The call, p.64
The Call, page 64
David thought long and hard before he asked Emily if she would like to take on the battle against infant mortality. Maybe this work would lift her spirits; on the other hand, might frequent reminders of the death of their own Nancy depress her even more? From the moment he first broached the idea, she was thrilled and aroused by it. She would need careful training. She went off to Menghsien; she spent several weeks at the P.U.M.C. in Peiping. In the end her greatest task was one of education—particularly that of dislodging from the midwives their ancient mud lore, handed down to them from heaven knew what primitive era. By the late summer of 1931, Emily was traveling from village to village, usually by bicycle, attending birthings—“given new life myself,” she wrote her sister Jane,
by all those new lives I have seen brought into being. It is sometimes my privilege to be the one to place the infant in its mother’s arms for the first time.
* * *
—
IN AUGUST word came of a calamitous flood of the Yangtze and Hwai rivers. “Just eight or nine months ago,” David wrote his mother,
the Great Famine that had been going on for three years in the northwest came to an end, with estimates of as many as ten million dead. Now this flood. Rich America had great difficulty in relieving the suffering during the Mississippi flood of a few years ago; Americans cannot even imagine what will happen after a disaster like this in poverty-stricken China. One feels that China is floundering around helplessly without a finger being lifted by any other country. The feeling has been growing in China since the Peace Conference in Versailles that she is pretty much alone in the world.
* * *
—
THREE WEEKS later some young officers of the Japanese army in Manchuria fabricated an “incident”—an alleged sabotage of tracks of the South Manchuria railway—which they used as a pretext to seize Mukden and launch an invasion of China north of the Great Wall. Treadup wrote Farrow Blackton:
The move in Manchuria has stunned us—so unexpected, so unprovoked. A turning point for China—for me and for you and all we’ve been trying to do, Blackie. Just when the nation is trying to put all her resources into relieving the unprecedented disaster in the Yangtze Valley—and that tragedy won’t be played out through its aftermath of famine and death for months to come—she finds herself face to face with Japanese arms. All over the country there are mass meetings, wearing of black armbands, plans for sending propaganda teams into the rural districts to stir up the illiterate to unite in saving the country. A war psychology is growing—by which I mean an acceptance as fact that the Japanese are a greedy, vulturelike race, bent on exterminating the Chinese, or at least subduing and exploiting the whole of China. Hatred and suspicion is reaching its poison into “my” dreary little villages. I feel as if I had been building a beautiful house out of precariously balanced match sticks, and this wind from Japan will knock it all down.
BOOK SIX
A LIFEWORK
THE CHRISTIAN WISH
TREADUP had never seen the small Paoting church so full. The foreigners were in the rear pews: “I had the uneasy feeling that the flock perceived us as shepherds driving them along.”
Here, up front, were the Chinese Christians of the Paoting region, worried about what Jesus would think of the Japanese.
Some twenty foreign missionaries were scattered through the rear pews. Charles Stanton was there, with Dr. Wells, the staunch pair of veterans dressed for the gravity of the Japanese bullying in black serge suits, their faces drawn into hard lines and slicked over from the heat: they were William Bradford and Cotton Mather, to the life. Letitia Selden had Helen Demestrie under her wing in the very back row. Angry old Dr. Cowley was present, off to the left, frowning and sputtering before anything at all had been said. David Treadup sat rammed beside Emily.
David was concerned both for the future of his own work and especially for Emily’s state of mind; she had been quickened by her birthing campaign. Treadup’s young assistant in the village work, Shen Mo-ju, had started his duties with a fiery will. Treadup hoped the “Deputations” they had been hearing about would not disrupt all that he and the others were doing out in the countryside. Beyond that, as he wrote in his diary, “I had no few misgivings about what sort of un-Christian outcome this meeting might have.”
The pastor of the church, Huang Ching, a mild, gentle, pudgy servitor whose spherical head was shaven—a shiny orb upholstered with a radiance of fatty tissue—rose to speak. He was dressed today in a black silk Chinese gown, and in consideration of the secular topic he stood down from the pulpit on the floor level, before the front pew.
There had been a lot of wild talk in the streets, he said. It was not easy for Christians to find a true way to serve their country and make sure the rest of the town believed them patriots. What should they do?
A few days after news came of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party, had, as Treadup later wrote, “immediately seized the opportunity to make themselves prominent once more after two years’ slump into comparative insignificance in local life.” The KMT had put up lurid, ghastly posters throughout the city, picturing the Japanese as apes among men—vile, bloodthirsty, grasping militarists, greedy for the whole of China. Young schoolboys, inflamed by the talk in the streets of the Hun-like Japanese, had gouged out the eyes of the invaders on the posters and had written scurrilous graffiti on them. Then—and this posed the dilemma for the Christians—various organizations in town, including the middle-school students, had organized propaganda bands, “Save-the-Country Deputations,” to go out into rural villages to spread the news of the seizure of the lands up north and to warn the ignorant farmers of the danger of imminent violent attack on all China by this enemy. The diary:
Now in the midst of this hysteria, what part were Christians going to take in loving their country and proving their love? For some unexplained reason, the KMT hadn’t sent its letter on the “Deputations” to our Chinese Christian friends. The Christians had, however, felt that they would lose ground in the community if they seemed unpatriotic, and they had written a letter to Charles Stanton of the American Board, asking whether they should send out preaching bands. He had suggested that they invite all their fellow Chinese believers to get together and face the matter frankly; he doubted whether foreigners should be involved. They had answered that although this was certainly a Chinese quandary, they would greatly appreciate our being present for moral support.
