Li Chun Chu Wu ’50 My Years at Woodstock

Li-chun Chu ’50 came to Woodstock School along with her brother TZ ’52 and sister Li-chiang ’59 in 1949. Li-chun went on to study at the University of California at Berkeley, earning an Associate of Arts degree in biology. She then transferred to Simmons College in Boston where her then-boyfriend Robert Wu was completing his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Li-chun received a Bachelor of Science degree from Simmons College in 1955. After graduation and marriage Li-chun and Robert returned to China, the land of their birth, to help “New China” develop science and technology. They were away for twenty years, and Li-chun lost touch with many of her Woodstock School contacts. Through family members who had maintained many close ties with the school Li-chun was eventually able to reconnect. Now living in California, here Li-chun shares about her path to Woodstock and her time on the hillside.

My parents

My father Vico Chu was born in Hangzhou China into a silk textile family and was educated in Lyon, France. My mother Tseneko was Japanese, born to an aristocratic Viscount family in Tokyo. Her heritage was from two shogun families –Ashikaga and Tokugawa. Her grandfather was the younger brother of the last shogun. Her mother’s side was related to the largest Buddhist sect of Japan. I am learning about my Japanese heritage in my old age.

Leaving Shanghai in December 1948

Like many elite families in China, father decided that we should leave China before the Communist army took over Shanghai. Toward the end of 1948 the Chinese Communist army was pushing toward Nanjing, some 170 miles away from Shanghai. Father contacted Messageries Maritimes, a French merchant shipping company, with which he did a lot of business in exporting silk to France before World War II. Messageries Maritimes were also agents for Air France in Shanghai. They promised to bring a small plane from Saigon to take our family of five, along with the Toan family, from Shanghai to Calcutta, India where father had already obtained an Indian visa. Mr. Toan was the chemist in the silk degumming factory managed by my father. He was an orphan, as his father was a revolutionist martyr killed in the pre-republic Qing Dynasty. Fellow patriots sponsored to send him to be raised and educated in France. He married a French woman, and their three children all went to a French school in Shanghai.

We left Shanghai with only some suitcases on December 29, 1948. The plane stopped in Hong Kong overnight, as airplanes did not fly at night. We then stopped in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), which was then under French colonial rule. When we left Shanghai we were wearing heavy winter clothing and had to shed it as we got to Hong Kong and Saigon.

The hotels in Saigon were under French military requisition, so we Asians were put up in the French army barracks, sleeping on soldiers’ bunk beds for two days and two nights. Meanwhile the Caucasian passengers were allotted rooms in the Palace Hotel. This was the first time I experienced discrimination against Asians. However, we had meals at the hotel and were treated to a sumptuous New Year’s Eve dinner.

The next day on January 1, 1949, Messageries Maritimes, which paid all our travel expenses, treated us to a tour of Saigon city with visits to museums and the zoo. On January 2nd we boarded a plane to Calcutta and then a one-engine plane from Calcutta to Bombay, where my father’s business partner Mr. Karanjia was living.

Woodstock becomes an option

Father soon enrolled both me and my brother Tao-zeun (TZ) in a Catholic day school for girls and boys, respectively. As the weather in India’s plains would become very hot, my father’s friend advised us to attend a missionary-run school called Woodstock School in the Himalayan foothills. In the meantime my father also saw Woodstock School’s advertisement for tuition-paying students.

Reverend Rhea Ewing was the school principal who interviewed us for class placement. He said that since there was no opening in the sophomore class he would place both me and my younger brother Tao-zeun in the same freshman class. My tears immediately flowed! I had almost finished my first semester of junior year at McTyeire Girls’ School in Shanghai, yet Mr. Ewing was going to demote me two grades lower to be in the same class as my brother! I was too hurt. Mr. Ewing then immediately said I could enrol in the junior class.

Mr. Toan’s younger son John followed us and attended Woodstock as a junior also. He was popular in school as the captain of the tennis team who helped Woodstock win matches against other schools, but he did not keep contact with the school after graduation.

