BOOK FIVE
VAST FORCES
MAY 30TH
“IF ONLY I were a bobolink!” David wrote in his diary in March 1925. “I would teach the other birds how to get some verve into their song!”
For he felt, in those early spring days when one village graduation after another was taking place, wholly fulfilled and triumphant. Over the years his science lectures had given him many transient satisfactions, but he had never felt such “verve” as he did now—as he did one morning, for example, in a small hamlet of millet farms on the great northern plain, when a group of newly certified Literate Citizens of the Republic of China crowded around him while he handed out one of the basic readers Johnny Wu’s people had been devising. He wrote that looking into the “eyes greedy for books” of those “peasant scholars” gave him “that queer light ache in my chest which I associate with what?—with homesickness?—with thoughts of Emily when we are separated?—with the sweetest memories?”—a sensation, it seemed, akin to the wonderful pain of exultation and self-love he had felt as a boy giving rides to friends in his wherry on the pond at Salt Branch.
EARLY in the spring Dr. Cowley in the mission compound in the northern suburb suddenly erupted with charges, which he very busily circulated among the Paoting missionaries and also shot off through the mails to senior colleagues in Peking and Shanghai, that this Treadup person was
getting himself neck deep in a layman’s quagmire, low-down secular country business properly belonging to Chinese authorities—temporal work in short that has nothing to do with the bringing in of Christ’s Kingdom on earth.
In his language-study days, David had come to admire this crusty medical evangelist who had braved out so many hardships, and the old man’s attack hurt him so much that he made a foolhardy attempt at appeasement. He wrote Cowley a letter in which he pointed out that Johnny Wu’s textbooks contained some moral precepts; that a fair number of the teachers he had recruited were Christians who carried on devotional exercises in opening their classes; and that in some villages extra sessions were being set up for religious studies.
Dr. Cowley took Treadup’s earnest defense as a confession of guilt, and he came back roaring—now in what seemed to David “a senile rage”—that he was going to “drum all these heathen Bertrand Russellisms and socialisms and Treadupisms out of the mission field.”
But in Shanghai David Liu stood behind Treadup. He firmly wrote Dr. Cowley that “the promotion of literacy in itself is one of the biggest steps we can now take towards making possible effective evangelism and Christian nurture in the next few years.” This by no means satisfied the old man, who continued to rumble; but it did blunt his threats.
IN MARCH Johnny Wu wrote Treadup that he wanted to “come and take a look at the remarkable work I hear you are doing.” The undertaking had indeed had an amazing success. By the time Wu wrote, almost 3,000 “peasant scholars,” aged from twelve to sixty, had completed work in all four of the Thousand Character textbooks. More and more farm people were enrolling in future classes.
Johnny Wu’s organization, the National People’s Education Association, had up to this time been working in the cities, but the surprising wildfire of Treadup’s campaign had encouraged Wu to think more actively about the needs of the great peasant population. He had indeed had this in mind from early on. One of the first things he had done, after the formation of the National People’s Education Association, had been to send a cable to the United States to Peter Ma, his colleague of those first tentative days of teaching the coolies back in the wartime labor camp in Boulogne, inviting him to join up. Ma seemed especially qualified to plan a peasant program, for he had been studying for a Ph.D. in rural education at Cornell. On his arrival back in China in February, he turned down several attractive offers of safe official jobs in Nanking and Shanghai and did sign up with Wu.
And now the two men came to Paoting, and Treadup took them into “his” villages. David wrote: “What a spree the visit was!” Johnny Wu drank in the possibilities and “his chest got so swelled up with confidence that one thought he would become lighter than air and go floating up into the sky.” Wu’s electric excitement conveyed itself to all the teachers and scholars who saw it, and a whole month later Treadup was able to write in a letter to Wu that “the universal report is that the wheels in everyone’s minds are whirring twice as fast as they did before you came.”
Treadup had the even greater joy of learning that the visit had had a long-range effect on Johnny Wu, as well. It had clinched Wu’s growing conviction that the most important job of all, in the effort to “make China literate in this generation,” would be among the peasants. And furthermore—on the evidence of the work around Paoting—that it might very well be feasible.
Writing to her family about Wu’s inspection tour, Emily must have reflected her husband’s view:
All the light of all our years in China seemed to come to focus during Johnny’s visit—I think of a magnifying glass focusing the sun’s rays on a bundle of twigs and setting it afire. My David held the glass in his hand!
BECAUSE of the farmers’ labor in the fields, the pace of the actual class-work eased somewhat in the planting time, but David worked no less hard. He and Mr. Hsiao went into new villages, preparing the way for new classes to be formed when the next winter would come. They enlisted and trained new teachers. They revisited the villages where classes had already been held, to try to find ways of keeping the reading and writing alive. “Everywhere I go,” Treadup wrote, “I feel that my friend Johnny is looking over my shoulder. I can never forget that the inspiration for all this was and is his.” One diary entry expresses his “certainty that old Dr. Cowley is mistaken. If this is not God’s work, I cannot imagine what is. I feel humbly close to God in my prayers.”
A SERIES of muffled explosions announced the dawn arrival at the compound gate of a coughing automobile. David happened to be at home that morning and he hurried in his bathrobe out to the gate, where he saw an open military-brown Renault with a swooping low hood over its engine and wide glass wings on its windscreen. The driver and a passenger were wearing what looked like gas masks to keep the dust out of their faces. The passenger, removing his, turned out to be a colonel from the staff of Feng Yu-hsiang, the Christian or the Betraying General, depending on one’s point of view. David led the colonel into the house, ordered tea from the Number One Boy, and ceremoniously waited for it before asking what he could do for his visitor. The colonel said Marshal Feng (for Feng had promoted himself to what in Chinese terminology corresponded to a field marshalship) wanted to speak with T’ao Tu Hsien-sheng. David asked when. The colonel said right then—he had instructions to return at once to Peking with the missionary in the car. “I decided you don’t snub the most powerful man in North China,” David later recorded,
so without even eating breakfast I dressed and put on my dust-tunic and goggles and told Em to expect me when she saw me—if ever. For all I knew he might be going to lop my head off. There seem to be quite a few decapitations these days.
But nothing so drastic waited for Treadup in Peking. Marshal Feng received him in an unadorned room in a large house. The huge bluff man greeted his huge visitor as a beloved old friend: again, the ursine hugs. Feng was dressed in his usual simple uniform with no insignia or decorations. Though in his own house, he wore what appeared to be a battered old round wide-brimmed felt American officer’s field hat. His cheeks were shaved but his jowls were not; his closely trimmed beard, unusually heavy for a Chinese, lurked like sinister infolded crow’s wings under the broad and jovial face.
“T’ao Tu, my friend,” he said in Chinese, “I have been hearing reports of the superb system of teaching you have started around Paoting. I am a great believer in mass education, you saw that I taught my own troops eight hundred characters; but a person of your talent for modern science—I remember your lecture to my men at Langfang!—you must not waste yourself on teaching people to read in a few country villages. Listen! Your assistants can carry on that work. I will gladly offer you five hundred thousand dollars, Mexican exchange, to endow the Paoting program. You and I have more important work to do. I have plans for China—give me six months, eight months—when we have peace—I need your help! Do you recall my classes at Langfang, where I was teaching the men trades? God did not put the Chinese people on this earth to be poor all their lives!…”
“He rambled on,” David wrote his brother,
shouting at the top of his voice. He is so sincerely emotional and at the same time so bombastic that it is very hard to resist his torrents, to say nothing of understanding them. It took me nearly an hour to pin down exactly what he was offering me. It appeared that he wanted me to be a kind of ‘eminence grise,’ a shadow counselor (a ‘ta-pi-tzu,’ a “big nose,” would have to hide behind the coromandel screen in the counsels of power) on education and modernization; he wanted me to start right away working with his army, and later, when he had unified China, to make plans for a massive program of rural education. We skirted the matter of his faith. He seemed a bit slippery. If he is to live out his ambitions, he needs the students behind him, and I had heard that the anti-Christian movement had made him a bit cautious about trumpeting his love for Jesus. Yet he made me get down on my knees with him and pray for China’s poor and for the success of some new long-range artillery cannons he had bought from the Russians.
At the end Treadup, expressing with elegant Chinese tact the unworthiness he felt in the face of the honor Feng was offering him, said that before making a decision of such importance he would have to correspond with his colleagues in the Y.M.C.A. and consult with his family. The former would take some time, as he would doubtless have to write not only to Shanghai but also to New York. “Not too long!” Feng cried, as if China’s future hung on Treadup’s prompt decision. Tears came into the burly Marshal’s eyes on their parting.
IN “SEARCH” Treadup claims that he had from the first no intention whatsoever of accepting Feng’s invitation—or his “bribe” of half a million dollars (Mex)—but his letters to David Liu in Shanghai and Todd in New York, while not pushing for approval, simply reported the proposal in its most modest terms—that Marshal Feng wanted Treadup to “work for his army.” He did add that “the Christian movement should give as much assistance as possible to Feng.”
There are hints in Treadup’s diary that Feng had subtly undermined his elation over the literacy work around Paoting, by suggesting that it was not nearly important enough work for Treadup to be doing. Probably much more significant for David’s future were the reminders of Feng’s efforts to train his men for trades, and his avowal that God had not put the Chinese on this earth in order to be poor all their lives—the implication being that reading and writing would never in themselves cure poverty. In coming months David was to give much pained thought to that stark conclusion.
Todd from New York, believing from such a distance that anyone called “the Christian General” should be given all possible help, was inclined to support Feng’s proposal; but by the time Todd’s letter arrived, David Liu had already brusquely vetoed it.
Before Treadup had a chance to visit the Marshal again to decline, all China was shaken by a tragic event in Shanghai. A family venture of the Treadups, a “newspaper” which they called The Shepherd and sent to David’s supporters and other friends in the States, gave news of it.
| “Tackling the Bull by the Horns” | ||
| THE SHEPHERD | ||
| Paoting | June 1925 |
| When Issued | No Promises | Price: Six Minutes |
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Editor-in-Chief: David Treadup Managing the Editor: Emily Treadup |
Printer’s Devil: Philip Treadup |
|
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Stamp Licker: Paul Treadup |
As a “Mass Education Number” of this sheet was fermenting in our editorial brain, an event took place in Shanghai that has set all China aflame. We must try to report it to our constituency. Bear with us if this issue is less light-hearted than the usual baa-ings herein of “sheep.”
Your editor was summoned to a conference of “Y” secretaries in Shanghai after the said event, and had an on-the-spot account of it from General Secretary David Y. S. Liu, who played a major role in keeping heads cool.
Here is what happened. During the spring, there was a strike in a Japanese cotton mill. In a fracas a Chinese worker was killed. At his funeral a few days later a band of student activists got in a fight with some Sikhs of the Municipal Police, and a few were arrested. Then they tried what students all over the world try—a street demonstration. It was on May 30. They had banners: “Down With Imperialism,” “We Are the Student Brigade,” “Innocent Students Are in Jail.” They also had dodgers to distribute, and they harangued on street corners.
The police started arresting them on Nanking Road. A large crowd gathered. Traffic was blocked. The Sikhs tried to clear the street, using their batons. The sight of bloody faces infuriated the crowd. It became unruly and surged toward the police station.
A British Police Inspector warned the crowd to draw back or be fired upon. It pressed on. The Briton then gave the fatal command. Some say nine were killed, some say twelve. An equally vague number were badly wounded.
All China caught fire like a dry forest. The very next morning, the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce called a general strike; the Municipal Council retaliated by declaring martial law. The city became like an armed camp, with volunteer militia, marines of several nationalities, and armed police patrolling the streets.
The Shot Heard Round the World at Concord Bridge could not have caused a greater sensation in our country than these shots of folly did in China. By June 2 the students of Paoting were already shouting through the streets, with vitriolic rhetoric and dodgers. There began a campaign of bill posting all over the city, pictures of students killed at Shanghai, cartoons of John Bull and the Samurai, drawings of Sikh policemen with guns in their hands standing over dead students. These latter have been liberally sprinkled with red ink for blood.
There is an explosion of nationalistic feeling. It seems every man, woman, and child is talking about “my country.” The outcries are: End business exploitation, cancel extraterritorial rights for foreign “invaders,” and stop all Christian “meddling.”
Page 2 (in case you are still with us)
All mission work in China is being tried as in a furnace. Christianity is “the foreigner’s religion” and “a tool of imperialistic governments.” A young man in the next compound, who had been a big help to me in the literacy campaign, came to me the other day with a book by Fosdick I had lent him, saying, “I can’t read this stuff anymore. You are trying to denationalize me.” I am glad to say that the villagers whom we are teaching have shown no such feelings. They greet me still with signs of great affection. One village chief took me aside to say confidentially that when “they” started killing foreigners, he would hide me behind a false wall he had built to secure his valuables from bandits!
The greatest anger is against the British, and the English missionaries have been called some ugly names. This is too bad. Great Britain has made huge grave errors in China, but many of her Christian missionaries have been heroically self-sacrificing, and have rendered a wonderful service.
Two American missionaries testified in the Shanghai investigation that the shooting had been unnecessary, so we are being treated with the usual Chinese courtesy. But I noticed that of the 20 warships in the Whangpoo, 13 were American!
There is no doubt that there has been a strong Bolshevik influence on the entire movement—for as usual a national paroxism has been dubbed a “movement,” this being the May 30th Movement. The anti-Christian impulse has come from Soviet Russian influence on the very nationalistic party of Sun Yat-sen, the Kuomintang as it is called. Much is being said in the business community these days about China going over to bolshevism and allying itself with Russia. If she does, it will only be because she gets more just, friendly, and equitable treatment from the Soviet government than she does from the professedly Christian governments in the West. Russia has given back to China her concessions in the treaty ports. Russia has given up extraterritorial rights. The Chinese feel that the Russians treat them as equals.
Sun Yat-sen, as you may have heard, has just died. It is quite likely that Sun will exert an even greater influence dead than he did alive. Whatever was Christian in him died some time ago, but he stands for an awakening China as no one else has done. People in the south are talking about a young officer who with Russian help developed the Whampoa Military Academy and who wears Dr. Sun’s mantle, named Chiang Kai-shek.
Remember the date May 30th, 1925. The “Storm Dragon” has been let loose in China. We shall need all our patience and brotherliness and Christianity to deal with it. China is beginning to find herself. If our calling means anything, we must help.
* * *
Next month: MASS EDUCATION!!!!!
IN LATE JUNE, after his return from the meetings David Liu had called in Shanghai, Treadup went to Peking to decline Marshal Feng’s invitation. He got a surprise. There was no hug this time. The broad bearded face was a palimpsest: its kindly expression of a “Christian brother” was written on top of barely erased tracings of severity and even hostility. Treadup had agonized over how to refuse Feng’s invitation with Chinese-like grace and tact; he could have spared himself the trouble, for Feng gave him no chance to speak at all but launched instead into a baffling harangue, during which he breathed not a word about his earlier invitation to Treadup—nor, for that matter, about what had happened in Shanghai on May 30.
