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Gladys Aylward
The Small Woman Who Did God’s Great Work
She held her breath and prayed silently as she sat in the straight-back chair, her hands folded in her lap. The stern director of the China Inland Mission shuffled through a stack of papers on the desk, sighing and shaking his head as he reviewed the results of her examinations. When he finally spoke, the young woman leaned forward to hear him, praying fervently for a positive answer. She was gravely disappointed. The director reported that her grades were subpar. Worse yet, he felt her advanced age, twenty-six, would prevent her from adequately learning the Chinese language. In light of these two setbacks, the director informed the young woman that it was pointless for her to continue to prepare for foreign missionary work. Gladys Aylward’s dream of serving in China was crushed.
From Parlor Maid to Preacher
Gladys Aylward was born in London to working-class parents. As the daughter of a mailman and the oldest of three siblings, she didn’t have the luxury or the means to dedicate years to her education. Instead, by the age of fourteen she was already working long hours as a parlor maid and a housekeeper. When she could snatch a few minutes between chores, she would slip into her employer’s personal library and page through one of his many books about China, a country whose people and culture fascinated her.
Though raised in the Anglican Church, Gladys was not particularly religious. At a revival with a friend when she was eighteen, however, she was convicted by the preacher’s message, which emphasized the importance of giving one’s life over to God. The message struck a chord in Gladys’s heart and awakened a desire to serve in the missionary field. Given her fascination, China seemed like a natural fit—until, that is, her grades and her age deemed her unfit for the China Inland Mission program.
Despite the setback, Gladys was undeterred. During her downtime, she sharpened her preaching skills, evangelizing from a soapbox in Hyde Park to an audience of jaded London commuters. Little by little, a penny at a time, Gladys saved enough money to purchase the cheapest ticket to China—via the Trans-Siberian Railroad. She argued with the travel agent, who insisted the route was impossible, given the war raging between Russia and China. “We do not like to deliver our customers dead,” the agent informed her.1 Gladys ignored him.
After two years of hard labor and penny-pinching, Gladys kissed her parents and her sister good-bye and departed from Liverpool Street Station, bound for China. She had ninepence in coins, two one-pound travelers’ checks, her Bible, a fountain pen, and her tickets and passport tucked into her corset. She carried a suitcase in each hand, a kettle and a saucepan tied to the handles with twine.
No Time for Crying
The travel agent had been right: the journey by rail, ship, and even at one point on foot, from London, across Siberia and Manchuria, and finally into China, was arduous. Gladys slept several nights on frigid train platforms across Siberia, grateful for the one blanket she had packed. After many weeks of grueling travel, Gladys arrived in the mountain village of Yangcheng in northern China. As she entered the tiny village, a group of children screamed and jeered, running from her in terror. Two Chinese women picked up dried clumps of mud and flung them at her. “It happens every time I go out,” seventy-four-year-old missionary Jeannie Lawson informed the bewildered Gladys, greeting her at the doorstep of her home. “They hate us here. They call us lao-yang-kwei, foreign devils. It’s something you’ll have to get used to.”2
Gladys also had to get used to the executions that regularly occurred in the market square. Not long after she arrived, she witnessed a man beheaded with a single blow from a curved sword blade while a crowd of onlookers cheered. As the head rolled across the stones, Gladys burst into tears. Later, Jeannie explained matter-of-factly that Gladys hadn’t come to China to cry over every horrible sight she witnessed, or even to change China’s laws. “We’ll try to change these things through the love and wisdom of Jesus Christ, by making them understand truth and justice,” she said, “but we won’t do it by running home blubbering our eyes out.”3
Knowing Yangcheng was an overnight stop for mule caravans and travelers passing through on the trading route, Jeannie and Gladys decided to open an inn. They called it the Inn of Eight Happinesses, and they advertised flea-free sleeping quarters, good food, and entertaining stories. The Chinese loved stories, Jeannie reasoned, so once the women had the travelers in the door, they would share the gospel stories with them and hope that the travelers would then carry the message to other parts of China.
The only problem, of course, was that the muleteers avoided the Inn of Eight Happinesses, preferring to sleep on the street rather than cross the threshold of the fearful “foreign devils.” When shouting her sales pitch from the doorway of the inn failed to entice the travelers, Gladys took action, grabbing the reins of the lead mule and leading it toward the courtyard so the muleteers didn’t have any choice but to follow.
Eventually the business flourished, and Gladys continued to run the inn on her own after Jeannie died. She also took on myriad additional responsibilities. As a government-appointed foot binding inspector, Gladys traveled from village to village, not only inspecting young women’s feet and notifying the rural residents that the ancient custom of foot binding must cease, but also spreading the gospel wherever she went.
As time passed, both Gladys’s command of the language and her reputation improved. At one point, summoned to the scene of a prison riot, the panicked prison director pleaded for her to help. “If you preach the truth—if your God protects you from harm—then you can stop this riot,” he reasoned as they stood outside the gate. Gladys was terrified, but she knew she couldn’t refuse the challenge. “Fail now, and you are finished in Yangcheng,” she thought. “Abandon your faith now, and you abandon it forever!”4 Miraculously, the rioting convicts listened to her, and Gladys’s intervention eventually resulted in reforms at the prison. From that day on, Gladys was known as Ai-weh-deh, “the Virtuous One.”
