The call, p.52
The Call, page 52
* * *
—
DAVID could not justify, either to the Lecture Bureau or to Emily, staying in Changsha through the entire four months of the course, but he did manage to get back to the city again for the promotion ceremonies at the end of the first month, when the first quarter of the course was completed. Wu had invited, to applaud the students, their families, their shop masters, and their friends, and to whoever passed the first examinations he awarded the first of a series of badges keyed to the colors of the Chinese national flag. The proud wearing of these badges in the city helped spread the word about Johnny Wu’s bold aim, which began to appear on posters in the city: ALL CHANGSHA ABLE TO READ!
One thing Treadup learned in that June visit was that even though Johnny Wu’s literacy program was openly advertised as a project of the Y.M.C.A., there was not a single disruption of any of its sessions by anti-Christian students. Indeed, in later years evidence was found that a young man of twenty-nine named Mao Tse-tung, by then already a member of the Chinese Communist Party in Changsha’s Hunan Province, had himself been one of the volunteer teachers in that campaign. It was reported that one of Mao’s associates had rewritten the textbooks for his students.
* * *
—
ON AUGUST 20 David Treadup managed to get himself to Changsha again, this time for the commencement exercises of the first course. The staying power of the program had been amazing. Of the 1,370 impoverished workers who had matriculated at the beginning, more than twelve hundred stayed through to the end, and of those, 967 passed their finals. On that triumphant afternoon, Governor Huang handed them certificates as Literate Citizens of the Republic of China.
The city decided to continue the courses on its own, and in September over fifteen hundred new illiterates were enrolled for the second term.
* * *
—
TUCKED AWAY in a letter to Emily, written from Changsha on the day of the commencement ceremonies:
“I think I’ve finally found a rock on which to stand.”
A THRILLING IDEA
IT IS May Day, 1923. Treadup is in Paoting, where, last evening, he delivered his lecture on aeronautics. He is up early, taking a long walk before breakfast. He stayed overnight with Letitia Selden and Helen Demestrie, and on the old rattling bed memories flurried in his mind in the dark. He feels a need to sift them in the heady air of first light.
He strikes out on a rutted earthen road to the southward. The air is misty and fragrant with the odor of damp soil. In less than a mile he comes to the first village; in the habit of such country roads, this one bypasses the village. Smoke is rising in a thin blue ribbon from a fire in the village; some way up, the ribbon seems to burst into renewed flame as the rays of the sun, poised on the distant lip of the day, strike it. There is a fork. Drawn by the sunrise, he turns to the east.
He comes to the bank of the river. He stands still for a long time on the tow path. Later he will write:
I had a distinct memory of having walked to this very spot, once, on one of my country strolls with Emily. Now, as I stood there, in the intensity of my remembering, I had the strangest mental experience: there was something puzzling and extremely attractive at the edge of my mind, but I couldn’t bring it into focus. Was it a kind of expectation? Straining to call it to the foreground, I thought over the recent days, guessing it might be something I had meant to do, which had slipped my mind.
* * *
—
“HAVE BEEN leading a double life,” he had written in his diary a few days before. “Juggled between Hu and Wu.” He was still a lecturer for the Bureau, being scheduled for engagements here and there by John Y. Hu, the man in charge of the Lecture Bureau. But the more active and eager part of his mind was committed to Johnny Wu’s ambitious new venture.
Early in April, Johnny had invited him to help prepare a new literacy campaign in the treaty port of Chefoo, in the north. As it happened, John Hu had already posted him for lectures in the northeast in late April and early May. He could manage both, but to make sure there would be no confusion, Treadup had cleared his going to Chefoo with the General Secretary, David Liu, and Liu had given him permission with an alacrity which surprised him. “But on reflection”—Treadup in his diary—
I know that David Liu has invested his heart in Johnny’s wild dream for China, and he knows that the showmanship we’ve developed in our lectures can help make that dream come true.
The prospect of the Chefoo campaign was particularly exciting. This was not just because Chefoo, on the upper coast of Shantung, the northern province jutting out into the China Sea like the head of a camel, had long been a fruitful center of missionary activity. Numerous schools and colleges were located in and near the city, and nearby stood, among other wonders, a villa which had been the home of the Presbyterian missionary Henry W. Luce, whose son Henry R. Luce, back in the States, was in that very year fresh out of Yale, raising money to start a weekly news magazine. Nor was the Chefoo prospect so promising just because the team now had some experience behind it—though this gave it confidence and saved it the energy of waste motions.
No, this campaign would be special because they were going to try something new and most radical: This time females were to be given a chance to learn to read and write.
* * *
—
THE WHOLE TOWN had backed the literacy campaign. Shops and schools throughout the city had closed down on the day of the opening mass rally. So many people turned out that it was necessary to hold simultaneous meetings in the largest guild hall and the largest theater in town. Right after the meetings fifteen thousand businessmen, students, gentry, scholars, and artisans marched in a parade. Student recruiters scattered into fifty-two districts, and in two days 1,466 boys and men and 633 girls and women were enrolled.
