City of Tranquil Light

by Bo Caldwell

  We embraced people and cried with them and told them we would pray for them. A woman holding an infant in her arms hesitantly approached Katherine, but when she said Katherine’s name, Katherine did not seem to recognize her. The woman began to explain that Katherine had delivered her when we had first arrived, and as the woman named her parents and the place she had lived, Katherine smiled and embraced her. Katherine looked at me and said, “She was the first baby I delivered.” The woman held her infant daughter out to Katherine and said shyly, “Her name is Mei Li. For you.” Then the woman held out a Chinese silver dollar. “For you, Kung P’ei Te. Perhaps you may buy a cup of tea on your journey.”

  Someone took my arm then and said, “Mu shih, a word with you.” I turned and followed a man in a peasant’s blue cotton tunic and trousers. I had not seen his face, so when we were twenty feet away from our friends and he turned toward me, I was astonished to see my bandit chief.

  “Hsiao Lao,” I said, and I glanced around me, suddenly afraid for him again. “How have you come to be here?”

  He looked pleased. “You are surprised to see me?”

  I laughed. “Yes. And delighted.”

  In the day’s dim light I looked at him curiously. His clothes were worn but clean, his hair still thick and black, his high forehead smooth and unwrinkled. Although his face bore the scars of his beating that day in jail, his expression was alert and thoughtful, as it had been when I first knew him. But there was something different about him.

  He said, “I am greatly in your debt, mu shih. I am a changed man.”

  “It is I who owe you. You protected my wife when I could not.” Speaking was suddenly difficult. “You saved her life.”

  He shook his head. “I am greatly in her debt. And you have given me more than you realize, mu shih. You have given me new life.”

  “I don’t know how,” I said, for I had often regretted not speaking to him more ardently about my Lord when I had been his captive so long ago. Whether I had been afraid of doing so or just young I didn’t know, but something had made me reticent. “I have thought often of the days I spent with you. I had many opportunities to speak to you about my God, and yet I did not. I have regretted my silence.”

  He shook his head. “I learned from what you did, not what you said. You healed my son; you cared for my men; you talked with me when I could not sleep.”

  I thought, I had no choice, and I laughed to myself, knowing my behavior had been motivated far more by fear than faith.

  “Mu shih, I saw your face when you fed me and bathed me and dressed my injuries in the jail. You had every reason to despise me and no reason to care about me, yet I saw not hate but love in your face that day. I saw that this God of yours was real to you. I decided that if He was real to you, perhaps He could be real to me as well. So I asked Him that: I asked Him to be real to me, and He answered my request. My life changed because of the life I saw in you.”

  He took something from his large sleeve and held out three rolled scrolls to me. “I have studied the art of portrait painting and now earn my living this way. These are a small return for the gift you have given me. Take them with you to your new home.” Then he took my other hand and put something in it and I saw that I held a great deal of cash. “For your journey,” he said, and I must have looked alarmed, for he laughed. “Do not fear, mu shih; this is not stolen fruit. I earn my wages now.” He paused for a moment. “I have also come to say goodbye, for I too am leaving.”

  “Where will you go?”

  He smiled broadly, and his expression was as alert and animated as when I first knew him. “I am going to the north. The people there have the right to hear what I have heard, and I have a great desire to tell what has happened to me. I want to speak of this God I now know and of the new life He has given me.”

  I was amazed at my sweet Lord’s ways. “Hsiao Lao, you have been called.”

  He nodded. “I have felt an invitation,” he said, “and I have said yes. I have believed since I was young that every life has a purpose. Now I have found mine.”

  He seemed suddenly restless and he glanced around him nervously. Then he said, “You must know that I will always visit her when I am near. And that I will make a point of doing so.” I did not understand his meaning at first. Seeing my confusion, he said, “You need not worry about your firstborn’s grave.”

  Firstborn; even then, the word stung. Only-born. “You have been tending her grave?”

  He nodded. “I know you do not believe in the needs and desires of the deceased as we do. Perhaps you are right; my beliefs are changing. But perhaps there is truth in the old as well as in the new. So I will keep watch over her, in case God is busy one day or in case she is lonely. You have my word that I will not leave her alone for long, mu shih. From this time forward she is my own, and I will care for her.”

  I was deeply moved. “You are most kind, Hsiao Lao.”

  He shook his head. “I am no longer Hsiao Lao. I am Hsieh Kuang Sheng.”

  I nodded. It was common to rename oneself at turning points in one’s life, such as when leaving home or starting a new business, and I was moved by the bandit’s choice for his new name. Hsieh was to thank, kuang was wide or vast, sheng was life; his name meant he was thankful for his vast—everlasting—life. “A good fit,” I said, “and one that I am certain pleases our Lord.”

  He smiled broadly. “When you return to your Beautiful Country, mu shih, take with you my gratitude to its people for sending you to us.” He bowed then, and I did likewise, and as I straightened the battered old postal truck pulled up and I turned toward it for a moment. When I turned back to Hsiao Lao to thank him, he was gone, and before I could call out to him—Thank you; goodbye; God bless you, my friend, or any of the other things I wanted to say—I saw him striding easily toward the city’s North Gate. He did not look back.

  I returned to the crowd and found Chung Hao, and when he met my eyes I felt how deeply I loved him, and I felt the great hole inside me that his absence would leave. He was wearing my father’s cap, the one I had given him on New Year’s so long ago, now worn thin. He took a deep breath and, in careful English that I knew he had worked hard at, he said, “You have brought us great blessedness, mu shih. It is a difficulty to speak my goodbye.”

  I couldn’t answer at first. When I found my voice, I said in Chinese, “It is I who have been blessed by you.” We were silent for a moment, and several times Chung Hao seemed about to speak, but stopped. I asked, “What is it?”

  He put his large hand on his chest and spoke again in English. “My heart is a wound,” he said softly.

  “As is mine,” I answered.

  He said, “But you are right to go,” and he looked toward Katherine.

  I nodded. She was a few yards away, saying goodbye to a group of children. We had not even begun our journey, but she looked exhausted; her eyes were sunken and dark, her skin pale, and her coat hung on her thin frame. In the midst of my sorrow, I felt a wave of relief and hope for her recuperation.

  Chung Hao looked back at me and said what no one else had. “I do not believe you will return to us, mu shih. Be happy in your new home with your wife.” Then, with tears in his eyes, he patted my chest and said, “Chih chi.”

  I nodded. “Chih chi.” It is a Chinese term not easily translated into English, meaning something like intimate friend, confidant, soulmate. But those words do not express the essence of the Chinese. Chih means to know, chi means self; together they mean to know self—a friend who knows your self—which was exactly the description for Chung Hao.

  He smiled broadly, clasped my hand tightly, and said, “We will meet again on the other side.”

  I could only nod, then embrace my companion and my helper, my brother and my friend.

  I helped Katherine into the back of the postal truck and climbed in after her, and we sat with the other passengers and their belongings on hard wooden board benches along each side. The truck’s back doors were closed, the truc
k’s motor started, and we began to move. I felt panic run through me, and I took Katherine’s hand and we stood at the doors, holding on to them and to each other to keep our balance. The doors didn’t quite meet, giving us a narrow view of people in the square waving, with some even following the truck through the city. The truck reached and passed through East Gate’s huge arch then followed a road that used to be a footpath and which we had traveled for more than twenty years, in heat and dust, in rain and mud and sleet. I knew the landmarks along our way by heart: the way the road curved to the right just outside the city, the large stone that marked the end of one man’s land and the beginning of another’s, the poplar tree that had offered me shade on countless afternoons, the deep ruts where the road dipped a little and became six inches of mud in heavy rain, the grave mounds that dotted the fields.

  We passed our compound on the right, and the farther away we got, the more my heart seemed to tear. The road turned sharply south and I strained to see our home one last time. Then I saw the city wall, just as I had seen it hundreds of times when I returned from every possible direction, at every odd hour of the day and night. I remembered the first day we had come to Kuang P’ing Ch’eng, and how its name had led me to expect a graceful city bathed in a gentle glow. It had not appeared like that at first sight so long ago, but as I looked back for the last time, that was exactly how it looked: beautiful, and filled with grace.

  Four days after leaving Kuang P’ing Ch’eng, we stood at the dock in Tientsin. As we waited to board the ship and leave Chinese soil, I looked at a city that should have been familiar but wasn’t; in the past I’d always been too preoccupied to notice my surroundings. I felt Katherine’s gaze resting on me and our eyes met, and I read in her expression the feelings in my heart: grief, sadness, exhaustion, and comfort at the sight of her.

  She started to laugh then. I thought she was crying, which would have been unlike her in such a public place. But she was laughing, and she kept laughing harder still, until she couldn’t speak. I was at first irritated, then worried that her mind had been touched.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She laughed harder.

  “Katherine, are you all right?”

  She nodded and when she had almost stopped laughing, she said, “Look at us! In Kuang P’ing Ch’eng, we were sent off like royalty. Look at this king and queen!” And she started laughing again.

  Still perplexed, I looked at her. She was my own sweet wife, whom I had looked at dozens of times a day for many years. Her hair was in a bun at her neck, with Mo Yun’s silver clasp holding it in place. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright despite fatigue, and her smile was cheerful and familiar and strong. In her hand she held our extravagant purchase for the journey: a Sunkist navel orange from California, which we planned to share when we boarded the ship.

  Then I took in the rest of her: the shapeless gray hat I did not recognize, the nondescript tweed coat I remembered buying on furlough twenty years ago, the flat black hand-me-down shoes I knew were too big. I looked down at myself: brown shoes with holes in the soles, patched woolen trousers sent from home a dozen years ago, a worn gray overcoat that had been given to me by an American doctor who had been passing through years earlier. We had tried to dress up for our journey, but I saw how shabby we looked, and how bereft, and what a contrast our appearances were to the rich lives we had led in Kuang P’ing Ch’eng. I too began to laugh, so that the two of us must have appeared greatly disturbed to those about us. But we did not care.

  When we boarded the ship a short while later I recalled speaking at Mennonite churches in the United States the year we had been on furlough. People often spoke of the sacrifice Katherine and I had made in going to China. This had always sounded odd to me, for I had never thought of it as sacrifice; I had only been following the desire of my heart. But on that cool November afternoon I understood that there had been a sacrifice nonetheless, a surrendering of one thing of value for the sake of something more valuable. The sacrifice wasn’t in going to China; the sacrifice was in leaving.

  In December 1933, twenty-seven years after leaving for China, Katherine and I returned to Seattle, which seemed right, as it was the place from which we had embarked. We booked passage on a train to Los Angeles, and five days later we arrived at Union Station. From there we took a bus to Mission Road in Glendale and the Suppes Missionary Colony, a nondenominational community of thirty furnished bungalows available to retired missionaries, those home on furlough, and those like us—betwixt and between and in need of temporary housing.

  I was gloomy during our first few weeks in Glendale; it seemed the best part of our lives was behind us. I was also disoriented, for we had returned to a country we did not know. Perhaps time affected my perceptions, but adapting to life in the United States upon our return seemed far more difficult than adapting to life in China had been when we were young. Everything was new and strange and modern and expensive, and there was much we did not know. Neither of us had ever voted in an election, used a washing machine, seen a motion picture, or learned to drive. We felt we’d come not only from another continent but from another time. When we had first arrived in China, we had learned to go backward; now we struggled to jump ahead.

