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When Isabelle Maynard was a child, she lay under silken quilts and took for granted the fact that she had a servant who waited like a silent sentinel to wash her clothes and comb her hair, to warm the young girl's feet with her own breath.

By day the child sheltered under strange trees and savored exotic fruits. By night she stuffed cotton in her ears to dull the sound of her parents arguing in the next room.

"Stuck in China," her father roared, "this godforsaken land."

Maynard's parents, fleeing the Russian Revolution, had only planned to stay in China a short time before immigrating to America. But as Maynard recalls in her memoir, "China Dreams," "since no one else wanted stateless Jews…their short stay stretched into 25 years."

This collection of lyrical, powerfully sensual anecdotes reveals how in the city of Tientsin, the author's parents "joined a large number of other Jews trapped in China." Unlike other Europeans in pre-World War II China who had passports to home countries where they might return, the Jews held only booklets stamped "Stateless." They diluted their sense of unbelonging by fashioning, in this seaside metropolis, "their own universe" — Jewish shops, a Jewish school, a synagogue, a social club.

It was an intense world-within-a-world, and Isa Zimmerman, as Maynard was then known, wanted to stay forever. Little did she dream that when her parents finally got their wish and fled to America — mother and 19-year-old daughter moved to San Francisco in 1948; her father followed a year later — a door would slam shut on that lush part of her life and would not open for decades to come.

"I had this weird feeling that it was all a dream, a no-man's-land of dreams," muses the author, who now lives in Emeryville. An only child, she had no siblings or other contemporaries who might validate her memories: "the tinkle of the outdoor barber's bell, the soft padding of the rickshaw man"; the Catholic convent where Isabelle had her French lessons and was known as "la petite Juive" ("the little Jew"); or of Mrs. Feldman, the seamstress, sewing scratchy brown uniforms for young Zionists in her house on Dickenson Road.

But Mao's China was a cipher; Americans could learn little about it, much less venture there in person.

Maynard, raising a family and pursuing a long career in social work, would go to sleep and dream of China almost nightly. The dreams were troubling, vivid, compelling.

"I had this incredible desire" to visit China, she says, "to see if Tientsin really existed. But the door was shut tight."

In 1982, travel restrictions had lifted and Maynard, then in her 50s, joined a tour group.

"What is the peak experience of a person's life? The birth of your child? For me the peak experience was when I stepped back into China," sighs the author, who is now retired.

When she reached Tientsin, the Chinese guide didn't want to let Maynard wander alone. "She said, `You'll get lost.'

"I knew every street, every corner," she recalls, having proved the guide wrong.

"I shed an awful lot of tears in Tientsin." The port was devastated in an earthquake some 20 years ago, but many of the buildings she once knew still stood untouched. A wall had fallen off her grandmother's house, so from the street Maynard could see clear into a bedroom where she used to sleep. A Chinese family was living in the bedroom now.

Back in the Bay Area, she found herself flooded with memories — now made vividly real. Friends urged her to write of her childhood. Though she was an accomplished actress, pianist and painter, she had never written seriously before. The words started flowing.

"That's when everything started."

She wrote of visits to the beach at Pei-tai-ho, of displaced persons and Japanese soldiers, of the Russian Orthodox friend whose roast-pig Easter feasts she always attended but which she never shared. She wrote of her servant, the silent amah with bound feet and "shiny black hair, brutally parted in the middle, separating the head into two severe, symmetrical black halves…

"She did everything for me and I never did a thing for her. I should have," Maynard writes with bruising hindsight.

Today the author regrets never having learned the Chinese language and never having made a Chinese friend — her mother assured her that such things "were not done." Writing the memoir cured her, she says, of those troubling nightly dreams in which the tastes and sounds and images of China loomed.

"I will go out of my way to see a Chinese movie," she notes, "and of course I love Chinese food." But Jews like her "were in China, not of China." Neither her parents' homeland nor the country where she was born nor the one where she has spent more than half her life are truly home for her.

"I carry my home inside me," Maynard says of the statelessness that, no matter what, follows her to this day.