Now in the meeting several Chinese responded to Pastor Huang. Typical of one group of speakers was a middle-school teacher, who said, “Many of my students are going out in propaganda bands. I am afraid their message is warlike. Perhaps we should form our own preaching band, to avoid compromise with the Christian ethic of brotherhood.” But others were hawkish. A wealthy wholesaler of medicines said, “I have just been in Manchuria, and I think my friends ought to know what is going on there. I have seen, with my own eyes, what the Japanese are doing. They’re seizing the main rail centers. They’re disrupting Chinese businesses in the area by trickery and violence. Setting up pathetic puppet committees of Chinese to demand that Manchuria be an independent country. Bribing and arming the hung hu-tze [“redbeards,” gangs of bandits] to rob trains and plunder villages and cities. It’s a dreadful campaign of terror and disorder. Christian love? It would never be able to stop these samurai.”
After much discussion, Pastor Huang asked the foreigners present to express themselves. “Though certainly a Chinese matter,” he said, “this is primarily a question about Christian conduct, and as Christians we Chinese would like to hear what the missionaries think.”
From “Search,” years later:
I was surprised to find myself on my feet. I delivered myself. I felt glad for a chance to speak, though I had no idea what I was going to say. I heard words coming out: I was not ready to advise for or against any specific line of action, but Christians should now be proving their love for China, not by following all the accepted norms of patriotic demonstration but “in superior ways which would prove them even greater patriots than most others.” I felt the sweat tumbling out of my pores, as if my poor body was making an effort to flush out some meaning from this nonsense I was uttering. I must have been overcome by the deep Christian wish that goodness of heart could blunt sharp steel. The madness I had seen in France; the senseless warlord slaughters…Whatever might happen, a Christian, I thought, should do his utmost to dissuade others from killing, but as to how—I was, alas, incoherent.
While he was speaking, Treadup was aware of some kind of commotion behind him. He was so busy framing his sentences in Chinese that he paid little attention to it, beyond having a blurred sense that someone objected to what he was saying. Later he learned that after he had spoken a few sentences, Helen Demestrie had begun to mutter and bounce around in her seat, and Miss Selden, “fearful that Helen would try to make a speech,” led her from the hall.
Charles Stanton next said a few words, vague like Treadup’s. “I felt comforted by his inarticulateness.”
The medicine merchant began shouting: “I warn you against listening to advice to ‘find God’s way’ in all this. Unless we Chinese remember all the grievances of the past against Japan and look facts in the face, we will all find ourselves slaves to the Meiji.”
But Pastor Huang calmly suggested that the Paoting Christians send two telegrams: one to the various Christian executive secretaries in Peiping, urging them to unite all the Christian forces in North China in a front to work for a peaceful solution; and one to the National Christian Council in Shanghai petitioning it to cable the League of Nations, urging it to find a speedy and peaceful settlement of the differences between Japan and China.
Then Treadup stood up again—“perhaps to try to make amends, through a concrete proposal, for my previous meandering”—and said, “Should we not send a third cable—to the Christian Council of Japan, expressing faith in our Christian brotherhood there, and urging them to petition their government to withdraw all military forces from the occupied zone?”
All three suggestions were approved.
* * *
—
IN THE CROWD in the street outside the church after the meeting, Dr. Cowley suddenly lurched toward Treadup, shoving Chinese aside to get at him. He was in such a rage that all the sounds he wanted to make seemed to catch in his throat; his Adam’s apple trembled as if it were so clogged with bad words that it might explode. “Always knew—you, Treadup!—idiot!—idiot! Those telegrams! What tommyrot! Pussyfooting League of Nations! Your suggestion—my gorry—cable to Japs! You have the brains of a six-year-old.” And more, with a constant spray of saliva.
Finally Treadup was able to say, “What would you do, Dr. Cowley?”
“Young man,” Dr. Cowley said, “I know the Japs. Nothing will stop those people. Except. Except—I don’t care—nothing except bullets. Bullets!”
“I’d rather find some other way,” Treadup said, trying to command his voice to be level. (“Search”: “My knees were trembling—anger—or some kind of terror in my heart from the crying out I seemed to be hearing of an Isaiah—or—perhaps?—fear, lurking somewhere just under the surface of my mind, that I may indeed have been a fool?”)
“Hah! They’ll bury you, my boy. Those Jappies will bury you. Don’t invite me to your funeral!”
