of Calgary,
about 80 miles South of Calgary.
At a very early age,
having just turned 14,
I was put on yet another ship.
This time, it was a Norwegian freighter ship,
and I was given into the care of a couple
that my parents had just
met and asked to keep an eye on me.
And so for three weeks,
I was virtually on my own again on this Norwegian ship.
But the captain of the ship and I became good friends.
And many an evening,
he took me up to where he had to stay up on the bridge.
And he spoke English enough that I
could communicate with him and
just enthralled me with his stories
of being a sea captain and the people
he had encountered and
the journeys he had made and all the rest of it.
But for three weeks,
I ate nothing but Swedish Norwegian smorgasbord.
Until this day, I still love pickle tearing.
[LAUGHTER] Still love it.
But it was an interesting journey.
But then we had friends in San Francisco that met
the ship and I was with them for a little while,
and then I was put on
a train and I was totally alone again,
and for three days and two nights,
I was on a train going up into Alberta.
>> How did you feel about making
that transition and leaving your family?
>> At the beginning, it was
exciting because I was on an adventure.
I really was on an adventure.
Let me back up and say why it was so
difficult for me to get schooling.
Because where my parents were living,
it was an hour's journey by ferry.
They were on one of the smaller islands outside of
Hong Kong into where they were schools in Hong Kong.
And it was very difficult transportation
wise to get me over there and get me back.
I did it for about a year and I would leave home at
seven in the morning and not get home and seven at night,
and then I was up half the night doing homework and
then back on the ferry boat.
It just was untenable.
They just couldn't see a way around it.
And meanwhile, they had heard of the good report from
my uncle who had sent his children up to this school.
So they thought long and hard,
certainly prayed about it
and felt that was where I should be.
I arrived there and I was taken under
the care of the school there.
Very strict.
Boys could not talk to girls.
We were in separate dining areas,
separate hallways getting to our classrooms.
If you looked at a boy or were
in any way showing interest,
you had what they call a detention,
and I had a lot of detentions.
[LAUGHTER] It was very
difficult just to come from a background,
well, any child would into a regimented school like that.
Very strict on how we dressed,
couldn't have your hair cut without special permission.
So it was a lot of rules.
>> Could you say the first year was fairly tough?
>> It was fairly tough,
but the journey leaving
Hong Kong and getting there was a real adventure.
But it wasn't really until the first year when things
were tough at school that I
really began to be very
homesick and missed my life and my family.
That was the first of four years where I had
no communication with my parents or my siblings at all.
Those were not the days of the telephone calls or
email or even cassette tapes.
It was just a letter once a week that
I would get in which I had to write also.
So I was there for four years and did very well.
My parents came back a month before I
graduated and I had earned
a scholarship to a university there in Washington.
So I made that transition while they were still back for
that year and a year and a half, whatever.
>> I wanted to ask you,
did you always consider yourself
throughout all of this period of
travel, an American?
Was that unquestionable or
did you not really have a sense of nationality?
>> I never considered myself other than American,
but I did not feel that I was
anything special because I was American.
I didn't ever have that feeling.
My early childhood was very happy
on that houseboat and with
the other children that lived on.
So internationally, I would say I was just an American.
In those days, it wasn't
a big no-no to be an
American [LAUGHTER] as it might be today in some places,
but no, I didn't ever have that feeling.
>> Well, tell me about you were
at Seattle Pacific College.
>> College at that time.
>> That's where you met your first husband?
>> That's right.
>> Tell me about him and his background.
>> His background was that he was
at Naval Academy, midshipman.
And in those days and I expect it's the same.
They're very strict on the academics.
All of his life, he wanted to be
a midshipman and his second year,
he failed calculus and he
was out because there was no second chance.
He was out.
But because of his background being there,
the CIA picked up on him.
And he was sent over to Okinawa in Japan
area and served there for three years.
It was while he was there that he met a group of
Christian men from what is called the navigators.
There are a group of generally military people
mostly naval who did mission work among military people.
And my husband, Fred,
met them and had a sound Christian conversion.
At that time, he knew that God had a call on
his life that wasn't going to include the CIA.
So he made a point on his way
back to the states from the CIA,
compliments of the government
to stop in as many places as he
could to see what mission work
was like in different parts of the world.
So when I met him at the college in Seattle,
he had already gotten
a good background as to what he wanted to do.