In the beginning I had to allow more than half an hour longer than any of my classmates to go up Jacob’s Ladder and get to class on time. I had to stop several times along the way, huffing and puffing to catch my breath, as I had grown up on the plains and was not used to the high altitude. The long hike from the dorm to the classroom was also a strenuous exercise for me. But gradually I became more acclimated and eventually played halfcourt basketball and ran the 100-yard dash and hurdles on Sports Day.

The first winter I was at Woodstock there was a landslide triggered by heavy rain that nearly took down the high school classroom building but raised the high school playground more than twenty feet, changing the landscape and creating several levels of terraced garden. Rocks and debris partly covered Hanson Field. Boys cleared up the track and field part so that Sports Day could continue in 1950.

Like many who attended Woodstock I have fond memories of my days in school there. We were surrounded by natural beauty and received an excellent education. We participated in rigorous outdoor and many other extracurricular activities in music, art, dramatics, and sports. Living with students of different nationalities and cultures had broadened our minds with an international world outlook. We built warm and lasting friendships from living together in a close-knit and caring community

Unsettling periods at Woodstock before we came

The history of Woodstock School is about not only the school but also about larger stories of the community of Mussoorie and the country of India during this time. Woodstock School had experienced two world wars, Partition, and Indian independence. There were unsettling periods just before we started at Woodstock.

During World War II Woodstock School accommodated child refugees from Burma (now Myanmar), Thailand, and Malaysia and provided a haven for those escaping from the Japanese invasion of their countries until they could get back to the

U.S. or UK. British soldiers undergoing convalescence during the war had stayed in Woodstock’s Midlands and Ridgewood dorms and participated in many Woodstock community social activities. In 1947 the partition of former British India into the separate countries of India and Pakistan brought violent riots, mass casualties, and the displacement of nearly 15 million people. Between 250,000 and 1,000,000 people on both sides of the new borders died in the violence. One of my classmates Indra Dutt ’50 was from one of those families displaced from Lahore to Delhi, as Lahore became part of Pakistan.

During the violent partition period the school was isolated from the outside world for one month for safety concerns. Those students living in the Woodstock dorms could see the fire and riot across the valley in the town of Mussoorie. The physics teacher was a colonel in the Indian Army Reserve. He gathered a troop and set up a camp to protect the Muslims from school and the surrounding area until he got buses to safely transport them to Pakistan. Classes at Woodstock school continued, although without Muslim students and servants who had departed during partition.

Many students’ missionary families also found ways to protect Muslims on the hillside, as Ann Leeder Pickett ’47 and Peggy Ewing Devine ’52 wrote in the book Living on the Edge. In January 1948 shortly after independence Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. And through it all Woodstock School survived.

The student body composition during my time

During my time at Woodstock most of the students were kids from missionaries’ families working in India. Many were born in India, spoke Hindi fluently, and were known as “mish kids.” Most of them had more emotional attachment to India than to their parents’ countries. They were being exposed to two different cultures during their childhood development age, absorbing them to experience a third culture that was their own. Many returned to teach at Woodstock in their adult years.

There were a few “gov kids” during my time in Woodstock whose parents had assignments in South and Southeast Asia, working in embassies and various international government agencies, private foundations, and businesses. Embassy kids and gov kids were differentiated from the mish kids by how much American chewing gum they consumed, as mish kids usually had less pocket money to spend.

In 1950 Virginia ’52 and Robert ’54 Service came to Woodstock with their mom Caroline, waiting for their father and U.S. diplomat John Service to arrive for his post in India. However, John Service never made it, as he was detained by the U.S. House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee hearings. He was accused by U.S. Senator McCarthy of being a communist and was blamed for the fall of China to the Communists. He had to fight all the way to the Supreme Court, and although he was cleared and reinstated in the State Department he was never promoted. He quit the State Department in 1962 and became a curator of Chinese language at the UC Berkeley Center for Chinese Study, as he was born in China of missionary parents working in Chengdu, Szechuan, China and was proficient in Chinese. His oral history interview is kept in the Berkeley Bancroft Library.

Other students were Anglo-Indians who were Christians, spoke English as their mother tongue, had a historical link to both Europe and India, and whose families wished for them to receive a British International Baccalaureate degree or American education to prepare for college abroad.

