The call, p.53
The Call, page 53
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AT JOHNNY WU’S invitation, Treadup attended, on August 1, the Chefoo graduation exercises. Here Treadup met and talked with Johnny Wu’s friend and patroness Madame Shen—a woman who was to be a decisive figure, later, in David’s life. She was a great lady of the New China. She wore silks with in-woven patterns as subtle as watermarks in delicate paper. She had bound feet. But she was “modern”: she cropped her fingernails and wore makeup. She was a dowager whose money power clung to her like a sensuous fragrance. She had given her endorsement—and some of her wealth—to “causes”: first to the safe Red Cross, then to schools for the trades, then more daringly to the Women’s League, and now to this campaign in which, for the first time, females were being relieved of the blindness of illiteracy.
Madame Shen was the principal speaker at the commencement exercises. The Chefoo Police Department Band and the American Fleet Band furnished music. Evidently moved deeply by her own generosity, Madame Shen wept as she said, “I have never seen barefoot scholars before.” She placed certificates of Literate Citizenship in the hands of 372 girls and women and 775 boys and men.
Then she made an announcement which, David wrote, “shook me, because I was so astonished that Johnny Wu had not told me about it beforehand.” On August 20, she said, there would be held at Tsinghua College in Peking a National Convention on People’s Education. Delegates had been invited from twenty provinces, including far northern Chahar and Heilungkiang.
Treadup assumed that Johnny Wu had been so busy that he had simply forgotten to invite him. Surely he would.
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WHILE TREADUP was in Chefoo, John Y. Hu, the chief of the Bureau, wrote to Blackton, now back in New York:
I am not sure if word has come to you regarding the condition of our friend David Liu.
You probably know that when David returned from his trip to Manchuria, where he was put into a very heavy schedule, he complained several times that he was unable to get sufficient air in his lungs. Recently he had a series of uncomfortable feelings and pains in his heart. He was confined to the hospital for about a week to undergo a thorough examination. The doctors now insist that he must have at least three months absolute rest. He returned a few days ago and is now living comfortably in his home, where Mrs. Liu is guarding him most carefully.
Two nights ago the National Executive Committee in granting David a three months’ sick leave from the General Secretaryship for all China, asked me at the same time to act in his place during the interim. I shall need the friendly advice of all of you as well as your prayers that the work of the National Committee may not suffer until such time as David can resume his work.
Returning to Shanghai and finding Hu in charge and David Liu absolutely cut off for three months from all decision making, David was in a quandary. Liu had approved his request to be transferred full time to the literacy work, but had he communicated the approval to anyone else? David decided to go directly to Hu and ask again for permission. If David Liu’s so very enthusiastic acquiescence had meant that the Bureau people wanted to get rid of him, Hu would make no difficulty. David felt that he needed a decision right away, before Johnny Wu’s invitation to the imminent National Convention in Peking would come, so he would be free there to tell Johnny of his enlistment full time in the mass-education work.
Again, the same careful approach: the closed door, the charm, the holding back, and finally the question.
Hu in a dead flat voice: “David. We need you in the Lecture Bureau. Now that I’ve been taken away from it, we especially need you…to keep our people toeing the line…. You said it yourself—exactness in every measurement.”
David sensed that Hu would not like his saying that David Liu had approved the idea. He decided to let it ripen a few days.
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HE POUNCED on the mail every morning, but no invitation to Peking arrived. David felt a chill. It came to him, one morning while he was rowing, that Johnny Wu’s meetings in Shanghai with the Renaissance people must have been to plan the National Conference! His not having been told anything then, and his not being invited now—there could be no doubt, he was being deliberately excluded.
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ON AUGUST 20, the day of the opening of the Convention, this letter came:
My dearest friend:
The insane busyness of my life in recent weeks has led me to an oversight which lies very heavy on my heart. I should long since have sat down, looking straight into your brown eyes, to unburden myself to you.
I know you know about the Conference that is to begin in Peking in a few days. David, we have come to a crossroads. Look here, we have become too big for the Y.M.C.A. More than 50,000 students have now graduated from our schools, nearly a quarter of a million more are enrolled or are about to be. Over 1,400 teachers have offered their services for no money. A hundred thousand people have taken part in our campaigns to wake up the illiterates. Governor Chou of Fukien has issued a proclamation that after a certain date anyone who does not know the one thousand characters will have to pay an Ignorance Tax!
So at this Conference we are going to form an autonomous National People’s Education Association. I know that you, dear David, with your keen sensitivity to what is right for our poor benighted country, will understand one aspect of what we are doing which is essential. Namely, this must be an all-Chinese undertaking.
You must not, my beloved friend, feel cut away from me and my work. Feel instead that you have been successful! You have tutored me in the ways of Christian love, I hope I have learned well from you. Furthermore, I need you as much as ever. Your fecund ideas—the stereopticon!—the sandwich boards!—the parades! I need your thinking, I need the way you sometimes turn cartwheels, I need your heart which must be huge and warm in your generous body.
