Casualties of Mom’s War Include Willows, Lotus Pond, Childhood : China: Reporter accompanied her mother to Chongqing this summer on first visit in a half-century to her World War II home.

Of all the changes that have occurred in this former war capital of China, my mother most mourns the lotus pond and willow trees of her primary school.

Today, the schoolyard is barren and colorless: a field of yellow earth ringed by a few scrubby trees, a swing set at one end and a basketball hoop at the other.

Mom was 10 years old when World War II ended in 1945. She had spent almost six years in Chongqing, a large city on the Yangtze River in southwest China’s Sichuan province.

Displaced by war, she lived in many cities before the family fled the Communist takeover in 1949. But Chongqing was her home for the longest.

My sister and I grew up listening to Mom’s stories of her childhood during what the Chinese call the Anti-Japanese War.

While my friends were hearing stories about their parents growing up on family farms or having teen-age crushes on Elvis, my mother was telling us about days spent hiding in air-raid shelters or fleeing on roads packed with war refugees.

She was 3 when the family fled to Chongqing from the eastern coastal city of Nanjing, where my grandfather was a university lecturer.

The ruling Nationalist government, badly beaten by invading Japanese, had retreated from its capital in Nanjing to this inland city. Many universities also moved.

Chongqing is surrounded by mountains on all sides, and the main river access is through the Yangtze River’s treacherous Three Gorges.

The mountains and rivers were natural defenses against invading Japanese troops. But the city was vulnerable from the air. My mother’s earliest memory is of a Japanese bombing one day when her parents were away.

“I was so frightened I crawled under my father’s desk,” she remembers.

There were wartime privations. The first day of school, there were no desks. Students brought chairs from home to use as desks.

Despite the war, my mother remembers a fairly normal family life. The children attended classes and families celebrated holidays.

One of her fondest memories was after-dinner storytelling. My grandmother, one of the few Chinese women of her time to be educated in things Western, transported her children to Shakespearean England with tales based on the classic plays.

But dinner was often interrupted by air-raid sirens. Everyone would grab a handful of rice to knead into rice balls and eat later in the bomb shelters, damp caves carved out of the mountains.

“It was dark,” she says. “The children would be too afraid to make a sound. We would hear the adults talk about incidents like the one at Lianglukou.” Thousands died there when bombs caused an avalanche that blocked the entrance of a huge air-raid shelter.

“That would just increase our anxiety,” my mother says. “We grew up with no sense of security.”

In 1942, my grandfather moved the family to the neighboring province of Hunan, 410 miles to the southeast, where he became manager of a cigarette factory. With the move, life took a turn for the worse.

There were air raids, and no mountain caves to hide in.

“We’d be woken up in the middle of the night and run out and hide under a bridge, or in the gullies between the fields,” mother remembers. “Or just lie down flat in the middle of the field.”

Hunan was in the path of the Japanese army’s 1944 summer offensive. With rumors of approaching troops, the family decided to flee.

Their first stop was Guilin, now a major tourist draw with its picturesque mountains. The only place to live was in a barn near the Li River. But the children, who had no school to attend, delighted in playing in the river and catching tadpoles.

When Japanese troops neared Guilin, the family was among the lucky ones who got seats on an overcrowded train. The less-fortunate sat on the roofs of the cars or tied wooden planks underneath and lay there.

“You never knew when the train would start or stop--there was never a signal,” my mother recounts. “If you were on top and fell asleep, you’d fall off when the train started. Sometimes if the train was going too fast, the rope holding your plank might break and you’d die.

“At the places the train stopped, there might not be any food. One time, my mother and I went into the fields looking for potatoes or anything to eat. Suddenly the train started up! Fortunately, it wasn’t going too fast and we were able to scramble on.”

There were other close calls. Japanese planes bombed the train engine and caboose, killing hundreds. But the compartment my mother and her family were in was untouched.

When they broke their journey to stay overnight in a guest house, wanting to wash up and get a decent meal, Japanese bombers came again. The family fled outdoors and watched the building go up in flames.

When my grandfather fell ill with typhoid, the family had to stop running. They were out of money and had only a bag of high-quality tobacco from the cigarette factory.

The six of them lived in a single room and cooked in a tin washbasin. My mother contracted malaria, and my grandmother somehow managed to find quinine pills. My grandfather lost so much weight that he scarcely looked human.

The children were sent into the streets to peddle the family’s books and clothes. They were too young to understand just how desperate their situation was.

“We thought it was pretty fun,” my mother recalls.

And still the Japanese advanced. Rumors spread that even the rats were fleeing.

Waiting for my grandfather to recover, the family was among the last to leave. The only place to go was back to Chongqing.

There was no rail or boat transport through the mountains. So my grandmother, a proud woman, got down on her hands and knees and begged for permission for her family to ride atop army transport trucks.