The minority were like us, not belonging to any of those groups.

We were one of the first few Chinese students in Woodstock in 1949. The following year Mary Chu and her brother John joined us.

Dorm and residential life

Sally Hazlett ’50 (nicknamed Cookie) invited me to be her roommate with open arms extended to a newcomer foreigner and a Chinese person. Later we became good friends and promised that we would be each other’s maid of honour when we married, but both of us somehow got married on the same Saturday when we graduated from college. She became the class secretary, connecting classmates through regular class letters, and submitted jottings to the Quadrangle before she passed away and was succeeded by Lois Duerksen and Lili von Tucher. Although Lili invited me to succeed her as class liaison, I declined as English was not my mother language, and I had been at Woodstock for only two years. But now we have no representative to tie us together as the number of our classmates has dwindled.

The high school girls’ dorm was called College during my time. Its name came from the time when there was a women’s Teacher’s Training College, with Midland Estates equipped to house the College starting in 1921. Midland Estates and many other properties were purchased by Woodstock School, at the time Allen Parker was principal. The Teacher’s Training College closed in 1934 and became part of Woodstock School to house high school girls.

My steamship trunk occupied a big area of our room, making it crowded. This trunk followed me from India to the U.S. and China. The dorm rooms opened onto a wide veranda with a roof where we moved our beds in the summer as insulation under the galvanized tin roofs was minimal, and there was no AC. The rooms became too hot for us to sleep inside. The veranda became a large communal sleeping quarter, mixing students together with the dorm’s residence assistants. My classmate Princess Bhavenesh Kumari of Patiala was full of mischief. She captured a couple of toads and hid them in the young residence assistant’s bedding. When the residence assistant had finished her round of inspection and was getting ready for bed, as she lifted her sheet the toads jumped out and made her scream. We had a good laugh under our covers but did not tell the tale of who was the troublemaker. Years later Bhavenesh regretted that her antics could have caused a heart attack. The matron of the girls’ dorm was an English matron, Ms Herringbone. Bhavenesh stole her corset, which was a peculiar item to us young girls, from her private laundry line and exhibited it publicly to embarrass her. Sometimes the boys would come to the forest underneath the girls’ dorm and imitate a Langur’s cries or the roar of a leopard just to scare the girls.

For the Woodstock 150 Campaign the Chu family - including Tao-zeun (TZ) and Irmgard, with Li-chiang being one of the major donors along with me and my husband Robert - donated funds to renovate Midlands and honour our parents Vico and Tseneko Chu.

More about Bhavenesh Kumari of Patiala

At Woodstock Bhavenesh was a tall, lanky girl who excelled in sports and student government. She was the captain of the girls’ basketball team, the attorney general of the student government, and a mischievous tomboy.

She went on to become a groundbreaking female attorney in India, earning her law degrees from India and Yale University. She practised law as a public service. She was presented with the Woodstock Distinguished Alumna Award in 2006, having served on the Woodstock School Board and having helped sort out the legal complexities of property rights vital to Woodstock's sustainability. She also drafted the School Constitution and the Principal’s contract which no one else had done before. She donated a complete set of more than a thousand volumes of annotated Shakespeare plays to the

Woodstock School Library. Bhavenesh addressed the Woodstock class of 1997, saying that Woodstock had provided her the most stimulating and significant influence of her life, where she learned the meaning of personal freedom and the responsibility that has helped her throughout her life.

In our senior English class the teacher wanted us to practice debate with the theme of democracy vs communism. Everyone was very serious and chose democracy. Daringly, Bhavenesh and I teamed up and opted to argue for communism as otherwise there would not have been a debate. It was a dubious attempt, as she is from an Indian royal family, and I had just left Communist China. Neither of us knew anything about communism. Besides, we had no idea how to conduct research, and there was no

Google search at that time. Our only go-to reference was the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Of course we lost the debate, but perhaps it helped set Bhavenesh up for her future legal career.