Think what we can do for China! There is no limit!
Your devoted friend,
Johnny Wu
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THE DIARY:
Emily heard me blowing nose after I had read the letter. She: “Is my baby boy boo-hooing again?” I: “This is no teasing matter.” She rushed to me, swift in contrition. At once I told her the idea I had had at Paoting. It is somewhat changed, now that Johnny is cutting himself off from the Association, but in a way it is more valid than ever. Despite the enormous wrench it will entail, she is in complete accord. Em, my sapphire!
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DAVID decided to “make haste slowly.” Blackton had written that he was coming out again in the autumn on another tour of assessment, and Emily agreed with David that since David Liu might be back at work by then, it would be best to hold the proposal until Blackie arrived.
In the meantime, he wrote, the prospect of living out his “Paoting idea” gave him “that endless irrepressible playful energy we see in the rhesus monkey—always jumping about like a gymnast, playing pranks, picking fleas off friends, grinning and making faces, swinging and leaping and running here and there.”
With John Y. Hu’s approval, he began an intensive series of what he called “raids” on the Bureau lab, driving the technicians to take each measurement three times, never to be satisfied with rough tolerances, to “back the Germans off the map in fine precision.”
His correspondence with Johnny Wu was exuberant and full of suggestions. Why not the slogan: “The Educating of China’s Millions in This Generation”? Johnny Wu had long recognized the need for intensive follow-up work—in “People’s Continuation Schools,” with four more months of class-work, and David had many suggestions for ways of getting things to stick in the students’ minds. How about encouraging reading circles? And perhaps “Question Stations,” places to which people could go at odd hours to ask about characters or borrow texts?
He carried on with his lectures. “On the platform,” he wrote,
my zest almost bursts the buttons of my jacket! I feel a great freedom, because I know that one day soon I will step off the treadmill. I want each lecture to be the best I have ever given!
He managed on one trip to get to Peking. There he found Johnny Wu’s great national organization holed up in a tiny courtyard of two rooms in Madame Shen’s palatial compound. “Our talk was like badminton. How we hit the feathercock back and forth across the net!”
Finally Treadup asked about plans. Wu said it would not be possible to put on any campaigns in the north, for the time being, because of constant disruptions by the warlords. In recent weeks the disintegration of the country had been disastrous. Johnny had heard that the province of Kwangtung alone had twenty-seven different governments! Wu said he was planning campaigns for the fall far away from the most dangerous battles—those in the north between Wu P’ei-fu, the biggest warlord of the area around Peking, and the Manchurian warlord, Chang Tso-lin. The literacy campaigns would be in central China, at Nanking and Wuhan. Would David come and “keep us on our toes”?
AT RISK
“THE TIME has come,” Treadup wrote in his diary, “to roll the dice.”
Wise Farrow Blackton had arrived back from the States in October, and he had now called a meeting of the senior people in Shanghai, for what he later characterized in his report to the International Committee in New York as
a penetrating and sobering review on the part of the staff here of the most difficult question in the entire history of the Association out here in China—the balance of power between the Chinese secretary and the American secretary. Or, to put the question more deeply and more bluntly: If the foreign missionary pulls out, leaving things to his Chinese brother, will Christianity survive in China? David Treadup was after me when I was here last spring to air this fearful question, and he pressed for the discussion this time. David Liu was well enough to take part. Those present: Liu, Wood, Keystone, Hu, Treadup, and myself.
It was true that Treadup had urged Farrow to have this discussion, but we can deduce from the way things turned out that his real motive in pushing for the meeting was quite different: He wanted to put at risk his Paoting idea.
SUMMARY MINUTES OF INDIVIDUAL POINTS OF VIEW,
Staff Conference, October 12-13, 1923.
F. ALBERT WOOD “We American secretaries cannot do the job. The Chinese must do it in their own way. In training work, however, I see the big place for the foreigner—creating leaders—not doing the job. Leadership in China is created often by our getting out, not by our feeling so terribly important. Of course the golden mean is needed here. And we are apt to err in being too conscientious about our divine call.”
DAVID Y. S. LIU “Be careful! The Association in China is yet a very tender plant and the work, by a false move, could be put back for twenty years. The Chinese staff is still young, inexperienced—quite unable to stand alone. So far our Chinese Associations have not been able to secure many men of outstanding strength and possibilities to serve as local secretaries. The Boards of Directors are on the whole not yet men of the kind of vision of Association work that is so essential, and they’re not themselves of high enough standing in the community to make it easy to get the best type of men for the secretaryships. We are working on the problem, but I do not see how we can maintain even the present work with any considerable withdrawal of foreign secretaries.”
