Paterson Ketrin

Katherine Womeldorf Paterson was born in 1932 in Qingjian, now called Huaiyin, in China’s Jiangsu Province, and was the third of five children.

The family settled in this small town, where her father, a missionary of the American Presbyterian Church, was head of a boys’ school and helped establish and strengthen church communities among the local people. In the summer of 1937, while the whole family was on vacation in the mountains, the Sino-Japanese War broke out. Returning home proved impossible. Her father crossed the front line and returned to Huaiyin to resume his school and church duties, but her mother, brother, three sisters, and Katherine herself had to seek refuge in the United States, from where they later moved to Shanghai. One of her earliest literary efforts was a letter to her father describing how much she missed him.

Frequent moves were more the rule than the exception for this family. By the time Katherine was eighteen, her family had changed residences fifteen times. As a child, she continually had to adapt to new circumstances, learning from experience what it meant to be a newcomer and a foreigner and discovering what it was like to feel out of place. Yet however unstable family life may have been on the outside, it was counterbalanced by the secure shelter of her parents’ love and care; it was within the family circle that Katherine came to know and love the Bible. From an early age she felt the power and majesty of Scripture; above all, she was moved by the poetry of the Psalms. Her mother not only read aloud regularly to her children, but also made sure they had many good books worth reading. Outside her family, people came and went, but books remained constant companions for the young Katherine, providing her with unfailing companionship. She eagerly read A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Lawson, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Frances Burnett. Her literary inclinations emerged quite early. At seven she was published for the first time in the newspaper of the Shanghai American School. In addition, she wrote plays that she staged with her classmates. The United States’ entry into the war against Japan in 1941 forced the entire family to return to their homeland, to Virginia, where Katherine finished high school. She