The call, p.25
The Call, page 25
This outburst calmed him, and, still standing, he began to explain to David the weakness of his beloved China. It came indeed from the incompetence and corruption of the ruling scholars, the literati—of whom, Chuan had just so frankly admitted, he was not one. “You missionaries,” Chuan said, “blame Confucius.” But this was wrong. The official state Confucianism which had so oppressed generations of scholars and bureaucrats was, Chuan said, “a lie to make us obedient.”
He stood there, Paul, with the paths of the tears glistening on his cheeks, lecturing me. I was deeply touched, because I felt that he was staking his entire authority as my teacher on this conversation. The little jade horse he gave me in Kuling was on the desk between us. He had noticed it. Whatever his weakness, his addiction, his failure as a scholar, he obviously did care about getting something important about China across to me. I was really touched. He made me feel important. “This is what I believe,” Chuan said. “Take your pencil. You have a habit of remembering by putting things on little cards. Take your pencil.” So I did.
“At about the time of your Jesus Christ,” Chuan said, one Liu Hsin, in order to support the reactionary and backward-looking usurper Wang Mang, claimed to have rediscovered a set of the classics written in an archaic script; these came to be called the Old Text. In the Sung dynasty, about a thousand years ago, scholars wrote commentaries on this “Old Text” which the Ming emperors, five hundred years later, decreed as official state doctrine because of their emphasis on authority and their assertions that China was the center and apex of the universe. But late in the eighteenth century and early in the nineteenth, scholars developed the theory that the classics in the Old Text which Liu Hsin had promoted two thousand years ago were forgeries, and the Confucius in them a distortion. They worked to rediscover what they believed to have been the true Confucius in the works of the New Text—particularly in Tung Chung-shu’s Spring and Autumn Annals. That real Confucius, they argued, was not a pedant or a formalist who cared only about ceremonials and submission to authority, but a warmhearted and progressive religious leader and man of action—a political reformer. His philosophy pointed toward reform of the instruments of government, concern for the economic welfare of the people, a recognition of the rights of ordinary people, and need for knowledge of foreign countries. K’ang Yu-wei, the author of the book Chuan had just handed to David, gathered these studies together in several books which, Chuan said, “have swept the spider webs out of my country’s house. They have taken away the Confucius who said you must obey the authorities and have given me a Confucius who used the events of the past to show that you could change things and make life better for everyone. K’ang has helped me to see that China does not have to stand still while the rest of the world moves.”
“It will take me a long time,” David wrote Paul,
to sort out the complicated emotions stirred up in my heart by Chuan’s confessions and assertions. I do know one thing. It is as if he had given me a magnifying glass with which to read the ‘Analects.’ Jesus has real competition! In his way old Dr. Elting tried to alert me to this. I wrote you about his grim warnings on Confucius on the ship coming out. Only now Chuan has taken the grimness away. And something else: Chuan gave me a glimpse of an eagerness in China, a desperate desperate wish for better ways of doing things, which I suppose I had heard about, but which I had not seen in the quivering flesh before. In his case it is all the more poignant because of his sense of his personal failure and weakness. O I hope I can help—and not just Chuan!
* * *
—
TUCKED AMONG notations in David’s diary of tennis matches with Swing and walks with Emily was a terse sentence on January 20: “Had letter asking me to go to famine relief district.”
It took two days for him to be able to write: “Have offered to go to the famine area.”
* * *
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TREADUP spent three weeks in February in the great famine district as the Y.M.C.A. representative in famine relief. David wrote Todd:
The extent of country involved and the population affected has been given in the press, but the misery and suffering no pen can describe.
In truth, according to others, I was spared the worst sights, because by the time I arrived the missionaries had done a remarkable job of organizing the relief. But it was bad enough, Dr. Todd. I will give you just one picture. For a week I was assigned to “write villages”—that is to say, work with a team assessing the need and writing food tickets. In one village, T’a kou, a man approached us carrying two baskets hanging from the ends of a carrying pole. Each basket contained a baby. He begged us to buy the babies. He said it would save both their lives and his—no mention of the mother. No matter what we said he would not leave us, but followed us, tugging at our clothing and finally shrieking curses at us.
A large part of the central plain of North China was liable to famines because of alternating droughts and floods. Across the flat land the rivers silted up and, not being protected by strong dikes, easily overflowed. During nearly the entire spring and summer of the previous year there had been heavy rains, and the country over an area of thirty thousand square miles had been covered with water. The region was densely populated and every inch of the land cultivated. An immense garden supporting nearly ten million industrious farmers became a deadly marsh. The houses, built of sun-dried mud bricks, simply dissolved. The people were obliged to emigrate—for hundreds of miles in every direction. But all the space into which they fled was already full, and the sudden crowding in of such great numbers caused frightful distress everywhere.
Chinese officials had eventually established refugee camps, so that the homeless might be under some sort of supervision. Treadup visited one camp near Yang Ts’un, in which there were five hundred thousand refugees.
