by Bo Caldwell
I nodded, trying to take in Mo Yun’s words. I felt a deep sadness, both at what she was saying and at what I was seeing, and I was baffled as to why this exhaustion had appeared so suddenly, as if overnight. “Has her life been more difficult recently? Does she need more help?”
Mo Yun shook her head. “It is not only the physical difficulties that take their toll; her life here is hard on her spirit as well. Kung Mei Li’s faith is strong, but it does not always protect her from worrying about those she loves.”
As I continued to watch Katherine, I understood that this was the sign I had been waiting for. It was time for us to leave China, and the reason had been right in front of me: my dear wife’s slow deterioration, the gradual wearing down of her body and soul.
Mo Yun rested her hand gently on my arm. “Perhaps God is asking you to give up what you love most for whom you love most.”
Katherine hung up the last sheet then picked up the basket and began to walk toward the house, and Mo Yun and I retreated inside before she saw us.
I went back upstairs to my study. Only fifteen minutes had passed, but everything felt changed. I sat down heavily and held my head in my hands. I was ashamed of myself, of my callousness and my neglectfulness, and I scolded myself for not having been more attentive; I should have seen her anxiety and fatigue long ago. As I let myself dwell on my shame, I decided that I was responsible for Katherine’s health and that we should leave China as soon as possible. My thinking was desperate and frenzied enough that had it been possible for us to go that afternoon I would have tried.
Finally I prayed the only thing I could: I don’t know what to do. Please help me, and at that moment I gave up. I gave up my plans for the rest of our lives and my hopes to die in China and my desire to direct it all, and I gave up my feelings of shame and responsibility for Katherine’s health. I asked God’s forgiveness for my willfulness; I asked that He show me what He wanted for our lives, and that He help me to carry out those wishes. As I sat in that still room, I felt the peace that had eluded me for many months. I knew that not only was it time for us to leave; it was right.
The next evening I asked Katherine to come and sit outside with me, something we did often. Our days were so busy that by evening I often felt I had barely spoken with her that day, even if we had been working side by side, and I enjoyed sitting with her in the after-supper quiet.
The two of us sat side by side on a bench in the garden. A breeze stirred the leaves of the poplar tree above us, and when I inhaled I could smell the familiar smoky odor of the city.
“Do you remember how strange everything was when we first arrived here?” I said. “At night I used to lie awake in the dark trying to decide how soon I could go home without looking like I’d given up. I decided six months was the minimum, and I didn’t think I’d last that long, but I also couldn’t imagine going home any sooner and facing everyone.”
Katherine laughed. “I could see that in you then. See that you were struggling, trying to force yourself to like it here.”
I turned to look at her in the darkness. She was staring straight ahead at the gate to our compound, and in the light that spilled out from the windows of our home I saw her profile, delicate and fine. “Didn’t you feel the same?”
She shook her head. “Not so much. I was determined to stay and decided that homesickness was a temporary inconvenience that wouldn’t last if I ignored it.”
I laughed at her down-to-earth practicality, a constant with her. “But did you like it here at the beginning? Didn’t everything seem strange?”
She shrugged. “It was China,” she said. “I didn’t think about it more than that.”
We were quiet for a while. Finally I took a deep breath and said, “Katherine, I think it’s time to go.”
She nodded and started to stand, thinking I wanted to go inside. “If you want.”
I took her arm. “No. Not inside.”
She looked at me, puzzled. “Where is it that you want to go?”
I looked at her and was surprised at the sense of peace I felt as I said words I had never thought I would. “I think it’s time to leave Kuang P’ing Ch’eng and go back to the United States.”
She started to speak but I shook my head.
“Wait. I believe the time has come for the mission to make the transition into a native church. I’ve been feeling this for some time, and I believe it would be in the church’s best interest for us to leave. With politics as they are, in the future our presence here may become more of a liability than a help.” I paused. “There are other reasons. But no matter what they are, I’m afraid that what I’m asking will break your heart.”
She looked at me with such seriousness that I could not tell what she was thinking. Then she said, “I don’t want to leave but I’m afraid to stay.”
I thought she was referring to the political danger. “I don’t think the situation is dangerous yet.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that.” She gazed straight ahead and seemed to see something far away, then she took my hand and squeezed it, and when she looked at me, there were tears in her eyes. “I find my strength isn’t what it used to be,” she said, “and I’m afraid I’ll become a burden here instead of a help. I don’t think I could bear that.” She wiped her eyes and would not look at me for a moment; then she smiled weakly. “I didn’t think I’d feel old so soon.”
Her words caught at me, and I could only nod. Then I said, “Our life here hasn’t been easy. Wonderful, but not easy.”
She looked around us at the garden, the house, the compound. “Can you imagine leaving? What will we do?”
I shrugged. “I haven’t gotten that far.”