When we were in school Bhavenesh was active in sports and dramatics. This continued in college as well. While she was at Miranda House, University of Delhi, she came face to face with the Labor Movement and became famous for leading college strikes. She declined judgeship offers from two states because she wanted to continue serving the public. She is truly worthy of receiving the Woodstock Distinguished Alumna Award, and I am fortunate to have her as my classmate and friend.

Student life

When I first arrived at Woodstock I auditioned for the music director who was piano teacher Ms Dorothy Sowers. She picked a sheet music piece which I had learned with Ms Liang in Shanghai. At that time I had not yet learned French, so I don’t remember the title of the piece nor the composer. It is possible that it was Ravel’s Jeux d’eau which had many black keys. Ms Sowers approved of my playing and accepted me as one of her students. She also enrolled me in the London Trinity College piano certificate exams program. The examiner came to school, and we had to play several required pieces, including a Bach Fugue and Chopin Minute Waltz. I got a certificate for passing the Senior Division with honours.

Every day an hour was set aside for piano practicing, and my piano playing improved. There was a row of Music Cells at the foot of the covered passage near where the Woodstock School front gate used to be, where we all practiced. Now it has been converted to administrative offices. Although there were no formal student recitals, I had played at the school assembly several times, so I was known in the whole school. But lower classman Stanley Unruh ’56 was the best pianist, and he was the piano accompanist for the school orchestra. I often wonder whether he became a professional pianist.

Even though I left Woodstock more than seventy years ago, when I find YouTube videos playing Woodstock songs the tunes immediately come back, although I do not remember the words. I was in the school choir and part of the Senior Sextet. We sang those songs countless times at school assemblies, and the tunes seemed to have become imprinted upon my memory.

As I already had algebra at McTyeire, I was excused from the class. I was able to solve one algebra problem even the teacher had difficulty with. I was regarded as a math wizard and voted to be the class treasurer the next two semesters. I was incredulous because I thought I would fail teacher Tiger Wong’s math class and would not graduate from junior high school at McTyeire. Being the Treasurer of the class was my very first time serving as any class officer.

I received a very high number of votes from the whole school when I ran for Student Government office, as I was well known in school. My two campaign posters composed and drawn by classmate Lois Deurksen ’50 no doubt had also helped. At that time the whole school population got to vote. As Minister of the Interior I oversaw organizing the school’s May Day Celebration festival, which I at first knew nothing about. The May Day Celebration was a tradition started by the class of 1949 with the May Queen and her court and others holding colourful ribbons cavorting around the May pole.

The May Queen was voted by the whole school, and several girls in the running cornered me in the dorm, pressuring me to tell them who would be Queen before the general announcement. Since the May Queen had to be dressed up in formal wear, the winner wanted advance notice to be well prepared. My roommate Sally was the May Queen in 1950.

Senior year the drama club performed two plays: Arsenic and Old Lace, and Cat and the Canary with Ellen Alter serving as drama coach. I remember that David Griffiths played one of the leading male roles. Those two plays were highly entertaining and enjoyed by the whole school.

In reading the Whispering Pine of 1950 I was reminded that I was the manager of the Girls Athletic Association, of which I have no memory of at all. I played forward in basketball intermural games with Bhavenesh leading as the captain. The highlight of the season was that we played against the Hillside team every Saturday night during the summer season and won. There was no gymnasium then. We played on the open-air court with cheerleaders cheering on the side and onlookers sitting on the bleachers. Sports Day was always a full-day affair at Hanson Field with the whole school participating in various races. I ran the 100-yard dash and 110 hurdles.

There were only three of us competing in the hurdles, so we were guaranteed to finish. TZ was running fast and was by far in the lead in the 100-yard dash when unfortunately he pulled his groin muscle with intense pain. With a grimace, tears running down his face, and great determination he hopped on one foot to finish the race in second place.

