Yearbook name: Patricia Ann Stryker (Patty)

 

My Unusual Life

(If anyone wants to get in touch with me, my email address is strykerpa@yahoo.com)

After my father graduated from college, when he was in the Army during World War II, he was assigned to learn Mandarin Chinese. He soon grew to love the language and its people, so he decided on a career as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, working for the Dept. of State in embassies and consulates in the Far East, and later working for Voice of America radio and USIA.

I was born in southern China in March 1949, just before the Communists took over the whole country by military force. (My older sister Terry had been born in Beijing, China, in 1947). As I was growing up I lived with my family in Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and in our house in Langley Forest in McLean, VA. During my 2nd and 3rd grades (in the mid-1950s) I went to Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean. In the late 1950s I attended 4th and 5th grades at Churchill Road Elementary School in McLean. Then my family moved to Hong Kong for two years, and I ended up skipping 6th grade there (because I was too tall!).

I have always loved traditional, Old World European languages and cultures, so I loved living in Hong Kong, which was a British Crown Colony then (1960-62) — also the harbor and the scenery there were very beautiful! I attended a British school where I studied French and Latin, etc., and had many European friends.

In 1962 my family returned to our house in McLean, and I began four years at our new high school, GCM. Do you remember that first year when our classes were at McLean High School because our new school building was not ready for us yet? It was great having our classes only in the afternoons!

In high school I took mainly humanities courses, and I was in our Concert Choir and our small Madrigals group for two years. I took four years of French and two years of German — I loved learning languages using the Audio-Lingual Method we used, where you memorize dialogues and learn to speak the language with a good accent! After school I took a lot of ballet classes and wanted to have a career as a ballerina, but I wasn’t very good at it.

After high school my parents and younger brother moved to Taichung, Taiwan, and I had my first year of college at Heidelberg College in Ohio, majoring in German and elementary education. I did very well academically, but I was not happy there. The following summer my older sister and I visited our family in Taiwan, and I ended up staying there for the next year attending nearby Tunghai University, where my mother was a college professor (this is a missionary school and some courses were taught in English by professors from the U.S., etc.) I was the only Western student who was there for the full academic year. I took courses in English and was in the Concert Choir, which was led by a young woman from Texas, Miss Rose. I lived in the dormitory in a room with five nice Chinese roommates, two of whom were English majors.

For a whole year I was tutored in conversational Mandarin Chinese using the wonderful Audio-Lingual Method, and I became fluent in speaking basic Mandarin. It was fun to be able to speak some Chinese with the other students!

The next summer (1968) my family moved back to our house in McLean, VA, and I worked as a secretary in Washington, DC, for several years. There I met a nice young man, a mechanical engineer from Mexico City.  We soon moved to Houston, TX, were married for a few years and later divorced.

After that I worked as a secretary in Houston for many years. In 1979 I took my first trip to Europe, where I had fun using a little of my French and German. In the late 1990s I joined AmeriCorps and worked as a reading tutor in a public elementary school in Houston.

During this time my older sister and my mother were living in Wichita, KS. My mother, after earning an M.A. in linguistics and a Ph.D. in anthropology, moved to Wichita and set up her own Friends English Language School within Friends University. There she taught English as a Second Language (ESL) to international students in order to help them improve their English, so they could function better in college classes.

In 2000 after my mother had a stroke and couldn’t live alone anymore, my sister and I moved with her into a new duplex in Andover (just outside of Wichita), and my sister and I took care of her for the next ten years until her death in 2010. Now my sister and I still live together in Andover.

In the past fifteen years or so, I have worked and volunteered with children tutoring them after school, and with adults teaching ESL to them and helping them earn their GEDs. In 2011, I took the basic course to be able to teach children with dyslexia how to read using Alphabetic Phonics and Saxon Phonics.

I have five nieces and nephews scattered across the U.S. My father (who lived in Alexandria, VA, for many years ) is still active and enjoying life at the age of 94. He and his 96-year-old Chinese wife (his second wife) now live near lots of her family in Danville, CA (near San Francisco).

Here are some photos of me during the past 50 years: