City of Tranquil Light

by Bo Caldwell

  I never expected such a welcome. We had returned to China on the Tenyomaru, the same ship that carried us to America last year, and as I went to bed late last night I thought of one of our fellow travelers. A large group from the Mennonite church in Seattle had escorted us to the dock, and as the ship made ready to leave, Will and I stood on the deck, waving to our friends below, who were singing loudly. A portly woman standing next to us eagerly searched the passengers on deck, then turned to me and asked, “Who are they singing for? Is there a famous evangelist on board?”

  I didn’t want to draw attention to us, so I answered hesitantly. “We’re missionaries returning to China.”

  I needn’t have worried; I might as well have said we were hoboes. The woman’s face fell, and without a word she turned her back to me and waved to her friends across the deck. “They’re just missionaries!” she shouted, and left us, for another part of the ship and, I presume, more interesting shipmates.

  Just missionaries. The prideful part of me wishes she’d seen our welcome last night. I don’t think I have ever been so happy to reach a place. It’s more than happy; I’m relieved to be here, for I feel like a dog retreating to lick its wounds. While Will worked on his family’s farm, I underwent treatments for malaria in Moundridge, Kansas. The doctor there gave me betony root, and I feel (and hope) that I am finally rid of this tenacious illness. But with that hope came sorrow, for I learned that malaria has made me unable to conceive again. I can’t have children, simple as that.

  My faith tells me that God is in all things and that good can come even from this, but I still feel that I’ve failed at something. I feel that I’ve failed Will, though I know he doesn’t see it this way. I find myself questioning my Lord’s ways; I do not understand why He would place a longing in my heart that He doesn’t plan to fulfill. But whys don’t get me anywhere; they just lead me around in circles. So I pray I can accept this painful lack, and if my prayers are halfhearted, I know they are still heard.

  In May of 1919, a month after our return from furlough, we heard of a small compound that was for sale. The compound had been the site of a pottery business that had gone bankrupt, and now the owners, who were originally from another province, had decided to leave Kuang P’ing Ch’eng for good and were eager to sell the property as soon as possible, and at a very reasonable sum. Though they did not say this, there was a reason for their low price: a man who had worked at the kiln had been murdered there and his skeleton still lay where he had died. The whole place was now considered haunted, and no Chinese would think of buying it as they were deeply afraid of evil spirits, whom they believed to wander unhappily through this world, pestering the living.

  With the contributions and promised support we had received on furlough, we were able to buy the compound, which was a great find. Just outside the city’s East Gate, it occupied some four acres surrounded by a fifteen-foot wall. As Katherine and I walked around the property and its two buildings, we talked excitedly about what we could do with so much space. We envisioned clean, well-stocked examining rooms, a large worship hall filled with believers, and a vegetable garden in the space behind the house where the soil was good and the plot slightly raised so it would not flood during the summer rainy season.

  The main building was a sturdy two-story ancestral home with a curved roof, made of wood rather than mud bricks, which was an advantage because of Kuang P’ing Ch’eng’s harsh weather and frequent flooding. On the lower floor, which was surrounded by a wide veranda, were the kitchen and a large open room that could function as a worship hall. Upstairs were three smaller rooms with low slanted ceilings—enough living space for us and for Chung Hao and Mo Yun, and even for a small study. The other building on the property, an old one-story wooden storehouse with an earthen floor, could be made into a suitable clinic and dispensary. Behind these two buildings was a large open lot with a deep well and space for another structure, if and when we had the funds.

  Because of the belief that the gate to a home or business indicated the value of what it protected, the compound’s imposing gate was also an advantage. A compound such as this always had a gatekeeper, who lived in a small house adjacent to the gate, and Lao Chang, the gatekeeper for the previous owners, asked to stay on with us. I was skeptical; he looked to me to be an old man, and I doubted he would be able to work for much longer. But when I asked his age, he smiled broadly. “We are the same, mu shih. My thirty-fifth year will soon begin.” He was right—he only looked many years my senior—and I agreed to his request.

  Once the deal was made, Katherine and I and Chung Hao and Mo Yun celebrated our good fortune with a dinner of tangerines, dumplings, and fish, a combination that sounds odd, but one that Mo Yun chose with care. Tangerines symbolized wealth and peace, dumplings good fortune, and fish abundance, with the skeleton signifying a surplus, and the head and tail a good beginning and a good end.

  The buildings on our new property needed a great deal of work, and we spent the rest of that spring and early summer repairing them. I replaced the windows and loose tiles on the roof of our home, we whitewashed the interior walls, and we had screens made for the windows, something that was viewed with great suspicion but which we knew would be a hygienic necessity in the summer heat. As the roof of the building we would use as a clinic was beyond repair, I spent much of that summer going up and down a ladder laying a new tile roof, and each evening Katherine cleaned and bandaged my tough old hands, cut raw from the rough edges of the tiles. We put in a wooden floor and new doors, we placed benches along the walls for patients, we lined the small room that would be the storeroom with shelves, and we set up two examining rooms, each with a large wooden table.

  By the end of June we were able to hold Sunday services in the large downstairs hall of our home, and a week later Katherine posted a sign at the compound gate announcing that the clinic was open every day except Sunday at no charge. She was soon seeing sixty patients a day, many of whom came a great distance. With the facilities of the new clinic and the help of Mo Yun and four of the older orphan girls she was training, she was able to treat far more patients than she had in the past. We were the happiest we had been since Lily’s death, and I began to believe we had survived the worst; surely the years ahead would be easier.

  I could not have been more wrong.

  In the North China Plain, summer was the rainy season, with a great deal riding on how much rain fell in those months. Too little rain caused long, painful droughts, while too much rain caused the Hwang Ho—the Yellow River, also called “China’s Sorrow”—to flood. These extremes of drought and flood often followed one after the other, and either could lead to famine. It had been that way for two thousand years, with famine in one area or another nearly every year.

  The Yellow River runs for twenty-four hundred miles east then northeast from the interior of China toward the Yellow Sea. The river’s name comes from its color, the result of the large amount of silt it carries, making it the muddiest river on earth. The silt accumulated at the river’s embankments, and despite constant efforts to build up the embankments to contain the river, the land was so flat and the drainage so slow that heavy rainfall made flooding inevitable. Time and again, cities, towns, and villages were destroyed, crops flooded, and millions of people left homeless and starving.

  On a hot and humid day in July of 1919 we had cloudbursts late in the morning. By noon those showers had become a downpour, and by afternoon there was word that the Yellow River was already rising. Although our compound was a good twenty feet above normal flood level and many miles from the river, we moved everything from the dispensary to the highest point in the compound—the top shelves of a large locked cupboard on the second floor of our home. I thought we were being overly cautious, but by evening there were reports that the river was overflowing its banks and people living near it were leaving their homes, carrying as many of their possessions as possible on their backs.

  Over the next weeks, the Yellow River flooded exte
nsively, entirely covering the lower-lying areas of the plain. Hundreds of villages and towns disappeared, thousands of people died, much of the region’s livestock drowned, and crops were lost overnight as fields of corn, millet, and summer wheat became acres of watery mud. The earthen walls of many of Kuang P’ing Ch’eng’s homes crumbled, and several inches of mud covered the floors of most houses, including ours. It seemed there was water everywhere I looked; everything felt wet.

  While it was quickly clear that the flood had destroyed the summer crops, it was thought that the harvests of the coming spring would be enough for the coming year. But the flood was followed by a devastating drought in Shantung and Hopei provinces. By the following spring the ground was too hard and parched to be plowed, and by the end of that rainless summer, our region was experiencing a severe famine.