“British journalists,” he said, according to Treadup’s diary,
“have suddenly started branding me as pro-Soviet. They say I’m bolshevizing my army. As Britishers they have reason to want to becloud the real issue. I have Japanese, Italian, and Russian military advisers—more Russians, as it happens, because there are more available. Russia has been foremost in willingness to recognize and aid China’s attempts to recover her lost nation. We are not interested in criticism by nations that have shown themselves unwilling to do as much. They will call anyone Bolshevik who tries sanely to advance the welfare of the masses. China’s faith in evolutionary reform on patterns devised by foreigners is dead. We Chinese must demand the complete and unconditional restoration of national birthrights. When this is assured there will be time enough to talk details of readjustment. We appreciate America’s traditional friendship, but right now we are waiting to see whether America, with her relatively small material interests in China, intends to throw her influence toward us or to become the tool of others who want to keep the trade advantages they got by force and by unfair treaties.”
A later entry, when Treadup had gone home to Paoting:
I felt as if it were a case of mistaken identity. He seemed to be shouting to somebody else!—not to his old friend me!—to a member of the United States diplomatic service, maybe. But I know he knew what he was doing. By poking around a little, I found out he had appointed a Chinese educator two weeks ago to the post he had “offered” me. How strange it was to get such a strong whiff—like too much garlic on a breath—of the crafty shiftiness so many Chinese have been accusing him of. The way the May 30th Movement caught on must have made him see that Sun’s people have been picking up strength among those masses he talks about. What our lord Jesus needs most, when it comes to “Christian” Chinese leaders, is a good supply of anchors.
THE BOBOLINK’S song went flat. Treadup’s Shanghai visit and Marshal Feng’s strange outburst worked on his nerves. Some rather daunting difficulties had been turning up in the villages. Because of recent floods, the countryside was suffering from a near famine. In the cold weather villagers had not been able to afford charcoal to heat the temple anterooms or rooms in private houses where classes met. Treadup was having to raise “brazier money” and “scholarship funds” from rich Chinese, because David Liu in Shanghai had been writing him stern letters about how badly he had run over the budget for his experiment, when he had built and equipped his compound.
He was troubled by how hard it was to enlist women in the classes, and to keep them when they did join. He could find no women to teach, and many villagers were opposed to mixed classes of men and women.
Most disturbing of all was the May 30th Movement. “I grind my teeth at being dubbed a running dog of imperialism,” he wrote in his diary. “I love China! It is my second country!” One night he sat down and drafted a
STATEMENT OF CHINESE AND FOREIGN CHRISTIANS IN PAOTING
We have learned with profound regret of the recent drastic treatment of Chinese by certain of the British and Japanese in Shanghai. We believe that the present crisis is due to deep-seated causes such as:
1. Frequent foreign aggression on Chinese territory.
2. Deep Chinese dissatisfaction with the present continued application of unequal treaties that were forcibly arranged with China as a result of wars. Conditions having greatly changed, treaties should be accordingly revised.
3. The extraterritorial rights of foreigners in China, with no similar reciprocal rights for Chinese in foreign countries, should be discontinued.
“Have become a door-to-door canvasser, just as if I were earning my way through college,” the diary reports. We have no way of knowing whether Treadup actually knocked on Dr. Cowley’s door with his statement in his hand, but it is clear that the old churl was soon rousing whomever he could to violent opposition to the Treadup paper. The diary reports that Dr. Cowley’s cry was: “A citizen cannot give up his rights! How far do you think our cause would have gotten without these rights? They have been God’s way of opening up the country to his servants!” Cowley got strong support from the foreign and Chinese Christian businessmen in Paoting, and from a few fundamentalist missionaries in the area. His group began circulating a counterstatement, in the form of a cablegram to Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg opposing treaty revision and asserting that it was not the unequal treaties that were causing the present troubles but rather “the long-unsettled political conditions in this country aggravated by propaganda of the Moscow Third International.”
Once again, as in the days of the Todd tour, Treadup could take satisfaction in a scorecard, but this time his gloating was rueful:
I have harvested 47 signatures. Dr. C. has 12. What a tragedy to be divided in the face of such needs and opportunities! How much longer are some of us going to attempt to make Christianity primarily a system of belief rather than a way of life?
ROWING AGAINST A GALE
ONCE IN THE DEAD of a moonlit night he leaped out of bed and stood like a dim ghost in his pajamas in the middle of the bedroom.
Emily stirred and groaned. “Are you ill, Mr. Treadup?”
David said very loudly, “No! No! I have to find Inventor Wang!”
He had had a dream of a monstrous irrigation pump, as big as a house, made of bamboo poles and cardboard, held together by “red ropes which seemed to be alive, they squirmed.” From an animal mouth—“like a dog’s”—the pump belched out water onto an expanse of parched fields that stretched to the horizon. Waking in a sweat, he had a sharp memory of the man in Shanghai with all his models of crude but ingenious labor-saving devices for the countryside. Wang had come from a village near Tientsin! David suddenly burned with a need to bring him to Paoting.
“Can it wait until morning?” Emily asked.
It had to. “I crawled back in bed,” Treadup wrote,
but I didn’t sleep another wink. I don’t know when I have experienced such a feeling of urgency. This last trip to Johnny Wu has upset me.
THE TRIP to which he referred had been a visit to Wu in Peking a few days before.
We sat in that little cooped-up office in Madame Shen’s palatial grounds, and Johnny—there was a sheet of perspiration like a gleam of varnish on that wide plank he has for a forehead, he was so exalted—told me about his new great plan. Johnny is unstoppable. He turns inches into miles and thinks them too short.
Johnny told David that he had decided to conduct an experiment far more ambitious than anything Treadup had even dreamed of—a large-scale rural-education program in one entire administrative district, corresponding to an American county, with its main seat less than fifty miles from Paoting. Wu’s colleague Peter Ma was to take charge in Menghsien, a district comprising ten towns and 443 villages, with a total population of seventy thousand families, probably four hundred thousand persons all told.
I was bowled over. The audacity of this dream was not just a matter of scale. Johnny wants to do much more than wipe out illiteracy in the ‘hsien.’ He wants to help that whole district achieve a decent level of literacy, yes, but also of order, of modern agricultural efficiency, of material prosperity, and of social well-being—wants to make it a shining model for the rest of the country. He wants no less than to change China by example.
What had upset Treadup in Wu’s bold plan was the inference from it that universal literacy would only be a beginning. The whole of the peasant’s life needed reform. Treadup knew he lacked the resources to imitate, even on a very small scale, such a vaulting undertaking. He did not have the skills to help “his” villagers develop better farming methods, more viable social patterns. He could help them to help themselves, of course, by teaching them to read and write. But as to that, what Marshal Feng had said about his wasting his time teaching in a handful of villages had got under his skin. Even Johnny Wu’s incandescent faith in him did not seem to help. The sense he had been having lately of his own great worth had suddenly gone flat. One of old man Cowley’s favorite epithets to hurl at Treadup had recently been “naive”; it took Johnny Wu’s wide vision of China’s needs to make David feel the sting of that word.
TREADUP spent almost the entire day after his sleepless night hunting through boxes and boxes of papers for the scrap on which he had written down the name of the village where Inventor Wang lived, and the directions to reach it. He did not find it. He wrote a long letter to his dear friend Mr. Lin at Peikai University in Tientsin, describing Inventor Wang’s devices and asking Lin to inquire among his students and among missionaries who covered the countryside, to attempt to discover the man. The diary:
Frustrating day. James B. Todd tried, when recruiting me as a volunteer for this field, to teach me BE ORDERLY IN RECORD KEEPING. Always in too much of a hurry! I just throw things in a drawer and run off to the next thing!
MR. LIN’S answer, which came a few days later, added to David’s distress. It barely acknowledged Treadup’s request and then launched into what amounted to a nationalistic broadside, with flashes in it of what must have been an old anger. Mr. Lin was sharply critical about the way missionaries had clung to their control of Christian institutions. They had such pride in what they had built, Mr. Lin wrote, that they were afraid to turn it over to Chinese, and what was more, they “loved position and power.” And the Chinese “had been taught that it was Christian to give and give.”
How sad such a distance from my dear friend, my first and most important Chinese friend, makes me. He used to help me believe—really believe—that I was giving something of value to his country.
IN THE FOLLOWING MONTHS, David was “caught in an undertow.” He felt the way he had when he lost his enthusiasm for the lectures, yet they continued to be a smash hit with the audiences. Now, with his confidence in the panacea of literacy undermined, he found his village projects growing faster than ever. The May 30th Movement had swept through the area, but not once in the villages did the fact of Treadup’s being a foreigner even suggest itself.
Wu visited Treadup’s villages in the spring of 1926, and “with kind words leaping off his tongue,” he told David that he was “learning like a child” from what David was doing, particularly from his efforts to follow up with peasants who had completed the course. Wu’s praise “made me feel as if I’d been looking at things cross-eyed—maybe they weren’t so bad.” David became determined to put down his discouragement, redouble his work, and extend it, learning all he could from the pioneering at Menghsien.
The second winter-and-spring of the literacy work was more successful than the first, and by the time the third came around, in the autumn of 1926, he and his growing force of helpers had enlisted all together some twenty thousand students.
EMILY was low. In the fall of 1925, Philip Treadup had applied for a scholarship to Yale for the following year. His father had sentimentally hoped he would go to Syracuse, but the T’ungchow boys seemed to want Yale or Princeton. For Emily, “the sight of that letter going off gave me a frightful pang. He’s still my little boy!” During the next summer she had taken Philip to Tientsin and had embarked him on a ship for Tokyo, where he would transfer to the S.S. President Cleveland, to sail off into the big world.
She was doing her best to console herself in a new vocation, as a teacher and mother-of-lost-children in the boarding school for seventy orphan girls that the Congregationalists had established in their compound. In the dormitory, which had thirteen rooms, with five or six girls in each, Emily felt, as she wrote home, “nourished to the depths of my soul by the responsiveness of those sweet children. You cannot imagine what extra measure God has given to Chinese children. They are purely and simply angels.” Still, she obviously felt, they were not a fair exchange for her own lost angel.
In Paoting the May 30th Movement had stirred up a hostility against foreigners which even beggars had begun to express. Street urchins hung about the gate of the Association compound, and when Absolom and Paul Treadup went out, these ragged Chinese children, not to be listed among the angels, shouted curses at them.
“IT WAS in 1926 or 1927,” Treadup wrote in “Search,”
that I first began to realize that I was caught up in vast forces—world currents—cataclysms of history—which were to overwhelm the puny efforts of one small person. I felt that I had been on the right track, and that I was making, for what it was worth, a Christian “contribution,” but now one tidal wave after another seemed to come along and crush everything in its path. I remember that period as being one in which I felt as if I were rowing into the teeth of a gale.
China was in chaos. Devastating power struggles were still going on. In the north Wu P’ei-fu had licked his wounds and joined his former enemy Chang Tso-lin, and together they drove Feng out of Peking. As warfare swirled near Paoting, swarms of refugees forgot their antiforeign feelings and crammed the Treadups’ and other foreign compounds; some of the local people who had been most vehemently anti-Christian a few months before volunteered to help.
Meanwhile Chiang Kai-shek with the Kuomintang armies in the south had begun a “Nationalist Revolutionary Expedition” to “liberate” China from warlords and foreigners alike. At the turn of the year into 1927 the left-wing Nationalist troops did the unthinkable—seized the British Concession in Hankow. The response of the foreign powers fanned the flames. Britain embarked twenty thousand crack troops from England to defend Shanghai. In that city dark-complected Punjabi troops put on a show of force which was a perfect display of the swank of imperialism, parading through the streets to the strains of bagpipes. Treadup wrote to brother Paul:
I got a letter from Hank Burrell in Shanghai the other day in which he said, among other things, “Today I was thrilled to see twelve hundred American Marines march through the city. Their splendid bearing and energetic step and fine form filled me with pride and emotion. The band went ahead, and when the bright silk American flag went by it surely looked a lovely sight.” I say: Bravado is one thing, and all very well, but those 1,200 are up against 400,000,000 Chinese. This is not just civil war. It is the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, and the Renaissance, all taking place at one and the same time. Most foreigners—even some of our finest Men of God—have a squint in their eyes these days and can’t see what’s going on right around them.
MEN OF GOD—those who saw clearly and those who did not—were living in bad times. The Y.M.C.A. was faltering. Chiang was less and less able to control the Communist wing of the Kuomintang, and as the southern armies rapidly swept northward, left-wing troops seized or looted Y.M.C.A. buildings in Nanchang, Kienning, Foochow. In Nanchang the troops expressed their contempt for the Christians by stabling their horses in the Association building. In all the cities, the political uncertainty and the surge of antiforeign and anti-Christian agitation were scaring off prosperous supporters of the Y.M.C.A., and fund drives were failing so badly that the Association could no longer pay the salaries of its Chinese secretaries and staffs. David Liu shared with Treadup and others a letter he had written Blackton in New York, in which he said: “A number of our strongest Associations are in life-and-death struggles.”
The surge of anti-Christian propaganda was taking its toll all through the mission field. Word came that hundreds of missionaries were evacuating Szechuan, Hunan, and other interior provinces; they had simply given up in discouragement and were going home for good. Many others were choosing not to return to China from furloughs. Old friends of Treadup’s were falling in battle. F. Albert Wood, a companion in the lecture work and a colleague in France, had become convinced that the new leader of the southern armies, Chiang Kai-shek, intended to blindfold him, put him against a wall, and execute him with a machine gun; he had been sent home under medical care. During famine relief work in backcountry Roscoe Hersey had come down with a form of encephalitis that was developing a sequel of Parkinson’s disease, and he was having to go home.
The home picture was not good, either. Letters from brother Paul were telling David that young Americans were staying away from church in droves; the auto, the radio, and the movies were “keeping their minds off the Divine Being.” Magazines brought word of growing hostility to missionaries among intellectuals in the States; anthropologists had convinced them that the dismantling of native customs and religions by Western missionaries was bringing about the collapse of moral order in China and elsewhere. Fund raising for missions was getting harder and harder.
TREADUP kept whistling up his spirits. From a letter to Todd:
The darker the political situation is, the keener is the realization on the part of thinking people of the urgency and importance of uplifting the masses. We are going great guns. This is one of the strange phenomena of this country that puzzles foreigners who daily read such headlines as WAR, OPIUM, ROBBERY, ect. They cannot understand how constructive forces can be operating while political chaos seems to be the order of the day. But they are, thank God!
David Treadup could still be seen, many a morning in early 1927, whirling up a funnel of dust across the countryside with the reckless speed of his Indian motorcycle, scattering hens and scavenger dogs and singing so loudly that his voice could be heard by farmers in the fields even over the roar of the engine.
“THE SECOND TIME I DIED”
THE TRAIN kept stopping. He was in a daze of enthusiasm for what he was about to do. “So many delays,” he wrote in his diary, never asking himself the reason for them. And: “Train seems to stand in stations forever.” And: “Swarms of peddlers selling sugared apples, malt candy, roasted chestnuts to soldiers on troop trains.”
Treadup arrived in Nanking on the morning of Friday, March 18. The train was nearly forty hours late. He was serene. One day was like another. He was God’s deputy on an errand for China. He had wired ahead to a physics professor at Nanking University, E. K. Johns, whose acquaintance he had made on his lecture tours, asking for a bed. Hiring two rickshas, one for himself and one for his valise, he made his way to the campus. It turned out that the Johnses’ house had been crowded the night before—and still was—with a missionary family recently downriver from Szechuan, so Treadup had to be put up in a university dormitory. He didn’t mind. “Fine little room,” the diary noted. “Solitary prayers, then off to see the scholars.”
YEARS LATER, when he wrote “Search,” Treadup recalled his trip to Nanking as “one of the most foolhardy boners of my life.”
During one of his periodic visits to Peking to consult with Johnny Wu, his dynamic friend had told him that three years’ experience in the field had made Wu’s literacy people realize that the original bank of characters they were using in their teaching had been selected from literature, rather than from life. Many more words were needed that bore on the humble, everyday doings of ordinary people. “I had in some dim way noticed this myself—I’d begun scribbling lists of words farmers used that were not in the thousand-character text.” Wu said that a team of ten men at National Southeastern University, in Nanking, led by the two American-educated scholars, C. H. Chu and Wellington Ts’ao, who had helped draw up the basic thousand-character text used in mass-education teaching, were now back at work, trying to find a true “people’s vocabulary.” When Treadup learned of this research, his old urge to be at the center of things had taken hold of him, and on an ill-considered prompting he had dashed off to Nanking with his scribbled lists in his pockets, to make the farmers’ case for the inclusion of country words.
In the luxury of his generous impulse, two glaring errors:
He had failed to ask Wu’s permission to make the trip. “How could I have been so remiss?” he asked himself in “Search.”
This was Johnny’s show. All those years we had been talking devolution—you don’t make grabs for the torch you’ve handed on—and certainly not for a torch that wasn’t yours to begin with. I was just so keen to get in there and help. O how I regret that blind eagerness of mine. Johnny never quite forgave me. Before that we had been brothers; ever afterward we were cousins.
The second negligence—much more dangerous. In his single-mindedness he had simply cropped out of his picture of the real world all the turmoil of recent months. May 30th might as well never have happened. He had totally ignored the fact that missionaries were being evacuated from the interior to save their lives. He had forgotten what he must have known: that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies were driving northward onto China’s midriff. He was, as he later put it, “stupefied by my love of my work.”
“THE SCHOLARS” were not at Nanking University, the missionary institution where he was staying, but were at Southeastern University, the government college which had no foreign faculty at all. Professors Chu and Ts’ao welcomed Treadup cordially and assigned a young member of their team to go over with him everything they were doing.
The team was analyzing the vocabularies of accounting books, business letters, public notices, official proclamations, contracts, and various other documents having to do with daily dealings, and their thought was that out of approximately six hundred thousand characters not previously analyzed, they would eventually choose about two hundred for coveted places in the final basic vocabulary for mass education. Treadup spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, after church, reviewing the work. He became totally absorbed.
Asked God’s forgiveness for breaking the Sabbath. Told him I was using his day to hasten the establishment of his Republic on Earth, where no one will be illiterate.
ON MONDAY afternoon, Treadup began to argue. He and the two leading scholars were sitting around Wellington Ts’ao’s desk in a room completely lined with exquisitely compartmented lacquered shelves that seemed to have been made to hold jade carvings—horses so light in their swiftness that they would appear to be carried by doves flying along under their hooves; squat tripod urns incised with lotus leaves for the incense of dreams; camels with their heads thrown back shrieking in protest at the limitlessness of the desert. But no, no. On those black shelves were crammed thousands and thousands of untidy little bundles of paper tied with ribbons—each one a packet of words vying for a place in the sun. A scientific study! Dust everywhere! Treadup in his nasal Mandarin was saying, with a merciless disregard for face, that the scholars’ study was too city-oriented, and that two quite different sets of textbooks and readers were really needed, one for city people and the other for peasants. The physical environments and the social and economic needs of the two groups were completely different. Peasants were four-fifths of the population!
There was a rumble of thunder in the distance. To the south? Treadup went right on talking. The two scholars became “fidgety and rather cross.”
Thought they were riled up with disagreement with what I was saying, so I got peppery. They broke in. Said we were hearing artillery fire. Southern troops approaching. Said I’d better get back over to Nanking University. Everyone expecting frightful looting when the northern troops withdraw. Writing this now in my student room back at the Univ. I had no idea Nanking was in danger. Where have I been? Up in cloud-cuckoo-land is the answer.
NOW “ANXIOUS to have my feet planted on terra firma,” he went to Professor Johns’s house and asked the good man to tell him what in the world was going on.
Johns was a bald, frail-looking, gentle-mannered professor of applied physics who after twenty-five years in China had become Chinese in every respect, it seemed, except for the pallor of his skin, the lack of acanthic folds in his eyelids, and the sharpness of his small nose, which was pinched by octagonal gold-rimmed spectacles. With sweet patience, he broke off the work he was doing—hiding the family’s household goods, against the expected looting—and sat down in his living room with Treadup to serve him tea and tell him all he knew. Shanghai had been taken by the Nationalists a few days before. They were sweeping everything before them. No one expected the northerners to be able to hold out at Nanking…. While they were talking, Mrs. Johns came in, a big-boned and strong-voiced lady, and insisted that Mr. Treadup move and stay with them overnight; the dorms would surely be ransacked; he could sleep on the very divan on which he was now sitting. Treadup accepted with pleasure and went for his things.
AT ABOUT ONE O’CLOCK that night, a United States Marine private knocked at the Johnses’ gate. Treadup, who in the living room was nearest, went to answer. The Marine said an order had come to evacuate all American women and children to the gunboats in the river at six thirty in the morning. Treadup roused the house. Mrs. Johns, her two children, the Szechuan missionary’s wife, and her three quite small ones all rode to the bund in rickshas which David had walked out to round up—for even in the haunch of a night of danger, dozens of half-starved ricksha men could be found slumped on the footrests of their vehicles, dozing, hoping for late fares.
Mrs. Johns carried with her the family’s table silver.
ON TUESDAY, Treadup “felt it my duty” to check in at the city Y.M.C.A. building. Nanking’s Fraternal Secretary, Appleton Sills, was overjoyed to have such a powerful-looking Association man “drop out of the sky,” as he put it. Everyone expected that night to be the bad one. The artillery fire was much closer to the city, and even rifle fusillades could be heard. It was planned to lock the city gates at dusk, but there were doubtless already many fleeing northern troops inside the walls, under little or no control, with weapons still in their hands, and, as always during a retreat, the routed troops were surely going to console themselves for their cowardice by stripping the lost place clean. Would Treadup be willing to join Sills at the Y building? The presence of foreigners—and one of them, especially, so big—would protect both the property and the Chinese secretaries, who lived there.
Treadup was delighted to be of use.
That night, however, brought an anticlimax. Because of the locked gates, most of the northern troops had to skirt the city, and those inside the walls retreated, after all, in good order.
WEDNESDAY NIGHT. Sills and Treadup were keeping watch and watch, four hours each, the off-duty man sleeping upstairs in a room with one of the Chinese secretaries. Shortly after three o’clock in the morning, Treadup was on station at an open window of the lobby. Beside him was Y. L. Ch’ien, the Chinese General Secretary. Two younger men who had been helping with refugee work were out at the grillework front gate, which was locked. Bands of Nationalist soldiers began passing. One group, including some officers, stopped and talked with the refugee workers. Suddenly Treadup heard a shout: “Chi tu chiao! Chi tu chiao! Christians! Christians!” Then rifle shots. The young men, who had obviously been threatened, unlocked the gates. The soldiers poured in, firing warning rounds into the air.
Treadup hustled Ch’ien off upstairs. A group of soldiers gathered around Treadup, and one, who took the lead, aimed a pistol at the big foreigner’s head while others began to reach into his pockets. Treadup slapped off the hands. The man with the pistol put the muzzle against Treadup’s forehead and demanded money. Treadup took his passport from his breast pocket and showed it to the talker. The man ignored it and shouted for money. Treadup had on his person two silver dollars and some small change, and he slowly dug the money out and handed it over. The man cursed at the small change and threw it on the floor. He began screaming that he was going to kill this yang kwei-tzu, this foreign devil.
I sensed that he meant what he was saying. I reached in my fob pocket and pulled out my watch—Em’s watch, really, which I gave her for a wedding present, mine’s broken and I had borrowed hers for the trip. It is one of my foibles that I need to know what time it is, even when I don’t know what to do with my time. The man snatched the watch but was still calling out his threats. He was a madman—a lot of political talk mixed in. The barrel of the pistol was hard against my temple. It was like a wet finger. He was more nervous than I was, the finger trembled. I will tell the truth: I felt absentminded, as if my brains had already been blown out. I was waiting for the wonder embedded in my fear. And then he did pull the trigger—the thing misfired. Just a click. He was furious and began scrabbling to get out the clip to put another in, but the men all ran upstairs and he finally went after them. I had the most delicious feeling of being under a great soft wing lined with down. Or I was at breast. This was the second time I died.
So he ran upstairs to protect Ch’ien and the other Chinese staff people. Up in the bedroom area the soldiers had already stripped the Chinese staff of their money, rings, watches, and spectacles (seeing this last Treadup quickly slipped his own glasses off and folded them into a shirt pocket). Sills was nowhere to be seen. The soldiers were now bullying the staff—nudging them with the butts of guns, threatening to shoot them—for being “foreigners’ slaves” as Christians. As Treadup stepped forward to try to calm them down, one of them, who appeared to be an officer, began shouting at the Chinese staff men, “Why are you trying to protect foreigners here? What is this foreigner doing here?” And, turning to Treadup: “Get out! Get out!”
At that, realizing that the whole concept of protection had been turned upside down, and seeing the man whose pistol had misfired approaching him again, holding the weapon at aim, so that it seemed he may have reloaded it, Treadup made a decision like that at the waterfall below Kuling when he decided against certain drowning in an attempt to recover Penn Landsdown’s body. He slipped out of the room. He was not followed. He ran down to the refectory kitchen, where there were no soldiers. It was still dark.
Treadup had been in the kitchen only a few minutes when Mr. Ch’ien miraculously appeared with Sills, who whispered that he had been hiding in a clothes closet upstairs. The soldiers were still stamping around above. Ch’ien led the two Americans to a side gate of the Y.M.C.A. compound. There the Association mechanic opened the gate and let the three out, then locked it again. Mr. Ch’ien led the other two through back streets to a police station and then courageously went back to his post at the Y.M.C.A.
With Chinese manners the police expressed regrets to Treadup and Sills for the way they had been treated. They took the two men into their squalid barracks at the back of the station and hid them on two k’angs—earthen beds—behind hanging curtains. Some time later a police officer pulled back Treadup’s curtain and said that he and his men were themselves loyal to the northerners; the invading troops were from Hunan—the most xenophobic province, Mao Tse-tung’s native region, and the base of one branch of the Kuomintang Communist wing—and the police were afraid they themselves would be killed when their station was raided. They were therefore going to dress in civilian clothes and disband to their homes before it got too light. The officer said his men would lend the two Americans some Chinese clothes, so they, too, could get away.
From a letter to Emily:
You should have seen me. What a ludicrous sight. They gave me the biggest stuff they could find, but my wrists dangled and my ankles stuck out over my American leather shoes and a winter wool-lined hat with earflaps perched on top of my head like a split pea pod. O I looked like the scarecrow in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ But I just calmly walked along through the streets, as if I were a coolie on my way to work. I was carrying my own clothes in a bundle under my arm. I passed herds of wild soldiers who paid me no mind at all!
Treadup somehow found his way through the unfamiliar city to Professor Johns’s house. It was now getting light. Treadup washed up, had a hearty breakfast, and went to chapel with Dr. Johns.
IN MIDMORNING a loyal servant came running to the Johns house to report that one of the other university houses, the Tranters’, was being ransacked. Dr. Johns knew that because Mrs. Tranter’s elderly mother was infirm and bedridden, Mrs. Tranter had chosen not to be sent off to the gunboats, and the two women were still in their home. At once Johns asked Treadup if he would go with him to see if they could stop the looters and rescue the ladies, and the two set off. Nationalist troops were stationed at the gate of the Tranter house and would not let the two enter. “Dr. Johns was superb,” Treadup wrote. “I would have wanted to bluster, but he spoke softly in his pure Kiangsu dialect, and they finally let us in.” The Tranters were hysterical. Their house had been ripped apart from top to bottom. All three Tranters had been threatened over and over again. The men had tried to steal the old woman’s wedding ring but a swollen knuckle kept it on her finger. From somewhere the men produced a file, and Tranter had had to watch while they sawed away at the ring and got it off.
Seeing that there was nothing to be gained by quarreling with the troops, Dr. Johns persuaded the Tranters to come back to his house. Treadup carried the wasted old lady in his arms like a baby. On the way back the party was accosted by a squad of Nationalists. They searched Treadup’s pockets as he stood with the woman in his arms; they soon found he had been robbed already—his glasses were in his inside pocket, pressed against him by his burden. The men took everything Dr. Johns had, including his glasses.
Then in his mild and sweet tones Dr. Johns begged the soldier who had taken his watch to give it back to him, as something dear to his heart. The soldier gave it to him. Dr. Johns had it in his hand. Another soldier then snatched it, and Dr. Johns politely began the same speech. Apparently enraged by the gentle man’s civility, the second soldier swung his rifle off his shoulder, fired from his hip, and hit Dr. Johns full in the face. Dr. Johns was knocked over backwards by the force of the shot. As the squad ran off, Treadup crouched over the dying man. “It seemed to me that he tried to speak. The face was smashed, but I thought I could see an utterance bubbling out from the bloody mass—forgiveness? ‘They know not what they do’?”
Mr. and Mrs. Tranter carried the old woman the rest of the way. Treadup carried the dead man.
THAT AFTERNOON the small party in the Johns house, behind locked gates and doors, heard heavy firing with big guns. Late at night there were loud knockings at the gate and shouts in English. It was a detail of Marines, rounding up Americans to take them all out to the naval vessels on the river. The Marines told the group that the bombardment had come from American gunboats, covering the evacuation of the U.S. consulate. The Tranters and Treadup were put aboard the gunboat Noa. Treadup persuaded the commanding officer to send him in a gig to one ship after another, to search for Mrs. Johns. He found her on the Preston. He told her about the death of her husband.
ON SATURDAY, on board ship, on the way downriver to Shanghai, David wrote Emily. Part of his letter follows:
We understand that our loyal Christian Chinese—how brave and sacrificial they have been through this whole affair!—buried Dr. Johns in the foreign cemetery yesterday afternoon. As far as we can tell, six foreigners were killed. Miss Gurney (do you remember her from Kuling? the germ lady?) is aboard with us, she has four gunshot wounds, poor thing—and she thought bacteria were going to get her! As we compare stories, we are all sure that the whole ruckus was planned. Officers took part. One bunch of Americans at the university got a long harangue in English by one of them, quoting Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. A doctor at the hospital hid in the coal bin all day Thursday. Upstairs the soldiers taunted the Chinese nurses for working for Christians, then stripped some of them naked on a pretense of searching for valuables. Three were violated—poor creatures, they were all pacifists. I have heard of three cases like mine when people were spared by guns’ misfiring. Dr. Reolin was kept under guard many hours and it was nip and tuck whether they’d shoot him, till the soldiers began poking around the apiary he kept in his backyard. Well one of them must have thought treasure was hidden in those nice white domes, he tipped one over and the bees swarmed and the men all ran for their lives. I forgot to tell you we saw one dignified Englishman walking placidly along in his formal gray felt Gladstone hat and nothing else but his B.V.D.s. The port doctor had his ring finger cut off so one of them could swipe his ring; he was killed later. At least eight residences were burned to the ground. I am all right Em—physically speaking—I am dizzy at times—bewildered. Our task is going to be harder than ever we thought. How can we help our dear Chinese friends stay sane? How can we stay sane ourselves? A lot of foreigners have begun saying again, “All these people understand is gunboats.” I saw with my eyes Dr. Johns go down to death a pure-hearted Christian if there ever was one. See how my hand trembles as I write. I do not dare think about the meaning of these last days and nights.
IN ORDER to reach home in Paoting, Treadup had to go roundabout:
First, by a Japanese ship, the Narayu Maru, from Shanghai to Tsingtao, at the throat of Shantung Province. “Sick as on our honeymoon voyage—sea wasn’t too rough, at that—a different malady—I am at odds with my Lord God.”
Thence, by train northward.
A Commissioner of the Salt Gabelle was on the ship, and his men told him we’d get right thru Tsinan without any trouble on the train. Well we haven’t been going right thru as we’ve been laid off on a siding 4 hours waiting for 5 troop trains to pass us. What is happening to our poor China? There is still hope we can catch the Blue Express out of Tsinan tonight….
THE ELECTION TO STAY
“PRAYER IS not helping me.”
He was finding the return to normalcy—his rounds of the villages on the saddle of his Indian—hard to make. “It’s as if I had new lenses in my eyes.” It was hard now to sustain a passionate belief that the most urgent issue of his days was which handful of country words should make their way into basic literacy texts. David had heard a click at the temple gate of his skull. He had watched a pure man shot in the face five feet away from him. He thought he had actually seen an effort to forgive—or some marvelous but not quite audible afflatus—or perhaps a man’s divine soul—leak out from where the mouth had been, in the bubbling blood. He had had to try to make murder seem an aspect of God’s wisdom to the man’s widow. Even more disturbing, he had felt, as he noted in his diary, “my will crouching in a back room of my brain” as he tried to come to terms not just with the rage in China’s ordeal of renovation but with “something dark in the human mind I have not been aware enough of all these years.”
HE STRUGGLED for balance. Friends in Shanghai had explanations. They leaned piously to Chiang. They said they had had oracles from former Y men, Christians, now in chairs in the Nationalist government. The Communist wing of Chiang’s Nationalist Party had staged the Nanking incident on purpose to discredit Chiang. He would cut this beast’s tail. “The leaders of the Kuomintang,” Keystone wrote Treadup, “are now determined on a complete break with the left wing or Communist faction, even at the expense of delaying indefinitely the completion of their plans for the unification of this country.” In both Shanghai and Nanking, Chiang began executing Communist leaders, scattering them, driving them underground.
David reached for brother Paul. “Sooner or later the Nationalist cause will sweep irresistibly over the whole country,” he wrote. And added:
It is the fault of foreign nations that this Chinese nationalism has such an antiforeign cast, for it is the foreigners who have taught China that the West will listen only to the barking of cannons. I have much sympathy for certain aims in the Communist program, but I cannot forgive what I have seen of their methods, any more than I can forgive Western gunboats. The Communists preach a Utopia in some ways not unlike the Kingdom of God we missionaries preach—but they will kill to bring it to pass. I have never believed that human nature is so vile that the only way to bring in a better world would be with whip and gun. Old Dr. Cowley calls me “naive.” Am I, Paul? Am I? Have I been wrong all this time? I know in my heart that I (and all my colleagues in this painful field) have brought profound and irreversible changes—for the good!—in China, but I also know that the changes have been far too slow and far from enough. Is the blood of sweet gentle Dr. Johns the price we must pay for faster progress? I shudder to think it.
HERE IS the gatekeeper with a telegram. He has put it on a plate, to hand to the mu-shih in style. It is from Austin McDonald, the United States Consul in Peking.
NATIONALIST ADVANCE RAPID ALL U.S. CITIZENS ADVISED EVACUATE PAOTING SOONEST.
Treadup writes Liu in Shanghai:
There seems to be a consensus that the women and children should leave. Our wives don’t like to be hurried away in this fashion: it diminishes them. But Em is packing. Boats are hired to take the party downriver to Tientsin tomorrow. Since as you know we Treadups are overdue for a furlough, Emily is putting things in the trunks so she and the boys could go on ahead to the States if things get worse.
As for the foreign men, I think we agree that we ought to stay by our job. At least until our Chinese friends think we are more of a handicap than an asset. I don’t believe that time has come yet.
WORD CAME BACK after a few days that Emily and the two boys had gone to Peitaiho. Absolom and Paul, oblivious of China’s upheavals, romped on the sand and galloped on donkeys, whipping their hats up and down like cowboys. Most of Emily’s letters to David in those next few weeks have been lost. Did David destroy them? There came a strain between them. David:
A telegram from you today, saying that you are engaging passage for Kobe Apr 26th. I am not quite sure from the wire whether I am included in the passage engaged, but you should know that I must stay on here. The Chinese in the villages all feel I should stay on, and I see no excuse for leaving.
Two days later:
I am not sure I would have been in quite such a hurry as you have been to engage passage, as I still believe this flurry will soon pass over. Make your own decision. I will plan to see you off if you go.
Be sure and leave out my clothes that you took, especially my best gray suit and the palm beach suits. And if you want anything else from here, let me know.
Another letter:
Why hurry away? Everything here is as peaceful as one could ask, and the opportunity for Christian work is certainly the best it has been in three years. Not a letter from Peking or Tientsin to explain what is the frightful spectacle that is driving us from our homes and work. I have just wired you as follows (with translation of code):
UNOOL Is return imperative? Consider with great care.
KUIPL Have concluded not to leave at present.
SNIRN Please cancel passage for
OATRP Mr. D. Treadup.
Again:
I am still in the dark as to what has caused this stampede. I think it’s Austin McDonald, the consul. He has been badgering me and everyone else to leave. He is advising Washington to use an iron fist and in preparation for that he wants all Americans out of the interior. Regarding your sailing, you will have to make the decision. I still feel that the family would be safe under the present conditions right here in Paoting. The Five Powers have handed in their note, and that relieves my mind somewhat. If Hoover is substituted for Kellogg, as the papers suggest may happen, we may expect a more enlightened foreign policy by the United States.
FOR EMILY the summer was heavy. She missed her oldest and dearest, Philip—whose letters from Yale, though mostly cheerful, betrayed (she thought, as she wrote in her diary) a “sense of being an alien in his own country.” In late June Emily fell sick, with what was diagnosed as sprue. A letter from David to Liu in Shanghai reported that “she has been put on a diet of nothing but strawberries and buttermilk, and is making slow progress.”
RUMORS flew around like pigeons with whistles attached to their tailfeathers. That Chiang had retired from public life. That he had married the petal-faced Christian graduate of Wellesley, Soong Mei-ling—daughter of the matron Emily had worked with in the antiopium campaign in Shanghai. New hope for the cause of the cross? But. There was always a but. That the retirement was a sham. That Chiang was back in the field. That he was behind the northward drive. That he was “beheading” the Communist Party. That he had reduced its strength to that number so beloved by the Chinese, for good and for ill: ten thousand. One-fifth of its former strength. So it was said.
Out of sight and earshot:
Just before the Nanking incident, the young Hunanese leader Mao Tse-tung published a Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan, in which he argued that the poor peasant was the main force of the revolution, and demanded confiscation of landlords’ land; but the thesis was rejected by the Russian-dominated Chinese Communist Party Central Committee. In Russia, Stalin won out over Trotsky, and not long afterward Ch’en Tu-hsiu, the co-founder of the Chinese party (who years before had advocated studying the life of Jesus), was accused of being a Trotskyist and was deposed as party secretary. Mao led an ill-considered peasant uprising in Hunan, was defeated, and fled to a mountain stronghold at Chingkangshan.
IN EARLY AUGUST Treadup sent a cablegram in Y.M.C.A. code to Shanghai and New York:
GYXITRPVUV EHEETLYENK.
Translated, this meant: “Departure Mrs. Treadup and sons postponed indefinitely. Communicate this to home center by cable and letter.”
Treadup wrote—perhaps not quite candidly—to Liu, that “after prolonged and very careful consideration of all points involved,” he and his wife had decided together that the family should remain in China. It might not be possible for Emily and the boys to come to Paoting in September, when they left Peitaiho, but they could be housed in Peking or Tientsin. When the situation cleared up, they could return to their station. Meanwhile he would go on with his work and now and then visit his family. “It seemed that it was asking too much of Mrs. Treadup to make her take the two boys home and have the responsibility for all three alone for a year.” The political situation looked more promising. It might be that before many months they could be a united family in Paoting, returning to America then together when the Association was ready to let them have their furlough.
BUT SHOCKS:
A Chinese saying: “When the lips are gone, the teeth feel the draft.” At Paoting the teeth of the north chattered.
The Nationalists surged northward, far faster than anyone had foreseen, in a two-pronged drive. Treadup’s old friend General Feng, now an opportunistic Nationalist, approached from Shantung to the southeast. (A bitter disappointment, Feng. Treadup learned that Z. T. Kao of the Association staff had interviewed him. Feng’s “religion,” if one could give that name to the constant of fanaticism in him, was now based on the “Three People’s Principles” of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. “I have dropped my active Christian evangelistic work in my army because I now have under my command large bodies of Mohammedan troops from Kansu.”) From the west and southwest, at the same time, came Wu P’ei-fu and Yen Hsi-shan, the warlord of the “model province,” Shansi—both now in Chiang’s camp.
In the November edition of The Shepherd, the lead story was:
WAR AGAIN, OR STILL
Fifteen thousand Northern soldiers in disorderly retreat toward Paoting, breaking into small bands, robbing and looting thru “our” villages as they flee from the advancing Nationalist army. Carts and animals taken by the hundreds from the farmers to move men, food, cannon, ammunition. Bridges blown up and repaired by armored trains. Bombs hurled from airplanes manned by Russians. Panic. Valuables hidden. Many fleeing.
What does it all mean? It means that the “blue-sky white sun” banner is closer to Peking than it has ever been. Does it also mean that literacy is of no use whatsoever? We are not yet prepared to jump to that conclusion. We are carrying on.
Not for long. Chang Tso-lin’s northern troops fell back on the environs of Paoting. Treadup was glad that Emily and the children had not yet come home. The local missionaries—all of whom by now had heard Treadup’s full account of the horrors of Nanking—decided that they would do well to gather together in, and try to defend, one compound. They settled on the high-walled Congregationalist compound in the south suburb. By cart and by ricksha Treadup carried there a few valuables: his L. C. Smith typewriter; the family silver, such as it was; “a bit of crockery”; his Mount of Olives Bible; a “few sentimental gewgaws.”
As it turned out, the pattern of Nanking was reversed: It took three days for the retreating northerners to loot the city, while the Nationalists, following on their heels, were restrained and orderly. The Congregationalist compound was never challenged by the looters. But Treadup’s little compound was.
FROM A LETTER to Liu in Shanghai, with a mere carbon to Emily:
The house has been completely wrecked, doors, windows, floors, bathtub ect. ect. all having been torn out. At the same time, everything I had not carted away has been removed, to use a coarse word, stolen. Everything, that is, except my books. Every one of them is still there—all over the floor, of course. Even the gates of the compound have been carried away. I have had the gate bricked up, but people—civilians, now—are still climbing over the wall, looking for hidden treasure, of which of course there is none left. The future? My own feeling is that perhaps the best thing to do would be to pull down the remains of the house and build a cheap bungalow, putting in an Areola heating plant and the usual water fixtures, planning an occupation of, say, 15 years. I am inclined to think it would be the cheapest thing to do in view of the damage done. The longer I live, the more I am inclined to advocate a very small compact house for life in China.
HE WAS on his hands and knees with a heavy heart. His papers, like his books, had been scattered all over the floor of his study. He was picking them up and randomly putting them into boxes. Suddenly he stood up, and out from the belly of his misery came a triumphant Onondagan war whoop. He had found the slip of paper with the name of Inventor Wang’s village, and the directions to get to it from Tientsin. He slipped it under the cover of his Mount of Olives Bible, to be sure he would not mislay it again.
PEKING fell on June 3, 1928. Two months later the bungalow had been built. Emily and the children were back. Shanghai paid for the new house. New York sent one thousand dollars of U.S. money to cover the Treadups’ losses in the looting. Treadup wrote Todd:
First. The loss was fairly and squarely ours and not the Y.M.C.A.’s, and we do not feel that the Association was under obligation to assume any responsibility. We were the ones who went into the foreign field “to spend and be spent” in the service. Your gift takes away the satisfaction of our having given something to the Cause of the Master, and I am going to put the money into our work in the villages. I hope the missionary movement will never become so completely organized and institutionalized that it will no longer be possible for one to go out and follow Paul the Apostle in the matter of self-sacrifice.
Second. In my opinion the International Committee was on right lines when you decided to ask their secretaries, who were looted in Changsha, Nanking, here, and elsewhere, not to seek indemnity by appealing to the American government to secure redress. This is not a time in China when a policy of “an eye for an eye” can do anything but harm.
SOMETHING deeper than the Pauline spirit of sacrifice was operating in David Treadup’s psyche. It was expressed in a self-consciously “written” letter he sent to his old counselor and friend, Farrow Blackton:
Do you ever get away from the feeling of despair, bewilderment, and hopelessness that has come to you as you have made your way down the crowded streets of a great city in China, like Soochow, or Hangchow, or the native city in Shanghai or Tientsin, or our Paoting, and you have felt the woes of that suffering and patient people settle down on your soul, a burden you are helpless to lift?
Can you ever shake off the sinking of heart that has come as you have suddenly turned aside from the beautiful countryside and paused before the hut of a villager, seeing through the open doorway the dire poverty of the hardworking peasant and his family who in return for their labor do not enjoy even a semblance of the comforts which we of America consider essential to animal life, to say nothing of human life?
The petition “Give us this day our daily bread” is, in the Lord’s Prayer, coordinate with “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” I am at this moment very very low in my mind. I had been so excited about teaching all China to read. I think I have to think more about bread. The bread and wine of the Holy Sacrament—flesh and blood. Bread above all. The everyday kingdom of flesh.
DANGEROUS GRAYS
ON A BITTER DRY DAY in January 1929, Treadup, wearing a quilted Chinese coat and a lambswool-lined hat with the earflaps down, boarded an open gondola railway car with his Indian motorcycle and a small bundle of spare underclothes and socks. At the Peking station outside the city wall, he changed trains and went on to Tientsin.
It was late in the day when he arrived there, but he did not pause. He putted right out of town on his motorcycle, southward, on the road toward Tsinan. Soon it was dark. His headlight sought, so that he could avoid, the worst ruts in the sunken dirt road. It was after midnight when he pulled off into a field, lifted his tent and bedroll from the sidecar of the Indian, pitched the canvas, and crawled in. “Night so still and cold I felt as if whole weight of the Cheops pyramid sat up there over me. Hence slept like a mummy.”
He was up at five. He boiled water for tea over a can of Sterno, packed, struck camp, and drove off before the local population had a chance to gather around and gawk.
The sun was not yet on the shoulder of the morning when he pulled into a medium-sized village where the first thing he noticed was a house surrounded by a whitewashed wall made not of mud but of real baked bricks, and crowned with jagged bits of broken glass. Assuming that this was the house of the village headman and main landlord, he knocked at its gate.
He asked the woman who answered whether this was the home of the village chieftain.
She said it was not. The headman lived in the third house down the village street—a relatively modest structure with a mud wall.
Treadup knew he must clear any errand in the village in advance with the headman. Though unpretentious outside, the chief’s house showed signs indoors of a fair degree of prosperity: a lacquered chest, brass bowls, new reed matting. The headman was spending this winter day playing a kind of chess with a friend. He greeted the foreigner cordially and told him that Wang the inventor lived in the “big house.” The foreigner had permission to visit him. He would not be the first foreigner to have done so.