ROBERT H. KEYSTONE “I agree. We must fight for all we are worth to get the American Brotherhood not to turn loose the work that has so far been accomplished. The Chinese Movement has avoided most of the serious mistakes which held back the American Movement during its first fifty years. It hasn’t entered any city of importance in which the Association has died, or in which it has made such blunders that the name of the Association has become anathema. There is no city in which the Association has incurred great debts. None in which it has bought property and lost it. None in which the Association has had to be abandoned. None in which it has fallen permanently into bad hands. None in which the program has been prostituted onto wrong lines. I marvel when I consider that the Association has had to be developed in China in the midst of great political disturbances, and that the Christian Church has been weak in every city where the Association has gone to work, and that the Y has had to make its way against non-Christian traditions, prejudices, and agitation. The magnitude of the achievement is amazing.”
JOHN Y. HU “You speak of making way ‘against’ non-Christian traditions. There’s the rub! Hu Shih—and, as you know, there is no more profound scholar in the country than he—has written somewhere that in a hundred years of work in China the Christian religion has made no appreciable impression on the life of the people. Its chief contribution has been in education. On the whole Christian work, he said, has ‘been worthy neither of praise nor of condemnation,’ and he predicted that if the Christians kept going as they had been, they would be ‘eliminated’ in the natural course of things. I put it to you that we know through our own life experience that Christianity is very much a superimposed growth in China and that it hasn’t really taken root. The only way to fight for its survival is to take it into the innermost recesses of the Chinese mind and spirit. To do this, we need men with the ability and devotion to find the preparation for Christ in the classical literature of China, and to find the consummation of the Chinese sages in the teachings of the Bible. No man can do this who is not a thorough Chinese scholar and a great spiritual Christian. This is the real Chinese leadership we need in Christian work.”
DAVID TREADUP “I somewhat disagree. What you suggest, John, looks too much to the past, if you will forgive my saying so. And China in the past has cut itself off from the advances that science has brought to the rest of the world. On the other hand, perhaps we missionaries have not stopped to study carefully enough how those advances might best be adapted to enter, as you say, all the way into the Chinese mind and spirit. Introducing American cotton seed to China, missionary agriculturists have found that the scientifically refined American seed does not grow in Kiangsu soil as it did in Georgia. One way to remedy the situation might have been to try to transport Georgia soil, Georgia climate, and Georgia workers to Kiangsu, but of course that couldn’t be done. The other way was to orient the seed to China, cross it with the Chinese staple and adapt it to Chinese soil, Chinese climate, and Chinese farmers. Working along this line the past few years the results have been remarkable. Should the agriculturalists have insisted on growing American cotton by American methods in Chinese soil by Chinese farming methods, they would have failed utterly, and Chinese Doubting Thomases would have said, ‘I told you so.’ Would that we Americans who work with ideas and minds in China could have learned to be as ‘practical’ as those who work with seeds and soil!”
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AN HOUR LATER. The moment was perfect. The mood was just right. Blackton and the staff sat in overstuffed chairs, covered with white muslin, in the boardroom. Teapots and half-emptied cups were on the tables before them. The topic had more or less run its course. Nothing had been solved, but there was a feeling that new insights might be possible in the near future and that—equally heartwarming—further funds would be forthcoming from the International Committee for tillers of the field who wanted so badly to be right-minded. The Americans had to some extent humbled themselves; the Chinese had made face.
Treadup began talking, rather casually at first, about Johnny Wu’s “people’s education campaign.” Here was a Chinese Christian doing something totally new, something that was obviously “practical,” something that got important results with amazing speed, something that challenged the old ways of Chinese thinking but that was manifestly needed if China was to become a modern nation. A vast undertaking, to make all China literate!
So far, Treadup said, now choosing his words with caution, Wu had been working in the centers of population where the need seemed most urgent and the techniques he had developed seemed most productive—in the cities.
“Recently, while visiting Paoting, I was struck by a great parallel need in the countryside. The peasants have been just as ‘blind’ as the urban workers. And they are, after all, four-fifths of China.”
He paused, allowing a long silence in which the others could think about what he had said. Then, looking from face to face:
“Johnny has left us. But I have worked closely with him. We love each other as brothers. I would like the permission of the National Committee and of the International Committee to go and live in Paoting to tackle this rural need on an experimental basis in the countryside there that I know so well. Working for the Y.M.C.A. and with Johnny.”
Treadup made the case that the lecture program had been, and still was, an important contribution to an awakening China; the Bureau was now flourishing in strong Chinese hands. His own role as founder of the program, and innovator in it, had long since been phased out. It was time for him to turn new soil.
He left it at that. There was a lengthy discussion. He had, in a way, prepared both David Liu and John Hu for his request, and he had talked at length with Blackie about Johnny Wu’s work. Of course such a radical change of assignment would require formal action in both Shanghai and New York, but at the end of that day David Treadup felt confident enough to write:
“It is good for a man to become a beginner again, every few years!”
THE CURE-ALL
THE NEW BEGINNING was haunted by memories of an old beginning. Here David and Emily were in the very same two rooms that had been their first married home. They slept in the same ancient iron bed which rattled and squeaked like a Peking cart whenever one even dreamed about motion. Out the window they saw the same arbor with the same charming tangle of climbing roses.