And he wanted to replace one of
the women in the mission field because there were
so many women compared to how many men were
missionaries that he felt he
wanted to replace one of those women.
So because of my background and
his more recent interest in mission,
that's what brought us together.
>> And you married.
Why were you drawn to him?
Why did you marry him?
>> Well, I wasn't certainly interested in marriage.
I wanted to finish my college education
but my parents were in
the states just for a fairly short time.
They must have come back.
I can't remember the sequence of their visit,
but they were back in the states at that time.
And this was a year and a half after I met
Fred and we knew we were going to get married.
And what attracted to me,
to answer your question,
partly, was not only our background,
but he was handsome.
He was good looking.
He was seven years older than me,
and he had a brand new Chevrolet.
All I could see was security, security, security.
Because of the background,
I just told you about,
my life had been anything but secure.
I think that was the attraction,
besides we had fallen in love.
We decided since my parents were home that it
would be a great honor to have them at my wedding.
We were married in December,
I had turned 19 in June.
I was 19. Very young.
>> And you had two children?
>> We had two children.
>> So did you work at that time?
Did you work in the home? What did you do?
>> Well, I continued
my education until I finished my second year,
and then we moved to New York because we were interested
in mission work with Presbyterian Church.
They required more education for
my husband so we came out
to New York to a seminary there that fitted the bill.
That was just what he needed to do.
And our son Scott had been born by then.
And we were there
for about a year while he got his degree.
But while we were there, it was interesting,
we had met another mission group,
but a home mission group.
And they were foreign students,
a group that worked with
foreign students that came from abroad,
and the mission was to meet these students,
become friends with them,
bring them into your home.
And as things would progress
in your friendship and your relationship,
bring them into a church situation
and actually lead them to Christ.
It was a mission based on a home situation.
We met these people and
we were practically living from hand to mouth.
We really were at that time in New York.
We were very poor.
We had very little. I think the fees at
the seminary had been picked up by somebody or other,
and I was not working.
Yes, I was after a bit.
I was doing home typing
for one of the big insurance companies.
I was doing a lot of the typing and
filling in forms and all that,
and I was working from home while I had the baby.
But we lived in a community where
English was the least spoken language,
out on Long Island, it was a very multiracial community.
But we had the opportunity once of inviting
three immigration officials from
Afghanistan from Kabul into our home.
They had come over to New York
for some official business,
and this mission group called
International Students Incorporated, ISI,
had met them and asked us if
we would like to have them for a weekend.
Well, the weekend turned into three weeks and we
learned a great deal
about not only them and their family,
their work and came to love these people.
We really did. Well, that whetted our appetite as to
the possibility of doing
mission work in America rather than going abroad again.
So that set very well with my husband,
but my concern as a mother was how are we going to live?
Who supports this?
What do we do?
We had three people for three weeks
and we barely had enough to live on ourselves.
But different church groups found
out about it and would help us,
it always worked out well.
Finally, the decision was made that we would give ISI
international students a year
of our time before we went abroad.
Well, that year turned into about 11 years,
and we were doing that.
That took us to some of
the major universities across the states.
My daughter was born in Philadelphia
when we were working with the university there.
Met, many people, dear friends
from every nation that came
to America on those days for schooling.
In fact, when my husband died,
the outpouring of love through
cards and gifts came literally from around the world.
So my life started out internationally,
and I would say continued internationally.
>> Well, I do want to touch on your second marriage.
Can you tell me about your second husband?
>> Very unexpectedly,
after my husband died and he died of cancer.
He died in February of 1978.
When he was feeling a bit better,
we had a decision to take a trip back to Hong Kong.
I had not been back since I
left for those high school years.
It was a long time. And he was keen to go with me.
Of course, he knew my parents.
They were at our wedding to begin with, and all.
But we wanted to go back together,
but he died very suddenly,
so I decided to take the journey myself.
We had arranged to be there for six weeks and we
went back to one of these schools that
my father had built and they had an apartment
up on one of the rooftops in their high school,
which was one that my father had built.
And I stayed there for six weeks with my parents
and at the end of the six weeks or very close to the end.
I was invited to attend
a lunch party with my parents after
church on a Sunday and that was fine with me.
It was just another something to do and people to meet.
Well, on the way over to this lunch party,
which was in Hong Kong for
people who don't know Hong Kong or the area.
