The call, p.49
The Call, page 49
DANGER ZONE
INTO HIS OFFICE at the laboratory one morning walked a bizarre procession. First, a very tall, gaunt Chinese, in peasant dress, with “eyes that burned like charcoal embers fanned by some wild fixation.” Behind him came four quite small men who looked like wharf rats, carrying between them two huge covered baskets.
The big man’s speech told that he was a Northerner, and indeed he said he was a farmer from a village not far from Tientsin. His name was Wang Tun. He had come to Shanghai, he said, on purpose to see T’ao Tu Hsien-sheng (Mr. Treadup). Mr. Treadup would not remember him, but he remembered Mr. Treadup.
How had he come to know Mr. Treadup? After the flood that had ruined large parts of Chihli and Shantung provinces in 1917, he, Wang, had been left without land or any resources to feed a large family. The British were calling for Chinese to go to France as coolies, and Wang, not knowing what this meant, had volunteered. He had many months of drudgery, ten hours each day, at the camp at Abencourt—he was obviously bright, he gave this name a quite good French pronunciation—and while there he had learned to read and write, and Mr. Treadup, he said, had been a famous man to those coolies who, like himself, had each week devoured the Laborers’ Weekly. At last the Armistice had come, but it had meant no relief for the Chinese. Wang’s company continued for a year rolling up the barbed wire, picking up shells and wreckage, and filling in dugouts and trenches.
During that time, Wang told Treadup, he thought and thought. China was weak and France was strong. Could he do something about that imbalance when he got back home? He was disgusted by many of his fellow returnees who were farmers, he said. They were satisfied to use their savings to buy a few mou of land and go back to the old ways. Some of his friends who had gone to Tientsin and Tsinan and Paoting, he said, were better. They had “eaten bitterness” because it was hard to get work, but those who had finally found jobs had joined the new labor unions and were insisting on some of what they had seen in a “strong” country—better working conditions, shorter hours, easier work, higher pay.
But Wang, Treadup wrote,
wanted to make life better in his own village. In France, he said, a Y.M.C.A. secretary named Larch had taught him some mechanics, and after his repatriation he had gone on with his studies at T’ungchow. “At that time,” he said, with his hands hovering over his two big baskets as if they were where all truth was hidden, “I practiced meditation, and one day I saw the sky open and there in the crack in the sky was an issue of the ‘Laborers’ Weekly!’ It said: ‘Do not waste time by hurrying.’ I had to think about that. At last I realized that that warning meant that my village should not be in a hurry for big iron machinery, it was not ready for big iron machinery. Perhaps here a very small motor, there a very small pump. At that time,” he said, his hands moving down toward the covers of the baskets, “I started my work.”
Wang took off the first lid. “I cannot do justice to the simple elegance of the objects he gingerly began lifting out of the baskets,” Treadup wrote. They were models of labor-saving devices: A wooden threshing machine to be run by wind power on windy days, by donkey power on still days. A boat for shallows to be run by a small engine which in time of drought might be converted into a pump for supplying water from rivers to fields, or which, Wang said, might be used to generate power to run a moving picture machine. A hydraulic flour mill, operated by a wooden waterwheel. A water-powered wooden machine with metal feet to crush stone…And dozens of others.
These beauties were put together from cardboard cut from British-American Tobacco Company cigarette boxes, sorghum stalks, heavy Chinese paper, pins, and rice paste! All the wheels and handles and rollers and belts and brakes and spokes and pistons were there in miniature! What’s more, they worked. Tiny gears turned “big” arms. Wang answered every engineering question I could ask. Every machine, it seemed, could be turned to alternate or numerous uses.
What thoughts this man Wang opened up in my mind! A transitional modernization of the farms of China! Wind, water, wood, a few small motors and pumps. What a vision!
* * *
—
FOR SOME TIME this vision bedazzled Treadup. He had several further talks with Inventor Wang, and before Wang set off for home David had him write down the name of his village and give a full description of its exact location. He wrote an excited and somewhat grandiose letter to Johnny Wu at Princeton telling him all about the wonderful devices Wang had put together and suggesting that one day Johnny and he could find a way to give a real and widespread life to the “transitional modernization” of the countryside of China.
* * *
—
BUT SOON this vacillating Treadup had dashed off in quite another direction.
One day not long after Wang had departed, the four “wharf rats” who had carried Wang’s baskets showed up at David’s office. David discovered first that these ragged creatures were, like Inventor Wang, literate and articulate men; their native dialect was Shanghainese but one of them, named Fu, spoke fair Mandarin. Then David learned that they, again like Wang, were returned laborers from France. Inventor Wang had found them by asking at the Shanghai resettlement camp for returnees. They, too, had learned to read and write in Y huts in cantonments in the British sector. But unlike Wang, they had been repatriated only a few months ago.