Treadup went back and knocked at the gate in the white wall.
Wang was not gambling over a chessboard. He was out in his yard with a crew of men supervising the construction of a large wooden machine; Treadup remembered at once the little model of the tamping machine for road building that Wang had showed him in Shanghai. Wang recognized his caller, and with great good form invited him into the house, directed his wife—the lady who had answered at the gate earlier—to bring tea, and the pair sat down cross-legged on a spacious k’ang in a room well lit by the sun through paper-paned windows.
Wang was chubby. He was dressed in the long cotton gown of a man who had no need to work with his hands. Yes, he had prospered. He let out his machines, he said, on a system of rental in kind—in grain, mostly—to which no one objected, because he had helped many of the farmers in the vicinity to grow more crops than ever before. His biggest hit was a device which vastly simplified the drawing up of water from a well, for irrigation; but he had also put many other labor-saving machines to work throughout his entire hsien.
“I remembered,” Treadup later wrote,
the burning eyes of this obsessed man when he came to see me in Shanghai. He had wanted me then to help him to help China. And now I saw that he had instead helped himself Unmarred fingernails! He had three little chins—good eating. I despaired of persuading him to help me to help China.
But that was what Treadup had come to do, and he tried. He reminded Inventor Wang that he had been a coolie once, a down-and-out younger brother; and that he had got his start through the literacy program in France. Now in the region around Paoting, and in the whole district of Menghsien, programs of literacy were catching on. But a farmer had come to Treadup recently saying, “I can read and write all the characters in your books, but my stomach still growls just like my neighbor’s who cannot read at all.” It was time to broaden the teaching—to help the farmers to acquire better tools, to make better choice of crops, to learn about rotation of crops and better application of manure, to get better seed, and to learn how to control insects and plant and animal diseases. He wanted Inventor Wang to come to Paoting and help the farmers install labor-saving machines—and without charging for the service. It would be Wang’s gift to the new China.
Treadup watched Wang as he talked. The roles these two had had in Shanghai were now reversed. It was Treadup now who had a rather wild eye, Wang who was the judicious listener. Through an evident gift for mimicry and a habit of doing favors for a price, Wang had picked up a crude version of the manner of a landlord; but now and then the former coolie peeked through the mask of fat. Treadup did his best to speak to the memories in the mind of that more hidden person, to an idealism that had surely been there. Treadup felt a flicker of anger at the memory of having been called a “dupe” on account of this man and his barrowmen friends. This man a Communist? Not now, not now.
A formal reciprocity would have to be established. And it was now Wang who, as Treadup had done in Shanghai, said, “Give me your address and tell me exactly how to reach you.” And, as had been the case in Shanghai, that was that. Treadup left. He did not expect to see Inventor Wang ever again.
TREADUP went to Menghsien, to be tutored himself, and he found the experience discouraging.
There Johnny Wu’s people had already mapped out a program far broader than the basic literacy campaign. Its aim was very high: to develop a model hsien so enviable that all China would want to copy it. The program was to be threefold. Village People’s Schools would carry on the literacy work, and a special farmers’ literature would be developed. An effort would be made to raise the farmers’ economic level by disseminating modern scientific agricultural methods, adapted to local Chinese conditions. And in a third phase, “modern citizenship training” would help to raise the moral level of the farmers.
What Treadup found disheartening was that the Menghsien experiment really might be called “scientific,” while by contrast his own efforts had been, and were bound to stay, intuitive and catch-as-catch-can. Wu had a staff of brilliant mission-schooled and American-educated Chinese rural experts; Treadup had a great deal of willing help, but it was from untrained villagers and country teachers. Some of Wu’s experts, including the Peter Ma who had been in France with Wu, were the first Chinese intellectuals ever to “go down to the people,” living with the farmers under the very conditions they faced—setting a pattern that, much later, Mao Tse-tung adopted as a basic article of faith and, eventually, as a device for punishment.
Treadup realized on this visit that he worked in “his” villages by hunch and by impulse, seeing one thing after another that needed doing, then frantically trying to do it—like his father in the mornings on the farm in Salt Branch; whereas Johnny Wu’s people were gathering hard information that would help them map out the most expeditious and fruitful ways of working.
In a letter about his Menghsien visit, Treadup wrote brother Paul:
The hardest thing to let go of, out here, is the idea that we missionaries have been put here to ‘show the Chinese the way.’ I am having to stomach the converse. You may remember that I’ve often said that Wu was my teacher in France. I am going to have to come back and back to Menghsien to learn the Chinese way. I see a future in which, except for occasional flashes of insight that no one else has had, I will always be an “assistant.” I will be fifty-one in a few weeks. Physically I feel very young and strong, but I suppose I am on the verge of the great slope. I hope as I meander down it I can accept gracefully the role of a marcher in the second rank.
ALL TOO SOON the time came when Absolom had to apply for entrance to college in the States. With his hearing disability, he had not done nearly so well in school as Philip, but Yale admitted him and furthermore gave him a full scholarship. Although Emily took comfort in knowing that he would have an older brother to watch out for him, she thought of him as her wounded chick and dreaded seeing him fly off. Soon, two of the three would be gone; already, during term time, her nest was bare, because both Absolom and Paul were now away at the T’ungchow boarding school.
As so often had been the case in their lives together, all signs of the strain between David and Emily, which had appeared in his letters of the previous spring, now had vanished. David had had his way. Emily had accepted his judgment with that remarkable deep-pool serenity of hers, into which whatever angers she ever felt seemed always to settle, leaving no trace. Her diary entries, sparse in this period, occasionally noted her missing the boys, but otherwise were radiant. For she had thrown her whole self into the compensatory mothering work at the girls’ school. She wrote her younger sister Jane:
How I wish you could have been at our little school yesterday. We had a ball-playing contest. It was an interclass affair, the games played being captain ball and basketball. Excitement ran high when the scores were close. It interests me to see how the girls abandon themselves to the game, not at all caring what happens to their clothes or personal appearance if only they can help make an additional point.
Emily was thrilled by some of the debates the students held during literary exercises on Saturday mornings. The subjects the girls chose showed they were thinking about big problems. Resolved, that the development of China is more dependent on reform measures within the country itself than on more just treatment on the part of foreign nations. Resolved, that the strength of a country is more dependent on the intelligence and good citizenship of the common people than on good officials. How sharply they could speak! This was indeed a “new China.” Emily: “It is no longer considered essential that Chinese girls should modestly hang their heads under all circumstances and keep all their thoughts to themselves.”
TREADUP took a trip to Peiping (for now that Chiang Kai-shek’s government was seated in Nanking, Peking’s name had been changed, from “Northern Capital” to “Northern Peace”) to get some advice from Johnny Wu on his country work. While he was there he decided to drop in at the Association building to see Thomas Gridley, to catch up on news of all his old friends in the Y.
Sitting in Gridley’s office the chatting secretaries heard a slow beat of drums and a mournful blare of trumpets in the street outside—a military procession—a company of soldiers, marching with stiff legs at a strange, formal, funereal pace. Halfway along two men walked with their hands tied behind their backs, one terribly bloodied. “They’re going to have their heads cut off,” Gridley said—then sharply drew in his breath. He had recognized the uninjured man, who, he said, was a graduate of Columbia and the principal of a school that was introducing the Dalton system of teaching to China—“decent chap, didn’t know he was a Red.” The other young man was shouting cant phrases over and over: “Throw off the yoke! Down with oppressors!” His guards tried to silence him by jabbing him in one side of the jaw, then the other, with their bayonets, but his bloody mouth kept screaming his defiance and his shibboleths.
“PICTURE of those two men in my mind day and night,” Treadup wrote in his diary. And another entry: “Have been thinking about Christian martyrs. Annie Gould and all the others, right here in Paoting.”
For some days that memory steeped in his mind. Then he wrote a letter to Todd which was to have a drastic effect on the rest of his life. In part:
It is time to make some general observations. Bear with me.
The present movement in China is a real people’s revolution. It is altogether different from the Revolution of 1911 or any of the subsequent so-called revolutions. Those were waves on an inland lake. This is an oncoming sea tide.
We missionaries are all congratulating ourselves that this is an auspicious time for our Cause. In the Nanking cabinet right now there are ten ministers. Six were educated in American universities—Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Oberlin, California. Seven of them are Christians. Of those seven, two are former Y.M.C.A. secretaries. We very nearly have the government in the palm of our hand!
But remember this: The leaders of the present movement have started something they cannot control They’ve unleashed powers which seem thrilling but they have also already gone to heinous excess. They have stirred desires and aspirations which cannot be satisfied soon, if ever. This means a long period of bitter discontent, striving, and struggle.
Treadup went on here to write of “this epoch of barbaric violence, which an imported Christianity is powerless to tame.” The warlord Chang Tso-lin, he wrote, had refused to sign a secret treaty on Manchuria with the Japanese, and the next day a huge bomb blew up his private car on a train and killed him. Treadup then described the Communist terror in Hunan; “I’ve been told that 20,000 were murdered in cold blood in Changsha alone—probably exaggerated but blood was badly badly shed.”
There are grays here, dangerous grays, and most of our Y.M.C.A. people, particularly our Fraternal Secretaries, see nothing but black and white. They think Nanking, being part Christian, is all good, while the anti-Christian Reds are all bad. But James B!—the Communist terror and the slaughter of Reds by Nanking are equally atrocious. The Christians in the cabinet in Nanking seem totally unmindful of the lesson of the church’s martyrs; they have blood on their own hands. Our boy’s-work secretary in Peiping says that pretend beheadings have become a favorite pastime of Chinese children in their play.
Everyone “on our side” is gloating that the Communists are done with. You must not believe it. They are not yet at work in “my” villages, but several Chinese I have talked with who have come up from the south have told me that a very large majority of the students are still infected by communism of the Bolshevist brand. They are fanatic. Like the early Christians, they are ready to take the sword at the neck for their beliefs.
How should the Y.M.C.A. respond to all this? To me it is very clear. After all the years of our work with the literati and the governing and business classes, who were our sole source of indigenous support, we must face it that the Communists have taught us that we must work—if we really believe in the message of Jesus—for the underprivileged.
Yes, James B. I came out here under the slogan which I think you helped to coin: “Evangelization of the world in this generation.” I would suggest that we now need a new one, no less hard to bring to pass: “For Jesus Christ’s sake, the abolition of poverty in this generation.”
“HUMANIST”
ONE EVENING while Treadup was at supper with Emily, the family’s houseboy Li bent over to the master and whispered that there was a peasant on a loaded cart at the gate who was demanding to see him. Li had tried to send the farmer away, the master was eating, come tomorrow, but the man said he had ridden from a long distance and would not be put off.
Treadup went to the gate. The peasant was seated on the bed of a large two-wheeled Peking cart, with a big load, covered with matting, behind him. He said, “I have come.” Treadup said, “I see you have come, but what do you want?” After a long pause the man said, “Do you remember a man who came to see you in Shanghai with some models of wooden machines?” Wang! Inventor Wang! He was dressed down to look poor. Treadup had not recognized him. He whooped. Wang jumped down from the cart. Treadup invited his guest to come into the house. Li was outraged at the sight of this peasant seated at the master’s dining table, and he set tea before the man looking as if he wished it were steaming donkey urine.
Wang said he would help Treadup in “his” villages on one condition: that Treadup would understand that henceforth the inventor was to live two distinct and different lives, one here, another at home. At home he would be, as usual, Inventor Wang, who manufactured labor-saving machines and rented them out to farmers; here he would be a clever peasant named Sung, who would share with other peasants, at no cost, some good ideas he had had about how to make some machines that would save a great deal of work. For if it ever got back to the farmers to whom Wang was charging rent that in another district he was letting his machines out free, “they would cut me up and feed me to the wild dogs and I would not blame them.”
AND SO a new phase of the work began. Wang became Sung for two weeks of each month. Li had to get used to the idea that this uncouth Chinese person lived from time to time in a guest room in the master’s house. The peasant Sung, the patron Mr. Hsiao, and the big-nose T’ao Tu Hsien-sheng began to visit villages showing the farmers four devices:
• A waterwheel for drawing up well water. This was Wang/Sung’s big item. Its features were a larger rope drum than on the usual waterwheel, so the bucket came up faster, and an automatic bucket spiller, whereas the bucket had formerly had to be dumped by hand. Much friction had been eliminated, so that one instead of two persons could wind it. It irrigated three mou rather than one mou of land, and cost two dollars less than the conventional well wheel.
• A simplified planter. The old-style planters needed the work of three people and a donkey; this one did away with two of the three, and it cost less than the old models.
• An improved harrow, with two sets of clod-breaking teeth, instead of one.
• A more efficient plow, with a guide wheel out front that set the depth of the furrows.
For some reason, even in the villages where Treadup and Mr. Hsiao were well known, the local farmers were suspicious of these devices, shown as full-scale models. Rumors began to circulate, much like those one had heard when they had started their work—that the implements were decoys…conscriptions…taxes…enticements to “eat religion.”
“Sung,” perhaps not altogether disinterestedly, argued that the suspicion was based on the fact that Treadup was offering to let people copy the machines at no charge; such altruism must be devils’ work. But Mr. Hsiao said he knew these people, and the one natural and accepted way to broadcast good ideas was to demonstrate them at the district temple fair, which would soon take place in about a month at a large temple twenty miles from Paoting. The beneficent geomantic influences of the temple would do away with all suspicion.
Mr. Hsiao arranged the necessary permissions. This time Sung set up the waterwheel on an actual well, and he hired three donkeys and three assistants to demonstrate the plow, the harrow, and the planter, on some fallow land he got Treadup to rent adjacent to the temple grounds.
And this time the devices were a sensational success. The farmers, who had brought their best wheat, millet, sorghum, chickens, hogs, and other produce for sale at the fair, actually tried their hands at the waterwheel and the three tools. More than four thousand farmers ground the handle of the waterwheel. Scores of village headmen agreed to let “Sung” and his strange pair of accomplices, the delicate scholar and the enormous foreigner, come to their villages to show their people how to copy the things.
A PERIOD of high heart. Treadup was bursting with ideas. He rushed from village to village putting the ideas to work. It did not matter to him that many of them were borrowed or even stolen from Menghsien. What mattered was that new Chinese energies were being set free, like ten thousand birds from ten thousand cages.
The push for literacy remained at the heart of the work. He formed intervillage alumni associations of the literacy schools and charged them with finding new teachers and starting new schools, and with circulating and using farmers’ readers and a periodical that the Menghsien people were publishing, called The Farmer.
But he also reached into Y.M.C.A. experience and started new undertakings. The temple grounds where the fair had been held became a kind of headquarters for these new experiments, as well as the seat of one of the largest literacy schools. Here Treadup organized a fly-killing campaign. He promoted the planting of trees. He got villages to cooperate in improving the roads that tied them together. He helped women organize Better Homes Clubs. “Just for a lark” Treadup even gave his beloved old gyro lecture a few times. “Well received. On par with a traveling opera or troupe of tumblers and jugglers!”
ONE DAY there came a scratchy and puzzling letter from David Liu. The General Secretary for all China reported that he had had “an extremely disturbing communication” from Todd in New York, asking Liu “what has got into our humanist friend Treadup?”