  September 17, 1920

  We are living in the land of naught: no rain, no crops, no food. Month after month has been dry. The cleared fields are only stubble, picked clean months ago of even the scraps of last year’s crops, but emaciated mothers and their children still scour the ground for anything other than dirt. They make thin porridge from roots and weeds, and they mix chaff and dried leaves into a cake that looks like baked mud. Farmers can’t feed their livestock, so they slaughter their cattle and sell their horses and mules. Families sell everything they own, and once that money is gone they beg and steal and live on whatever they can find—dog meat, a small bowl of parched barley flour. There are rumors of cannibalism.

  Until I experienced a famine I thought starving to death was a slow process, which by itself it is. But a weakened body welcomes all kinds of quickly fatal diseases, and a person deprived of nourishment can die in only a few days. The dead lie in the streets and are carried out of the city at night, and some days when I am in the city they seem to outnumber the living. Babies whose parents are unable to feed them are discarded, usually in a ditch outside of North Gate, where wild dogs fight over their corpses.

  Many people have left the city, walking three hundred miles or more to relatives in other parts of the country, taking only their clothes and sleeping in abandoned temples along the way. Many others have come to us; each day at our gate we find a dozen or more refugees from the city as well as from places farther away, and we have taken in nearly two hundred people. We are somehow able to feed them all, though I’m not sure how; every meal seems like the loaves and fishes. Each morning we cook five large kettles of a porridge made of millet and beans and do all we can to make the food go further. We buy the coarsest grain so that we can buy more and have more to share, and as we’ve run out of cooking fuel we’ve begun to burn whatever we deem least necessary—old furniture, doorframes, wooden crates.

  Perhaps half of our refugees are infants and children, their ribs showing through their ragged tunics, their eyes sunken and hollow. Some are orphans whose parents have starved to death; others have been abandoned by parents who can’t feed them and decide it’s better to leave them here than take them along, only to bury them down the road. The parents bring their children to the compound gates then just disappear, or they plead with us first then tell their children goodbye and turn and walk away as the children cry and try to run after them while we hold them back. It is horrible, and I wake each morning with dread.

  Not all of these desperate parents bring their daughters and sons to us; some send them to live with relatives, others tie them to trees and leave them there. Still others sell their offspring, either because they want the money or as a way to keep the children alive. At first this was a clandestine affair, but now the selling of children, especially young girls, is a brisk business with its own stand at the market, where anyone can buy a girl for three dollars. Buyers say they’ll keep their charges, but they rarely do; most return to the coast cities they’ve come from to resell their purchases for a profit. Will and I visit the stand each day and buy every child offered for sale. I cannot stand to see them shipped off to the grim future of prostitution and slavery that I know awaits them.

  Our guests have transformed the compound into a city of its own. The grounds are covered with temporary shelters for the adults; at first we set up cots in the worship hall for the abandoned or orphaned infants and children, but those were all occupied in a few days. So now the clinic is our orphanage and the meeting hall the clinic; it’s musical chairs on a larger scale. Will and Chung Hao moved everything out of the clinic and into the large downstairs room of our home, and we filled the clinic with as many cots and bamboo baskets set on rockers as would fit. Our worship services are now outdoors. As we had only just put the finishing touches on the clinic, dismantling it seemed like going backward and I admit that it pained me. But with more than one hundred children in our care, it was the only choice.

  Tonight before I came upstairs I stood in the doorway, looking at the dozens of cots and baskets and the sleeping children and babies that they held. The room smelled of them, a dusky, heavy scent, and the sound of their breathing was like a distant ocean. After seeing so much hardship and death in the last six months, I have found the nearness of the children to be a salve. When I had soaked up as much of it as I could, I went upstairs to bed, unexpectedly calmed and consoled by our charges.

  Since returning from furlough, the word “childless” has taken up residence in my mind. It sits in the room of my thoughts like an unwelcome guest. But tonight I found a different word lingering my mind: “childfull.” I’m no longer childless; I’m childfull, for although I have not one child of my own, I have the unexpected gift of a hundred who are like my own, a fact that fills my cracked heart with purpose.