* * *
—
WITH THE CHEFOO CAMPAIGN well launched, Treadup had swung off to lecture at Tsingtao (Electricity), Tsinan (Radio), and Paoting (Aeronautics). There had been sporadic heckling at all three lectures by students involved in the May Fourth Movement, but at all three cities he had blunted the disturbances by talking about the Changsha and Chefoo literacy campaigns, in which Movement people had been taking part.
Standing there on the towpath in that mental state, I racked my brains. Whatever it was, off there in the mist, was so desirable. As in a child’s game, when, blindfolded, you’re hunting an object and the other players call out “You’re cold,” “Getting warmer,” “No, no, cold again,” I groped for this elusive something. Chefoo? No, that felt cold—except—perhaps there was a—what was it—that I had seen on the city streets? The lectures? The angry young students shouting about imperialism and capitalism? Cold. I veered off in completely different directions—earlier times in Paoting? Miss Titty’s hand on my cheek? The martyrs of Paoting—Annie Gould slung like a pig on a pole before they killed her? Then better thoughts—Emily! Emily! Then: The light in Teacher Chuan’s eyes, responding to the little show with the gyroscope Mama had sent me? Cool Then suddenly a clear view again of the sun on the tower of smoke rising from the village—warm, somehow warm…. But I could not find whatever it was, and I turned away from the river and started back.
An hour later, sitting over coffee cups at the dining table, “I snapped out of it. It came to me in a flash.” Two images—a country beggar in filthy rags on a paved sidewalk in Chefoo, and the sunlit ribbon of smoke—came together, as he wrote, like the yin and the yang, and “I had it. What a thrilling idea!”
But that is all he wrote in the diary—“a thrilling idea.” He did not share the idea even with the diary. Was he afraid that someone—who could it be but Emily?—would peek? On his return to Shanghai he apparently did not tell Emily, for a long time, what had hit him.
* * *
—
IN MAY, the wise old man of the Association in the China field, Farrow R. Blackton, was in town. He was now based in New York, as Associate General Secretary of the International Committee, but he had come to China on an inspection tour. He had cabled ahead asking if he could stay with the Treadups. In David’s absence Emily had had to suffer the chagrin of cabling Blackton on his ship to say that they did not have a guest room. Blackton stayed then with the Keystones. After his return David had several warm, confidential talks with Blackie. David was full of two topics: the delicate issue of the slippage of standards in the Lecture Bureau lab under Chinese management; and Johnny Wu’s mass education campaign. “I was emphatic in saying I thought this was the best thing the Y had ever done. I wanted him to get the message to Todd and the others in New York.” Unless this last passage was a hint, there was nothing to be found either in his diary notes for those days or his later exchanges of letters with Blackton to suggest that he had divulged in these talks his thrilling Paoting idea.
One day Farrow Blackton said, “Of course you know Johnny Wu is in Shanghai.”
This took David by surprise. He had assumed that Johnny was still in Chefoo. How could Wu possibly have come to Shanghai without being in touch with him?
Blackton said he had heard he was having a series of meetings with some of the big men of “the Renaissance”—notably the great Dr. Hu Shih, and W. T. Tao, Huang Yen-pei, Yuan Hsi-tao, and some others. And a rich and powerful elderly lady, Madame Shen Hsi-ling, widow of an ex-premier, was constantly with Wu, Blackton said.
The diary:
Asked around. All staying in a private mansion. Did not dare run Johnny down. He evidently didn’t want to be in touch with me, and if I had pursued him, we both would have lost face. What is this about? Hurt.
* * *
—
A FEW DAYS later the hurt was healed. Treadup received an excited and affectionate letter from Johnny Wu, postmarked Chefoo. It said that he had decided to put on a literacy campaign in a smaller city, and had chosen Kashing, in Chekiang Province, not far southwest of Shanghai. Would David take a major role in getting it started?
Treadup at once wrote back:
I have been wrestling with the desperate realization that there are some 300 million illiterates in China. We must hurry! One way of hurrying is to make it possible for each teacher to handle, let us say, 250 students in one room, rather than 12 or 15. May I try an experiment in Kashing? Stereopticon! With a magic lantern we can project enormously magnified characters onto a screen. One teacher can easily preside over recitals by a large class….
Two days later a telegram came:
GO AHEAD YOU ARE GENIUS.
Was this the brilliant idea? We find out later that it was not, but for the moment it was enough to engage fully the trait David Treadup rightly valued most in himself—his wholeheartedness. Here he was no one’s assistant; he was in control. His keenness vibrates in his report of the Kashing experiment, written at the end of the term for Johnny Wu, James B. Todd, and the whole world to see:
A very expert teacher is assigned a class of 250 in one room. Lights go out! The stereopticon flashes a brilliantly colored picture on the screen. It is a picture of a man. Following a discussion—who is this man? is he like the students themselves?—the character for “man” is thrown on the screen in gigantic size. The pupils see the written character for the spoken word and are called on to repeat the word, “man.” Two hundred fifty voices shout “man” as loudly as possible. You can’t imagine the noise they make. Hundreds of voices pour the sound in upon the eardrums, and the hands draw the character first in the air, then in chalk on slates.