Hong Kong is an island that's separate from the mainland.
The mainland is Kowloon and
the new territories that we would call the new territory.
We had to go from the new territories by
ferry over to Hong Kong for this lunch.
We were with a few people
and one of the girls that was there
who was working in one of
the schools turned to me and she said,
Lori, I think you're going to meet
your next husband today.
And I looked at her and I said,
Stephanie, for goodness sake,
don't even think about it,
I've just been widowed three months, something like that.
We get to this lovely home,
Hong Kong Island itself
is inundated with high rises
because you have to build up,
you can't build out,
there are a few single dwellings
there owned by the very wealthy.
Well, my now husband's friend from
Glasgow University where he met him was
one of the more high ranking officials
in the Hong Kong Shanghai back.
In fact, he was the top lawyer for them.
He had one of these single homes way up on
the peak that overlooked the harbor and was magnificent.
The perfect place to meet your next husband,
although I didn't know that.
We were there and the first person
that greeted us when we
got there was Colonel Derek Lee,
and he was a friend of our host and brought us in and
welcomed us and found out a little about me.
And for the pre-lunch and the lunchtime,
we talked a little bit
among the other friends that were there.
And there were three men
from America who were at that lunch,
who I got to know.
They had been there for
a Christian businessman's conference in Hong Kong
that had been set up by
our host from the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank.
So one of them took a real liking to me and his name was,
I don't know if I should say this.
I don't know that he lives anywhere near here,
but it was a distinctive name that I never forgot.
Anyway, this gentleman gave me his card,
took a great interest in me.
And Colonel Lee obviously saw this,
so he made sure then when it came to
lunchtime that he was seated
with me at one of the many card tables that
had been set up around the swimming pool.
So the idea of our hostess was that you would sit
around a card table, man, woman, man,
woman, and that each course of the five course lunch,
the gentleman would get up and move to the next table.
Except this colonel never moved.
He just stayed there and engaged me and
engaged me and engaged me in conversation,
told about his amazing stories
behind the iron curtain and how he was lost,
and totally enchanted the group
of women that were sitting there.
At the end of the day,
he asked if he could see me again,
and I said, well, I don't think so.
He said, well, I really would like
to take you to dinner.
We were still seated at the table,
and I was feeling very coquettish
and excited and it was just a wonderful day.
So when he asked me out for dinner,
I looked at him and I said, well,
I think I have a day when that might
happen as long as you don't take
me to some hole in the wall for dinner.
Well, he reared back in his seat and his hands came up.
Madam, British colonels do not
take their ladies to holes in the walls for dinner.
Well, that just captured my heart.
So about two nights later,
we had dinner at a very nice restaurant.
And then unknown to him and to me,
we had both been invited to
a yachting party by our host of that day,
which was a yacht that
belonged to the Hong Kong Shanghai bank.
So we were both surprised to
find each other on this yacht.
Well, I've told you the many times that I have crossed
the ocean and each time I was sick,
I am not a good traveler on the water.
Well, sure enough, I got sick on this yacht.
And the sea wasn't all that
Turbulent. It wasn't,
but the smell of the diesel, whatever.
I just don't do well.
So they decided that they would anchor for lunch,
not far off from one of the small islands.
Hong Kong area is full of islands, not far off,
and so they decided they
would put me on shore for a while.
But I shouldn't go alone,
so they asked Colonel Lee to accompany me over to
the shore and stay with me till I could
catch my land legs again.
So we were on the beach for three hours.
But the interesting thing was during
that three hours, it was lunchtime.
And so what our host did was they sent
over a little boat with two Chinese sailors,
one was rowing and one was seated on a little seat with
a silver tray with
a silver teapot and tea for two on the beach.
Well, it was the most romantic occasion.
It should be in the movies. It was.
>> They were trying to set you up.
>> Yes. They were trying to set me up. So anyway,
that was how we met and then for the next three months,
we kept in touch by cassette tape.
And then he came over to California where I was living,
met my family and my friends.
And because he's British,
they all thought because of his accent,
he was part of the royal family.
He totally swept them off their feet.
And he was there with us for three weeks.
He didn't stay with me.
He stayed with some friends of ours,
but we did take some trips out of
the California Oakland Bay area
to meet with other friends so I
could introduce him around.