Early the previous fall, missionaries and other foreigners had begun to plan relief. Several committees were formed and urgent appeals were sent everywhere. Soon funds began to pour in, especially from America in response to appeals from The Christian Herald. With these funds five main distributing centers had been opened, each having from three to fifteen outstations. These were all manned by missionaries, at no small sacrifice to their regular work.
“It is very difficult,” Treadup wrote Todd,
for a Chinese to understand why the foreigner loves him, but when the truth does dawn upon him—after he has some food in his stomach—he becomes most devoted to the missionary and even perhaps to what he has to say. But food must come first. I have the following reason to know that:
In the second week of my work of writing villages, Dr. Merriam Joachim, the famous Lutheran from Georgia, whom you have doubtless met, joined our team. As you may know, Dr. Joachim is a very decisive old gentleman, and it was his decision to preach first and feed after. Both John Sewall and I tried quietly to urge the reverse, but NO! Up he stood. He started a service. Unfortunately his dialect was wrong, so he had to use an interpreter. There were several thousand famished people gathered around us. He has a voice to make your hair stand on end, and when the starving people heard his shouting, they began to get on their knees and kowtow to him. He had never seen so many people on their knees in one place before, and he thought he was making a wonderful impression. But they were begging for bread, not talk. He bent down and took out of a portmanteau a large packet of hymns printed in Chinese, which he began to hand out, hoping to get this crowd with horrible stomach cramps to sing! Sewall and I could not believe our eyes. But as soon as the hymn leaflets appeared, the mob thought they were food tickets, and they rushed on the old man from every side, and I think they would have torn him to pieces in their primal craving. Sewall and I shouted. Even he saw the danger, and in panic he threw the hymns up into the air as far as he could, so the wind caught them—literally “casting Gospel seed broadcast”—and all three of us ran for our lives.
At first the Chinese officials had been very much opposed to famine relief by foreigners. They said, according to David, “The famine came as the Decree of Fate, there were too many people, it was the Will of Heaven that they die.” They were especially opposed to distribution of food through construction of public works. But the missionaries went ahead, in spite of the officials’ resistance, and, David wrote Todd, “Now in the providence of God a most wonderful change has come over the officials.” They had begun assisting with money and influence and were urging the missionaries on with public works. David wrote that he found it a most inspiring sight at Yang Ts’un to see the delegations from the gentry and officials come to the missionaries’ headquarters with maps and estimates, begging the missionaries to open new public works and save the starving people.
So now the missionaries were building dikes, opening drainage ditches, constructing roads, and digging canals all over that territory. This, they all felt, was the most practical form of relief. The gentry and officials took responsibility for securing rights of way, for dividing the families into working sections, and for seeing that the work was done. Teams set up by the missionaries laid out the work and oversaw it, and if it proved satisfactory, the missionaries paid each head man in rations of food.
From Treadup’s letter to Todd:
This relief work has given our people a great opportunity to teach the Chinese honest administration. Every bag of food stuff is checked over some 6 times before it reaches its destination, and is then given directly to the hungry. In a land of universal “squeeze” where ‘calamities’ are most often ‘opportunities’ for corrupt gentry and bureaucrats, this may have been the greatest good to come out of the suffering.
David took delight in reporting one by-product of the famine relief. The flour the teams distributed mostly had come from America in cloth sacks. The weather was cold, and more and more he saw the poor people wearing “imported clothes, because in large red letters you could read XXX ROLLER PATENT Made in U.S.A. or, in blue, STAR ROLLER MILLS Made in U.S.A.”
David described to Todd the opening of one of the relief works:
The officials had asked the committee to rebuild the great roads out from the east and west gates of Yang Ts’un. Dr. Burns, who is in charge, replied that we would do both if only famine refugees were employed. This was agreed to, and I was asked to open the work. I went out with the officials, looked the old roads over carefully, planned for the width, amount of excavation or filling needed, bridges to be built, etc., for the first mile. In 2 days word came that everything was ready to begin. I went out and saw a most interesting sight. For nearly a mile the roadsides were lined with famine refugee huts, built in those two days. These were made of reed matting hung on bamboo framing and were smaller than the top of a Western “prairie schooner.” Each was the home of an entire family, possibly 8 to 12 persons. Standing in front of each hut was the head of the family, in many cases women, the husbands having starved to death, in several cases little boys 10 or 12 yrs. old, both parents having died. The head of each family had been provided with a Chinese spade, the rest had earth-carrying baskets, all were standing around in the most eager anticipation of the missionary to come and review them. We divided them into companies of 100 families each, and each company had a certain section of road to repair.
Imagine this double line of little huts along the road for a mile, thousands of human beings, sick and haggard, having lived on bark of trees, roots and herbs or mud from the bottom of the river, possibly for months, and now the longed-for help has come. The intense eagerness, the inexpressible longing pictured on their faces—these were most painful to see.