Luckily, she and the local commanding officer, a General Tu, were both from the same close-knit group of northern Chinese who had migrated south. He took pity on her.

The family was allowed to bring only two bedrolls, but the trucks were piled high with goods belonging to the army families, including their commodes.

My still-weak grandfather sat next to the driver, but the rest of the family rode atop the piles, clinging to the ropes.

A sea of refugees filled the roads, some on foot, others riding animals, all fleeing.

The army trucks were fueled by charcoal and stalled frequently. The soldiers wanted to separate the family, putting my mother’s older brother and sister on another truck, but my grandmother refused. That truck later caught fire and exploded.

As the caravan climbed into the mountains, the weather got colder. Snows forced them to stop in the provincial capital where the family stayed in a storage room.

When the trucks set out again, they had chains on their tires. But they were forced to stop again for several weeks to wait for the ice to melt. The only place the family could find to stay was next to a pigsty.

The most grueling part of the trip was “72-Turn Road,” so-named for its hairpin turns down the mountains. At one sharp turn, my mother’s younger sister started to fall out of the truck, but somehow my grandmother caught her and dragged her back in.

When the family made it back to Chongqing in early 1945, my mother recalls, “the first thing we did was boil all our clothes.” Everyone was flea-infested.

The war was in its last months, and shortages were acute. The children had no shoes to wear. Their clothes were so old and bleached by repeated washings that they were white.

Breakfast was thin rice gruel; lunch, a bowl of rice full of sand and pebbles. There was no electricity, and the family used oil lamps. Homework had to be done before the sun went down.

Then, suddenly, it was over.

“It was dusk, after dinner. I don’t remember exactly how we heard, but everyone knew,” mother says. “My sister and I and our cousin danced all night long, we were so happy. The entire city of Chongqing just went crazy.”

My grandmother bought leftover U.S. army supplies, including American jam, and the children had the novelty of eating toast and jam for breakfast.

My grandfather left almost immediately for a job with a Shanghai trading company. But it was six months before the rest of the family was able to secure passage on a steamer down the Yangtze River to Shanghai.

The family later went to Hong Kong, then to Indonesia, where my mother attended high school, and later to Taiwan, where my mother attended college. She and my father settled permanently in the United States in 1969, living most of the time in Rochester, N.Y. She now lives in Lancaster, Pa.

On our recent return visit to China, my mother and I arrived in Chongqing with no addresses, no one to look up. The night we flew in, all my mother could remember was that from the front door of the family home halfway up a mountain slope, she could see the juncture of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers that run along either side of central Chongqing.

But the next morning, looking at a map, she began to recognize place names and was able to pick out the district where she used to live.

Her main goal was to find her primary school, which she remembered as being at the top of the mountain, above her home.

“It is the only place that carries good memories. Everywhere else, we were fleeing the war and the bombings,” she said.

We hired a hotel car for the day and set off. As we got closer, she started to softly chant the place names: “Tu mountain. I remember Tu mountain. Longmenhao. I remember Longmenhao.”

The driver had never come this way before. After much discussion, backtracking and circling, we headed down a steep narrow road so crowded with peasants selling vegetables that the car could barely squeeze past.

The road ended abruptly just above the riverbank and Mom recognized her first sight: the dock from which the family used to board ferries for the city center.

“What happened to all the sand that we used to play in?” she wondered as we got out of the car.

We knew we were in the right place when we start climbing the worn stone steps that lead to the mountaintop. Turning around to look back, we could see the two rivers: the brown muddy Yangtze mixing with the green, clearer Jialing.

In the hot sun and Chongqing’s near-100% humidity, my sister and I soon tired of the steep climb. But my mother, more energetic than she’d been in days, set a brisk pace.

She spotted an old, white-haired woman, and to my amazement spoke to her in the local dialect, asking if there was a school nearby. I never knew she could speak Sichuanese.

The old woman gave us directions, and we continued our climb. Cresting the peak, we entered a schoolyard. My mother took a swift look around and sighed heavily. In a voice laden with disappointment, she said softly, “It’s all changed.”

She waved a hand toward the slope and said, “None of these buildings were here then. The mountains used to be so much prettier.”

A young schoolteacher took us to a colleague’s home where several older teachers and the headmistress were having lunch. They confirmed that the school was the one that my mother attended.

They told Mom that the willow trees were cut down in the 1950s and used as fuel during a misguided nationwide campaign to build backyard furnaces to produce steel.

In the 1970s, the lotus pond was filled in so children wouldn’t drown.

Later, my mother recalled that when the family returned to Chongqing after months fleeing the Japanese advance, it was she, not the school, who had changed.

“I was a completely different person. Before, I had had a very happy childhood.” Her voice broke. “But because of fleeing the war and my illness, I couldn’t play on the swings anymore. Before, I could swing really, really high.”