And my son who had just gone into
the Air Force thought he was the hottest thing around.
My daughter was not quite so sure.
She had just lost her dad.
So but we had three weeks together.
At the end of which I was happy to see him go.
We were so very different.
I'm a black and white person and he dwells in the grays,
can't make his mind up about this,
that and the other and I've already been
streets ahead of him in those areas.
So it was difficult.
But while he was away,
a number of things happen as
we corresponded back and forth.
And we really were in love.
It was good to see him go but hard
to see him go and over the next few months,
I felt that God was leading us together.
So I went back to Hong Kong in February,
I think it was of
'79 and stayed with my parents for a number of months.
And because my son was in the Air Force,
I had my daughter and she came and she lived
with us and worked over on
Hong Kong side and we got married in
the officers mess in September of 1979.
And our first posting was Northern Ireland.
The first week were there.
We lived behind barbed wire fencing.
The first we were there.
This was at pretty well the height of
the troubles they were having in '79.
The High Street, what they call,
we call it a Main Street.
They call it the High Street was bombed and
we were confined to our barrack areas.
It was interesting that experience because I'm
a California girl used to sunshine and shores of beaches.
And here I am in Northern Ireland.
It rains every day.
You live behind barbed wire fence.
You can't come or go
in and out of a store without being searched,
having your handbag searched.
But I was the only American there,
so I stood out.
But I was known as Colonel Lee's American wife.
I didn't have an identity
other than Colonel Lee's American wife.
So being an officer's wife,
I had a few duties that I had to attend to.
And one of them was to speak at
the wives club occasionally.
So they came over to me one evening and said,
would you mind speaking to our wives club,
such and such a date?
I said, well, what would I speak about?
And they said, well,
what do you do?
And the saw some what we call macrame,
they call it macrame and it something my mother had done,
some of this rope work that you put plants in and all.
Could you tell us about that?
I said, well, I didn't do that. My mother did.
And then I thought for a minute and I said,
I would like to talk about color and
how important color is for people.
I had worked for a year and a half with
a color consultant when we were
in California who his whole thing was taking colors,
and I think the rage
here at that time was color me beautiful.
And it was the in thing.
You went and had your colors done as to
what spoke best on you on one occasion.
And so I said, I know a little something about that.
She said, that would be wonderful.
So I went to this group and there was probably 80 wives,
both officer and enlisted men,
and I had my color swatches and all the rest of it.
And then they asked me a little bit about myself.
So I told them how I had met Derek
and all the rest of it.
But they wanted to know what color
suited at the best of times.
And so I got onto the romance side of it.
And my parting words were, ladies,
if you want to be good in bed, wear red?
Well, the house fell apart.
You don't have an officer's wife talking like that,
but here I am this American wife
who could get away with it.
Well, for weeks afterwards,
I had some of the husbands stop me
and you're Laurie Lee. I said, yeah.
Thank you so much for
that talk you gave to the women that last week.
So I left having an identity?
I guess that's what I'm saying,
I left having an identity.
But that was the beginning of many years
with the British Army.
Several times in Germany,
like I said in Northern Ireland,
a posting in England.
My husband is a dentist
and he was a dentist with the military.
So he went to different places like
Borneo and Katmandu in
Nepal that I couldn't accompany him.
But it has been a rich life, it has.
>> And can we just finish here,
when did you move to Georgia?
>> We moved to Georgia 12 years ago.
>> And where do you live now?
>> We live in Marietta, East Cobb.
The reason we're here is because my daughter lives here.
My first husband died in 1979,
and four years later,
my son was killed in
a mountain climbing accident with
the military in Switzerland.
So I only had my daughter and wherever she lived is,
of course, where I would end up being too.
So she had left California
when Derek and I were married
and she returned from Hong Kong,
met her husband in Florida and they settled in Woodstock.
So Derek had by that time retired and we were in England
for almost 16 years, not that long.
All over 16 years after he left the military.
We moved back here,
and I had begun to get some health problems.
And it was the time to move back to be with my family.
And my husband had no immediate family at
all that would keep him back in Britain.
But we had a lovely life in Britain,
challenging and lovely life in the military.
I ended up doing things that I never thought I would do.
But I learned a lot. I've had a very rich life.
>> Well, thank you so much,
Ms. Lee, and we will conclude there.
>> Thank you.