In “Search,” reviewing this period, Treadup wrote that his single-minded absorption in the details of his village work must have blinded him to the ominous significance of Todd’s code phrase, “our humanist friend.”
I knew very well that to the hard-line fundamentalists, “secular humanist” was just a goat whisker short of “heathen.” Todd was no fundamentalist, but he was saying much more than met my eye. He was saying that if I wanted to substitute the abolition of poverty for evangelization, then I must be more a functionary than a missionary, and a pink one at that.
Treadup was further misled by the fact that David Liu was not concerned with the real meaning of what Todd had written. Liu was furious because Treadup had written a letter to Todd over his, Liu’s, head. He had no interest in the content, only in the insubordination. Treadup had recently had a confidential letter from Burrell in Shanghai telling how difficult Liu had become. He was now “an individualist of the most extreme type, who uses the personal pronoun all the time when talking of Y policy.” He had lost the loyalty of the Chinese staff, and, Burrell wrote, John Y. Hu was on the point of resigning. If he left, the Lecture Bureau would surely fall apart. “I know how dear to your heart the lecture work is—thought you should know about this,” Burrell wrote.
In his busyness, Treadup had put off trying to do anything about this alarming news; now that he himself was on the mat, it was too late. And in his busyness, he was (he was later to realize) too casual in his response to David Liu. He simply sent Liu a copy of his letter to Todd, with a longhand note: “Sorry! Didn’t mean to cause any short circuits.”
HE WAS BUSY. While carrying on work at the temple and making rounds to the villages, he was making periodic trips to Johnny Wu’s headquarters in Peiping and to Menghsien to learn as much as he could about improved methods of using bean cakes, roast cottonseed cakes, night soil with added gypsum, and ripened barn dung for manures; about simple controls for wheat smut and rust, and sorghum and millet smut; and simple ways of killing the most common pests—aphis, wheat fly, cutworm, cotton leaf rollers. And he also began to learn from the Menghsien people about real farm income and living expenses, and about farm tenancy, systems of credit, and marketing arrangements, and about the possibility of forming farmers’ cooperatives.
“Here,” he suddenly wrote in his diary in the midst of his highest good cheer, “I feel as if I had finally walked through the door into reality—and I find I am in a very dark room.”
ALL DURING the summer, reports had been trickling in of yet another extensive famine, in the northwest regions of China. Vast areas of the provinces of Shensi, Kansu, and Suiyuan had been suffering from drought for nearly a year. Word now came of a group of forty small children who had been sold to rich landlords for food by their fathers and had been shipped off toward Peiping to be resold. Somehow some American Board missionaries in the interior had managed to have these children ransomed, and they now arrived in Paoting for care. With help from some Chinese Bible women of the American Board mission, Emily took them on at the school. She wrote home:
They came straggling in. Those who could had walked twenty miles a day for a week. Some of the girls and littlest boys rode in on wheelbarrows. These poor little scarecrows had been living for weeks on a diet of chaff, bean pods, and peanut shells. They are between eight and fifteen.
Dr. Wells examined them, and then with fears, tears, and palpitations, they were stripped of all their clothes and popped into a real porcelain bathtub and given a bath. For most of them it was their first bath—the people of north Shensi and Kansu believe that water is harmful to them—most men in that area bathe all over twice in their lives—at birth and before getting married—hate washing their feet, hands, or faces, and cutting their hair—more pigtails still in that part of China than anywhere else. So! Quite a lot of terrified squealing! Out they came and we wrapped them in a sheet, weighed them, put on hospital clothes way too big for them, and tucked them in bed. Why bed in broad daylight? So we could send their clothes to the basement to be steamed!
The next day, when the strange lady (me) said they could put their clothes on and they found them sweet and clean and sterilized with no little itchy creepy creatures in them, and when they were led over to a yard where there were swings and things to play with, and after they were given all they could eat of ‘chou’ (a millet mush, the main article of diet in this region), cornbread, and vegetables—then they forgot that they had ever been afraid!
TREADUP now received an extremely unpleasant letter from Todd. In part:
Your letter of “observations” is creating some havoc in the International Committee. At your own request, you were put out to pasture after your fine development of the Lecture Department on experimental literacy work under our wing, but reports have come to us that you have spent a large portion of your time on types of work having nothing to do with literacy, work properly under branches of the Chinese National Committee to which you have made no reports, either of plans or of progress.
More serious to some of us is the distinct humanist tone of your letter. One is put in mind of the fact that from the very first, your work in the field has revolved around science. I must put it to you quite firmly that no man can honorably remain in the Y.M.C.A., and the Y.M.C.A. cannot honorably employ any man, who does not have a philosophy of life which has squarely at its center some outside “plus ultra” which we usually call “God,” and a deep conviction that that God has been best revealed to man by the life of Jesus Christ.
The International Committee is having to consider whether it can afford to continue your free-lance work in Paoting, or whether it should recommend to the Chinese National Committee that you be returned to the lecture work….
Treadup was aghast. This from Todd, whose evangelistic meetings in China would have been half empty if it had not been for Treadup’s lectures! Free-lance! “He has slapped me in the face!”—no mention of turning the other cheek. He shot off a one-sentence letter:
Since you have used the phrase “quite firmly,” I must tell you quite firmly that I try every day of my life to be a Christian.
AFTER A FEW DAYS of thought, of prayer, and of talking with Emily, David realized that that had been a foolish and intemperate response, and that if he wanted to continue the village work about which he now cared so much, he would have to rebuild his bridges to both Shanghai and New York. Besides writing long letters to Liu and Todd, describing his work in great detail and giving the best reasons he could for being permitted to continue in it, he asked Johnny Wu, Gridley, Burrell, and Charles Stanton of the American Board Mission in Paoting all to write to both Liu and Todd urging that he be kept on under assignment to the People’s Education Movement.
As it turned out, David Liu, for whatever reasons, very much wanted Treadup to stay in Paoting, and he asserted to Todd in no uncertain terms that it was his prerogative as chairman of the Chinese National Committee to assign fraternal secretaries wherever he wished; and besides, Johnny Wu’s letter to Todd was wonderfully generous to Treadup, and persuasive about the importance of his work to the Christian cause in China. However, no matter what Liu asserted, the fact remained that New York paid Treadup’s salary, the Syracuse backing having faded away over the years, so the issue would have to be settled in the States.
Treadup worked and waited, and at last in mid-July this letter came from Todd:
This will report to you the passage by the International Committee of the following motion:
Moved, that (1) the International Committee authorizes continuation of Mr. Treadup’s salary for a two-year period beyond the end of the current fiscal year; and (2) that inasmuch as Mr. Treadup has been able to give great impetus to the Literacy Movement in North China, the Chinese National Committee’s continued assignment of him to this work in the Paoting area be affirmed; but that (3) he and his family being long overdue for furlough, it is further moved that Mr. Treadup be released for furlough for one year, on the usual terms, beginning August 1, 1929.
I know this will please you. I want to apologize for the high line I took with you in my last. China’s recent turmoil has had us all on the razor’s edge. We all look forward to your return to these shores.
What an outcome! This was an endorsement of sorts—but only two weeks to get ready for furlough: two weeks to try to provide continuity of all that was happening in the villages during a whole year of his absence! To say nothing of only two weeks’ time for Emily to pack, and for David to clear everything with Liu in Shanghai, and to arrange passage. David realized how shrewd the deadline was: There was no time for him to fight off this abrupt removal.
MISSPELLED on the passenger list of the S.S. President Harding were “Mr. and Mrs. Tredup & 2 sons.” Those four were on the high seas when the New York Stock Exchange crashed.
REAPPRAISAL
THE LONG TRAIN snaked through the Rockies. Sitting in the backwards-riding seat of the section he shared with Emily, David looked back now and then out his window and saw what appeared to be an endless caterpillar of Canadian Pacific Railway Pullman cars working around a broad curve, the illusion of infinitude resting in his never being able to see the observation car at the very rear; the great segmented metal worm of progress was forever coming out of some tunnel or emerging from a deep cleft of granite and gneiss beside a white-water torrent.
“I see the track over the grim and majestic mountains, winding through these gorges and threading these tunnels,” David wrote in his diary,
as standing for my travails. What back-breaking work it must have been to lay down so many ties and pin onto them, spike by spike, all these miles and miles of steel ribbon. Yes. I’ve been working on the railroad all the live-long day.
Absolom and Paul, in the section across the car, were quarreling over a card game called Authors. From time to time the train plunged into a tunnel; the car filled with sooty smoke; the boys paused in their arguing, then resumed as soon as the train burst out into the light again.
Emily stood up, crossed the aisle, and murmured to them. They quieted down. Emily sat again.
“I don’t like the word humanist,” David said.
Emily did not reply; stolid silence was her enigmatic answer.
IT IS still dark. A lodge at Lake Louise, where the family has taken the tickets’ privilege of an overnight stay. Treadup, who has not slept well, gets up, dresses himself in stealth, and sneaks out for a lakeside walk. First light reveals through evergreen boughs a glassy surface. Then, as morning seeps across the arch of heaven over the mountains, a magic light works its way under the surface, and David can see, even from the wild path in the woods, clean rocks deep down. After China’s rivers this pure water stuns him. His heart quickens—the trapper in his ancestry is alert. He hears a slapping sound. His feet take silent steps on the forest floor; he pushes branches apart. Two beavers are not twenty feet away. One is on watch, the other is felling a stout sapling. Swift, tireless work. Hurry! Cut it up! Swim the branches to the dam! Back again! Chop more! David is reverent. He watches a long time; the beavers never rest. From his diary, that night: “I am so self-absorbed. Brother animal, how does it feel to be me?”
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LIMITED creeps into Grand Central Terminal. David Treadup and the two sons carry the handbags along what seems a mile of platform; trunks will be delivered later. Emily is wearing a delicate veil, robin’s-egg blue, wrapped over a hat of white feathers. All across a continent’s span she has obviously been daydreaming about her first encounter with Philip; she has not seen him for two years. It is almost time for the new fall term to begin at New Haven, and she will have to give up Absolom then, too.
Four Treadups pass through the gate to the upper level. There stands Philip. He is wearing a jaunty cloth cap and white buckskin shoes. Emily lifts her arms to raise the veil for a kiss, long anticipated. But Philip, evidently not wanting to be taken for a child, holds back; he takes his cap off and shakes her hand. He shakes hands all round.
“We needn’t take a cab,” he says. “We have enough soldiers to carry the valises.” He is amazed at how Paul has grown. “What a horse!” he says. “Well, Abbo,” he says, “off to New Haven, what? Wait and see. It’s just swell.”
On the Madison Avenue sidewalk, he teams with the brothers, playfully jostling Paul.
“Quit it,” Paul says, who thinks he has been unfairly given the heaviest bag.
Philip has scarcely looked at Emily. She has lowered her veil. She says, “What ever has happened to your complexion, Phil? Are you eating what you should?”
“For heaven’s sake, Mother!” Philip says.
HERE WAS the encounter David Treadup had been rehearsing in his mind halfway around the globe. Emily had been hearing him grinding his teeth at night. He had tried various approaches on her; she had not allowed him to lean on her, had said, “Whatever you think is wisest, David.” Could an angry man pray to an angry God to be freed of his anger, so he could deal coolly with his danger? The hardest thing was to know his own mind. He rose in the elevator at 347 Madison Avenue, his broad forehead as wet as if he had been rowing a scull. Busy, busy James B. Todd had put him off for two days and now kept him waiting in the International Committee anteroom for three-quarters of an hour.
At last. The two huge men sat opposite each other in a sun-lit office. Todd, now sixty-four, was still blond and smooth-faced; such wrinkles as he had were fine, like the tiny cracks in dried enamel. “He had the power if not the glory,” Treadup wrote later. Treadup was fifty-one; there were no gray hairs among the brown, and his leathery skin and flaring mustaches “must have made me seem crude and Kiplingesque—a subaltern who had lost his troops in a foolhardy charge—quite out of his depth in this spiffy homeside H.Q. with its mahogany bookcases and broad desk that was too tidy, much too tidy.”
“Well, old boy,” Todd said. “Welcome home.”
Treadup later wrote that he did not like the idea of Todd’s being comradely. He wanted a dressing down—harsh words to react against with strong words of his own. Instead he was getting mush. Good trip home? How was the crossing—don’t we remember you used to suffer from mal de mer? That royal “we”! A winner’s picture drawn of an invalid on the high seas; David remembered Todd snorting down the gangway at Hong Kong that time, just having ridden out a typhoon as if it were a tame saddle pony. He decided Todd had never forgiven him for attracting the bigger crowds during their great tour. Suddenly he could not contain himself and burst out with “a line I had intended to keep for much later.”
“I don’t like the word humanist,” he said.
“Oh?” Not ready for that, yet.
“Human, yes. All too. It’s that extra syllable. What’s that supposed to convey?”
Todd cleared the bassoon throat. “We’re having to go through a reappraisal these days, of our entire effort in China. All along the line. You know, David, better than I do, how volatile everything is out there in the field.”
From “Search”:
So he had me at a disadvantage right off the bat. He was going to be analytical. Havoc of warlords ect., ect. He was too full of love to face me out. The International Committee ect., ect…. Soon he actually began to praise me: wonderful pioneering of the lecture program, then on top of that the literacy work. “Your contribution has been unique,” he said. Then he added another word. “Idiosyncratic.” Spoken as if it were the nicest possible quality in one of his subalterns. I didn’t realize it at the time—I was beginning to ease away from my grievance in the radiation of his warmth—but now I’ve begun to see that he was getting around, in a subtle way, to his scunner against me. I was deviant. I had fractured the Association’s norm—or, in other words, got out from under his thumb. Flattered at the time, however, and with a rush of gratitude at being relieved of my painful anger, I barged into his trap.
“Literacy is the cornerstone,” Treadup said, “but it isn’t the building, by a long shot.”
“So that?”
“I found an ingenious man who’d been a coolie in France,” Treadup said—and suddenly he was off with a full heart on the story of Inventor Wang and his wooden machines. Todd wanted to know more. Treadup breezed along about things learned at Menghsien. Better seed. Scientific manures. Rotation. “All these things are merely extensions of the lecture program, really. The only difference—acts in fields instead of words on platforms.” David Treadup was soon carried away by the full onrush of his sparkling trait of enthusiasm. He was free with his ideas on the ways in which the old methods of the Y were shriveling on the vine. Todd played the part of a fascinated student, and Treadup was all too willing to teach. By the time their talk was over, after an hour, David Treadup had delivered himself into the hands of the reappraisers. Going down in the elevator that day he felt on top of the world. He thought he had dazzled old Todd.
ABSOLOM was to live in a double on the fourth floor of an entryway in Fayerweather Hall, in Berkeley Oval. He and Philip carried his trunk up. Room 403—a living room with a fireplace, and two bedrooms off it. On the bed in the better of the two smaller rooms was a bag of expensive golf clubs. A claim had been staked.
Emily, fighting off tears, was outraged. “A good sport would flip a coin for the bedrooms,” she said.
“Abbo will work things out,” Philip said in a loud voice for Absolom to hear. “Won’t you, kiddo?”
Absolom was pale. He nodded and tried to smile.
David Treadup leaned out the window and looked down at the trees in the paved oval. “Watching the young men in their blazers down there I was filled up with vainglory,” he wrote that night. “Was in mind of Absolom Carter. Would he have believed that the bad boy of Enderbury Institute would one day have two sons at Yale College?”