With all due Chinese good manners, they invited T’ao Tu Hsien-sheng to visit their “unworthy residence.” It was in the Whangpoo industrial quarter, they said. “The shining future” about which they had read in the Laborers’ Weekly in France, they said, had arrived. It was now. Could he come the next day to see it with his own eyes? Since they were, as they put it, their own masters—in other words, unemployed—they could come for him at any time he chose.
When Treadup followed the four downstairs from his office the next morning, he discovered that all of them were wheelbarrowmen. Fu insisted that the Hsien-sheng ride on his flat-bedded barrow; the other three pushed their empties along behind.
In twenty minutes they had arrived at their destination. This, Fu said, was Little France.
A vast area, apparently an old marketplace for country produce, abandoned when the surrounding district had been taken over by silk filatures and other factories, had been turned into “the most squalid sinkhole of humanity I have ever seen,” as David later wrote Todd. Fu said the entire shipload of returnees in which the four had been lucklessly included had simply been dumped into this area to fend for themselves. Some had been able to return to their previous homes, but most had been younger sons or brothers without futures in their native villages. The most princely houses in Little France were huts made from flattened ten-gallon tin oil cans; the majority were of reeds and mud; some were mere lean-tos made from stolen boards and scraps of tar paper and reed matting. The passages were deep with slime. There was a stink of whatever human beings could void; excrement was kept in neat piles before the huts, to be carried on barrows many miles to the country and sold to farmers as night soil. Fu said many men had brought their families here, but there were no women or children in sight because, he said, they were all there—and he waved toward the mills between the encampment and the river. His own wife and two daughters were there.
Had T’ao Tu Hsien-sheng ever been in one of those silk mills?
* * *
—
THEY ENTERED the long reeling room. Treadup felt the sweat leap in hot terror from his forehead, cheeks, and neck, because he thought for a moment that without dying he had arrived in hell. He was relieved, looking at his host, to see that Mr. Hsieh, too, suddenly had pearls on his round face. The room was unbearably overheated. Steam rose from myriad pipe ends. Mr. Hsieh, the owner of the filature, was a Christian and a member of the Y.M.C.A. Board of Directors, so it had been easy to arrange to visit the mill. Mr. Hsieh stood beside the huge missionary and, with delicate courtesy disregarding the foreigner’s awful ignorance, explained all.
Down the long room ran four double rows, facing each other, of copper basins, into which boiling water was run from time to time out of the ranks of steam pipes. Along one side of each row little girls, who looked to be from six to twelve years old, stood at their basins swashing cocoons in the steaming water with small reed brushes, to soften them. When the threads on a girl’s cocoons were loosened enough, she would scoop a batch through a small gate in a wire-screen divider to the basin of a woman reeler beyond, who also had in front of her a shallower copper basin full of boiling water. The woman would dexterously pick up a filament from each of five or six cocoons and, working a treadle, would spin them together into a silk thread, which would eventually pass on pulleys over her shoulder onto a reel behind.
The children’s faces were pallid and pinched. Many were excited by the arrival of a huge big-nose, and they looked up in inattention from their basins. Women overseers, passing constantly up and down the lines, were quick to get them back to work, by the expedient of pushing their small fingers down into the boiling water before them. Almost fainting from shock and distress, the big strong missionary walked down one of the aisles, and he saw that though the girls and women were amazingly skillful at keeping their hands clear of the water, nevertheless their fingers were wrinkled and parboiled, like poached pig’s knuckles. On rags on the floor by some of the women’s stations lay nursing babies. None of the infants cried; they seemed to know by instinct that they must not.
Treadup searched the faces above the steaming basins, wondering which two girls and which woman were the members of the family of the man named Fu, who had learned in France to read and write and dream of a new dawn in his homeland.
August 31, 1921.
Dear Todd:
I desire to write now concerning the terrible industrial need of this nation. I have found, after visiting many mills and factories here in Shanghai, there are thousands of girls and boys from six to twelve years of age working in the cotton and silk mills twelve hours a day, seven days a week. In the native weaving mills and other industries, children are working up to fourteen hours a day, often standing on their feet all that time, for wages varying from three to seven cents a day. Many of these children receive no pay whatever, but only food worth six cents a day during several years of apprenticeship. I have never seen such conditions in my life.
The Young Men’s Christian Association has the unique opportunity to help change these conditions. Our social gospel impels us, does it not, to work for nothing less in the long run than the complete abolition of all wretchedness and poverty?
I have made contact with returned coolies from the Labor Corps in France. When I was in New York I told you how their horizons had been widened there. Many have come home to disillusionment and vile living conditions. Chinese life is being completely turned on its head by what is happening to industrial workers in the cities. Countrymen come here and are “emancipated” from the Confucian restraints. They gamble, find prostitutes, consume foreign wines and drugs, not only opium. They are indifferent to religion. Their customs of participating in country home duties, festivities, and simple daily pleasures such as kite flying or bird training are exchanged for the craze of more and more rapid excitement. The lurid, breathless cinema. The quickly consumed cigarette. Materialism is rampant, filial piety is forgotten, younger brothers become less poor than older brothers and snap their fingers at them. It is each man for himself.