“When I picture going back, I’m worried I’ll be sitting in a rocking chair on a front porch for the next twenty years. Then sometimes I think that’s all I’ll be able to do.”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t sound so good. I’m counting on history: each time God has led me away from one thing, He’s led me toward something else. Away from home and toward China. Away from the familiar and toward you.”
“We’ll be leaving home, you know. America’s going to be the strange new place this time.”
I looked at her and held her hand to my lips and kissed it. “My home is with you, Meine liebe Herz. What more do I need?”
Katherine laughed. “You’re very good at that, Will Kiehn.”
“What?”
“Saying just the right thing. To me, anyway.”
We stayed outside much longer than usual that evening, listening to the sounds of the night and chatting quietly about this and that, none of it to do with leaving our lovely City of Tranquil Light. I knew we were comforting each other as the idea sank in, and helping each other to make peace with it. When we went inside, I felt different, as if something inside me had shifted slightly, as though I’d already taken a few steps away from my beloved home.
The next morning I wrote to the Mission Board in the United States, notifying them of our feelings and asking that we be allowed to return to America, and that evening we gathered the leaders of the church together and told them of our decision. While they were saddened, they understood and supported us, and they agreed it was in the church’s best interest. As the magistrate had said, not only was the country becoming more unsafe for foreigners; our presence could endanger those around us as well. In serious trouble, it would be impossible for them to hide us without jeopardizing the safety of their own families.
There was one aspect of our leaving that encouraged me: the end of our work in Kuang P’ing Ch’eng would mean the transformation of the mission station into a native church, a transition I had dreamed of for many years and that was essential to the church’s survival and growth. Without native support, mission stations closed or disappeared once the missionaries left, and at a time in which all foreigners and even those associated with them were suspect, the transformation of the mission station into a native church was even more important. I began r
eading reports from other mission stations that had made this transition successfully and envisioning how it could occur in Kuang P’ing Ch’eng. A native church would need to assume responsibility for all church matters and govern and support itself. We would sign over the deeds to the mission property to the national church, which could then decide whether to continue employing the mission’s national workers, who numbered around twenty. Those the church decided not to retain would be given severance pay by the mission, and the church would be free to choose its own leaders and other workers.
At that time, our baptized believers numbered somewhere around nine hundred people, spread out around the church in Kuang P’ing Ch’eng and seven outstations in surrounding towns and villages. The elders of the church discussed a name for the new church and decided on The Church of His Beautiful Strength. We were also leaving a modern clinic with running water, thanks to an electric pump donated by a church in Kansas City; electric lights, thanks to a Delco generator donated by a Sunday school in Cleveland; and indoor plumbing, thanks to the city’s wealthier merchants. The clinic had four well-equipped examination rooms, a full dispensary, beds for sixty patients, and a staff of eight nurses and nurses-in-training, and it would continue to be managed by the church for the time being, with two Chinese doctors, trained at Peking Union Medical College, to work with Mo Yun. Most exciting was the orphanage, which was nearly empty by then, as the dozens of children who had come to us during the famine and civil war had either returned to their parents or grown up. Many of the girls had married, and the older boys had been apprenticed to tradesmen and businesses in the city. Now it would be a school.
As I lay in bed each night thinking of leaving Kuang P’ing Ch’eng, I also found myself remembering our arrival there—the day we came to the city, our small storefront on Hsiao Chieh, our tentative beginnings—and as I did, I was amazed at what God had done, sometimes through me, sometimes with me, frequently in spite of me. I could not exactly reconstruct how it had all come to pass—where we had found the money and the knowledge and the perseverance to do what we’d done. It didn’t add up; it made no more sense than it did to have leftovers after feeding five thousand with a few loaves and fishes. But I had stopped trying to explain it. Mysterious abundance was not the exception to the rule. It was who God was, when we gave Him half a chance.
Two months later we received word from the Mission Board in the United States that we should return when we were able to. We would be supplied with temporary housing in Glendale, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, while we rested and awaited our next assignment. I made arrangements for our travel to the coast, and we continued with our normal lives for as long as we could.
Then suddenly it was the week of our leaving, and I woke each morning with a feeling of dread. Word of our departure had spread far and wide, and people we had known for more than twenty years traveled from country villages and towns all over the region to say goodbye. Our compound was busy from morning until night, and there were many farewells: feasts, eloquent speeches, gifts of candies and cakes, seaweed delicacies from the coast, and a huge ginseng root, considered very precious. From Chung Hao and Mo Yun we received a red silk lantern so that, they said, our new life would have happiness and much light. There were also contributions made to the mission-turned-church in our honor: eggs, pork, chickens, cash. On our last Sunday our worship hall overflowed with well-wishers. The people of Kuang P’ing Ch’eng valued long friendships, and that morning I looked out at scores of old friends.