THE THREE remaining Treadups settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, for the year. “I want to distance myself a bit from the muck-a-mucks,” David wrote. David’s cousin Lloyd Frampton, Jr., the eldest son of David’s hosts in New Bedford during his unhappy time away from Syracuse, was a clerk in a clothing store in Springfield, and he had written the Treadups about a modest house in his neighborhood—“self-respecting folks, quite a few foreign-born, Poles and such, nice little high school, our church has a young pastor who is staging The Mikado this month—after being stuck off at the ends of the earth you’ll find a little corner of real America here.” Emily had to adjust to housekeeping; one of the things that was all too real in real America was that you didn’t have three obliging servants in your house—a ludicrous notion for a poor family, if you thought about it, in this turmoil after the Wall Street crash. Young Paul celebrated his sixteenth birthday the day the local high school opened; the huge boy was soon a star on the football team. The Framptons kindly took Paul temporarily into their house and loaned their Model A Ford to David and Emily for a fortnight’s drive up through New England in early October, so they could see the forests in a blaze of autumn. This was the first time the Treadups had ever had a true vacation together, with no responsibilities of any kind, familial or pastoral. For those few days David’s diary was as radiant as the great maples on the Vermont hills. He had won Todd over; he had burned away the awful extra syllable; the three boys’ energies were all in gear; his eyes were filled all day with the hot orange of sugar bush, rusty red of oak, yellow of birch, purple of sumac, and limpid blue of God’s heaven above. And best of all, Emily by his side. “How good it is to be, all day every day, flank to flank with a peaceable human being! My Emily of the forests!”
LEAVES DRIFTED to the ground—from trees and from illusions. Treadup was summoned to 347 Madison. He took the New York, New Haven, and Hartford. He found his old ally in all his unorthodox undertakings, Farrow Blackton, “remote, like a man suffering from a most unnatural sort of amnesia—inability, that is, to remember favors he had done me. No one has helped me more in the past than he. But this time—well, I got a bit of a chill, as if he were a friendly banker trying to work himself up to foreclose a mortgage on me.” Furloughs, “as you well know,” Blackton said, were not joy rides. On the average, secretaries on furlough spent three and a half months in study, four and a half in deputation, and the rest, yes, in visiting brethren, going back to the wellsprings of faith, and resting up for work ahead. As to study, he had one suggestion: Kenneth Scott Latourette’s recently published History of Christian Missions in China. “Then Farrow said a peculiar thing: ‘Reading it will give you a chance to reflect on your particular niche in the enterprise.’ Was he putting me on guard in some way? That phrase ‘reflect on’ is one that Chancellor Day used to use in his sermons, in direct connection with the sins he assumed we were all committing daily.” As to deputation, the International Committee, discussing his case, had been of the opinion that he should reawaken his original backers, at Syracuse University.
I asked, “Does this mean that the International Committee is cutting me off?” “No no no no,” Farrow said, “no, no, no,” repeating the word so many times I thought he must have meant the exact opposite. The hairs on the back of my neck began to bristle. I felt like a beast at the mouth of his lair who smells very faintly on the wind a predator.
The very next entry in the diary: “I have always tried to do the right thing.”
THROUGH the whole year he did try—always after his own fashion, however, which was sometimes, as he had put it, “deviant.” He read Latourette, but he also read John Dewey and Bertrand Russell. There was something surreptitious about the latter part of his reading; even in the privacy of his diary he used only the authors’ initials. “Have to know a little better what the other folks are thinking,” he wrote. Another time:
Hate to say it, but I find I have a sneaking liking for brother B.R. His mischievousness is attractive, very human. Reminds me of my little sister Grace when she was small. J.D. is all tough beef, B.R. is salt and pepper.
His first money-raising trip to Syracuse was discouraging. Chancellor Day had retired long since, and of course by this time there was no one on the faculty who remembered Treadup. The flavor of the Hill had changed. A huge athletic stadium loomed. Chapel was no longer compulsory. The Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. had moved downtown. There didn’t seem to be a single soul who gave a hang about missions to the heathens.
All these impediments aroused in Treadup a perverse enthusiasm. He took a trip to call on his old acquaintance Elmer Sperry, now nearly seventy and ailing, and begged from him certain gear he said he needed “to steady the feet of some backsliders.” The wealthy old man ordered his shops to supply Treadup with whatever he wanted. David set up a workbench in the cellar of the house in Springfield and spent weeks assembling the parts shipped to him by the Sperry people.
In the early spring of 1930 he traveled once more to Syracuse, this time with a spate of crates and trunks. On three successive evenings he delivered “the old faithful gyro spiel” to the Syracuse community, twice at the college and once in the city. “That lecture is a sure shot,” he wrote. By the time he finished the last of the series, he had received pledges of annual support for ten years into the future. “A sufficiency until my next furlough, at least,” he smugly wrote Blackton.
THE FAMILY was at table in the railroad flat over the Woolworth’s five-and-ten in Salt Branch village. Father Treadup was seventy-nine and fuddled. He firmly believed that David was not David but rather his second son, Will, to whom the old man had taken a powerful dislike; he kept barking at David, every time he opened his mouth, to “pipe down” or “drop it, son” or “hang up, that’s more than enough from you.” David’s mother was seventy-six and wonderfully alert. Her eyes seemed huge through her cataract glasses. She was well-informed about China and asked intelligent questions. Dear, mild brother Paul and beaten-down Grace were also there, and so was Emily. Mother Treadup had cooked the meal, and she was constantly jumping up and darting into the tiny kitchen and coming out with new surprises. Sweet potatoes! Baked with marshmallows on top! “I remembered,” she said to David.
Suddenly, toward the end of the meal, she turned her big searchlights on David and said, “Son, what’s ailing you? You’d better tell your mother about it.”
David began to bluster. “What do you mean? I’m fit as a fiddle! How ailing?”
“I just get a bone feeling about you. Don’t like the way your voice sounds.”
Emily said, “You’re right as rain, Mother Treadup. He—”
“You stay out of this,” Mother Treadup sharply said.
But Emily finished her sentence. “He’s a humanist. Ask him.”
“What’s wrong with that? That sounds first rate.”
“My husband—your son,” Emily said, “is too full of love for human creatures.”
Father Treadup, with Will still on his mind, gave out a derisory, disbelieving whistle.
“Come off it, Em,” David said.
“An excess of love,” Emily said, “leads to a spilling over of the sacred into the profane.”
“Ah, son,” Mother Treadup said, understanding it all, “so generous with rides in that awful rowboat on the Sabbath!”
Recording this conversation in his diary, David commented: “It seemed as if with those magnified eyes Mother could see right through me. What puzzles me is that I had thought I had shed all that worry.”
TODD was impressed by the pledges Treadup had garnered at Syracuse—“at a time, my boy, when all eleemosynary institutions are feeling the pinch”—and in giving David his marching orders, now at the end of the furlough, he was so friendly, so ebullient, so Toddish, that David came away feeling that there was indeed nothing to worry about. Good luck with the rural work. Todd did remind Treadup, offhand, that the International Committee had voted him one more year’s salary, but the reminder was put in such a way as to give David a distinct impression that there would be a more or less automatic renewal. There was no mention of reappraisal “all along the line.” When David left, the handshake between the two huge men was so cordial as to seem like an arm-wrestling match.
Mr. and Mrs. Treadup and Paul sailed from Vancouver on the Empress of Asia on May 14, 1930.
INSOMNIAC SOULS
ON THE HIGH JUNE DAY when the Treadups once again threw open the windows of the bungalow in their tight little compound in Paoting, David exclaimed at the pleasure of being back under the immense amethyst sky of North China. The same old noises—China’s great changes had not changed the audible China. Roosters celebrating the mounting of hens. The rhythmic hand-drums and melancholy arias of roaming vendors of white cabbage, candied apples, sweet potatoes. The yelping of “wonks”—mangy wild dogs skulking in dangerous packs. Edgy squalls of in-lawed women. Suddenly a flute’s questioning murmur. Male laughter, and men loudly clearing their throats to spit, as if such hawking were the war cries of heroes.
The euphoria didn’t last long. Treadup spent two frustrating days tinkering with the engine of his Indian motorcycle, which seemed to have come down with asthma. There could be no question here of getting spare parts; he had to file the points of the spark plugs and polish those of the distributor, take down the pistons and rout out the carbon, disassemble the carburetor and give it a good cleaning. For Emily the return seemed not to be as joyous as David would have hoped. She was bereft. Her firstborn, Philip, and her wounded chick, half-deaf Absolom, were on the opposite side of the earth; and even the baby, Paul, was gone—he had taken a summer job in Peitaiho. Her face looked drawn; she complained more than once to David that the ceilings “in this shack of yours” were too low. “I feel like a caryatid,” she said.
EVERYTHING had gone slack in the villages.
The Indian charged over the country roads, raising a cone of dust. Treadup stopped at place after place, and though he was everywhere greeted with great cordiality, and though here and there literacy schools were supposed to be in session, he could see that the life had gone out of the work. On account of Todd’s abrupt notice of his furlough, David had not had time, before he left for the States, to make the rounds of all the places where work had been started, to try to make sure that things would be kept going at top speed without him. He realized his managerial error—a really appalling one—in not having developed a strong Chinese deputy, one who could have taken charge in his absence and who would eventually have been able to take over altogether, on the seed-planting principle of missionary devolution. Old Mr. Hsiao, who had been so helpful in getting the literacy work under way, had retired to his home, where he spent his gentlemanly time reading classics from old scrolls. Inventor Wang had stopped coming. One village chieftain told Treadup that a team of agitators for a farmers’ union had come through the area—probably Communists—and they had been sharply disapproving of the way the schools were organized. The villagers had not wanted to join a union, the headman said, but they had been frightened by this visitation. In some of the villages, the schools simply stopped meeting. “I am downhearted,” Treadup wrote.
I feel as if these people had been going through all those motions, before our furlough, just to please me. Must I start all over again? How can an outsider get them to realize that it is their own future to make?
FROM A LETTER Emily wrote to a church women’s group she had met with in Springfield:
After the first busy excitements of being back I experienced what I suppose is a fairly natural reaction—a “post-furlough” depression. This is very strange for me. I am not used to this. At least it was a very level feeling, when after the year away all the contrasts and discouragements of Christian activity in mission work, as well as personal daily living, seemed to pile up on me and possess me.
I felt a first violent shock on the day when a group of Chinese women in a circle of converts here, whom I had considered my friends from beforehand, met to welcome me back. I could not think of one thing this group had in common with any group of women I’d been with at home, except that in both cases we were women, attempting to be Christians in a form of fellowship. Their total situation is so barren and so beautyless. I couldn’t help wondering, if I were stripped down to the bare level of existence that is theirs, might I be, in some unexplainable way, better off?
IN LOW SPIRITS neither David nor Emily got much support from the people in the mission compounds. Everyone seemed edgy. Letitia Selden was deeply worried about her yokemate, Miss Demestrie, who, with her creaky knee and a buzzing in her ears, had become extremely cranky—some were whispering that she was having to be shut up in her room quite often. Old Dr. Cowley, who was David’s father’s age and worse tempered than ever, was triumphant about “the waste of time” of Treadup’s literacy program, now proven by what had happened in his absence. Three-quarters deaf, the old man shouted his merciless and baleful judgments at Treadup.
A young man named Christopher Shanks—who had been sent to Paoting by David Liu to organize a Y.M.C.A. in the city—was forever complaining about catarrh in his sinuses, lumbago after tennis, microbes invading what he called his digestive track. People were saying he should be the sunniest person on earth, for he was engaged to be married to a newcomer, Polly Lassiter, a husky-voiced, bouncy, freckled R.N., a graduate of the Cornell nursing school. What more ideal match—a desperate hypochondriac and a trained practitioner of Tender Loving Care? Emily befriended Polly, hoping to have a cheerful friend; but she found this nurse to be, under her jovial surface, “the angriest person I ever knew.”
BACK IN MAY, while the Treadups had been on the high seas, Johnny Wu had invited government people and missionaries from all over the country for what he called a Menghsien Literacy Institute—a systematic demonstration of what the Menghsien group had begun to learn about possibilities for China’s future. David regretted having missed the Institute, and he now wrote Johnny asking if he might come alone for a few days and “get some practical ideas and store up some energy for my task of starting all over again.” Wu was warmly cordial, and in September, as the heat of summer began to ebb, David took a train the few miles southwest to Menghsien.
The place hummed. There were now some two hundred workers in the Menghsien experiment—nearly all city-bred, mostly with college degrees either from universities in the United States or from church colleges in China—a group therefore much influenced by Western culture, conscientiously trying to avoid patronizing the ill-advantaged farm people with whom they were working.
Treadup picked up some new ideas about teaching methods, as well as some techniques for health education, adapted from campaigns David’s own Lecture Bureau had first devised. But more important he came away from his visit with two new understandings, neither of which cheered him much.
The first was that the Menghsien group had concluded that in its first spurt of enthusiasm it had tried to do too much too fast. Now the group had set itself a ten-year plan, in three phases: From July 1930 to June 1933, the concentration would be on literacy and education; from July 1933 to June 1936, on agricultural and economic reconstruction; and from July 1936 to June 1940, on village self-government and citizenship training. Ten years! David would be in his sixties at the end of a decade. Did he have the strength and patience to try to match the multifaceted programs of Menghsien, working all alone, for ten long years? And what if ten years, in turn, proved far too short a time?
Secondly, touring Wu’s villages, David had his eyes opened to an important reason why change was so hard to bring about. Johnny carefully explained to him the ancient method of built-in social control in such rural areas. It was called the pao-chia system. A chia consisted of about ten families, with a headman supposedly chosen by the families but usually a creature of the local magistrate; a pao was made up of about ten chia. Each pao was answerable to the district magistrate. Any offense or irregularity of behavior committed by any person within the hundred-family network must be reported to this hsien magistrate. Thus from the times of Mongols and Manchus had the rulers held their grip on the countryside; and in this way through the centuries the conservative Confucian mores had been vigilantly maintained. So David had to ask himself another new hard question: Had he—a foreign devil, working alone—the ingenuity, the prestige, the moral force even to put the slightest dent in this pervasive machinery of control?
(From a distance, years later, he would observe that the Communists’ double system of control nets—work units and neighborhood units—simply carried on, with doctrinal variations, this ancient method of surveillance.)
TOWARD THE END of October one piece of news did cheer Treadup. He received a telegram from David Liu:
HEARTY GREETINGS PERSONALLY ATTENDED CHIANG KAISHEK’S BAPTISM THIS AFTERNOON OCTOBER 23RD CAUSE FOR THANKS SATISFACTION.
David of course knew that Chiang’s wife had long been a Christian, and he had heard that for more than a year various Chinese Christians and American missionaries had been meeting with both Chiangs for Bible study and prayer. David’s long-standing and deeply built-in awe of powerful men was stirred by this news, and somewhat later he wrote Todd an enthusiastic letter:
People are ascribing various motives to Chiang for his conversion. Pressure from his wife’s family, who hold his purse strings? Courting favor in the West? But the important thing is that in the present state of affairs in China, he has nothing to gain and everything to lose by becoming a Christian. The news of his baptism was received coolly and without comment in the Chinese press. I’m told that President Chiang gave as one of the main influences in leading him to seek baptism his reading of Fosdick’s ‘Manhood of the Master,’ as published in Chinese here by our Association Press, and he has further asked the Y.M.C.A. to bring out a new edition, to which he has agreed to write a special introduction.