The Y.M.C.A. has no man in all China with industrial training. I have been talking with David Liu, with all our foreign secretaries, and with church leaders here, and they all join me in urging you to send out a National Industrial Secretary to grapple with this situation. I would like to do it myself, but I lack the training….
Ever yours,
David Treadup
* * *
—
A NEW bamboo-framed mat shed goes up in Little France. It is to be a Y hut, just like those in France. Treadup rushes around, supervising Y.M.C.A. students who are doing the actual work. On his own initiative and without clearing it with the National Committee, Treadup has raised the money for this project from one man, Mr. Hsieh, the silk filature owner, a Christian.
* * *
—
DAVID LIU stood in the doorway of Treadup’s office. “He had that certain look of geniality which I instantly recognized as a signal of trouble.” Liu asked Treadup to take a walk with him. Treadup knew this meant Liu wanted to get away from all ears.
They walked on the Bund. As always they talked in English. Liu said he had had a confidential letter from Todd in New York which was extremely disturbing. It was not easy to speak of its contents. The two men walked as far as the Customs House without further words. Treadup observed the ceremonial silence of Chinese courtesy. Finally Liu said, “You have been my good friend.” (Treadup’s translation: “This is going to be very unpleasant.”) Liu said, “I know you, and there is nothing to worry about.” (Translation: “I am worried sick. I have begun to lose my trust in you.”)
Here Treadup could wait no longer, and the blunt American in him spoke out: “Come to the point, friend David. What did Todd write?”
Liu said that the International Committee was considering the question of sending out an industrial secretary. The cost would be heavy. They had some other questions….
“David! David! What did he really write?”
Moratorium. Pacing. Then:
Todd had written that since David Treadup’s return to China, three different missionary groups had asked the International Committee to withdraw him from the field.
The most importunate had been that new organization, the China Bible Union, which had written—and here David Liu reeled off complaints he seemed long since to have memorized in pain—that Brother Treadup was a Godless modernist who through his lectures on secular science called in question every one of the saving truths of the Holy Word, such as and even including the deity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, His virgin birth, His atoning sacrifice for sin, and His bodily resurrection from the dead, as well as the miracles both of the Old and New Testament, the personality and work of the Holy Spirit, and above all the necessity of the new birth of the individual as a prerequisite to Christian social service—“and so on and so on and so on,” Liu said. Oh, and the creation of the universe, and of man in the image of God from the dust of the ground, and of woman from a rib of the man.
“Makes me out to be mighty eloquent,” David said, “to wipe all that out”—then realized that sarcasm was in the circumstances his worst possible resort. Liu walked on, very pale.
Liu finally said the second complaint had been in his opinion much more serious. It had come from members of Shanghai’s British mission community and clergy, which had written a round-robin letter signed by, among others, an Anglican bishop. This letter had suggested that the said Treadup was associating with Communists among the laborers returned from France and among the returned students posing as returned laborers. It was not thought that the said Treadup was necessarily conspiring in political activities with these people; only that he had been duped by them. But the extent of Treadup’s agitation of the industrial issue was beginning to be an embarrassment to a religious establishment cautiously constructed brick by brick in this field since the year 1807. “The wisdom of this world,” their letter had said, quoting St. Paul, “is foolishness with God.” The diary:
This horrified me. I doubted myself. Could it be—the simple wheelbarrowman Fu? Was it after all strange that Inventor Wang, a countryman from the north, and the four Shanghainese wheelbarrowmen had come in a delegation, then the four came back, and Fu and the others had pointed my way first toward silk, then cotton, then weaving, then the other factories, and more or less suggested the hut, and—oh, I was stung, stung, by that word “duped”!
Liu turned as if to go back to Quinsan Gardens.
Treadup: “You said there were three.”
It took much more time to get this one out. At last: It seemed that “two of our fraternal secretaries”—the euphemism for the Americans in the Y.M.C.A., now that the Chinese secretaries were in charge—had found out—it was rather irregular, there had been a breach of confidentiality—from the editors of the North China Daily News the authorship of a letter which purported to speak for the role of the Y.M.C.A. in the anti-Japanese boycott that had been taking place. They said the opinions of the author, spread out that way to the world as if they were the Y.M.C.A. position, had not been tested with the rest of the Association staff. They mentioned “other dubious activities” without specifying what they were.
Treadup was suddenly “blazing angry.” “David! You have to tell me who the two were.”
No! No! No! Liu fluttered his hands. “Enough confidentiality has been broken already,” he said. “I had no right to tell you any of this. James B. Todd’s letter was marked ‘For Liu Only.’ ”
“But can’t you see that I now have to go around guessing—and we will all begin to mistrust each other?”
“I started by saying you are my friend.” (Translation: “Now this has become too difficult for me. Please, David Treadup.”)