For Indian Independence Day we had an Indian style banquet and all dressed in Indian costume: the boys wore white Gandhi caps, pointed in front and back with a wide band, while the girls dressed in beautiful saris. We all sat on the floor, using our fingers to eat chapatis and curry from the low tables. Indra Dutt loaned me one of her saris and helped me to dress by gathering the fabric and tucking it in at the waist so that the pleated sari would not fall apart. We sang the Indian national anthem,

Jana Gana Mana

One of the extracurricular activities I participated in was the stamp club. We exchanged stamps to expand our own collection, not only with the fellow students but also with the hillside members. We learned geography, biography, history, culture, and art along the way. I got first prize for my display of stamps at the Hobby Show, in both 1949 and 1950. I started collecting stamps when I was younger in Shanghai and vowed to keep that hobby into my retirement. I seem to have lost the patience for arranging stamps into stamp books in this fastpaced modern age. I got a collection of Swiss stamps which my father received as repayment after he had loaned his friend fifty dollars in the early nineteen twenties. When my classmate Jeff Conser had a stamp shop in Boston, I did not have any discretionary funds to buy anything from him. My father supported my stamp collection hobby by saving all the stamps and buying specialty stamps.

Our French teacher Madame Vodicka, a refugee from Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), told us the stories of her ordeal of surviving a Nazi concentration camp during WWII by making dolls from discarded stocking and other material. She later emigrated to Australia with her husband, a medical doctor, as Czechoslovakia became one of the communist countries. She made dolls for her granddaughters and had her son Peter, an eminent international lawyer, send me a doll from Australia in 2015. Madame Vodicka and my mother had shared the same experience of having to leave their home countries to escape communist control.

As she was not used to the informal and relaxed atmosphere of kids in the American School, she was strict with the students, punishing them for disrespect shown to the teacher. The class of 1952 boys pulled a prank on her during the free period at the Study Hall when she was the supervising teacher. They attached small firecrackers to her desk and were gleeful when the firecrackers exploded. But so, too, did she. Three students confessed and were punished by having to write 500 times in one week, “As a student loyal to Woodstock, I know better than to let off firecrackers in the school buildings, especially in a crowded study hall. I apologize to Mme V and to the school in general for my poor conduct.”

High School Superintendent Dr Robert Fleming was also our sociology class teacher. He took us touring in India to visit important Indian sites and learn about Indian history and culture, including beautiful Kashmir, the disputed territory between India and Pakistan since 1947, and Amritsar, the preeminent spiritual site of Sikhism’s Golden Temple where the military operation was carried out, forcibly removing the Sikh leader and leading to the assassination of Indira Gandhi by one of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. We visited the Ganges River, where Hindu faithful bathe in the river before dawn, as they believe the water is holy. There were also the emaciated hermits who rubbed their bodies with ashes and paints. After graduation father took the family to tour the Taj Mahal in Agra and the golden temple in Amritsar, after which we stayed in a houseboat at a lake in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. We bought Kashmir felt rugs with embroidery, which I have brought with me from California to Boston and to Beijing, China.

Although Woodstock School is a coed school, there was not much social interaction between boys and girls. We were in class together, but we ate separately in the dining hall. There were no school dances like at the American schools, but we had a dress-up, formal Junior-Senior Banquet, with sophomores serving as the waiting staff - a highlight to our school year. To the envy of the whole junior class of girls I was the first one to be asked by a senior boy, the most popular Bob Forsgren, as his partner. Mother had to hastily make a two-piece formal dress out of fabric which she had in the trunk.

Shortly after our sociology field trip the nicest boy in class, Kenneth Fordham, asked me to “go together” with him, meaning to be his girlfriend. Going together was nothing but the boy carrying the girl’s books up the hill from the dorm, as we did not have book bags or backpacks, and there was no movie or ice cream parlour for couples to hang out. I don’t remember whether we had walked on Frivolity Lane, a windy path around Midlands beside Alter Ridge to Woodstock College where in the forties and fifties couples would walk. Ours was a short relationship as we graduated soon after and went our separate ways. The last we saw each other was on Going Down Day at the Dehradun railway station, eating jalebis

His family belonged to a strict mission in which only one boy of the family, his older brother Ernest, could leave the mission to attend college in the U.S., while the others had to stay with their parents in India doing missionary work. Kenneth later accompanied Dr Fleming trekking in the Himalaya and Nepal before all the missionaries had to leave India. He worked in insurance, but his brother Ernest was a medical doctor and provided funds for a writers’ workshop in memory of his daughter, an aspiring writer who passed away young.