There was one goodbye we did not say: we were not able to see Edward and Naomi Geisler, who were in the midst of moving to the far northwest of China when Katherine and I made our decision to leave Kuang P’ing Ch’eng. Edward and Naomi’s three children were by then adults; Paul, the oldest, was serving as a missionary in the south of China, while John and Madeleine had settled in the United States after completing their educations there. Edward had written that it was his desire to preach the Gospel to those who had never heard it, a desire Naomi shared, and with their children grown and independent, the time seemed right to leave the church at Ch’eng An Fu in the hands of native workers and move west. I had thought that leaving China without seeing her sister would greatly trouble Katherine, and I had begun devising a plan for seeing the Geislers, even if it meant traveling four days each way to be with them for an afternoon. But when I proposed it to Katherine, she said no. “We’ll see each other sometime, either here or there,” she said. I did not understand her meaning, but when I pressed her, she shook her head. “I’ve said goodbye to Naomi twice: once when she left home and again when she left for China. I don’t think I can do it again.”
We did not spend a great deal of time packing during those last days; we left our Chinese clothes and our housewares and linens and filled only two large suitcases and the chest that had been given to us at the feast several years earlier. This seemed right, as we were leaving much of ourselves. In the midst of packing I noticed Katherine holding her medical bag, a black leather satchel I had ordered from a catalog in the United States and given to her as a wedding present twenty-seven years earlier. I remembered her opening it when I gave it to her, and I saw it in my mind as it was then, the stiff leather smooth and shiny and ink-black. Now the case was battered and worn, its leather soft and dull and scratched.
She held it for a long moment, just staring at it.
“You don’t have to keep that if you don’t want to,” I said.
“I think it belongs here.” She looked at me to see if I agreed, and when I nodded, she began to clean the bag inside and out then pack it with supplies.
That evening Katherine gave the bag to Mo Yun. In return, Mo Yun took from her hair the silver clasp she had worn every day for as long as we had known her. The clasp had been given to her by her mother, who had received it from her mother, and so on for many generations. In China at that time, a woman who married gave up her own family and, to a large extent, her identity, so the gift was one of sacrifice and self.
Mo Yun held the clasp out to Katherine. “When you leave a place you love, you leave a piece of your heart.” She closed Katherine’s fingers over her gift. “But you take with you the hearts of your beloved.”
On the morning of our last full day in Kuang P’ing Ch’eng, I left the compound early and set out for the cemetery where our daughter was buried, something I did several times a year, always alone. It was Katherine’s choice not to accompany me; where I found solace, she found sorrow, and she had not been to the cemetery since Lily’s death.
The fields were pale and still in that first light, the air cool and wet. I walked northwest on a rutted hard-packed dirt road that was mostly a rough path cut through fields or around them. It was a road I had come to love; it followed the curve of the city’s wall, then branched off to the northwest and toward the hills far in the distance, barely visible. The occasional elms and poplars were my signposts, the crows my companions, and God seemed very present.
I walked for nearly an hour, and it was still early morning when I reached the cemetery, which consisted of some twenty-five grave mounds in the middle of a field of wheat and surrounded by a grove of pine trees. Lily’s grave was in the southwest corner of the cemetery, a location chosen by Chung Hao. He had said she would be near his mother, whom he had loved and who would now watch over my child, and while in my heart I did not believe in that view of the afterlife, the idea still gave me comfort.
At the grave I found what had surprised me a few years earlier but what I had now come to expect: fresh pine branches placed carefully on my daughter’s grave, covering it. When this had first happened several years earlier it had troubled me, but I found the branches again the next time I visited and every time thereafter, and I came to understood that someone who cared for us was caring for her. Pine trees were believed to keep evil spirits away and to bring protection and peace to the dead; I could only guess that the branches were left by a patient of Katherine’s or someone else we had
helped in some way.
That day once again the branches covered the small grave. I knelt in the dirt and told my daughter a final goodbye.
The next morning after breakfast Katherine and I walked together through the house for the last time. We did not speak as we walked from one room to another, touching the walls and furniture. Despite the furniture and books and rugs we were leaving, the house no longer looked or felt like our home; it was already changed into something else, except when we looked outside. In each room, we gazed out at ordinary views we loved. From the kitchen we saw the compound yard, from the meeting room we saw the garden that had sustained us, from our bedroom we saw the city wall, and from the small study where we had prayed together most mornings we saw the compound gate and, beyond it, the plain to the south. Katherine wept softly, and when we left the house and pulled the door shut behind us for the last time, she kissed it. We were leaving holy ground.
A few dozen people were waiting for us in the compound yard, and when we reached the front gate we found many more waiting for us there. Together we walked through East Gate to the yu chen chu, the post office, which was next to the yamen in the center of the city. We would ride in a postal truck to Handan, and from there we would travel by train to Tientsin on the coast.
When we entered the city, we were met by an even larger gathering, so that by the time we reached the post office we were surrounded by several hundred people, many of whom had come to us as patients years earlier and were now friends. There were members of our church, and men and women whom we had treated and cared for when they were children and who now held their own children in their arms. There were people we did not know by name, only by face, but whom we still loved.