But even with all their feverish anxiety to begin work to get food for their famished bodies, the work must be opened auspiciously. The head man brought a table and placed it on the exact spot where the road was to start. On this he placed incense, candles, images, etc. Next he spread a mat on the ground, and all the heads of families took turns in worshiping the spirits of heaven and earth. Then the required number of strings of firecrackers was set off, to drive off evil spirits, and when the smoke cleared away, all the shovels went into the ground at once, and the work was, from a Chinese point of view, most favorably begun. Was this a bit heathenish? Perhaps, but I felt that refusing to let them do according to custom in beginning a work of this kind would have done no good and would only have prejudiced them against foreigners. You are a great preacher, Dr. Todd, but I feel I have to work, perhaps more slowly, by teaching and example.
I shall never forget the work of the past 3 weeks. I only wish I could have stayed longer.
* * *
—
TWO THINGS in this letter, one having to do with David’s development, the other with China’s, should perhaps be pointed up.
The first is David’s bold assertion, challenge almost, to Todd—that though Todd was a great preacher, David preferred what he presumed to be the deeper penetration of teaching. Thus David intuitively drew the line that would define the nature of the strange struggle, of which they would hardly be aware themselves, between these two strong men in their later collaborations.
The second interesting point in the letter is the description of the system of public works, with its built-in insurance against corruption—a pattern the world would see imitated and expanded upon in the great public-works projects of the Communists, involving vast numbers of citizens with spades and earth-carrying baskets, especially in the huge flood-control campaigns on northern rivers. The Chinese had for centuries used this form of labor in family and clan units and for slave labor, but what was new here was the idea of carefully organized works pro bono publico, through which no prince or gentry or middleman would benefit. This would prove to be one of the many innovations of the missionaries which the Communists would later take up and magnify in their transformation of China.
* * *
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DAVID’S letter, written immediately after his return, did not give any real sense of the state of shock and prostration into which the brief famine-relief stint threw him. At first he was just glad to be in a place he could call home. “Great joy to get back with Emily. She is happy to have me back, and I am that to be back.”
But a few days later David, knowing that he had been spared the grimmest sights of a famine—sights he would have to face in another famine years later—nevertheless wrote in his diary: “Joshua Bagnall was right. There is a scar on the brain.”
His shock registered on his body. In April, there is a brief note: “My left arm is giving me some trouble.” A few days later: “Dr. Malley operated on Mrs. Malley, removing a tumor from the anterior of the uterus. I helped with anesthetic.” On May 11: “Have discovered a swelling on my neck. Dr. Malley is treating it.” Four days later: “Mrs. Malley’s fever up.” The next day: “Gave chloroform to Mrs. Malley while Dr. Malley opened wound.” On May 21: “Swelling on my neck seems tumorlike and is growing.” The swelling worsened. By the second of June, Mrs. Malley was sitting up in bed, but on that day Dr. Malley advised David to have the growth removed from his neck. He went to Peking and saw three doctors: Teale advised rest; Hull, an operation; Atkins, operation. He returned to Paoting, and the next day wrote: “Helped Dr. Malley get sponges ready for operation.” On the sixth, with Dr. Hull down from Peking to assist, Dr. Malley excised the growth. “Took long time nearly 3 hours.” June 7: “In bed. Life seemed scarcely worth living.”
It turned out that what had been removed was not the cancer he had become convinced was there, but a harmlessly infected gland.
* * *
—
THE WOUND on his neck itched with its mending; the one in his mind still burned. It was during this period of a tenderness of David’s sensibility—with its mixture of relief and bitter memory—that Teacher Chuan interrupted a lesson suddenly one morning to ask David whether he knew about the Taiping Rebellion.
David, not wishing to seem stupid, covered his ignorance by saying he had heard of it.
“You must think what you are doing when you make Christians of us,” Chuan said. Then he told the following story (as David noted it right away in the commonplace book he was keeping at the time):
Back in the 1840s, a missionary gave a thrice-failed scholar in South China named Hung Hsiu-ch’uan a Christian tract. Hung had a vision—a sage appeared to him, commanding him to down demons and save humanity. He decided the Christian pamphlet gave him the means to obey the sage. Became an itinerant preacher. Organized a sect, “God Worshipers’ Society.” Two months with a Protestant missionary in Canton—he is by now a moonstruck fanatic. His preachings begin to have an anti-Manchu ring. Some of his converts start a military organization. The Christian nations have armies—why not Chinese Christians? By 1851 the movement has a dynastic name, “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace” (‘Tai-p’ing t’ien-kuo’)—this is the Taiping Rebellion of which I’d heard. Two years later Hung has an army of half a million soldiers. He announces that he is the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He sets up in Nanking a rival government to the Manchus. He and its other leaders become more and more corrupt and brutal. They copy the old dynasties: found a nobility, a bureaucracy. They play at empire but can’t govern the countryside and never gain the support of the scholars and gentry. In 1864 they are beaten by the “Ever-Victorious Army” loyal to Peking, led by famous Charles G. (“Chinese”) Gordon—martyr of Khartoum, later on.