  What we would do next we did not know, a fact I worried over more than I cared to admit; I could not imagine anything that would fit us or fulfill us as much as mission work. I also knew I would not be easy to place; I was too young to retire and had never pastored an American church. But then a Mennonite church in Los Angeles surprised me by inviting me to meet the congregation of a small nondenominational church that was looking for a pastor. The Mennonite church was assisting them in their search, and the pastor would not say why he thought I might be suited for this particular congregation; he said only that it was an unusual church, young but growing rapidly, and one I might find interesting. Its congregation had recently split off from the Mennonite Church to form their own community, moving to a large room on the second floor of a wholesale market.

  Despite not knowing what had prompted the group to separate from the Mennonite Church, the idea appealed to me. I was finding that as I grew older I saw less need for denominations, which I viewed as human institutions, each with its good and bad. Nor did I see the need for expensive sanctuaries or complicated services or boards and committees. I had come to believe that a church was not a building or an organization but a gathering of believers, and less time spent on the extraneous meant more time to give to service. Simpler meant better.

  When I expressed my interest, the pastor who telephoned arranged for two of the members of this young church to come for Katherine and me the following Sunday, so that we could attend their service, meet some of their members, and see everything for ourselves. We both woke early that day, wondering if this would be the right place for us. We were excited but also anxious; this was the closest thing either of us had ever had to a job interview and we felt suddenly young and inexperienced, though we were in our early fifties.

  At nine o’clock a car pulled up in front of our bungalow and we looked nervously at each other. As we watched the driver and passenger get out of the car, we looked at each other again and began to laugh, for the man and woman walking toward our front door were Chinese. We said hello in English; then the gentleman asked if we spoke Mandarin, and when we said we did, the English portion of our morning ended.

  In the car, the gentleman told us about his congregation. It was a young Chinese church that had been started by a small group of recent Chinese immigrants who, unable to find a Mandarin-speaking group, had decided to start one of their own. They had at first met at the Mennonite church; when the group became too large for that space, they moved to the wholesale market, which could seat one hundred people. The Mennonite church had been supportive and welcoming of the new group, but the group’s members felt that being independent of an established church would allow them to grow as they saw fit. They were now a nondenominational Chinese Christian chur
ch with Mandarin as their common language.

  A sign in front of the warehouse read CHINESE COMMUNITY CHURCH—SUNDAY SERVICE AT 9:30 A.M. with the same information in Chinese characters underneath the English. The service was upstairs, and when Katherine and I were introduced to the congregation, we looked out at more than fifty Chinese worshippers. I bowed to the group and said, “Ni hao.” How do you do?

  A few people in the congregation nodded, but most stared at me solemnly, some suspiciously.

  “Ch’eng chieh-chien,” I said—I appreciate your receiving me—and saying even that short Mandarin phrase gave me joy. A few more people nodded tentatively. The kindness in their expressions brought Mo Yun to mind, and I repeated her words to us shortly before we left Kuang P’ing Ch’eng. “When you leave a place you love,” I said in Mandarin, “you leave a piece of your heart.”

  It was as though a barrier came down; people nodded at me and smiled, and I continued. “My wife and I have left much of ourselves in China, in a city called Kuang P’ing Ch’eng in the North China Plain. I suspect many of you have done likewise; a piece of your heart remains far away, in your home in the East. We lived in China for twenty-seven years, more than half of our lives, but God has brought us here now, to this new home. We do not know why; our future is unknown. But we have learned that He knows better than we, and that He is always worthy of our trust.”

  After the service we were surrounded by people, all speaking Chinese, and the sadness that I had carried with me since leaving Kuang P’ing Ch’eng eased. A few weeks later I was asked to preach at the morning service, and when I again gazed out at that Chinese congregation, I felt as nervous and unsure of myself as I had when I was a young man in China. I asked God to make me a vessel and to give me the right words, and as soon as I began speaking I felt peace and joy settle inside me. A week later I was asked to be the pastor of the church, a position I gladly accepted, and Katherine was asked to work with the women and children.