‘An extraordinary experience’

Young Chang

An 8-year-old American girl in the jungles of the Philippines during

World War II? Not a story you hear everyday.

That’s why Mary McKay Maynard, a Connecticut resident, wrote her

recently published memoir “My Faraway Home.” Maynard will sign books and

speak about her wartime childhood Friday at the Newport Beach Central

Library in honor of the week of Veteran’s Day.

“I think these World War II stories are vanishing very fast,” the

67-year-old said. “It was an extraordinary experience. I just felt that

people didn’t really have any idea about it. The war in Europe got most

of the attention. The war in the Pacific didn’t.”

For the author’s husband, Howard Maynard, who read two pages of the

manuscript everyday for three years, the completion of “Home” symbolizes

an inherent triumph that comes with writing a memoir -- that the author

lived to tell.

“It’s beautifully told, and I realize the things she went through...

that things could’ve happened differently and that she wouldn’t have been

here,” the 69-year-old said. “And I wouldn’t have met her. Never would

have married or had any children.”

Maynard’s story starts on Dec. 7, 1941. She and her parents were

eating breakfast at their Mindanao, Philippines home when the 8-year-old

noticed that the adults stopped eating their scrambled eggs. The radio

announcer had just reported Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

Maynard said she probably didn’t understand what war was. She just

sort of felt it.

“I knew something was going on because they just sat and looked at one

another and their first thought was for my brother, who was on another

island in boarding school,” Maynard said.

The family had moved to the Philippines five years earlier because of

a mining job Maynard’s father had found on the foreign islands. After a

couple years of changing work situations, the father became general

manager of the Mindanao Mother Lode and the family settled in. Life

finally became good and neighbors showed the Americans warmth.

When the attack on Pearl Harbor attack was announced, Maynard’s

parents believed the conflict would last weeks. They didn’t anticipate

two years.

“The Japanese took over the [Philippine] islands and invited us to

come in to concentration camps,” Maynard said. “About half the group

accepted that offer and the other half, my parents among them, wanted to

try staying out at a jungle, at a mine.”

The family moved inland, up four rivers and into unexplored territory.

They worked on what was previously a closed, primitive gold mine that had

been abandoned. But it was well-equipped, Maynard remembers. “Perfectly

comfortable.”

Life changed completely. For the first time, a previously sheltered

Maynard worked, scrubbing slats. She lived in simple houses with

grass-thatched roofs and her mother tried to make Christmas special in

the midst of a war with yarn lovebirds and other small gifts.

Maynard made friends with other village kids in the jungle, including

one American boy named Neil. She learned to live with Japanese military

planes swarming over the Pacific Ocean while waiting, constantly, for the

Navy to rescue stranded Americans and for the war to somehow end.

She craved butter. The native Filipino foods were low in cholesterol

and fat -- Maynard looks back on it as a “really good diet” actually --

so she craved indulgences like lard. But by the time she returned to the

United States, the survivor wasn’t sure whether she could eat American

foods.

“I guess, maybe without really being aware of it, I realized that the

world had changed completely,” the author said.

But for an 8-year-old whose parents protected her, life in the jungle

wasn’t horrible. She and the family were looked after by the Filipinos,

and she never saw a Japanese soldier.

“So I had no firsthand horror, which makes it a different kind of war

story,” Maynard said. “I think I wanted to write it because I could write

it from a child’s point of view. It was rather idyllic, far from

violence.”

The family finally escaped, after two years, through a letter sent to

General MacArthur. Maynard’s parents died of illnesses soon after

arriving in the United States.

Today, she is a mother of three and grandmother of seven. She paints

and takes photos to pass her days. She thinks about going back to the

Philippines -- it would be her first time since childhood (she returned

once after coming back to the states) -- and might visit sometime soon.

“I guess to get that feeling again,” Maynard said. “That familiarity.

I’d love to be able to, in some intangible way, to thank the Filipinos

for their goodness. I’d like to see the tropical clouds pile up in the

sky.”