Breaking the Law for the Lord
Along with wayfaring travelers, Gladys began to take orphaned and neglected children into the inn as well. When she was reprimanded for challenging a government official about the lack of child-protection laws, she responded with a declaration of her own: “I have to inform you . . . that I did not come to China only to observe your laws. I came for the love of Jesus Christ, and I shall act upon the principles of His teaching, no matter what you say.”5 Just minutes after that pronouncement, Gladys stopped on the street and bought an orphan for ninepence, the money she had in her pocket. The girl, who was six or seven years old at the time and came to be known as Ninepence, lived with Gladys until she was married. By 1938, one hundred orphaned children lived at the inn.
When the Japanese began to bomb the mountain villages in 1937, Gladys identified herself with the Chinese people so intimately that she refused to leave even as artillery shells began to fall. “Do not wish me out of this or in any way seek to get me out, for I will not be got out while this trial is on,” she wrote in a letter to her mother. “These are my people; God has given them to me; and I will live or die with them for Him and His glory.”6 Because she knew the mountainous terrain well from her travels, she worked as a spy for the Chinese soldiers, scouting behind enemy lines and reporting back to the Chinese nationalist officers. Though she considered herself Chinese by adoption and she deeply loved her people, she knew the information she passed on to the nationalist officers resulted in the loss of Japanese lives, a fact that kept her awake long into each night.
For a long time Gladys was able to blend in with the other Chinese refugees and thus continue her intelligence work undetected. Eventually, however, the Japanese learned about her espionage efforts. One day Gladys was shocked to read a leaflet tacked to the city gate announcing a one-hundred-dollar reward for “The Small Woman, known as Ai-weh-deh.”
Early the next morning the Japanese fired at her as she dashed through the back gate of the walled city. Bullets ricocheted off the rocks around her, and as one grazed her back, she tore off her coat, balled it into a bundle, and dropped it behind her as a decoy. Bullets tore her discarded coat to shreds as Gladys wormed her way through the weeds on her belly and tumbled into the shallow moat. Pulling herself out of the water on the other side, she buried herself in the stalks of a dense wheat field, where she hid from the Japanese soldiers until darkness fell. After daylight faded she began the trek through the mountains toward Yangcheng. Two days later she reached the Inn of Eight Happinesses, where she gathered all one hundred orphans and prepared to flee to the safety of Sian, more than one hundred miles away.
Occasionally the group of refugees was offered shelter in a barn, but often they spent the nights in caves or in the open, huddled on the ground in the frigid mountain air. There was little to eat or drink—a handful of millet and a cup of water at most, and Gladys often gave her small portion to a hungry child. Gladys and the older children carried the young ones for miles at a time, encouraging them with hymns, prayer, and entertaining stories. Occasionally the slopes were so steep the group formed a human chain, passing the younger children from hand to hand down the mountainside. Twenty-seven days after they had set out with little but the clothes on their backs, Gladys and her orphans arrived at the refugee center. Every child had survived. Gladys, however, was near death, suffering from severe malnutrition, typhus, pneumonia, and exhaustion.
God’s Second Choice
Although the doctors doubted she would survive, Gladys eventually recovered from her illness. It didn’t take her long to resume her ministry of sharing the gospel in the villages and prisons in and around Sian. When the Communist government forced her to leave China in 1948, she returned to Britain, and when she sought reentry into China ten years later, the Communist government denied her. Instead, she settled in Taiwan, where she founded the Gladys Aylward Orphanage. She worked as a missionary in Taiwan until her death in 1970.
Gladys earned a fair degree of fame among Westerners when the movie The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, based on the biography The Small Woman and featuring Ingrid Bergman in the lead role, was released in 1957. Gladys was appalled by the movie, which took generous liberties with the details of her life, including embellishing her relationship with the Chinese colonel Linnan, whom she met during the war. Although she loved Linnan and even considered marrying him at one point, she never so much as kissed him and was horrified by the film’s love scenes, which she felt sullied her reputation.
Hollywood portrayals aside, Gladys Aylward should be recognized for her contributions to Christian history and esteemed as an example of perseverance in the face of daunting odds. Refusing to be defined a failure and determined to overcome her educational shortcomings, she circumvented the traditional missionary route and took matters into her own hands, traveling alone into the unknown in order to heed what she knew was God’s calling for her life.
“I wasn’t God’s first choice for what I’ve done for China,” she once said to a friend. “There was somebody else. I don’t know who it was—God’s first choice. It must have been a man—a wonderful man, a well-educated man. I don’t know what happened. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he wasn’t willing. And God looked down and saw Gladys Aylward.”7 God didn’t see a “small woman” in Gladys Aylward. He saw Ai-weh-deh, the Virtuous One—a woman who would do great things in his name.8