  While we believed that some of the children in our care would be reclaimed by their parents, we doubted that most would, and we needed a permanent place for them to live; they could not sleep in the clinic indefinitely. As building an orphanage would provide work as well as housing, I began drawing rough plans for one, and soon Chung Hao and I were marking out the foundation. We bought building materials and organized men into companies of twenty, with one man serving as leader of each company. In this way, we were able to employ several hundred men.

  Each day I went out to oversee tasks about which I knew little and for which I had no training. When I woke in the morning and thought of what faced me in the coming day, it seemed impossible. There were no sawmills; everything was done by the men in our compound. We hired local men to make adobe bricks; I ordered doorknobs, hinges, and screws from the United States and glass, nails, putty, and lime from Shanghai. We would use calcimine as paint to cover the plaster on the building’s interior.

  On the first Sunday that followed the start of this building project, we invited all whom we employed to attend our outdoor service. The day was clear and cool and I hoped that a few dozen souls would attend, which was why I was amazed when nearly one hundred men sat on the benches in front of me. Ten minutes later every seat was taken, and by the time I began to preach, several hundred men faced me.

  At the end of the service, I followed my usual custom of inviting those who desired to receive Christ in their hearts to come forward so that Chung Hao and I and five other leaders of the church could pray with them. I was floored when every man present in that throng of several hundred stood and began to move forward, and I restated my invitation, thinking they had not understood. “If you desire to have Christ reside with you,” I said loudly, but the men were already on their feet and pressing forward as though they were in line for something valuable in short supply. They called out loudly, “I want Christ! I want Christ!” and as many of them as could fit climbed up on the platform and joined us there, so that we were quickly surrounded. While I knew that many of them did not fully understand all that was involved in accepting Christ, I felt unable to turn anyone away. I decided that if their motives were suspect, the matter was between them and God, and I left it to Him as we prayed with one man after another.

  Two hours later I stood ladling out millet gruel to a line of people
that seemed endless. Finally our gateman, Lao Chang, stood before me. Katherine had cured his nearly blind son of trachoma and restored the boy’s sight, and Lao Chang had come to know the God we preached. He was devoted to us and to the mission, and he insisted on eating last while his son stood guard at the gate.

  Lao Chang watched in silence as I ladled porridge into his bowl. When I inquired after his health, he said, “I am most fortunate, mu shih.”

  His answer surprised me. “How so?”

  He smiled, showing his few remaining teeth. “Because I am alive and I am well. My God is good to me.” He paused for a moment then said, “But you, mu shih. Why do you stay with us here when you could so easily go to your home and eat your fill?”

  “My home is here. And if my belly were full but my heart empty, what would I gain?”

  “Ah,” he said. “It is a marvel nonetheless for a foreign-born to endure our pain.”

  By the fall of 1921 we had had no rain for more than a year. No crops had been sown that spring, the yield of the previous year’s crops had been severely diminished, and millions of people across northern China had died from starvation. The new orphanage, which we had thought would be so spacious, was already cramped. We had envisioned it as a home for fifty children and soon had one hundred and fifty living there.

  As the famine wore on, our spirits wore down. Widows whom we had clothed and fed cursed us to our face, claiming we had killed their husbands then eaten them. Some of the boys in the orphanage complained that we weren’t feeding them enough, but they were certainly in better shape than they had been when they came to us; the mere fact that they were alive when so many were dying was a miracle in itself. Other boys began to lie and steal, taking food, plates, cooking utensils, tools, pens, anything small that could be sneaked out and sold. When I confronted them they claimed they’d done nothing wrong, which was just about true in their eyes. Many of them were the sons and grandsons of bandits, where stealing was considered a perfectly legitimate way to earn a living. Others said that because I had saved their lives I was their father, and everyone knew that taking something from your father wasn’t stealing.