Since our work in the China field is so directly influenced by the political atmosphere, it is reassuring to know that in the newly organized National Cabinet, in addition to the President, the head of the Judicial Yuan, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, of Industry, of Railways, of Finance, and the Postmaster General are all outspoken Christians, whose chief contact with Christianity has been through the Y.M.C.A. We have reason to hope for great days ahead!
THE LETTER Treadup received back from Todd was exceedingly unpleasant. After perfunctory notice of Treadup’s reflections on Chiang’s conversion, Todd wrote that he had been reviewing the monthly accounting sheets sent in from Shanghai, and had come across a disturbing outlay for June—forty-nine dollars Mex for ten five-gallon drums of gasoline delivered to Paoting from Standard Oil in Tientsin. “Our budget situation,” Todd wrote, “is such that fifty dollars at a clip for a marginal item like this is rather strong medicine.” David remembered New York’s miserly objection, years ago, to the single little box for magic-lantern slides he had asked for. The worst of it, from David’s point of view, was that Todd then went on to flatter him, saying he had had, from their talks during David’s furlough, “a renewed sense of your unique combination of devotion and good old-fashioned practical horse sense.”
“ ‘Unique,’ ” David bitterly wrote in his diary, “equals ‘deviant.’
“After long talks with Emily, and some prayer alone, he decided he had better not try to answer the rebuke. The keys of his typewriter would fly to the page out of his control! Marginal! How else could a man get from village to village?
FAR FROM TREADUP’S KEN an inexorable process of history was grinding away. The Chinese Communist Party was split between a peasant soviet movement, led by Mao Tse-tung, and a more traditional form of Marxist urban insurrection, advocated by a Politburo member named Li Li-san. A Red army led by Mao and others captured Changsha, in Mao’s native Hunan Province, then retired from the city. A second attempt to capture Changsha was a disaster. David heard vague reports of these battles. The urban revolt in the coastal cities was also dismally failing, and Moscow, then trying to guide and control the Chinese movement, discredited Li Li-san. Chiang launched the first of a series of major offensives against the Communists. Chiang’s people captured Mao’s wife and sister in Changsha and executed them.
THE BELL in the tower pealed. In the vesting room of the little chapel in the American Board compound, the groom, Christopher Shanks, in the full rig of a borrowed cutaway, was “green in the gills.” The suit was tight under his arms. His head seemed skewered on the sharp corners of his stiff collar. David’s diary: “I got the impression that Mr. Shanks’s liver had decided to take a vacation on his wedding day.” Old man Cowley—who though a doctor was also an ordained minister—was going to tie the knot and was in a foul mood. “Let’s get our stumps stirring here,” he shouted over the mournful tolling. “What’s holding things up?”
What was holding things up was that Polly Lassiter, the bride, had not yet appeared at the chapel entrance. Speculations. Trouble with the veil? A seam had split? The bouquet, promised by the husband of a mission sewing woman, had not yet been delivered?
David Treadup, in his sugar-scoop coat as best man—Chris Shanks having no kin within eight thousand miles—noticed that the groom had gone from green to white; sweat poured from his face. “Young man,” Treadup said, “I advise you to sit down in that chair over there and let your head down between your knees. Get some blood back in your temples.” Shanks obeyed; his boiled shirt creaked and buckled, and a stud flew across the floor. The Reverend Dr. Cowley, pacing back and forth, cried out, “Tell them to stop that infernal clanging.” David went out and laid a hand on the arm of the Chinese boy who was tugging away on the bell pull. Then he stepped around to the chapel entrance, where Emily, who seemed to be Miss Lassiter’s only friend and was certainly her only attendant, as matron of honor, was patiently waiting.
“She’s half an hour behindhand,” David said. “Not the best omen.”
“She didn’t want my help,” Emily said. “I’d better go have a look-see.”
Emily walked three hundred yards up a brick path to the house where Polly was living. The door to the nurse’s room was closed. Emily knocked.
“Come in.” Cheerful sound.
Emily swung the door open and saw the bride sitting in an armchair in a gray dress reading Northanger Abbey. The wedding dress was nowhere to be seen.
“My heavens!” Emily said. “You’re keeping the whole world waiting!”
“I’m not going through with it,” Polly Lassiter said in a calm voice. Her eyes were dry. Her freckled face had its customary radiant look. “He’s so…so…” She gave up on the sentence with a shrug.
Emily was aghast. “My dear, you can’t do such a thing at the last moment!”
“I can do it and I am doing it,” Polly said.
“Aren’t you even going to tell the poor man?”
“I presume you can do that.”
“He’ll have a heart attack.”
“Oh, no, Mrs. Treadup. That is exactly what he will not have.”
Emily went back to the chapel. At the vestry door she whispered a summons to David. It fell to David to break the news to Shanks and then to push the unconscious man to the infirmary in a wheelbarrow.
Miss Lassiter was right. Christopher Shanks did not have a heart attack. Indeed, within a day or two he looked better than he had for several months.
DAVID’S DIARY:
The fiasco of these young so-called lovers has made me think deeply about my own good fortune in the connubial line. To think that Em might have married Zeedon, ’00! O my dove! Right now I puzzle about the darkness that has settled in you. Dr. Wells says there is nothing to fret about, says her hot spells and chills are part of “that time of life.” And of course she misses the brood. But I fear that something deeper has been happening—and if it is happening to her, it is also happening to me. Her soul is insomniac and I seem to hear it sighing and turning over within her. We are so reciprocal in our feelings, she and I, that I am obliged to ask: Is she depressed because of worrying about me—about my work without end in this baffling China field, my work without real hope?
TURNING POINT
ROLAND J. FARKUS, PH. D., had arrived for a three-day stay. Ahead of him had come a letter from David Liu, explaining that Dr. Farkus was carrying out a “field inquiry” for the International Committee in New York.
Dr. Farkus was a short, stout Canadian, with a bald head, rimless glasses attached to his nose by gold nippers, and a perfectly round front decorated by a thick watch chain, upon which, Treadup noticed, Dr. Farkus tugged, as if to get at his timepiece, whenever an answer Treadup was giving to one of his questions began to stretch out beyond a minute or so. At first Treadup gave guarded answers; he was deeply suspicious of this “inquiry.” He had a bad feeling that Todd was “trying to get the goods on me.”
But the brisk little Canadian soon thawed David out. He was disarmingly candid. The whole missionary enterprise, he said, was at a crossroads. In spite of the Generalissimo’s conversion, Christianity itself was under strong Communistic, anti-Christian, and antiforeign attack, and had had to give ground. The number of foreign missionaries had dropped from eight thousand to fewer than six thousand, and it was getting very hard to recruit new Chinese pastors, especially of college and university grade.
At the same time, support for the Y back in North America, Farkus said, was dwindling with the hard times there. David Liu in Shanghai was “hollering for more fraternal secretaries” just at a time when the International Committee was having to tighten its belt.
“Between us,” Dr. Farkus said, talking in a low voice, as if to emphasize his trust in Treadup, “Dr. Liu is playing the tyrant in Shanghai, and two of his best men have just slipped in their walking papers—John Hu and Y. Y. Han. Truth is, they can’t stand Dr. Liu’s high line with them.” So Dr. Farkus was having to “take a wee look around the various China stations, try to sort out the sheep from the goats.”
At this point Dr. Farkus said some flattering words about “all I’ve heard about your get-up-and-go up here in Paoting.” And then, lowering his voice again, “Young Dr. Shanks here looks like a weak sister. A whiner, what? What’s your view of him?”
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Treadup said. “I can’t sit in judgment on a colleague.”
“Nicely put! I understand what you’re saying,” Dr. Farkus said. “Oh, very good. Very good way of answering, Dr. Treadup. I like that!”
“No,” Treadup said. “You have me wrong. I don’t talk slant. What I’m saying…I don’t like being asked to be a company spy.”
The diary:
O my goodness, what is this talent of mine for diving into boiling water? Is it my “honesty”? I’m afraid I feel it is something uglier. I’m not proud of it, whatever it is. I wasn’t surprised to see that watch really come out of the pocket after that. Another engagement. To talk confidentially with “Dr.” Shanks about “Dr.” Treadup?
David wrote Farrow Blackton later that day, saying that he thought the “Farkus Inquisition” was an unpardonable intrusion into the affairs of the Chinese National Committee. All these years the Association had been proudly talking about its record in devolution—turning over the management of things in China to the Chinese. Then it sends a man out to snoop around and override the judgments of David Liu. No matter how touchy Liu was getting, there was no excuse for this.
The diary again:
Not very proud of my letter to Blackie, either. Did I hope it would land, in the course of routine circulation, on that acre of tidy oak in Todd’s office?
“I HAVE to be stabilized by an old friend,” Treadup wrote.
So, “as I’ve done before when bamboozled,” he went to Tientsin to see the first Chinese friend he had ever made—Mr. Lin. They met in the presidential office at the university. Mr. Lin was in Chinese clothes; he served Treadup tea in the Chinese way. He had recovered his old bounce. His university was thriving. He was aware and appreciative of the literacy work Treadup had been doing. “I sensed something sad in the ease of his warmth to me—namely, that he had long since ceased needing me.” The subject of Christianity never arose; Treadup came away convinced that Lin had moved toward a new inner synthesis, “more social than spiritual.” With great energy, and with his familiar flooding emotions, Mr. Lin poured out his excitement about “a new fire that’s burning here at my university.”
This new thing, Mr. Lin said, is different from the explosion of fifteen years ago—Dr. Hu Shih’s movement—the Chinese Renaissance. That earlier movement had opened up the Chinese written language and the entire culture, previously reserved for the literati, to the people at large, and it had emphasized practical sciences and a democratic ideal—“just what you were doing with your lectures, my friend.” That phase had reached its height, Mr. Lin said, from about 1920 to 1923; then for several years—confusion, warlords.
But now—in the last year or so—China’s most interesting thinkers, having won this new freedom, were turning their thoughts in an entirely new direction—outside themselves, toward the life and problems of the common people, China’s Old Hundred Names. This new tendency, he said, was being called ‘Pu Lu Wen Sho,’ or the Proletarian Culture Movement.
The students at Peikai had been aroused during this year, Mr. Lin said, by two new waves within this tide. One called itself the Liberty League. It had been founded a few months before by fifty-one writers and teachers, including the great essayist and story writer, Lu Hsun. A few weeks later, a second organization caught up the students; this one called itself the Federation of Leftist Writers. Mr. Lin gave David the Federation’s manifesto, which Treadup later translated into one of his commonplace books. In part:
Art and literature in all ages have taken the joys and sorrows of man as their principal theme. We who are artists and writers of this generation cannot do better than to take as our subject the throbbing heart of the oppressed masses now straining and groaning under its burdens. Let us then join hands and create a proletarian culture movement which shall be our contribution to the cause of freedom in this country.
IMPRESSIONABLE and vulnerable as he was, David took from Mr. Lin and carried back to Paoting just what he had thought he needed—a baggage of refreshment and zest. He happened to encounter old Dr. Cowley a few days later, and he told him about his talks with his Tientsin friend.
“What idiocy and poppycock!” Cowley said. “Your convert, my friend, talks like a Communist. What an easy mark you are!” Telling Emily about this, David was able to discount the curt judgment. He reminded Emily how bleak and hateful old man Cowley had become; the ferocious Christian love with which he had burned so long had made charcoal of him. But in the privacy of his study, that evening, David remembered another time when his enthusiasm had been given a blunt check by a “realist”—after Dr. Elting’s itinerative preaching on the country cart, which David had so much admired, when at luncheon that Standard Oil man, Gilbert Olander, had brought David up short by calling Dr. Elting an ass, a numskull, a busybody, and an utterly blind creature. David’s remembering that incident is signaled in his diary by a terse entry: “Cowley and Olander—the wet blankets of this world. I suppose I need them.”
TREADUP went back to the villages. The first task was to restore the literacy schools. As the weeks and months passed, Treadup was delighted by the alacrity with which the villagers resumed this work. “They want it! They need it!” he wrote after a graduation ceremony that had gone particularly well.
He was on the lookout for a Chinese deputy. At Menghsien he had asked Johnny Wu to give him one of his young college-trained men as an assistant, but Wu had said he was shorthanded as it was, and could not spare anyone. Then Treadup had begun to think that it would be best, anyhow, to try to bring up someone from the villages, so that the moving spirit, after David was out of the picture, would be a native leader, one of the region’s own.
In the spring of 1931 David came across a promising young man named Shen Mo-ju. He was the eldest son of a farmer; as a fourteen-year-old boy he had been shanghaied into a warlord’s army and had had a leg shattered in a battle. Discharged, he had limped through one of Treadup’s literacy schools himself, then had signed on at once as a teacher. His was one village in which the school had thrived all through Treadup’s furlough. Shen was, as David wrote, “a person with leadership deep in his eye sockets—he gazes at you with his serene and rather sad eyes and you just want to do anything he asks you to do.”
In May David invited Shen to move to the compound in Paoting with his young wife, and to have a grand title: Deputy Director of the Paoting Regional Self-Help Educational and Agricultural Association. Shen accepted, and from then on, as David wrote, “our work stepped up from a canter to a gallop.”
TREADUP enlisted three women, Polly Lassiter, Letitia Selden, and, for the first time as a partner in his labors, Emily Treadup, to do health work in the villages. He had learned at Menghsien that there were three principal causes for the devastating death rate in these North China country villages—more than thirty per thousand—and he asked each of these ladies to start a campaign to combat one of the three causes: smallpox; diseases such as dysentery and typhoid, caused by polluted water; and infant deaths, caused especially by something called tetanus neonatorum, which came from midwives’ practice of plastering the cut umbilical cord with mud.
Nurse Lassiter agreed to work part time—for she had ample duties in Paoting—vaccinating against smallpox in the villages. She soon became so excited by her campaign that she petitioned her mission superiors to be temporarily freed for this work full time. David wrote: “She’s a firebrand! Lucky Shanks! She would have ground him up and fed him to a cat.” First she went to P.U.M.C., the Rockefeller hospital in Peiping, and assured herself of a steady supply of vaccine and sterile cotton. Then she set about training teams of village women who had been outstanding graduates of the literacy schools to administer vaccinations. She equipped each team with sewing needles, cotton balls soaked in Chinese wine for disinfection, tubes of vaccine, and simple report forms on which these Literate Citizens could keep records of names of the villages and of the scores, then hundreds, then thousands of farm people in them who had been vaccinated.
At first Miss Titty was resistant to Treadup’s proposal that she work on typhoid and dysentery. Her aching bones. She was no scientist. She didn’t know a thing about diseases. Never been sick a day herself. She had lots else to do. Treadup finally realized that the real problem, which she did not seem to want to discuss, was Helen Demestrie. Who would take care of her yokefellow when Miss Titty was out in the villages? David faced this out with her, and Miss Titty recognized that an amah named Sze, whom Miss Demestrie loved and trusted, could stay with her. So out went jaunty Miss Titty with a teaching mission: the bleach she advocated putting in village wells was not foreign deviltry; water for tea and for cooking had not just to be heated, it had to be boiled—you had to see the bubbles; and flies! Flies were dangerous. Flies must be killed. But the villagers firmly believed that food that flies would not eat must be poisonous. A campaign to kill flies; cash money for every hundred flies brought in to collecting stations! But the villagers believed that the foreigners were going to use these flies to make medicines. Uphill teaching, but Miss Titty kept at it.
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.