Moon in the Mango Tree: The Story Behind Pamela Ewen’s Newest Book

by Karen Gibbs

Letter writing is an art form lost to this generation, gone with e-mail, its shorthand and the delete button. A new book, “The Moon in the Mango Tree,” may inspire families to dig out the letters of their grandparents from attic trunks and hold them for the treasures they are. They are a window to the lives of our ancestors.

Mandeville resident and writer Pam Ewen was so inspired when her mother presented her with a typed and bound copy of the letters of her grandmother Barbara Perkins. The letters were written during the 1920s, when Barbara’s husband, Harvey, served as a medical missionary, and later as the royal physician, in Siam.

“I had heard most of the stories before from my grandmother,” Pam recalls. “I would spend one month each summer with her in Chestnut Hill near Philadelphia. She would play the piano and sing. We would laugh and laugh. She convinced me I was a special person.”

The book of letters arrived shortly after Pam’s father died, a time in her life when she needed a project. With one book already under her wing, she began to shape the letters into a work of non-fiction. Pam spent hours in the library soaking up 1920s life in Siam and Philadelphia.
Although she visited Paris, Rome and Lausanne, searching out the places her grandmother described in her letters, she never went to Thailand, because “it is so different from when my grandmother lived there.”

The manuscript was more than 600 pages long when she put it aside. “Thank goodness I got an agent. He suggested I do a fictionalized history. He convinced me you can get to a deeper truth with historical fiction,” Pam says.

The theme running through the letters is her grandmother’s faith struggle and the conflict between her desire for independence and her deep love for her husband. It seems to reflect Pam’s own search for faith, which she came to terms with in her first book, “Faith on Trial.” Writing the book was the beginning of a new relationship between Barbara and Pam, between grandmother and granddaughter.

As Pam composed the chapters, she played the music her grandmother loved—Haydn, Bach and Liszt. “I remembered her as I was looking at her words. It was like she was inside of me. It was jarring to stop. Sometimes, I would write for 12 hours.

“I knew her well enough that I could put two and two together and read between the lines. I hope I got it right. My mom thinks so.”

Readers of “The Moon in the Mango Tree” will agree that Pam captured the exotic sights and sounds of Siam and the angst of a young bride yanked from her sheltered life in middle-class Philly surrounded by music, art and books and plopped into a village carved out of a jungle.

The very day her husband, Harvey, came home with the news he had been accepted as a medical missionary in Siam, Barbara had received notice that she was accepted to sing with the Chicago Opera. Surmising that physicians could practice anywhere, she was already mentally packing for a move to the Midwest.

Her mother promptly squelched any thoughts of a career in music with a firm statement of fact: A wife always follows her husband. Devastated, Barbara never revealed the invitation to her husband and hid the grief at her loss.

The couple’s first Siamese home was in a remote jungle setting, which, though beautiful, was stressful and frightening, with suffocating heat, tigers in the forest shadows ready to pounce, and translucent worms piling up on the porch in the monsoon rains. The free-spirited and artistic Barbara also came face to face with some harsh, mean-spirited missionaries in the small village that was now home. As an example, when Barbara delighted in finding a piano and let loose with beautiful music, finding fulfillment in the moment, it all came to a screeching halt with a reprimand from the minister’s wife, “We are not here to have fun, Mrs. Perkins.”

The intellectual environment was stifling for the young woman. She wrote in one letter, “I wish there were people to talk [with] about something other than religion.”

A third dilemma for Barbara was the lack of purpose in her life. “In the middle of the jungle, with those missionaries, she was out of place,” says Pam. “She had lost the comfortable faith of her childhood and had not replaced it with anything.” And she was surrounded by those whose lives were lived in accord with a harsh philosophy.

Suffering terribly from the biting criticism of her actions—and even her dress and her hair—Barbara sought solace in an ancient Buddhist temple covered with vegetation. She had a long chat with a monk, and discovered the serenity and love to be found in this “pagan religion.” The missionaries lowered the boom when her tryst came to light, however, and even her husband whispered, “How could you?”

The village officials, on the other hand, complimented Barbara, saying, “We are honored when an American visits our temple.”

Since music was her great love, the young wife searching for her niche decided to start a children’s choir. Even before they sang, the minister eyed the boys and girls sitting together—a no-no—and delivered a hellfire-and-damnation sermon, pounding the podium. The children sank in their seats, suspecting they were the subject of his tirade, although they could not understand his words.

While Barbara might at first glance come across as self-centered and selfish, the daily abuse she suffered from the missionaries, even to what she called “spiritual rape,” stirs support and sympathy in the reader. Barbara herself realized the missionaries were out of touch with the mother church in America. Some had been in the jungle two decades. But it didn’t erase the pain, heartache and mind-numbing boredom. She was not even accepted as a volunteer at the hospital.

Barbara’s first child, Pam’s mother, was born in a Bangkok hospital after an arduous six-day raft trip down a river and a two-day train ride. The journey home was made through the jungle with the infant in a cage used to carry animals in order to protect her. (In her extensive research for the book, Pam found the diary of a nun who taught at the Siamese school her mother attended. The nun wrote the Pope requesting they be allowed to wear white in the tropical country, and her request was granted. It was the first order to wear white.)

While Siam was hell for Barbara in more ways then one, Harvey thrived there, caring for the sick in his hospital and in outlying villages. (He would eventually found the first medical school in Bangkok and receive the Order of the White Elephant, the highest award, for service to the country. He also cared for the royal family’s albino elephants, considered sacred in Siam.) Harvey was a gentle, loving man, but so much of a workaholic that he came home and retreated to medical journals, missing meals because he was so caught up in his reading. He detected his wife’s depression, but seemed too busy to help her, other than with cursory suggestions.

It was infrequent, but Barbara did receive support from a few who detected the overwhelming sorrow she carried in her heart. One friend teased her, “How long are you going to wait to sing?”

Another said, “You will mildew in this steam bath.”

And yet another, “You don’t quite fit in here, do you?”

Barbara began to ask herself questions: Who are we to tell the Siamese how to live? Most importantly, what is the price of love? A feisty woman who had been a suffragette, and whose husband was drawn to her because of her strength, she began to crumble under the many adverse conditions in her new home and the nagging thought buried deep that she might have had an operatic career. She tried to physically will away the resentment, anger and fear of the challenges of her new life. Always echoing in her mind was her mother’s remark, “A woman is responsible for the spirit of a home.”

A move from the jungle village to Bangkok provided Barbara only a temporary respite from her struggle. She had to stifle a sob at a symphony concert when the music stirred her desire to sing. The dam would burst soon, and she would no longer be able to endure life in Siam.
She finally told her husband she was putting their two children into a Swiss school—which Pam’s mother remembers—and going to Rome to study music with the maestro who trained Caruso. And although Harvey’s work came first, he would never stop his wife from doing what she felt she had to do.

Ensuing chapters of “The Moon in the Mango Tree” let the reader share the outcome of Barbara’s journey as she searches for the true meaning of her life—some 40 years before the liberation of women from being “only homemaker” became more generally accepted.
Pam opens the book by describing the couple’s first trip up the river to their new home.
Fireflies blink in unison, alternate bushes on and then off. Pam says, “I thought she was making that up when I first read it. Then I researched and found out it is true. Her stories read like reading Kipling. With her beautiful descriptions, it was as if I were there.”

And with Pam’s beautiful narrative, the reader feels as though she is also living every moment with Barbara.