When we’re kids, we are the story, and life is a string of scenes and episodes. When I was ten, there were the episodes of catching fireflies, drawing pictures, planting a row of radishes with my mom. There was the wondrous episode when the grownup men went to get sweet corn from a farm and bring it home RIGHT NOW to be put into boiling water and eaten RIGHT NOW with butter, salt and pepper. There was the explosive episode of my dad and uncles taking us out of town to shoot off illegal firecrackers they’d bootlegged from Wyoming. I learned anarchy from those happy men in their khaki pants and white undershirts, sleeves rolled up over Old Golds and Lucky Strikes, talking about the war and when they were kids and firecrackers were legal. “Hell, everything was legal, well, except hooch.”

One of these episodes was, it turns out, a turning point in history as well as in my life. It was 1962 when I was 10 and, for two or three wet autumn days, Dad was 15 floors below ground at Strategic Air Command (SAC) Headquarters on Offutt Air Force Base, and we were forbidden to go outside. My little brother and I felt our mother’s dark anxiety everywhere.

After 36 hours of constant underground vigilance, my dad came home, remaining on- call. “Let your dad get the phone.” The waiting went on until, in early-dark late afternoon, the phone finally rang. “It’s over. My God. We were inches away from nuclear war,” said my dad, a war-gamer for SAC. And then we were — inexplicably to me still — going shopping on wet streets in still-spitting rain, heading to a huge discount store in west Omaha.

I knew all about nuclear war. We had ludicrous “duck and cover” bomb drills at school (ludicrous since my school was less than 20 yards away from the base, so we WERE the target). We’d watched the weekly documentaries and the films that simulated nuclear attacks — like that on Hiroshima — but on London, New York, Paris. My brother and I had seen (more than once) the crater at Alamogordo and we knew all about Fat Man and Little Boy; we’d seen the casings of their brothers. I could see hundreds of B-52’s from the top of the hill on my walk to school.

When we got to the store, my mother gave me a dollar to spend any way I wanted. I bought a Bible. It seemed appropriate given the danger we’d been through, and I thought it would make my mother happy.

When I took the Bible out of its gold and maroon box, I noticed its particular aroma of leather, paper and glue. I opened it with proper reverence and, in my careful, neat, lopsided, newly learned curvy cursive, using a fountain pen because it was more formal than a ball point, I wrote my name and the date. I imagined my Bible would someday be filled with names, the name of my husband, my children, my grandchildren. That moment, that day, marked the end of my childhood and the beginning of, “I wonder what’s going to happen?”

It was a big, black Revised Standard Version with no pictures and no red writing. My Bible (of which I was quite proud) and I finished kid’s Sunday school, and together went we “went forward” to publicly accept Christ as my personal savior. We attended the Bible study leading to my very literal immersion into the Baptist Church. It went through my brief fling being born-again at summer camp, and my Bible went to college with me. In 1972 I got married, and I wrote my husband’s name in the Bible, even though I felt, even then, that writing it was a mistake. When we divorced, I crossed out his name, and, for a time, I liked my Bible less for that. In 1982 it went with me to the People’s Republic of China. It was there my Bible met its destiny. I never imagined that Bible would have a story of its own, or one so filled with irony.

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The Chinese government flew us from San Francisco to Guangzhou, and that included a flight from Hong Kong, which is only a few hours train ride away. My then husband, Jim, and I expected a long Hollywood-style interrogation when we landed behind the Iron Curtain, but the only question the People’s Liberation Army customs officer asked me when I got off the plane (an Aeroflot, which I found amazing) was whether I had brought any “religious material.” By that time in my life, I had self-identified to a proselytizing Jehovah’s Witness in Denver as a Zen Baptist and what was and what was not religious material was an open question. I said no. I didn’t know that there was a whole (large and well-funded) mission in Hong Kong that relied on American tourists to smuggle Bibles into China. In any case, I don’t believe in converting anyone, and my Bible was there for me to use in helping my students understand the Western literature I would be teaching.

Soon I was involved in my classes, and my Bible (with its indomitable Bible fragrance tying me to my childhood and home) sat on a shelf in the bright room I used as an office. I liked that it was with me in that very foreign place.

In one of my classes, I met a Chinese woman my own age with whom I became close friends. She came from Hainan, a large island in the South China Sea, straight across the Gulf of Tonkin from Vietnam. Looking at its location on the map mesmerized me.