Do you think they will ever forget it? Never! A powerful subconscious action is induced by means of the repeated crossover of the senses: Eyes see the graphic material, throat repeats, the hand writes in air, mind grasps the meaning, the hand writes on cold slate, and 250 other voices pound on the eardrums in unison.
The results: amazing! Students eat, sleep, and dream Chinese characters. They come through rain, flood, and mud, and will not be denied.
At the end of the term we are forced to the conclusion that not only can large numbers, 200 to 400, be handled by one teacher, but that the work can be carried forward on this quantity basis with greater speed and with higher-grade learning results than in the individual small classes.
This method is soon to be adopted widely through the country. A great light begins to shine in Asia. I believe it will reach in beneficent and healing rays around a dark and needy world.
* * *
—
AN INTERLUDE in Shanghai. Treadup feels that he is, at last, God-intoxicated. He has almost too much energy. He systematically resumes rowing. He is at the boathouse as dawn begins to break. He streaks in his shell through the new light, his oars leaving pairs of circles of ripples on the metal-smooth water. He comes home and eats a lion’s breakfast. Emily, with a delicate gray veil over her velvet-piped brown hat, and pulling on immaculate white gloves, is ready to go out to the mills. The boys, in white shorts and shirts at the breakfast table, will have a morning of tennis and swimming at the Shanghai American Club. They chaff each other without malice. Their father is calm, benign.
He chooses not to ride a ricksha to Quinsan Gardens; he walks at a brisk pace.
David Liu, who sets all the staff an example of industriousness, is already at his desk. He is a short, wiry man with gold-rimmed spectacles, in a Western suit with a fresh stiff collar on his shirt. He is tightly wound up. The cords of his neck are like the strained ropes of a working block and tackle, as his brain struggles to lift from his torso the weight of all his responsibilities.
Treadup asks if he may close the door. Liu nods. Treadup has never been more charming. Liu, who knows all the craft and the ceremony of the sages, has guessed that Treadup wants something. The balance of forces between these two men is most delicate: Treadup hired Liu as his assistant in the early days of the Lecture Bureau; now Liu has risen to be General Secretary of all China; Treadup is an underling and a supplicant. The resonant fact is that this conversation is taking place in China; one man is native, one foreign. Treadup pulls back, postpones. Liu is suddenly quite American: “What is it, David?”
Treadup rhapsodizes about the Kashing stereopticon experiment.
Liu’s dark eyes give a glistening reflection of Treadup’s animation.
Then Treadup blurts it out: He wants to be transferred from the Lecture Bureau to work full time for Johnny Wu’s mass education program.
The Paotingfu idea? Almost but not quite, we infer, for that evening’s diary entry laconically says: “Didn’t spill all the beans.” For the moment, there is such a look of relief on David Liu’s face that David Treadup wonders if something is wrong with his request.
Liu beams. “Certainly. When?”
Treadup has a puzzled feeling that it has been too easy. Had he been such a nuisance to the Lecture people, bucking up their standards, that they wanted to get rid of him that much?
* * *
—
AS DAVID recovered his bounce, Emily flagged. There was not room in that poky Shanghai house for a cheerful man.
To get back her strength, she strayed out of the house and into the city to “contribute.” The advanced concerns among female missionaries just then were child labor and the factory life of women, and these became Emily’s. Though it would have been hard for the missionaries to admit it, there could be no doubt that the increasing agitation of the Communists in the Yangtsepoo Road factory district was what had finally opened their eyes to the appalling conditions of work in the mills. Emily headed for the district.
First she toured the plants owned by members of the Y.M.C.A. Board of Directors and by large contributors to the Y. David had given her a vivid description of the little girls dipping their hands in simmering water in the cocoon tubs at the filature he had visited; but still, she was deeply, deeply shocked. She wept a good part of each day at what she saw, and, empathy proving therapeutic, came home in rather good spirits.
After she had canvassed the mills for a couple of weeks, she called on certain owners and treated them to some forthright American speech. These elegant Chinese gentlemen were not used to having women of any nationality speak sharply to them. Nor could they have imagined that a missionary lady would be strongly inclined to blackmail them—to the extent, that is, of threatening exposure through articles in the foreign press if they would not take certain steps.
The gentlemen fanned themselves, as if it were hot, or tucked their hands in the sleeves of their gowns, as if it were cold.
Far from responding to such signs of loss of face with delicacy, Emily pounced on the men with new onslaughts of frankness. She asked the men for promises. If she got none, she returned again and again. Any small promise she got from one mill owner she used against another—until there came to be a regular trade war of promises.
Soon: lunch hour a few minutes longer in one filature; a quarter-hour shorter day at another; better ventilation at a third. One very small gain after another. Each announced with warm praise in the foreign press. The changes were by no means fundamental; they were minor palliations. But they made news in the Settlement. There was never mention of Mrs. David Treadup’s name, of course; leave it to Philistines to parade their piety on street corners, for all to see.
And soon the norm was restored. Emily became as usual more cheerful even than David. The cramped little house became cozy.