When I developed alternately high fever and shivering cold it was presumed that I had contracted malaria and was hospitalized in Landour Community Hospital where Dr Bethel Fleming, wife of Dr Bob Fleming, was the chief medical doctor. Dr Bethel Fleming had taken care of countless Woodstock students sick with measles, mumps, and whooping cough before vaccinations against those childhood diseases were available.

One day Ray Smith ’54 killed a ten-footlong King Cobra snake within the vicinity of the campus. Dr Fleming skinned it and ordered the kitchen to cook it into hundreds of bite-sized small sandwiches, so that everyone on the campus could get a taste. It tasted like chicken, but some students gagged after learning that it was cobra instead of chicken. Cantonese in China and Hong Kong have a snake banquet, which is considered an exotic but not uncommon feast.

My mother found a rental house in Landour through the school at Edgehill Villa, while my father was staying in the hotel in Bombay before he moved to Bangkok, Thailand. With the increase in school enrollment, Edgehill Villa was acquired by Woodstock School and expanded to house lower grade students. Mother hired a cook and a sweeper. My mother taught the cook to marinate beef in soy sauce and sherry Chinese style and invited all the Chinese students and sometimes other students, too, for a Sunday dinner of Chinese-style steak. That was a big treat, as we never had any beef in the school’s dining hall, for the cooks and waiters were all Hindu.

My mother renewed her cooking skills from the cookbooks she got from Hong Kong and her handwritten recipes from the classes she took in Shanghai earlier. Her recipe book had travelled with her from China, India, Thailand, France, and the United States and was inherited by my sister. My mother became known in the hillside community as a wonderful cook and gracious hostess, as she socialized with the community. She added new varieties of spices to the Christian community. She maintained lifelong contacts with some of the staff through yearly Christmas card exchanges.

The Owens, who were at Shanghai American School before the Communists took over China, became principal of Woodstock School after the Ewings left in 1950. The Harveys, the religion and music teacher who later played piano voluntarily at Southern California’s Nordstrom

Department store every Sunday for twenty years, came to mother’s memorial service, driving from Los Angeles.

Mother would sneak a sip of sherry to boys coming for Halloween treats, purposely breaking the rule of no alcohol allowed on campus. She was severely reprimanded by the principal. She tried to make Chinese salted eggs but failed and dumped the rotten eggs down the deep gully, stinking up the whole valley, as there was no garbage collection. Years later, at Woodstock local alumni curry club gatherings old alumnus Joe Chacko ’49 would relate the story, as he was my mother’s “handyman” and “electrician on call.” He said he would be rewarded by my mother with weird Chinese food that he was suspicious of.

Mother made our class flag, a red horse with wings on a white background, carried by the class marching on the school’s Sports Day. The boys wore long white pants and white tops, while the girls wore red shorts with white tops.

When we graduated there were 27 of us with photos in the Whispering Pine. All the parents came to see us graduate from high school, including my parents, with father coming from Bangkok, Thailand. He took a great many pictures with his Rolleiflex camera as he was an avid photographer. I inherited the camera when I left home for Berkeley, and I had it with me in China.

60 Years Later

In 2008 almost sixty years after my graduation, when TZ received the Distinguished Alumnus Award, he invited both my sister Li-chiang and me to visit Woodstock and tour Northern India. We visited Delhi and the palaces and forts of Northern India including Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Udaipur.

After attending TZ’s Distinguished Alumnus Award ceremony at Woodstock I visited Bhavenesh’s comfortable home for tea and met up with her and Sheila Berry in New Delhi for lunch. Sheila Berry came from a large Calcutta family where 13 of her family members had attended Woodstock.

I could recognize both Sheila and Bhavenesh right away as they seemed to look exactly as they looked fifty years ago but more mature and dignified. That day Bhavenesh was ready to go to the Supreme Court after lunch, so she was dressed in an all-white lawyer’s outfit.

Here are some of my father’s photos of the hillside, of which five of them were included in the class of 1949 Whispering Pine. I remember that his photo was also the feature photo for the class of 1952 yearbook, but that issue is not digitally available to confirm.