During WWII the Japanese occupied Hainan and established air bases to supply their invasion of French Indochina and the Philippines as well as to coordinate their attack on Pearl Harbor. After years of fighting, Hainanese Communist guerilla fighters (people from the various mountain tribes as well as coastal Chinese) succeeded — with the help of the American Army — in pushing out the Japanese. During the Cultural Revolution in the ‘60‘s those so unfortunate as to have learned English during the anti-Japanese War, were imprisoned, tortured, killed. Survivors talked of suicide as if it were a disease. One of these was my friend’s elementary school teacher, Mr. Hu. His first wife, Mr. Hu explained, had “…got the suicide” while he had spent most of five years in a tiger pit.

With the fall of the Gang of Four, Mr. Hu married again and was transferred from Hainan to teach English in a high school in a village near my university outside Guangzhou. English was in; Russian was out and any Chinese who could speak English was an important government property. He was a lovely man and his students — past and present — adored him. He and his wife made a beautiful lunch for me and we talked away the afternoon in American English. China (to avoid looking as if it might have changed its mind about the United States) usually hired British teachers as Foreign Experts in English. I was among the first “wave” of American teachers, and I seldom heard an American idiom or nuance of American speech. This man came out with phrases like, “Oh boy,” and “OK,” and, “You bet,” and “Not worth a plug nickel.”

“You speak American English, Mr. Hu. Where did you learn it?”

“In the anti-Japanese war,” he answered, “from American army. I was a clerk.” Most Chinese would have said, “clark” in the British way. At the end of the afternoon, I invited himand his wife to my apartment for Thanksgiving dinner I had, at that moment, decided to prepare. American food, though not turkey. I thought I could get a chicken and make potato salad.

I had invited a few of my own students, too, as well as Mr. Hu who arrived with my friend and her husband. As I put the meal together, Mr. Hu entertained everyone with the story of the, “Pigrims randing on Prymoth Lock on the Mayfrower.” In his voice I heard exactly what he had done in that tiger pit to keep himself sane and not “get the suicide.” A good memory from his past had kept him from losing his mind and had kept him alive. There was more to it, something I didn’t suspect.

Some days later my friend came to my apartment and asked me to take a walk with her. I was still naive. I didn’t realize that many of the walks I took with friends in China were taken so it would be difficult for anyone to listen to our conversation. The irony of Chinese life under communism then was that the more public we were the more privacy we had. We left the campus, walked across the rice fields of the agricultural college behind us and up the small mountain. “Do you have a Bible?” she asked.

“Yes. Why?” I knew she and her husband sincerely regarded religion as superstition.

“Mr. Hu,” she answered.

I would take a bus halfway to Mr. Hu’s village to a stop that connected to many other buses, no big thing for me to do this, completely normal. There was a store near the stop where foreigners often shopped. He would meet me at the stop, and after giving him the Bible, I would return home.

The night came, cold and pouring rain. I wrapped my Bible in newspapers and tied it with pink string. Chinese were always carrying newspaper-wrapped bundles tied with pink string so this would not be unusual. To keep it dry, I slipped it into the plastic envelope that often contained the poncho I would be wearing, also completely normal. If anyone noticed — which was doubtful — it would look simply as if I had given Mr. Hu a poncho.

Twilight turned to night as I waited beside dripping palm trees, holding my red umbrella and my bundle. Finally, a bus stopped, and the disembarking crowd rushed up the street. Someone pushed me. I looked up, relieved it was Mr. Hu. I opened my mouth to speak; he shook his head very slightly. I continued walking, passing him the bundle as if it were a hand- off in a football play.

I held a party for my students on Christmas Eve, and, of course, invited Mr. Hu, but he was “too busy.” On Christmas morning, I found a beautiful card with a silk painting, an anti- American propaganda tract from the height of the Cultural Revolution (in English) and several Mao buttons had been slid beneath my door. Mr. Hu. I never saw him again.

My Bible, bought at the end of the hottest moment of the Cold War, was smuggled to a Chinese man who’d learned English and become a Christian while working with the American Army in WWII. I was sure that the story of hope told in the Bible, and his memories of his young glory as a resistance fighter against the Japanese, had kept him alive while he was harassed and tortured by Maoist mobs during the Cultural Revolution. I, the smuggler, am the daughter of a man who had the US Government’s highest security clearance during those years of ideological warfare and whose politics were clearly established in Ayn Rand’s Anthem.