* * *
—
IT TURNED OUT that the Chinese cable office would not accept messages for Japan, so the appeal to the Japanese Christians had to be sent by mail. David reports that he “felt Dr. Cowley’s icy spit on my face as I typed the letter.”
UNREAL REALITY
IN NOVEMBER 1931, following a widespread custom among missionaries, in anticipation of the Christmas season, Treadup wrote a long “round-robin” letter, addressed to Dear Friends. It told “of a period of great good heart in my work in the spreading of literacy among the Chinese.” Pleased with his composition, Treadup splurged and had it printed in a small press in Paoting. The first page had a pretty border of baroque spinach—a Chinese printer’s approximation, perhaps, of the mu-shih’s description of mistletoe. He shot it off to everyone he knew in both China and the United States.
This is a strange little brochure. It is written for people, among others, from whom Treadup has raised money and perhaps hopes to raise more, but in it he lingers on hardships—endless chilly rides, bicycle wheels skidding in sand. Yet everything is just fine. There is no mention of the “Deputations” of propaganda units ranging the countryside, not a word about KMT pressure or the horns of the Sixth Commandment. One is reminded of Treadup’s letters home from New Bedford during the period of the “black hole,” when he had flunked out of Syracuse—making out that all’s well in a well world. The “reality” of the villages of this letter seems to be a denial of the reality of incipient despair.
Excerpts:
• Picture an old man, hunched over, standing in the doorway of a mud house—wood-framed paper windows on either side of him. You can tell by the way he moves his face, as if there were a dark wind blowing from every direction he faces, that he is totally blind. We are holding the opening ceremonies of a literacy school in the village of Shao T’an. The scholars, farm people in their work clothes, are in the bare courtyard. The old sage says: “Fellow blind people! You have enrolled yourselves in a literacy class. It is to be your blessed privilege within four months to lose your blindness and to see! A marvel!”
• I started out early Saturday morning with Mr. Hsu, one of my new “leaders,” heading for Ch’ien Lin, a small walled town nearly forty miles away. The Indian had broken down; we two were on bikes. A good part of the way we had to ride in narrow ruts and watch our front wheels carefully in order to avoid nasty spills. There were several long patches of sand where we had to get off and push, and in those places I was glad the Indian wasn’t working.
• Villagers gathered around. They were eager to talk about rumors coming from all points of the compass concerning the poisoning of wells by Chinese hired by the Japanese. All the stories were the same: Groups of two or three traveled about the country with a poison which they threw into village wells. After forty—or seventy—or one hundred—days the water would be poisoned enough to do its dirty work. There were many reports of people made sick from drinking the water and an occasional account of one who had died. Symptoms differed. In one place, a man drank water from a poisoned well, and his head swelled to twice its normal size. People swore to the truth of deaths but they were never able to say just who it was who died. They have made covers for all the wells, lock them every night, and station constant guards over them.
• A new literacy school. Principal Shih examines the scholars. It is so interesting to see six- and seven-year-old boys outstripping the twenty- and thirty-year-old men in the recognition of characters. Among the students’ greatest thrills is some picture taking, for they have never seen a camera. One of the young men asks me how far it is to America. Six thousand miles. The man is thunderstruck and asks: “Have you come all the way on your bicycle?”
• The bicycle ride back from Sze Shu T’an was the hardest trip I have ever taken. The wind was against. It got stronger and stronger. Twice I had to get off and walk for quite a stretch because of the gale. Most of the time I had to lean down over the handlebars and push for all I was worth and then make only a snail’s pace. I was all in when I reached home. I was weak all evening. But the next morning I felt fresh as could be, no ill effects of the hard exertion—not even any lameness.
• In Ku Chuan the opening of a mass education class had been scheduled. This ride out was long and strenuous. We were disgusted to find that in spite of the definite appointment, almost the whole village had gone off to a neighboring hamlet to see a traveling yang ke, or planting-song show. I left a message for the leaders: I could not make this forty-mile bicycle ride again just for this one class. If they were really in earnest about learning to read, they would have to come up to Ch’ien Lin the next day, Sunday. When the regular meetings there were finished, the opening exercises could be run off. Li and I went away discouraged. Lo and behold!—that whole village showed up the next day, walking the five miles to Ch’ien Lin. The exercises could not be held for them until late afternoon. They walked back to Ku Chuan in the dark.
• It was a terrible bus with no pep whatsoever. In one sandy place it stalled, and all the passengers had to get out and push it through. At the gates of Ch’ien Lin armed militia stopped the bus. The soldiers looked more frightened than the passengers. It came out that there had been a big fire the night before. The burnt-out street had many shops in the bamboo industry, and the heat exploding bamboo poles, large and small, with sounds just like artillery and rifle fire, woke the townspeople with fears in their hearts—bandits had arrived and were ransacking and shooting! Now there was still panic—searching buses—the next morning. There will be a legend, one day, about the bamboo bandits.
